Twelver Shi'ism

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Twelver Shi’ism — Ithnā ʿAshariyya, “the Twelvers” — is the largest branch of Shia Islam, named for its conviction that authority over the Muslim community descended through a fixed line of twelve divinely appointed Imams, beginning with ʿAlī, the cousin and son-in-law of Muhammad, and ending with a twelfth who did not die but passed into concealment. It is the majority confession of present-day Iran and Iraq, with large communities in Lebanon, Bahrain, and elsewhere, and it stands apart from both Sunni Islam and the smaller Shia branches by the particular shape of that succession.

The dispute from which all of Shia Islam grows is the question of who should have led the community after Muhammad’s death in 632. Where Sunnis accepted the elected caliphs, the partisans of ʿAlī — shīʿat ʿAlī — held that the Prophet had designated ʿAlī and his descendants, and that the Imam is not merely a ruler but a divinely guided, sinless interpreter of the revelation’s inner sense. Twelvers count the Imamate through ʿAlī’s sons Ḥasan and Ḥusayn — Ḥusayn’s death at Karbala in 680 is the tradition’s central remembered grief — and on through their line to the eleventh Imam, Ḥasan al-ʿAskarī, who died in 874.

What sets the Twelvers apart is the doctrine of the twelfth. They hold that al-ʿAskarī left a young son, Muhammad al-Mahdī, who entered a “lesser occultation” of contact through deputies and then, in 941, a “greater occultation” still in force: the Imam lives, hidden by God, and will return at the end of time to fill the earth with justice. This teaching of the hidden Imam reorganized the tradition’s whole sense of time and authority, leaving the community to await a guidance present but unseen.

Beneath the law and the politics runs a strong esoteric and philosophical current. Shia thought distinguished a ẓāhir, the outward letter of revelation, from a bāṭin, its hidden meaning, of which the Imams were held to be the living key; the Imam was understood by many as a cosmic as well as a historical figure. From the sixteenth century the scholars of Safavid Iran wove this imamology together with Neoplatonic and Illuminationist philosophy and with the monism of Ibn ʿArabī — the synthesis associated above all with Mullā Ṣadrā, whose metaphysics of being and of the imaginal world drew the philosophical, the mystical, and the scriptural into one system.

The relation between this speculative theology and the discipline of the law was never settled. Twelver jurisprudence saw a long contest between those who restricted authority to transmitted reports and those who admitted reasoned interpretation, the latter prevailing and granting the trained jurist a wide mandate to guide the community in the Imam’s absence — a development whose furthest political form is the modern doctrine of the jurist’s rule. The twentieth-century reading of Twelver philosophy as a hidden esoteric thread, in the work of scholars such as Henry Corbin, is itself an interpretation, and one the tradition’s own jurists would frame differently. What the sources hold steady is the absence at the center: an awaited Imam, withdrawn and expected, around whom the law, the philosophy, and the mourning all arrange themselves.

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