The authority of Abū Jaʿfar al-ʿAmrī, the second in the canonical sequence of envoys, emerged around the time when the old guard agents of the eleventh Imam were dying, two decades after the Imam’s death. The process of back-projection of the envoy paradigm to the earliest phase of the Occultation has obscured details of Abū Jaʿfar’s life, but we can piece together, in Chapter 5, some details from reports of opposition to Abū Jaʿfar from both skeptical agents and rival charismatic bābs. He established his authority through his father’s prestige, by forging alliances with other agents, by repudiating doubters, and issuing rescripts (tawqīʿāt) in the name of the hidden Imam. He also attempted to maintain revenues, giving concessions and dispensations for alms taxes, while asserting the legitimacy of the Imamic agents to continue revenue-collection, particularly from waqf endowments and Imamic estates. Through these activities he established the office of envoy firmly enough to survive him.

On the eighth night of Rabīʿ al-Awwal, in the year 260 of the Hijra (874 ce)1 the Imam al-Ḥasan b. ʿAlī al-ʿAskarī died in Samarra, then the capital city of the ʿAbbasid Empire. Ḥasan was too young to die – just twenty-eight or twenty-nine years old – and he had been leader of the small, but widely dispersed religious community of the Imami Shiʿa for only six years. With no obvious successor to replace him, his death refreshed a political crisis that had been brewing since his father’s lifetime. Ḥasan’s bitter rival – his brother Jaʿfar – seized the opportunity to reassert his own claim to succeed to the Imamate. Though Jaʿfar had some initial success in calling the Shiʿa to support him, he was ultimately rejected, to be remembered in Twelver Shiʿi sources as Jaʿfar “the Liar.”

Chapter 1 surveys the rise of the pre-Occultation Imamic agents, and their role in ensuring the stability of the Imamate. While previous scholarship has tended to conflate the various roles of the followers of the Imams as a bloc of men (rijāl), it is argued that we must distinguish between different roles, in particular between scholars and agents, although these roles sometimes overlapped. Unlike pure scholars, the prestige and authority of the agents rested upon the fiscal institutions of the Imamate: the systems for collecting the canonical alms taxes, the zakāt and the khums, which were instrumental in ritually and materially connecting the community with their Imams. It is argued that, though the precise origins of an institutionalized Imamate are unclear, by the time of the tenth Imam, legal conventions and institutional protocols for defining the Imamate and its operations had emerged, setting the scene for Occultation-era contestations.

New phenomena emerge from existing materials. The envoyship (sifāra), the office that has been the central subject of this book, emerged from the pre-Occultation institutions of Imamate – in particular the Imamic agentship (wikāla), with some interplay with esoteric charismatic conceptions of the Gate (bāb) to the Imam. Following the death of al-Ḥasan al-ʿAskarī, a plethora of competing politico-doctrinal visions emerged to solve the problem of the identity of the next Imam. Imamic agents were among the key players, first in contesting the different visions of the Imamate and then in forming a core of support for the idea of the Occultation. But the image that emerges from a close comparison of the earliest layer of reports about this period does not suggest the clean and inevitable succession of the agents to authority.

analyzes events immediately following the death of the eleventh Imam with no apparent offspring. In spite of his strong claim as son of the tenth Imam, Jaʿfar “the Liar” ultimately failed to succeed to his father. Opposing camps generated anti-Jaʿfar propaganda which survives in our sources and can be used to reconstruct key events and early discourses. It is argued that within twenty-four hours of the eleventh Imam’s death, several events of central symbolism for future understandings of the Occultation had occurred, including funerary rituals for the dead Imam; the claim that one of his concubines was posthumously pregnant with his child; and the dispute over the inheritance of the Imam’s property. These events were related to claims for Imamic mediation including claims made for the mother of the dead Imam, Ḥudayth; servants within the household of the Imam; and the concubine pregnant with the Imam’s child.

The envoyship of Abū Jaʿfar al-ʿAmrī generated expectations of succession, culminating in Ibn Rawḥ al-Nawbakhtī’s accession to the role upon his death. Quasi-Imamic mechanisms of designation (naṣṣ) and initiatic inheritance (waṣiyya) were invoked to support this. However, it is argued in Chapter 6 that long-present pressures against a centralizing Imamate now led to the collapse of the envoyship. Ibn Rawḥ fell afoul of the complex machinations of the ʿAbbasid court. He was imprisoned, then was challenged by his aide, Shalmaghānī, who claimed to embody Imamate and divinity. Ibn Rawḥ issued a denunciation of Shalmaghānī, and the caliph al-Rāḍī had him executed as a heretic. However, soon after Ibn Rawḥ’s death, a rescript from the hidden Imam declared the termination of the office of envoy. Thereafter, the diffuse leadership of earlier elites, especially scholars, came to replace the centralizing bureaucratic leadership of the envoys, and the defunct envoyship was canonized as orthodox history.

Canonized Twelver narratives imply that the “envoys” (sufarāʾ) of the hidden Imam were recognized as key authority figures immediately after the eleventh Imam’s death. However, it is argued inthat the authority of the agents was established piecemeal, and they came to be known collectively as the “nāḥiya,” a new term for the ambiguous Occultation-era institutions. The first of the canonized envoys, ʿUthmān b. Saʿīd al-ʿAmrī, is not depicted as an active agent in the earliest layer of reports. Instead, he appears as a mere eyewitness to the hidden Imam. Meanwhile, the earliest clearly active agents included several who were not canonized as envoys, and none emerges clearly as a preeminent “envoy.” Early reports indicate a rupture in authority when the old guard agents of Imam al-Ḥasan al-ʿAskarī all died out. The office of the “envoys” was only fully established thereafter, to fill this vacuum of authority.

investigates the troubled last years of tenth Imam ʿAlī al-Hādī and his son al-Ḥasan al-ʿAskarī. Hādī faced challenges from esoterist bābs claiming authority, most notably the renegade agent Fāris b. Ḥātim, who posed such a threat that Hādī ordered his assassination. Such challenges were compounded by a bitter succession dispute catalyzed by the unexpected death of Hādī’s designated heir, Abū Jaʿfar Muḥammad. This created confusion in the community, and doubt about the next Imam, al-Ḥasan al-ʿAskarī. Ḥasan was accused by his opponents of lacking the requisite knowledge to be an Imam, dogged by his infertility, and opposed by another brother, Jaʿfar. This dispute over Imamic succession generated a feud which was to continue after Ḥasan’s death and create a fundamental flaw between pro-Jaʿfar and anti-Jaʿfar camps that split both the family of the Imams itself, as well as their followers, and defined the development of the Twelver Occultation.