Ismailism begins its history, almost immediately with the experience of concealment (satr), which was interconnected with the inaccessibility of Ismaili Imams beginning with Muḥammad b. Ismāʿīl b. Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq , who came to be known as Muḥammad al-Maktūm (the hidden). This period of concealment is also marked by the belief of early Ismailis in Muḥammad b. Ismāʿīl being the seventh enunciator and the qāʾim. This period comes to an end when the Fatimids rise to power and ʿAbd Allāh al-Mahdī (ʿUbayd Allāh, in non-Ismaili sources) (d. 322/934) establishes the Fatimid dynasty in North Africa as the first Fatimid Imam-Caliph. The notion of qāʾim is also, as a consequence, revised to accommodate the shift from the early doctrine of messianic beliefs to one that can incorporate the founding of an Ismaili state. The Nizārī-Mustaʿlian split at the time of al-Mustanṣir (d. 487/1094), the eight Fatimid caliph, marks the beginning of another period of concealment with the same implication of the physical inaccessibility of the Imam, which lasts from the death of Nizār (d. 488/1095) until the death of Muḥammad b. Buzurg Umīd (d. 557/1162), the third ruler of Alamut, when his successor Ḥasan II (d. 561/1166) claims decent from Nizār but also claims shortly after to be the qāʾim. It is here that concealment and manifestation transmute fully into a doctrine which specifically deals with the religious law (sharīʿat) and its esoteric meaning (qiyāmat). While in earlier periods (and even later on) concealment often related to the physical accessibility of the Imam (not occultation unlike the Imamī tradition), this time concealment specifically referred to the period of the domination of religious laws and rituals. Manifestation, or be more precise the cycle of manifestation, referred to the era when under certain conditions, religious laws would be lifted. The multiple meanings of satr and kashf, all of which were interconnected with how the doctrine of imamate was understood by Ismailis of different periods, reflect the dynamics of how authority was articulated and exercised in the Ismaili community. This paper will address how these multiple meanings are often invoked, interpreted and reinterpreted to accommodate socio-political and doctrinal changes in the Ismaili community. The paper will draw on the works of Sijistānī, Qāḍī al-Nuʿmān, Nāṣir-I Khusraw and Naṣīr al-Dīn al-Ṭūsī and a few unpublished fragments of manuscripts from the Alamut period of Ismaili history.