The Twelver and Nuṣayrī sects are usually studied as separate phenomena, but for a moment in the 4th/10th century, they were mutual participants within a commonwealth of groups coming to terms with the absence of a visible Imam after the death of al-Ḥasan al-ʿAskarī in 260/874. In the first half of the 4th/10th century, the Nuṣayrīs were literally ‘twelvers’ in the sense that they acknowledged the Twelve Imams. The Twelver leaders, the Safīrs, wakīls, bābs or nuwwāb, were in the process of consolidating their authority as spokesmen for the Hidden Twelfth Imam, and as such they needed to gather a wide base of support to establish a new legitimacy for their crisis-ridden community. While the purely intellectual conception of bāb-hood has been studied, this paper investigates the practical political implications of spiritual authority among Twelvers and Nuṣayrīs. I argue that rather than being mutually exclusive intellectual traditions, the office of Safīr was developed in practical dialogue with various conceptions of spiritual authority current within the Shīʿī community of the time, including the Nuṣayrī bāb, and others. Published in 2007, the latest edition of the Nuṣayrī author Khaṣībī’s al-Hidāya al-kubrā includes a chapter that was missing from the 1986 edition, and it adds greatly to our understanding of this moment of cross-over between the Twelvers and Nuṣayrīs. This chapter demonstrates that Nuṣayrīs acknowledged the same Imams, and also the four safīrs as intermediaries for the hidden Imam. The Hidāya’s depiction of the wakīls, however, is careful to mark a distinction between them and the Nuṣayrī bābs as a different kind of authority, pertaining to the collection of tithes. When we examine Twelver sources like Ibn Bābūya’s Ikmāl al-dīn, we see, however, that the collection of tithes was becoming increasingly problematic. Ultimately, neither the Twelver nor the Nuṣayrī office of bāb survived. In particular, the Twelver scholar Nuʿmānī declared the ‘second Occultation’ of the 12th Imam thereby permanently rejecting any further claims of bāb-hood. While this rejection of the powerful intermediaries of the 12th Imam has been linked to the emergence of Būyid power and patronage onto the political stage, I will show that there are clear internal reasons for the rejection of bāb-hood, due to the problems of a series of divisive challenges to the Safīrs’ power, including from Khaṣībī himself, as well as ongoing scholarly disapproval of centralizing efforts that stem for the era of the manifest Imams.