The idea of the ghayba has been a centerpiece of Shi‘i Islam throughout its storied history. Although there has emerged since the 1970s a considerable corpus of scholarship on the ghayba-idea in Twelver Shi‘ism, considerably less scholarship has been devoted to studying its pre-Twelver instantiations. My paper aims to rectify this current historical bias by shining direct light on the ghayba-idea’s earliest instantiations in the late-Umayyad and early-Abbasid period. Such a shift in focus, I argue, produces several exceptional insights. Firstly, there are insights into the emergence of the ghayba-idea itself: whence does it enter Shi‘ism and how is it able to take hold of Shi‘ite belief thereafter? The first Shi‘ites to espouse belief in a ghayba of their imam are the Kaysaniyya, whose poets preserve for us the earliest testimony to the belief that their Mahdi – ‘Ali’s son Ibn al-Hanafiyya (d. ca.700) – had not died but was rather hidden in the mountains outside Medina where he awaited the time of his triumphant return. I argue that the belief’s roots must lie in the currents of late antique messianism that flourished during the Perso-Byzantine War of 602-28, the Islamic conquests, and the Abbasid revolution—currents that the early Shi?ites proved adept at navigating throughout the seventh and eighth centuries. The second enigma of the ghayba-idea that arises – and, in my view, the least noticed – is its rapid expansion and dissemination in the eighth century CE. After the emergence of the ghayba-idea among the Kaysaniyya in the early eighth century, this belief does not become merely an idiosyncratic doctrine of disappointed millenarians—it spreads like wildfire across of the eastern lands of the Islamic caliphate. For period spanning 700-800 CE, Muslim scholars record at least nine persons who reputedly entered ghayba; at least five of these ghaybas are espoused by non-Muslims (e.g., the followers of the Jewish rebel Abu ‘Isa al-Isfahani and the Abu-Muslimiyya). Furthermore, most of these persons said to have entered ghayba tend to cluster around the Hashimite movement that gave rise to the Abbasid revolution in 750. Is this apparent dissemination of the ghayba-idea merely the artificial byproduct of Muslim author’s using heresiological tropes?—Or, is there something about the alchemic mingling of messianic ideas enabled by the Hashimite movement in Khurasan that, when passed through the alembic of the Abbasid revolution, produced this incredible spread of the Shi‘ite ghayba-idea?

The Kitab al-Irshad of Shaykh al-Mufid (d. 413/1022) is one of the chief sources on the early history of Shi‘i Islam containing the lives of the twelve Imams in one book. Although mainly perceived as a collection of Shi‘i traditions, this work has had tremendous impact on the way early Shi‘i history has been perceived and studied by the tradition itself as well as by Western academia. However, little attention has been paid to the internal subtleties of the Kitab al-Irshad and to how its author builds his arguments, constructing the fundamental elements of Twelver Shi‘i doctrine and its main historical narrative, relating in particular to the doctrine of twelve Imams and the occultation of the twelfth and last Imam in Twelver Shi‘i Islam. Little attention has also been paid to the narrative structure of this work and the way in which Shaykh al-Mufid weaved the core Shi‘i doctrines into that narrative, further shaping and systematizing them. In fact, one could even say that he used narrative as a principal tool of historical discourse to articulate and further refine those very core doctrines. In analysing this work, I will therefore address the following questions: what use does Shaykh al-Mufid make of narrative and narrativity in articulating the history of the Shi‘i Imams up until the 4th/11th century? And: How does his work compare against other representatives of the Muslim literary and historical tradition (e.g. works of hadith, sira, tabaqat and ta'rikh) of his and earlier times? In this respect, it is particularly interesting to understand whether his work is a response to works of history such as those of al-Baladhuri (d. ca 279/892) and al-Tabari (d. 310/923), or, whether it is also a response to similar developments in other branches of Islam thus representing an attempt to delineate an independent Twelver Shi‘i identity. In addressing these questions, I also investigate how the author plays across a range of disciplines to reach his goal of compiling the biographies and the traditions of the twelve Imams. I argue that one of the important achievements of this work is the creation of a unifying narrative structure for the life story of each of the twelve Imams as well as the totality of the twelve life stories in response to important developments within Shi‘i Islam and within the Muslim tradition in general.

Writing the history of the early ‘ghulat’ – those Shi’is who for their ‘extreme’ views on God and the Imams came to be called ‘extremists’ – presents two chief obstacles. One is the polemical and skewed nature of outsider accounts, the other is the extreme paucity of original works written by the ‘ghulat’ themselves. Today, however, the second obstacle can partly be remedied, as a number of quotations from original ‘ghulat’ texts has come to light through the publication of a collection of Nusayri sources. These quotations – both, completely unknown or known by their titles only, provide an invaluable window into the literature of the early ghulat, into their religious worldview, and into their social history. This paper studies the history of the early ‘ghulat’ by looking at the convoluted fates of two such texts, a certain ‘Kitab al-azilla’ (‘The Book of Shadows’), and a ‘Kitab al-kursi’ (The Book of the Throne’). Written in the ‘ghulat’ milieu of 8th-9th centuries Iraq, they have partially survived in six different texts by 10th-11th century Syrian Nusayri authors, and partly in the famous ‘Kitab al-Haft’ (the best-known ‘ghulat’ work). They also contain a one-page-long overlap, borrowed from one text into the other and presented by its author as its integral part. Beyond reconstructing the content of ‘Kitab al-azilla’ and ‘Kitab al-kursi,’ and beyond unearthing the religious ideas found in them, this paper studies the history of the early ‘ghulat’ by following the fates of these two treatises. Having emerged in 8th century Kufa, and having initially peacefully coexisted with other fractions within Shi’ism, the ‘ghulat’ were gradually demonized and pushed underground, and in the 10th century their successors the Nusayris were transplanted by their leaders to a safer Syria. These two works likewise are a product of the 8th century ‘ghulat’ milieu, suppressed in Imami literature, and preserved by the Syrian Nusayris. By following in the footsteps of these two books, I hope to present a micro-historical picture of the ‘ghulat’ community between 8th century Iraq and 11th century Syria.

The Mongol invasion introduced radical change in the evolution of the Muslim societies, in particular in the East of the Islamic world. Mongol and post-Mongol periods, extending roughly from the 7th/13th to the 10th/16th centuries, are marked by an intense search for a new stable socio-political configuration, which would ensure cohesion and survival of the Muslim community. A new socio-political configuration required a new basis of legitimisation, i.e. a new conception of religious authority. My presentation will focus on the evolution of the mystical and messianic pattern of religious authority in Timurid Iran, on its roots in the esoteric Shi’i and Sufi currents, and on its possible influence on the actual construction of the new socio-political configuration of the Muslim world, which eventually took the form of the Ottoman, Safavid and Mughal Empires. I will analyze and compare three movements with distinct doctrinal lines: the Nizari Ismailis (with reference to the Rawda-yi taslim attributed to Nasir al-Din Tusi) on the Shi’i side, the Kubrawis (with reference to the works of Najm al-Din Kubra, Nur al-Din al-Isfarayini, Ala al-Dawla Simnani, and the thinkers associated with the Kubrawi circles, such as Sa’d al-Din Hammu’i and Aziz-i Nasafi) on the Sufi side, and the Hurufis (mainly with reference to the Jawidan-nama-yi kabir of Fadlallah Astarabadi), as an example of Sufi/Shi’i eclecticism with a strong messianic component that developed in early Timurid Iran. I will argue that the spectacular rise of messianism in Iran during the late Mongol and Timurid periods had its roots in the dramatic doctrinal evolution --, in particular concerning the issue of relationship between prophecy (nubuwwa) and sainthood (walaya) --, which took place simultaneously in Sufi and Shi’i circles in the period immediately preceding the Mongol invasion. I will further cite some examples from the Jawidan-nama-yi kabir , which show how the messianic leaders of Timurid times combined the Sunni and Shi’i intellectual heritage, apparently in an attempt at creating a doctrine acceptable by all major factions and leading to the unification of the Muslim community, and with an ecumenical dimension extended to Jews and Christians. This messianic perspective, later associated with the idea of charismatic kingship, arguably played a central role in the legitimisation of the Ottoman, Safavid and Mughal rules.