Throughout Shiʿi history, there has been a tension between the tendency to exaggerate the sanctity of the representatives of God on earth, and the sober denial that humans participate in this sanctity. This has been most evident in the Imams’ excommunication of their ‘extremist’ followers (ghulāt), but it was a pivotal dynamic at moment of crisis, when members of the Shiʿi community would seek to resolve the crisis through claims to represent divine truth. The production of the Twelver Occultation doctrine was one such moment, when the demise of the line of living Imams required the intervention of charismatic individuals to create a set of doctrines and institutions which would hold the community together in a radically new era. This paper investigates the earliest, formative phase of the development of the Twelver Occultation doctrine, between 874-900 CE. During this period, numerous different solutions were proposed to the crisis of succession that followed the death of the 11th Imam, al-Ḥaṣan al-ʿAskarī in 874 CE. How and why did the doctrine of the Hidden Imam constitute itself? Using the early Twelver and Shi’i sources, I reconstruct who were the key political players before and after the death of the 11th Imam, and create a narrative for the eventual triumph of the occultation idea. Instead of the traditional Twelver narrative of a smooth succession from the power of the Imams to the representative authority of the Four Envoys (safīrs), I argue that we recognize a transitional period before the rise of the Envoys in which a group of the fiscal agents of the Imam collaborated to ensure some semblance of continuity, while maintaining a theology of uncertainty, represented as the “I-don’t-know-ites” (lā-adriyya), in the heresiographies. This gave way to the more positive doctrine of the Occultation of the 12th Imam, child of al-Ḥasan al-ʿAskarī, with the rise to preeminence of the Second Envoy, Abū Jaʿfar Muḥammad b. ʿUthmān al-ʿAmrī. In this paper, I recover the voices of opposition to Abū Jaʿfar, and show how he was able to establish his authority in spite of both moderate and extremist opposition to his assumption of the quasi-Imamic authority of the safirate. Finally, I show how the contestation of claims to authority in this earliest period of Twelver identity lays foundations that become incorporated into the canonical doctrine of the Occultation which crystallized in Twelver works of the late 10th to mid 11th centuries CE.

In order to justify or defend the ghayba of the twelfth Imam, Twelver Shīʿī scholars have traditionally adduced a body of sayings and reports ascribed to the Prophet and the previous Imams that predict a ghayba (or two) for a future Imam. Among these reports are three that appear to suggest that a select cadre of the Imam’s followers is aware of his location during his ghayba, and - according to one of the three reports - thirty individuals are with him. These reports contradict numerous others that reject the possibility that any of his followers can see or recognize the Imam during the ghayba. They moreover would appear to be in tension with the alleged final rescript of the twelfth Imam, said to have been furnished by an individual later canonized as the fourth and last of the Imam’s plenipotentiaries days before his demise, declaring anyone who claims to see the Imam again before his emergence from ghayba “a lying impostor.” All three reports seem to have originated with a group called the Wāqifa, followers of the seventh in the twelver line of Imams who denied his death, refused to accept the imamate of his son and claimed that he had escaped from prison (which had marked his first ghayba) and entered into hiding (his second ghayba), giving rise for the first time to the notion of two ghaybas. Beginning in the tenth century, Twelver scholars reinterpreted these and other reports, bringing them into line with the nascent dogmas associated with the alleged son of the eleventh Imam. In the works of later scholars, the same reports came to serve a new purpose. One such scholar was the prolific Nūrī-Ṭabarsī (d. 1902) who devoted two substantial works to controversial stories of individuals – mainly among the ulama – claiming to have encountered the hidden Imam or witnessed his miracles during the second or “major” occultation. Aware that most of these accounts go against the warning found in the alleged last rescript, Nūrī-Ṭabarsī – and other who have followed him – set out to resolve this contradiction by adducing the same reports to defend their belief that the Imam continues to be seen and recognized by his most elite followers during the major occultation. This presentation will examine these three reports, glossing key terms, and explore the ways Nūrī-Ṭabarsī and others have exploited them to negotiate a contentious and understudied aspect of the ghayba.

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.