Introduction

Summary

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.”