Conclusion

Summary

New phenomena emerge from existing materials. The envoyship (sifāra), the office that has been the central subject of this book, emerged from the pre-Occultation institutions of Imamate – in particular the Imamic agentship (wikāla), with some interplay with esoteric charismatic conceptions of the Gate (bāb) to the Imam. Following the death of al-Ḥasan al-ʿAskarī, a plethora of competing politico-doctrinal visions emerged to solve the problem of the identity of the next Imam. Imamic agents were among the key players, first in contesting the different visions of the Imamate and then in forming a core of support for the idea of the Occultation. But the image that emerges from a close comparison of the earliest layer of reports about this period does not suggest the clean and inevitable succession of the agents to authority.