1 - The Rise of the Agents in the Late Imamate (830–874 ce)

Summary

Chapter 1 surveys the rise of the pre-Occultation Imamic agents, and their role in ensuring the stability of the Imamate. While previous scholarship has tended to conflate the various roles of the followers of the Imams as a bloc of men (rijāl), it is argued that we must distinguish between different roles, in particular between scholars and agents, although these roles sometimes overlapped. Unlike pure scholars, the prestige and authority of the agents rested upon the fiscal institutions of the Imamate: the systems for collecting the canonical alms taxes, the zakāt and the khums, which were instrumental in ritually and materially connecting the community with their Imams. It is argued that, though the precise origins of an institutionalized Imamate are unclear, by the time of the tenth Imam, legal conventions and institutional protocols for defining the Imamate and its operations had emerged, setting the scene for Occultation-era contestations.