Embodied Imamate

"Embodied Imamate: Mapping the Development of the Early Shiʿi Community 700-900 CE" ERC Horizon STG project, 2024-2028 PI: Edmund Hayes, Leiden University According to the canonical accounts of Twelver Shiʿism, the Imams were a sequence of twelve men who passed supreme religious authority in succession from father to son between 661 and 874 CE. Yet this canonical sequence owes more retrospective doctrinal reconstruction than to the historical existence of a continuing institution of leadership. Nonetheless, this canonical doctrine of twelve Imams remains a dominant paradigm that has meant that a systematic history of the emergence of the Imamate as an institution has not yet been attempted. The Imami Shiʿi Imams played a key role in early Islam. Their leadership defined the quietist yet oppositional community of the “Imami Shiʿa”, a community scattered throughout the Islamic empire. Their quiet opposition to the status quo gave rise to one of the great reservoir of alternative narratives about the meaning of Islam and Islamic history, providing an important parallel to the dominant narratives emerging from governmental elites, and Sunni voices claiming orthodoxy. A comprehensive history of Imamate has never been written. Scholarship on Imami Shiʿism has overwhelmingly focused on doctrine. However, religious groups are fundamentally social phenomena, and must be studied in their social, as well as their doctrinal dimensions. Hence, this project, “Embodied Imamate: Mapping the Development of the Early Shiʿi Community 700-900 CE (ImBod),”will frame the Imamate as a set of social interactions between two aspects which are rarely separately theorised: the Imams, and the community who venerated them.