Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

THE UMMA t 139
itories of the understanding of the true, albeit hidden (batin) sense
of Scripture. This divine knowledge was transmitted to Ali, the
first Imam, by the Prophet himself and by Ali to his successors in
each generation.
According to most Shiites, the Imamate passed from generation
to generation by designation at the hands of the previous Imam.
Where there are major differences of opinion is on the designated
heir of the sixth Imam, Jafar al-Sadiq (d. 765). The question arose
whether the Imamate passed to his eldest son Ismail (d. 760),
whom he had formally designated his successor but who predeceased
his own father, or to his younger son, Musa al-Kazim (d.
799), whom Jafar had designated Imam after Ismail’s death despite
the fact that Ismail had a surviving son, Muhammad. Could the
designation be taken back, in effect, or did it necessarily descend
on the dead Ismail’s infant son? The different answers to this question
set in train the division between the so-called Ismaili Shiites
who regarded Ismail’s son Muhammad as the only genuine Imam,
and Imami Shiites who recognized Musa al-Kazim and his descendants
as Imams.
This was the distinction in the eighth century, but by the tenth
the two groups had taken an additional and significant step apart:
the Imamis embraced, as we have seen, the notion of the concealment
of the twelfth Imam in their line. This reportedly occurred
sometime about 878, and though the direction of the community
rested for a spell in the hands of deputies, by the mid–tenth century
the Imamites had accepted the fact that there was no longer
an Imam in the flesh and that until his return as the Mahdi, they
were solely a spiritual community, a concession which, for all its
attractiveness for the intelligentsia, had surrendered the Imamis’
claim to the highest political power in Islam.
Sunnis and Shiites
The Party of Ali thus maintained that (1) the umma was primarily
a spiritual community, a “church” that runs a “state,” so to speak;
(2) that its leader or Imam—a term they preferred to “caliph”—