Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

142 t CHAPTER SIX
one after another, appeared to speak for the “concealed” Muhammad.
They brought him the monies paid by the Shiites as their
alms-tithe and carried back answers to questions posed to the
Imams. There may have been doubts about this arrangement from
the beginning, and there were problems with the four “delegates”—they
called themselves “gates” or “ambassadors” of the
now long-departed Abu Qasim Muhammad. There was a rather
abrupt solution. In 941 the last of these deputies produced a document
from the Hidden Imam announcing that the period of the
Lesser Concealment was over and that henceforward there would
be no delegates or spokesmen, no direct communication. The Lord
of the Ages, who was still alive, though in another, spiritual dimension,
had gone into a permanent Greater Concealment, not to return
until the events preceding the Day of Judgment.
The concealment of the Imam, the infallible guide and head of
the community, had repercussions on the entire structure of Shiite
Islam. It was first thought that at the Great Concealment in 941,
the Imams’ functions were in fact in abeyance, that everything
from the conduct of a holy war, to the enforcement of the sharia
(Islamic law), to the collection of the zakat had effectively lapsed.
No law-based community could survive, however, without an executive
or judicial authority of some sort, and soon Shiite lawyers
were exploring the possibility of the delegation of at least some of
the Imam’s powers. By the fifteenth century it was fairly generally
established among Shiites that their ulama (legal scholars) exercised
what they called a “general representation” of the Hidden
Imam and thus were empowered to collect the zakat on the Imam’s
behalf and even to declare a jihad in defense of the faith. In the
end, their ulama, particularly in Iran, had established a wide-ranging
authority among the Shiites.
Political Ismailism: The Fatimids
Sometimes called the “Seveners,” the followers of Ismail, son of
Jafar al-Sadiq, and of his descendants led an obscure existence in
the Abode of Islam for most of the eighth and early ninth centu-