Shia Islam

Fatimid Caliphate

• Fatimids (909–1171): Controlled much of North Africa, the Levant, parts of Arabia, and the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. The dynasty takes its name from Fāṭimah, Muhammad's daughter, from whom they claim descent.
  • In 909, the Shia military leader Abu Abdallah al-Shiʻi overthrew the Sunni rulers in North Africa, an event which led to the foundation of the Fatimid Caliphate.^[57]
  • Al-Qaid Jawhar ibn Abdallah (Arabic: جوهر; fl. 966–d. 992) was a Shia Fatimid general. Under the command of Caliph al-Muʻizz, he led the conquest of North Africa and then of Egypt,^[58] founded the city of Cairo^[59] and the al-Azhar Mosque. A Greek slave by origin, he was freed by al-Muʻizz.^[60]

Safavid Empire

A major turning point in the history of Shia Islam was the dominion of the Safavid dynasty (1501–1736) in Persia. This caused a number of significant changes in the Muslim world:

• The ending of the relative mutual tolerance between Sunnis and Shias that had existed from the time of the Mongol conquests onwards and the resurgence of antagonism between the two groups.
• Initial dependence of Shia clerics on the state, followed by the emergence of an independent body of ulama capable of taking political stands different from official policies.^[62]
• The growth in importance of Persian centres of Islamic education and religious learning, which resulted in the transformation of Twelver Shia Islam from a predominantly Arab phenomenon to a predominantly Persian one.^[63]
• The growth of the Akhbari school of thought, which taught that only the Quran, ḥadīth literature, and sunnah are to serve as bases for verdicts, rejecting the use of reasoning.

With the fall of the Safavids, the state in Iran — including the state system of courts with government-appointed judges (qāḍī) — became much weaker. This gave the sharīʿa courts of mujtahid an opportunity to fill the legal vacuum and enabled the ulama to assert their judicial authority. The Usuli school of thought also increased in strength at this time.^[64]

• 
  The declaration of Twelver Shīʿīsm as the state religion of Safavids
• 
  The Battle of Chaldiran in 1514 was a major sectarian crisis between Muslims in the Middle East.
• 
  A monument commemorating the Battle of Chaldiran, where more than 7,000 Muslims of the Shia and Sunnī sects killed each other

The Ashari position and the Shia rejection

The dominant theological school of mainstream Sunni Islam, the Ashariyya, holds that God's will is the ultimate source of all moral categories — that an act is good because God commands it and evil because God forbids it, rather than God commanding it because it is intrinsically good. On this view, moral categories are posterior to divine will and have no independent existence that could constrain or evaluate God's actions. The Ashari position on predestination follows from this framework: all human acts, including sins, are created by Allah and "acquired" (kasb) by humans through a mechanism that Ashari theologians acknowledged was philosophically difficult to render fully coherent, but which they regarded as established by revelation. The Athari school, foundational to Wahhabism and Salafism, tends toward a harder determinism in which divine decree encompasses all things without qualification.^[81]

Twelver theology, shaped by the rational theological tradition of the Imams and particularly by the teachings of Imam Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq, rejects both of these positions. In Shia theological epistemology, the human intellect (ʿaql) is capable of independently recognising moral categories — that justice is genuinely good and injustice genuinely evil — and God, whose essential nature is good, acts in accordance with these categories rather than arbitrarily defining them by fiat. Divine justice in Shia theology therefore means that God does not and cannot act unjustly, not because an external standard constrains Him but because injustice is incompatible with His essential nature. This position aligns Shia theology more closely with the Muʿtazilite school than with Ashari Sunni theology on this specific question, though Shia scholars are careful to distinguish their position from Muʿtazilism, grounding it in the teachings of the Imams rather than in rationalist philosophy alone.^[82]

Amr Bayn al-Amrayn: between determinism and free will

The Shia position on human agency and divine decree is encapsulated in the doctrine of Amr bayn al-Amrayn (amr bayna al-amrayn: a matter between two matters), traced in the classical sources to Imam Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq. When asked about the relationship between divine decree and human free will, the Imam is reported to have replied that the truth lies neither in pure compulsion (jabr) nor in pure delegation of independent power to humans (tafwīḍ), but in something between the two — a position that affirms genuine human agency and moral responsibility while maintaining that this agency operates within and depends upon the sustaining will of Allah rather than independently of it.^[83]

This doctrine directly addresses what Shia scholars regard as the central incoherence of the Ashari kasb position: if Allah creates all acts including sins, then punishing humans for those acts is unjust, and divine justice becomes logically impossible to maintain. The amr bayn al-amrayn doctrine resolves this by affirming that human choices are genuinely the human's own — not compelled by divine decree in a way that would remove moral responsibility — while simultaneously maintaining that humans do not possess independent power that operates outside of Allah's sustaining will.^[84]

The theological and jurisprudential implications of ʿAdl

The elevation of divine justice to the status of a foundational creed has significant implications throughout Shia theology and jurisprudence. The intellect's capacity to recognise justice and injustice independently means that rational argument is a legitimate and necessary tool of theological inquiry — a position that gives Shia theology a more explicitly rationalist character than Athari Sunni theology, which is suspicious of subjecting divine matters to rational evaluation. This rationalist orientation is reflected in the central role of the intellect (ʿaql) as one of the four sources of Jaʿfari jurisprudence alongside the Quran, the Sunnah, and the consensus of Shia scholars.^[85]

The doctrine of divine justice also provides the theological grounding for the Shia concept of the Imamate as a divine obligation: if Allah is just, He would not leave humanity without a divinely guided and infallible leader after the Prophet's death, since doing so would expose humanity to misguidance for which they could not be held fully responsible. The necessity of the Imam is therefore not merely a political convenience but a logical consequence of divine justice. This argument — known in Shia kalām as the qāʿida al-luṭf (the principle of grace or divine facilitation) — holds that divine justice requires Allah to provide whatever is necessary for humanity to achieve the purpose for which they were created, and that an infallible divinely guided Imam is a necessary component of this provision.^[86][87]

Pre-eternal prophethood and prophetic preparation

In Twelver theology, Muhammad's prophethood was not conferred upon him at the age of forty in the cave of Ḥirāʾ but was a pre-eternal reality established before the creation of the physical world. This doctrine is grounded in narrations attributed to the Imams preserved in al-Kāfī and other Shia hadith collections, in which Muhammad is reported to have said: "I was a prophet while Adam was still between water and clay."^[88] In Twelver theology, the event at the cave of Ḥirāʾ was therefore not a moment at which prophethood was bestowed upon Muhammad but rather the moment at which he received the divine command to declare publicly what was always already true — that he was the messenger of Allah and the seal of the prophets.^[89]

This theological position has significant implications for how Shia scholars evaluate specific narrations in the Sunni hadith corpus concerning the first revelation. The account recorded in Sahih al-Bukhari (Hadith 3) — transmitted through Aisha — describes Muhammad returning from the cave frightened, saying to Khadīja: "I fear for myself," and being taken to her cousin Waraqah ibn Nawfal, a Christian scholar, whose identification of the experience as revelation provided Muhammad with his initial validation. Shia scholars reject this account on theological grounds: a prophet divinely prepared for his mission from before birth cannot genuinely fear for his sanity, cannot be uncertain about the nature of his own revelation, and cannot require a Christian scholar's confirmation of an Islamic prophetic mission. The reliance on Waraqah ibn Nawfal is particularly problematic from the Shia perspective, since it implies that the Prophet's certainty about his prophethood was dependent on external human validation rather than direct divine assurance — a position Shia scholars argue contradicts both prophetic ismah and the Quranic description of divine communication (53:3).^[90]

The full ismah of the Prophet

Closely related to the doctrine of pre-eternal prophethood is the Twelver position on prophetic ismah (infallibility or divine protection from error and sin). While mainstream Sunni theology holds that prophets are protected from major sins and from errors in conveying revelation but may commit minor lapses or errors of personal judgment subsequently corrected by further revelation, Twelver theology holds that the prophets are fully infallible in all matters — actions, statements, and personal conduct — on the grounds that the prophet is the ḥujja (proof) of Allah on earth and that any error in his conduct would undermine the Quranic injunction to follow his example absolutely (33:21).

This divergence produces concrete disagreements over specific narrations in the Sunni canonical collections. Shia scholars reject as incompatible with prophetic ismah the narrations in Sahih al-Bukhari describing the Prophet contemplating suicide during the interruption of revelation (fatra al-wahy), the hadith al-sihr (Bukhari 3268) which records that the Prophet was effectively bewitched by a Jewish man named Labid ibn al-Asam such that he would imagine he had done things he had not done, and narrations suggesting the Prophet forgot portions of the Quran during recitation. From the Shia perspective these narrations are not merely historically dubious but theologically impossible: a prophet under divine protection cannot contemplate suicide, cannot be effectively bewitched in ways that compromise the reliability of his statements and actions, and cannot forget a text whose preservation Allah directly guaranteed (75:17).^[90]

Shia scholars further argue that the portrait of the Prophet that emerges from the Sunni canonical collections — uncertain at the moment of revelation, distressed during its interruption, susceptible to bewitchment — reflects the political conditions of the Umayyad and Abbasid periods in which humanising the Prophet served the function of making fallible caliphal authority seem less inadequate by comparison, rather than representing an authentic biographical record of a figure whose ismah the Shia tradition regards as theologically necessary.^[91]

Nūr Muḥammad: the primordial light

Central to Twelver Shia theology is the doctrine of Nūr Muḥammad (the Light of Muhammad), which holds that before the creation of the physical world, Allah created a primordial divine light (nūr) from which Muhammad and the Imams of his household were formed. This doctrine, rooted in narrations found in al-Kāfī and Bihar al-Anwar, establishes that Muhammad and the Imams share in a pre-eternal spiritual reality that transcends ordinary human existence — Allah created the light of Muhammad before the creation of the heavens and the earth, and from this primordial light the entire created order subsequently emerged.^[92]

The Nūr Muḥammad doctrine establishes the theological foundation for the continuity between prophethood and imamate in Shia thought: Muhammad and the Imams are not separate or successive figures but participants in a single pre-eternal divine reality whose outer (ẓāhir) dimension is the prophetic mission of legislation and revelation, and whose inner (bāṭin) dimension continues through the line of Imams after the Prophet's death. The question of who succeeded Muhammad was therefore not a political question about competence or seniority but a cosmological question about which individual shared in the nūr and possessed the divinely bestowed knowledge and authority necessary to guide the community.

The continuity of divine guidance: prophethood and imamate

A foundational principle of Twelver theology is that Allah does not leave humanity without access to a divinely guided ḥujja (proof or guide) at any point in history. This principle, articulated in narrations attributed to Imam Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq in al-Kāfī — "were there to remain on the earth but two men, one of them would be the proof of God" — establishes the theological necessity of the Imamate as a continuation of the same divine project of guidance that prophethood represented.^[93]

In this framework, the death of Muhammad did not end divine guidance but transformed its mode: legislation (tashrīʿ) concluded with the Prophet as the seal of the prophets, but the function of interpreting, applying, and esoterically illuminating that legislation continued through the line of Imams. The Imams are therefore not replacements for the Prophet nor independent sources of new divine law, but the authoritative custodians of his complete legacy, possessing both the exoteric knowledge of the sharīʿa and the esoteric knowledge of its deeper dimensions.^[94] From the Sunni perspective the succession was a political question the community could legitimately resolve through consultation. From the Shia perspective it was a theological question — who possessed the divinely bestowed nūr, knowledge, and ismah necessary to serve as the ongoing ḥujja of Allah — that only Allah could answer and that Muhammad had already answered at Ghadir Khumm.^[95][96]

The rejection of ʿAdālat al-Ṣaḥāba

The most fundamental divergence between Shia and Sunni hadith methodology concerns the doctrine of Adālat al-Ṣaḥāba — the collective presumption of uprightness applied to all companions of the Prophet in Sunni hadith criticism, by virtue of which a narrator's status as a companion is in itself sufficient to establish the reliability of their transmissions. Shia hadith methodology explicitly rejects this collective presumption and evaluates each companion individually on the basis of their known conduct and loyalty to the Ahl al-Bayt. Companions who remained steadfast in their support for ʿAlī — such as Salman al-Farisi, Abu Dharr al-Ghifari, Miqdad ibn Aswad, and Ammar ibn Yasir — are accorded high reliability; companions who opposed or abandoned ʿAlī are subject to critical evaluation regardless of their general proximity to the Prophet.^[97]

The Shia theological basis for this rejection follows from the sacred history narrative: if the companions collectively failed to uphold the Prophet's designation at Ghadir Khumm, their collective presumption of virtue cannot be maintained. Shia hadith critics further argue that the doctrine is logically circular — the reliability of the companions is established by the Sunni tradition, but which companions count as reliable was itself determined by a tradition shaped by the very political events whose legitimacy is in dispute.^[98]

The four books and the Shia hadith canon

The canonical foundation of Shia hadith literature consists of four major collections compiled in the 10th and 11th centuries CE, collectively known as the Kutub al-Arbaʿa (the Four Books): al-Kāfī by Muḥammad ibn Yaʿqūb al-Kulaynī (d. 329 AH), considered the most authoritative and containing hadith attributed to the Prophet and all twelve Imams; Man lā Yaḥḍuruhu al-Faqīh by Shaykh al-Ṣadūq (d. 381 AH); and Tahdhīb al-Aḥkām and al-Istibṣār, both by Shaykh al-Ṭūsī (d. 460 AH).^[99]

A critical distinction between the Shia and Sunni hadith canons is that Shia collections include hadith attributed to the twelve Imams alongside those attributed to the Prophet, on the theological basis that the Imams' statements constitute authoritative religious knowledge transmitted through the line of divinely guided successors. This effectively extends the hadith authority period from the Prophet's death in 632 CE to the beginning of the Major Occultation of the twelfth Imam in 874 CE, grounding Shia jurisprudence in a body of traditions that Sunni methodology does not recognise as authoritative.^[100]

The four sources of Jaʿfari jurisprudence: the role of ʿaql

The Jaʿfari school of jurisprudence recognises four sources of religious law: the Quran, the Sunnah (comprising both the Prophet's traditions and those of the twelve Imams), the consensus of Shia scholars (ijmāʿ), and the intellect (ʿaql). The inclusion of the intellect as an independent source of religious law is theologically grounded in the doctrine of divine justice — since the human intellect is capable of independently recognising moral categories, its conclusions in matters where revelation is silent or ambiguous carry genuine legal weight.^[85]

The practical significance of ʿaql as a jurisprudential source is considerable: it gives Shia jurisprudence a degree of rational flexibility that allows it to engage with novel legal questions through reasoned argument rather than exclusively through textual precedent. This rationalist orientation also underlies the Shia institution of the marjaʿ al-taqlīd (source of emulation), the senior jurist whose qualified legal reasoning (ijtihad) ordinary believers are expected to follow in matters of religious practice — an institution that has no precise equivalent in Sunni jurisprudence, where the dominant Ashari and Athari theological frameworks are more suspicious of subjecting divine matters to rational evaluation.^[101]

Doctrine about necessity of acquiring knowledge

According to Muhammad Rida al-Muzaffar, God gives humans the faculty of reason and argument. Also, God orders humans to think carefully about creation, while he refers to all creations as his signs of power and glory. These signs encompass all of the universe. Furthermore, there is an analogy of humans as the little world and the universe as the large world. God does not accept the faith of those who follow him without thinking and only with imitation, but God also blames them for such actions. In other words, humans have to think about the universe with reason and intellect, a faculty bestowed on us by God. Since there is more insistence on the faculty of intellect among Shia Muslims, even evaluating the claims of someone who claims prophecy is based on the intellect.^[105][106]

Doctrine

Twelver doctrine is based on five principles.^[165] These five principles known as Usul ad-Din are as follow:^[166]

1. Monotheism: God is one and unique;
2. Justice: the concept of moral rightness based on ethics, fairness, and equity, along with the punishment of the breach of these ethics;
3. Prophethood: the institution by which God sends emissaries, or prophets, to guide humankind;
4. Leadership: a divine institution which succeeded the institution of Prophethood. Its appointees (Imams) are divinely appointed;
5. Resurrection and Last Judgment: God's final assessment of humanity.

Books

Besides the Quran, which is the sacred text common to all Muslims, Twelver Shias derive scriptural and authoritative guidance from collections of sayings and traditions (hadith) attributed to Muhammad and the Twelve Imams. Below is a list of some of the most prominent of these books:

• Nahj al-Balagha by Ash-Sharif Ar-Radhi^[167] – the most famous collection of sermons, letters & narration attributed to ʿAlī, the first Imam regarded by Shias
• Kitab al-Kafi by Muhammad ibn Ya'qub al-Kulayni^[168]
• Wasa'il al-Shiʻah by al-Hurr al-Amili

The Twelve Imams

According to the theology of Twelvers, the successor of Muhammad is an infallible human individual who not only rules over the Muslim community with justice but also is able to keep and interpret the divine law (sharīʿa) and its esoteric meaning. The words and deeds of Muhammad and the Twelve Imams are a guide and model for the Muslim community to follow; as a result, they must be free from error and sin, and Imams must be chosen by divine decree (nass) through Muhammad.^[169][170] The twelfth and final Imam is Hujjat Allah al-Mahdi, who is believed by Twelvers to be currently alive and hidden in Occultation.^[171]

Jurisprudence

The Twelver jurisprudence is called Jaʽfari jurisprudence. In this school of Islamic jurisprudence, the sunnah is considered to be comprehensive of the oral traditions of Muhammad and their implementation and interpretation by the Twelve Imams. There are three schools of Jaʿfari jurisprudence: Usuli, Akhbari, and Shaykhi; the Usuli school is by far the largest of the three. Twelver groups that do not follow the Jaʿfari jurisprudence include Alevis, Bektashi, and Qizilbash.

The five pillars of Islam to the Jaʿfari jurisprudence are known as Usul ad-Din:

1. Tawḥīd: unity and oneness of God;
2. Nubuwwah: prophethood of Muhammad;
3. Muʿad: resurrection and final judgment;
4. ʿAdl: justice of God;
5. Imamah: the rightful place of the Shia Imams.

In Jaʿfari jurisprudence, there are eight secondary pillars, known as Furu ad-Din, which are as follows:^[166]

1. Salat (prayer);
2. Sawm (fasting);
3. Hajj (pilgrimage) to Mecca;
4. Zakāt (alms giving to the poor);
5. Jihād (struggle) for the righteous cause;
6. Directing others towards good;
7. Directing others away from evil;
8. Khums (20% tax on savings yearly, after deduction of commercial expenses).

According to Twelvers, defining and interpretation of Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh) is the responsibility of Muhammad and the Twelve Imams. Since the 12th Imam is currently in Occultation, it is the duty of Shia clerics to refer to the Islamic literature, such as the Quran and hadith, and identify legal decisions within the confines of Islamic law to provide means to deal with current issues from an Islamic perspective. In other words, clergymen in Twelver Shia Islam are believed to be the guardians of fiqh, which is believed to have been defined by Muhammad and his twelve successors. This process is known as ijtihad and the clerics are known as marjaʿ, meaning "reference"; the labels Allamah and Ayatollah are in use for Twelver clerics.

Islamists

Islamist Shia (Persian: تشیع اخوانی) is a new denomination within Twelver Shia Islam greatly inspired by the political ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood and mysticism of Ibn Arabi. It sees Islam as a political system and differs from the other mainstream Usuli and Akhbari groups in favoring the idea of the establishment of an Islamic state in Occultation under the rule of the 12th Imam.^[172][173] Hadi Khosroshahi was the first person to identify himself as ikhwani (Islamist) Shia Muslim.^[174]

Because of the concept of the hidden Imam, Muhammad al-Mahdi, Shia Islam is inherently secular in the age of Occultation, therefore Islamist Shia Muslims had to borrow ideas from Sunnī Islamists and adjust them in accordance with the doctrine of Shia Islam.^[175] Its foundations were laid during the Persian Constitutional Revolution at the start of 20th century in Qajar Empire (1905–1911), when Fazlullah Nouri supported the Persian king Ahmad Shah Qajar against the will of Muhammad Kazim Khurasani, the Usuli marjaʿ of the time.^[176]

Ismāʿīlī Imams

In the Nizārī Ismāʿīlī interpretation of Shia Islam, the Imam is the guide and the intercessor between humans and God, and the individual through whom God is recognized. He is also responsible for the esoteric interpretation of the Quran (taʾwīl). He is the possessor of divine knowledge and therefore the "Prime Teacher". According to the "Epistle of the Right Path", a Persian Ismāʿīlī prose text from the post-Mongol period of Ismāʿīlī history, by an anonymous author, there has been a chain of Imams since the beginning of time, and there will continue to be an Imam present on the Earth until the end of time. The worlds would not exist in perfection without this uninterrupted chain of Imams. The proof (hujja) and gate (bāb) of the Imam are always aware of his presence and are witness to this uninterrupted chain.^[182]

After the death of Ismāʿīl ibn Jaʿfar, many Ismāʿīlīs believed that one day the eschatological figure of Imam Mahdi, whom they believed to be Muhammad ibn Imam Ismāʿīl, would return and establish an age of justice. One group included the violent Qarmatians, who had a stronghold in Bahrain. In contrast, some Ismāʿīlīs believed the Imamate did continue, and that the Imams were in Occultation and still communicated and taught their followers through a network of Da'i ("Missionaries").

In 909 CE, Abdullah al-Mahdi Billah, a claimant to the Ismāʿīlī Imamate, established the Fatimid Caliphate. During this period, three lineages of Imams were formed. The first branch, known today as the Druze, began with Al-Ḥākim bi-Amr Allāh. Born in 985 CE, he ascended as ruler at the age of eleven. When in 1021 CE his mule returned without him, soaked in blood, a religious group that was forming in his lifetime broke off from mainstream Ismāʿīlīsm and did not acknowledge his successor.

Later to be known as the Druze, they believe Al-Ḥākim to be God incarnate^[183] and the prophesied Mahdi on Earth, who would one day return and bring justice to the world.^[184] The Druze faith further split from Ismāʿīlīsm as it developed into a distinct monotheistic Abrahamic religion and ethno-religious group with its own unique doctrines, and finally separated from both Ismāʿīlīsm and Islam altogether.^[185] Thus, the Druze do not identify themselves as Muslims, and are not considered as such by Muslims either.^{[186][187][188][189]}

The second split occurred between Nizārī and Musta'lī Ismāʿīlīs following the death of Ma'ad al-Mustansir Billah in 1094 CE. His rule was the longest of any caliph in any Islamic empire. Upon his death, his sons, Nizār (the older) and Al-Musta'lī (the younger), fought for political and spiritual control of the dynasty. Nizār was defeated and jailed, but according to the Nizārī tradition his son escaped to Alamut, where the Iranian Ismāʿīlī had accepted his claim.^[190] From here on, the Nizārī Ismāʿīlī community has continued with a present, living Imam.

The Musta'lī Ismāʿīlīs split between the Ṭayyibi and the Ḥāfiẓi; Ṭayyibi Ismāʿīlīs, also known as "Bohras", are further divided between Dawudi Bohras, Sulaymani Bohras, and Alavi Bohras. The former denomination claims that At-Tayyib Abi l-Qasim, son of Al-Amir bi-Ahkami l-Lah, and the Imams following him went into a period of anonymity (Dawr-e-Satr) and appointed a Da'i al-Mutlaq ("Unrestricted Missionary") to guide the community, in a similar manner as the Ismāʿīlīs had lived after the death of Muhammad ibn Imam Ismāʿīl. The latter denomination claims that the ruling Fatimid caliph was the Imam, and they died out with the fall of the Fatimid Empire.

Pillars

Ismāʿīlīs have categorized their practices which are known as seven pillars:

Contemporary leadership

The Nizārīs place importance on a scholarly institution because of the existence of a present Imam. The Imam of the Age defines the jurisprudence, and his guidance may differ with Imams previous to him because of different times and circumstances. For Nizārī Ismāʿīlīs, the current Imam is Karim al-Husayni Aga Khan IV. The Nizārī line of Imams has continued to this day as an uninterrupted chain.

Divine leadership has continued in the Bohra branch through the institution of the "Missionary" (Da'i). According to the Bohra tradition, before the last Imam, At-Tayyib Abi l-Qasim, went into seclusion, his father, the 20th Al-Amir bi-Ahkami l-Lah, had instructed Al-Hurra Al-Malika the Malika (Queen consort) in Yemen to appoint a vicegerent after the seclusion—the Da'i al-Mutlaq ("Unrestricted Missionary"), who as the Imam's vicegerent has full authority to govern the community in all matters both spiritual and temporal while the lineage of Musta'lī-Ṭayyibi Imams remains in seclusion (Dawr-e-Satr). The three branches of Musta'lī Ismāʿīlīs (Dawudi Bohras, Sulaymani Bohras, and Alavi Bohras) differ on who the current "Unrestricted Missionary" is.^{[citation needed]}

Doctrine

The Zaydīs, Twelvers, and Ismāʿīlīs all recognize the same first four Imams; however, the Zaydīs consider Zayd ibn ʿAlī as the 5th Imam. After the time of Zayd ibn ʿAlī, the Zaydīs believed that any descendant (Sayyid) of Ḥasan ibn ʿAlī or Ḥusayn ibn ʿAlī could become the next Imam, after fulfilling certain conditions.^[193] Other well-known Zaydī Imams in history were Yahya ibn Zayd, Muhammad al-Nafs al-Zakiyya, and Ibrahim ibn Abdullah.

The Zaydī doctrine of Imamah does not presuppose the infallibility of the Imam, nor the belief that the Imams are supposed to receive divine guidance. Moreover, Zaydīs do not believe that the Imamate must pass from father to son but believe it can be held by any Sayyid descended from either Ḥasan ibn ʿAlī or Ḥusayn ibn ʿAlī (as was the case after the death of the former). Historically, Zaydīs held that Zayd ibn ʿAlī was the rightful successor of the 4th Imam since he led a rebellion against the Umayyads in protest of their tyranny and corruption. Muhammad al-Baqir did not engage in political action, and the followers of Zayd ibn ʿAlī maintained that a true Imam must fight against corrupt rulers.

Jurisprudence

In matters of Islamic jurisprudence, Zaydīs follow the teachings of Zayd ibn ʿAlī, which are documented in his book Majmu'l Fiqh (in Arabic: مجموع الفِقه). Al-Ḥādī ila'l-Ḥaqq Yaḥyā, the first Zaydī Imam and founder of the Zaydī State in Yemen, is regarded as the codifier of Zaydī jurisprudence, and as such most Zaydī Shias today are known as Hadawis.

Timeline

The Idrisids (Arabic: الأدارسة) were Arab^[194] Zaydī Shias^[195] whose dynasty, named after its first sultan, Idris I, ruled in the western Maghreb from 788 to 985 CE. Another Zaydī State was established in the region of Gilan, Deylaman, and Tabaristan (northern Iran) in 864 CE by the Alavids;^[196] it lasted until the death of its leader at the hand of the Samanids in 928 CE. Roughly forty years later, the Zaydī State was revived in Gilan and survived under Hasanid leaders until 1126 CE. Afterwards, from the 12th to 13th centuries, the Zaydī Shias of Deylaman, Gilan, and Tabaristan then acknowledged the Zaydī Imams of Yemen or rival Zaydī Imams within Iran.^[197]

The Buyids were initially Zaydī Shias,^[198] as were the Banu Ukhaidhir rulers of al-Yamama in the 9th and 10th centuries.^[199] The leader of the Zaydī community took the title of caliph; thus, the ruler of Yemen was known by this title. Al-Hadi Yahya bin al-Hussain bin al-Qasim ar-Rassi, a descendant of Ḥasan ibn ʿAlī, founded the Zaydī Imamate at Sa'dah in 893–897 CE, and the Rassid dynasty continued to rule over Yemen until the middle of the 20th century, when the republican revolution of 1962 deposed the last Zaydī Imam. See: Arab Cold War.

The founding Zaydī branch in Yemen was the Jarudiyya. With increasing interaction with the Ḥanafī and Shāfiʿī schools of Sunnī jurisprudence, there was a shift from the Jarudiyya group to the Sulaimaniyya, Tabiriyya, Butriyya, and Salihiyya.^[200] Zaydī Shias form the second dominant religious group in Yemen. Currently, they constitute about 40–45% of the population in Yemen; Jaʿfaris and Ismāʿīlīs constitute the 2–5%.^[201] In Saudi Arabia there are over 1 million Zaydī Shias, primarily in the western provinces.

Currently, the most prominent Zaydī political movement is the Houthi movement in Yemen, known by the name of Shabab al-Mu'mineen ("Believing Youth") or Ansar Allah ("Partisans of God"). In 2014–2015, Houthis took over the Yemeni government in Sanaa, which led to the fall of the Saudi Arabian-backed government of Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi.^[202][203] Houthis and their allies gained control of a significant part of Yemen's territory, and resisted the Saudi Arabian-led intervention in Yemen seeking to restore Hadi in power.^[204] (See: Iran–Saudi Arabia proxy conflict). Both the Houthis and the Saudi Arabian-led coalition were being attacked by the Sunnī Islamist militant group and Salafi-jihadist terrorist organization ISIL/ISIS/IS/Daesh.^[205][206]