The Shiʿi imams hold a key position in our understanding of early Islam. Every first-year university course on Islam will mention the twelve imams venerated in Twelver Shiʿism. However, our understanding of these men is still surprisingly basic. They are usually treated as mere sources of doctrine or ahistorical, unchanging symbols.
Imams were revered scholars and religious leaders descended from the Prophet Muḥammad. They are often mentioned in scholarship as posing a threat to the legitimacy of the ruling caliphs not just in a religious sense, but also from a socio-political viewpoint. Their leadership defined the quietist yet oppositional Imami Shiʿi community scattered throughout the Islamic empire. Imami Shiʿism was a key part of the turbulent thesis and antithesis which formed Islam, and it remains greatly influential until today in its Twelver incarnation. Remarkably, there is no comprehensive history of the imamate. There are a number of reasons for this, central among which are that scholarship on Imami Shiʿism has approached it as a doctrinal and intellectual phenomenon. However, while doctrine is important, religious groups are also fundamentally social phenomena.
The Embodied Imamate project is perhaps the first large-scale attempt to position the imams as historical actors embedded in specific and changing social and political circumstances. Instead of accepting the canonized set of twelve imams, the project seeks to understand the emergence of the institutions of imamate, and provide a chronology for the changes and controversies that marked this emergence.
In order to do this, the Embodied Imamate project makes a pioneering attempt to trace the development of imamate and Imami Shiʿi identity through a set of sources that have rarely been fully exploited and compared: familiar sources like historical chronicles and Shiʿi hadith; but also sources like inscriptions which are rarely used by scholars of Shiʿi history.
Embodied Imamate deploys new methodologies like the large scale, systematic digital analysis of biographies, chains of hadith transmission and genealogies. Textual sources regarding ritual and the spatial performance of identity are read in fresh new ways by contextualizing in space through the use of maps, GIS and spatial analysis. The conceptual approach is also new: instead of assuming that such a thing as a “Shiʿi imam” or indeed a “Sunni caliph” or the “imam of a school of law (madhhab)” was always clearly defined or inevitable, the project seeks to understand what circumstances led to the creation of particular kinds of religious and political leadership, and how leadership was defined not by the theology of imamate alone, but crucially, by the way that leaders and their followers interacted. The imams are seen, not as a unique case, but rather on a continuum of other forms of religious authority that were institutionalized to different extents, including caliphs and the eponymous founders of Sunni law schools, but also rabbis, bishops and Zoroastrian priests, and so on.
