Was There an Early Imāmī Shīʿī Legal System?

By Edmund Hayes

When we speak of Shīʿī law, we usually mean the legal edifice of Twelver Shīʿīsm, which developed in the centuries following the collapse of the historical imamate with the death of the eleventh Imam in 260/874.

In this series of essays, I am going to ask what role the Imams had in making and implementing law during their lifetimes, and how legal functions were negotiated between the Imams and their community.

Was there something like an early Imāmī Shīʿī legal system which bound the Imams and their followers? Were Imams producers of purely theoretical legal knowledge, or were there also structures for legal interpretation and for passing judgements within the community? Was there anything like a system of courts, and were there any legal professionals, or mechanisms of enforcement?

One might usefully ask the same questions of the early Sunnīs or proto-Sunnīs[1] who were contemporary with the Imams: figures like Abū Ḥanīfa (d. 150/767) or Aḥmad b. Ḥanbal (d. 241/855) clearly had legal opinions, but did they oversee a legal system? Not really. Sunnī scholars coexisted, sometimes uneasily, with caliphal systems of law to whom legal enforcement was entrusted.[2] This is complicated by the fact that early caliphs were not themselves Sunnīs or not stably so before the 10^th century CE.[3] Moreover, (proto-)Sunnī figures were sometimes hostile to, and sometimes in sympathy with, caliphal institutions.[4] In early Imāmī Shīʿīsm, although some actors collaborated with caliphal authorities, the general attitude to the caliphal system was hostile,[5] which complicated the ways in which effective legal recourse could be achieved. I discuss this further in my second essay in the series.

In this first essay, I will lay out some general principles, such as what do we mean by Imāmī Shīʿīsm versus Twelver Shīʿīsm; whether we can trust our sources; and how we can think about the legal statements (ḥadīth) of the Shīʿī Imams as relating to the practical enforcement of legal obligations and legally-mandated ritual practice, and how the Imams’ opinions related to the opinions and practices of their followers, and the prevailing institutions within the Shīʿī community and in the wider world in which the Shīʿa found themselves.

Introducing the Imams

My essays will focus on the early Imāmī Shīʿa from the 8^th–9^th centuries CE. Who were the Imāmī Shīʿa, and who were their Imams?

The sequence of Imams ultimately canonized[6] by the Twelver Shīʿa in the 10^th century CE are as follows[7]:

1. ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib, d. 40/661
2. al-Ḥasan, d. 49/669
3. al-Ḥusayn, d. 61/680
4. ʿAlī Zayn al-ʿĀbidīn (al-Sajjād), d. 95/713
5. Muḥammad al-Bāqir, d. 114/ 733
6. Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq, d. 148/765
7. Mūsā al-Kāẓim, d. 183/799
8. ʿAlī al-Riḍā, d. 203/818
9. Muḥammad al-Jawād, d. 220/835
10. ʿAlī al-Hādī, d. 254/868
11. al-Ḥasan al-ʿAskarī, d. 260/874
12. Muḥammad al-Mahdī (the hidden Imam)

The Twelver Shīʿa (or “Twelvers”) today recognize this canonized sequence of Imams as a closed set to whom there can be no additions. However, we should make a contrast between mature Twelver Shīʿism and the circumstances before the death of the Eleventh Imam, which led to the crystallization of the doctrine of the occultation and the canonization of this closed sequence of twelve Imams. Therefore, I use the word “Imāmī”  to refer to the followers of this lineage of Imams during their lifetimes.[8] While the Imāmī Shīʿa may have held many of the same doctrines as the later Twelvers, it is convenient to separate the two, especially when trying to understand the practical agency of the Imams during their lifetimes.

While the exact boundaries of the Imāmī community were probably constantly shifting, we can see across a range of sources (including heresiographies,[9] and the Shīʿī ḥadīth works that I discuss below) a persistent, multi-generational identity that defines the group of non-Zaydī, non-Ismāʿīlī Shīʿa[10] who recognized a lineage of Imams centering upon the descendants of the two most prestigious and productive Imams, Muḥammad al-Bāqir, the Fifth Imam, and Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq, the Sixth Imam.[11] Following the death of al-Ḥasan al-ʿAskarī in 260/874, the Twelver community developed into a notably different entity in term of its doctrines and institutions, under the pressure of the new dogma of the occultation of the Twelfth Imam.[12] In using the term Imamī to refer to these pre-Twelver Shīʿī followers of Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq, I am stretching the term a little away from its usage within the Twelver community, for whom Imāmī and Twelver are synonymous. And indeed, the two terms emerge in our sources at around the same time.[13]

It is unclear whether the Imams before Muḥammad al-Bāqir can be considered Imāmī in the full sense of an institutionalized community that was distinct from other Shīʿa. The exact moment of the emergence of the Imāmiyya as a distinct group is still an open question in the field that has hitherto been most systematically addressed by Najam Haider.[14] Certainly, the earliest Imams in the canonized sequence occupied very different niches among their contemporaries than the later Imams: ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭalib was a short-lived caliph, one might even say counter-caliph, given the constant opposition to his rule from an ultimately successful claimant, Muʿāwiya.[15] ʿAlī’s son Ḥasan relinquished his claim to caliphate, and his brother, Ḥusayn, was a failed rebel, while his son was a quiet-living scholar in Medina.[16]The first three men who were later canonized as Imams fulfilled very different institutional roles from later Imams who were, in their lifetimes, recognizable as leaders of a distinctive community that was set apart with its own institutions. At the time of the collapse of the imamate in 260/874 it was an institution with systems for collecting communal tithes, systems for the official appointment of agents, and perhaps also official mechanisms for providing imamic imprimatur to scholarship produced within the community.[17] I will deal with these aspects of the imamic system in the essays that follow.

What is an Imam?

Scholars have not yet fully grappled with the question, “What is an Imam, in practice?” A reflexive assumption implicit in much scholarship on early Islam is that the crystallized, post-occultation image of the imamate of the twelve Imams was established from the time of ʿAlī and persisted uninterrupted until the occultation.[18] Within the mature Twelver tradition, Imams are lumped together as functionally a single entity whose statements have equal weight as sources of law. This leaves little room for historical analysis of the ways Imams differed and responded to specific historical circumstances. Twelver scholars in the later tradition also tend to collapse the epistemological distinction between the rulings of God and the utterances of the Imams, which are said to represent the opinions of “the Lawgiver” (al-shārīʿ).[19] Accordingly, the Imams from ʿAlī to al-Ḥasan al-ʿAskarī are all treated equally as lawgivers, as divinely-sanctioned sources of legal wisdom which emanates out to the community.[20] If we read the ḥadīth of the Imams carefully, however, in spite of their often hagiographical nature, an image emerges of the Imams as embedded in a set of social relations that governed the nature of their influence on their contemporaries.

In what follows I suggest that the Imams did indeed have an influence on their contemporaries, for example, by sending out letters with (legal) instructions to their agents and by excommunicating heretics.[21] In addition to this kind of top-down influence where the Imams and their agents were directing the flow of information, we also see various kinds of bottom-up influence upon the Imams and the structures of the Imamate: questions sent to the Imams, requests for clarification, and even decisions made by community members over who could be an Imam, and who could not, based on localized values about what qualities an Imam should have. In my third and fourth essays I will look at these interlocking top-down and bottom-up dynamics.

Sources and Methods in the Study of Imāmī Ḥadīth

We need to briefly broach the subject of sources and historicity. The vast majority of material on the Imams, their lives and opinions, comes from Shīʿī ḥadīth. While there are occasional opportunities for corroborating and comparing aspects of the Imams’ biographies in non-Imāmī sources, on the whole, only the Imāmīs were really interested in the Imams. If you want detailed information on the Imāmī Imams, there is no set of sources which compares to the Twelver ḥadīth compilations, which might potentially be accused of attempting to represent canonized dogma more than historical details.[22]

I will make the case that Shīʿī ḥadīths provide us two tracks to discern historicity. On the one hand, these ḥadīths, if used carefully, can yield historical information about the Imams themselves. On the other, these ḥadīths give us valuable insights into the life and times of the imams, including individuals and groups who may have fabricated or elaborated reports about the Imams.

There has been little ink spilled on Shīʿī ḥadīth and its analysis in European and American academia, especially when compared to Sunnī ḥadīth studies. Western scholarship on Shīʿī ḥadīth is somewhat schizophrenic: on the one hand, there is endemic in the field a certain skepticism, assuming that the ḥadīth attributed to the Imams probably reflect what contemporary and later Shīʿa thought, rather than what the Imams said and did.   On the other hand, for sake of convenience, many works unquestioningly reproduce the biographical details of the Imams as if they are historical fact, or at least, without providing explicit methodologies for sorting fact from fiction.[23]

There is a relative lack of methodological conversation about how to treat the sources for the lives of the Imams.[24] Some scholars prefer, as Matthew Pierce puts it, to eschew the search for “bland facticity,” in favor of inquiring after the process of meaning-making in the later community.[25] There are a few notable exceptions to this, such as Hossein Modarressi’s, Hassan Ansari’s and Kumail Rajani’s bibliographical and source-critical studies.[26] However, even source-critical works tend to avoid asking questions about the Imams themselves. Najam Haider’s recent book, The Rebel and the Imam,[27] for example, places narratives found in Twelver ḥadīth alongside Zaydī and non-Shīʿī historical sources, and interrogates the ways in which narrative is intended to convey theological and ethical argumentation, rather than to record facts. In spite of his admirably systematic approach, Haider sidesteps the question of the historicity of the details he discusses.

Explicit questions have been raised regarding the dating and historicity of Sunnī ḥadīth, which have been subjected to many decades of intense scrutiny and methodological innovation,[28] but no similar work has been accomplished for the Shīʿī ḥadīth corpus.

Although the question of sources for the lives of the Imams is a hard nut to crack, there are some reasons for optimism. Most Shīʿī ḥadīth are linked to Imams who lived in the 8^th and 9^th centuries CE. This is a fully literary period of Arabic writing. Thus, it is important to stress that we should not treat imamic ḥadīth the same way as Prophetic ḥadīth, which purport to date to the obscure period in which Islam emerged. Unlike Sunnīs, the Shīʿa were never opposed to writing their ḥadīth down, and so we have records of early written collections of ḥadīth (often named something frustratingly innocuous like “document” (kitāb), or “source” (aṣl)).[29] The isnād chains of transmitters’ names provide social information that is supplemented by important details in biographical dictionaries.[30] And isnāds can be used to reconstruct histories of knowledge-transmission in the community.[31] Haider used isnāds to track and date the process of sectarian separation from other denominations.[32] Furthermore, while Shīʿī sources have their biases and their commitments, so do all our historical sources. This does not mean that we should discard our sources, but rather work to assess the commitments and orthodoxies of our sources so that they can be understood and corrected for.[33]

At the current state of research, my own broad solution to the issue of historicity is to work along a dual track, keeping in mind both possibilities simultaneously: that any particular ḥadīth of the Imams may well represent historical details relating to the lives of the Imams; but they equally might represent, instead, the opinions and imaginations of an actor or actors within the Shīʿī community. Rather than making definite judgements about the historicity or dating of a single ḥadīth report, we often need to model both possibilities: what could this mean if it were the words of an Imam; and what would this mean if it were the fabrication or elaboration of a community member at the time or later?

At the same time, processes of fabrication should be seen as constrained by the structural dynamics and institutional features of the Imāmī community. The more we can reconstruct these dynamics, the better we will be able to assess the motivations and mechanisms for fabrication. Plausible fabrications must employ elements of a shared and accepted reality, albeit while also inserting tendentious details that provide a particular image or push a particular doctrine.

It is fortunate for a historian of institutions that the motivation to fabricate ḥadīth is mainly concentrated on the legal or theological contents of the reports, rather than the  details of the mundane operation of the community’s institutions. This means that we can expect such institutional details to be represented in our sources relatively intact, allowing us to build up a picture of how the community organized itself in practice. Thus, for example, we have no particular reason to doubt the representation of the dynamics of petitioning the Imams, often by letter rather than in person, seen in numerous Twelver ḥadīth.[34] When aggregated, mundane details from the ḥadīth of the Imams can be understood as depicting dynamics we can accept as broadly historical.[35]

Neither ḥadīth transmission nor ḥadīth fabrication can be seen as a free-for-all. Within the relatively small Shīʿī community scattered both transmission and fabrication took place in districts of towns and cities like Kufa, Baghdad, Qum, and Rayy,[36] where people were usually known to each other and where relations with the Imams were maintained, albeit at a distance, by recognized intermediaries. As we will see in the succeeding essays, a set of social institutions arose for maintaining authenticated imamic information. These social institutions, such as the framework through which agents carried letters to the community on behalf of the Imams, motivated the development of certain hermeneutic and epistemic rules of thumb for figuring out whether information that purported to derive from Imams could really be trusted.[37] While there were ways in which such information could be massaged, these ways were governed by historical rules that make them accessible to scholarship now. Thus, for example, the successive elaboration of ḥadīth reports to increasingly fit them into crystallizing orthodoxies is clearly visible in some cases.[38] There was no magical black box for ḥadīth generation which could operate without leaving traces of the processes of generation. The community too was alert to such issues and attempted to document abuses.[39]

My overall optimism that we can traces the processes by which Shīʿī ḥadīth were elaborated over several generations does not mean we will be able to trace these processes for any given ḥadīth. But if we study the social structures within which ḥadīth were circulated and preserved, we can understand the ways in which information might have accrued and formulate hypotheses. In the meantime, when we look at any single imamic ḥadīth report, I think we have to treat it a little bit like Schroedinger’s cat,[40] and have in mind both the possibility that it is true and that it is not true, simultaneously, until a clear demonstration occurs. As we will see, there are examples of Imāmī ḥadīth that can be demonstrated to be very plausibly historical.[41] When we find such islands of historicity, we need to use them to build up a more stable picture and evolve our understandings of the system around them.

Notes:

[1] I am not fond of “proto-” constructions, as they tend to take the place of real analysis, while perpetuating the psychological effects of reification they are intended to avoid. However, scholars of early Sunnīsm have not reached a consensus regarding the moment when Sunnīsm can be said to have come into being. The problem is one of definition. Depending on how you define it, Sunnīsm can be seen to first exist at very different moments in time. As Crone puts it, “How and when this agreement [between different strands of Sunnism] was reached is still unknown, but the answer seems to be the tenth to eleventh centuries as far as law is concerned, somewhat later in the case of theology (insofar as the conflict between Traditionalism and kalam was ever resolved). When the dust had settled after the Mongol conquests, the Sunnis appear with great clarity as those who belonged to the Hanafi, Maliki, Shafiʿi, or Hanbali legal schools, and who accepted the creeds associated with these schools, be it in Traditionalist form or in that of Ashʿarite or Maturidite theology.” Patricia Crone, Medieval Islamic Political Thought (published in the USA as God’s Rule) (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press: 2004), 220. The most recent word in this conversation belongs to Ahmad Khan, Heresy and the Formation of Medieval Islamic Orthodoxy: The Making of Sunnism, from the Eighth to the Eleventh Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023) who does use the term “proto-Sunni” for the period I am discussing here.

[2] See, for example, the sources cited in footnotes 1 and 3.

[3] The Umayyads were ʿuthmānī, rejecting ʿAlī’s “rightly-guided” status that is definitive of mature Sunnīsm. ʿAbbasid claims emerged from a Shīʿī milieu, and although they distanced themselves from their early Shīʿī construction of their legitimacy, caliphs go through a Muʿtazilī, anti-ahl al-ḥadīth phase in the mid-9^th century. For the general picture, see chapters 2–11 and chapter 16 in Crone, Medieval Islamic Political Thought. For the ʿAbbasid turn away from Shīʿī sources of legitimacy, see Deborah Tor, “The Parting of Ways between ʿAlid Shiʿism and Abbasid Shiʿism: An Analysis of the Missives between the Caliph al-Manṣūr and Muḥammad al-Nafs al-Zakiyya,” Journal of Abbasid Studies 6 no. 2 (2019): 209–27, https://doi.org/10.1163/22142371-12340049.

[4] Marshall Hodgson posited the idea of the proto-Sunnī ahl al-ḥadīth as belonging to the “piety-minded opposition” to the Umayyads. See Marshall Hodgson, The Venture of Islam, Volume 1: The Classical Age of Islam

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), 247–67, but this view has been challenged by Steven Judd, who emphasized patronage and the collaboration of pious scholars with the Umayyad rulers, Religious Scholars and the Umayyads: Piety-Minded Supporters of the Marwānid Caliphate (London: Routledge, 2014).

[5] In the 5^th/11^th century, when, under the Būyids, it was increasingly possible for Shīʿī people to take high office, it was still necessary to justify participation in government, as we see in the treatise of al-Sharīf al-Murtaḍā (d. 436/1044): Wilferd Madelung and al-Sharīf al-Murtaḍā, “A Treatise of the Sharīf al-Murtaḍā on the Legality of Working for the Government (Masʾala fī ‘l-ʿamal maʿa ‘l-sulṭān),” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 43, no. 1 (1980): 18–31.

[6] By invoking the idea of canonization, I am drawing an inexact analogy with the lexicon of the Catholic church to indicate that these Imams were recognized as part of a closed set of holy figures, the recognition of whom became constitutive of Twelver orthodoxy.

[7] Several of the Imams have disputed death and birth dates. This list comes from Hossein Modarressi, Crisis and Consolidation in the Formative Period of Shi’ite Islam: Abu Ja‘far Ibn Qiba Al-Razi and His Contribution to Imamite Shi’ite Thought (Princeton: Darwin Press, Inc. 1993), 5–6. In general, for dates of Imams, but also scholars and other major figures in the history of Shīʿīsm up until the present, see the resource meticulously compiled by the Kumail Rajani of Exeter University at the following site: https://shiidates.net.

[8] Hassan Ansari defines the Imāmiyya as the followers of Ṣādiq, in particular those who were neither Zaydī nor Wāqifīs who stopped the imamate at Kāẓim. L’imamat et l’Occultation selon l’imamisme: Etude bibliographique et histoire des textes (Leiden: Brill, 2017), xix.

[9] For example, Nawbakhtī’s early 10^th century work, Firaq al-shīʿa, ed. Helmut Ritter (Istanbul: Maṭbaʿat al-Dawlah li-Jamʿiyat al-Mustashriqīn al-Almānīyah, 1931).

[10] For a recent introduction to the history and theology of the different Shīʿī groups, see Najam Haider, Shīʿī Islam: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).

[11] Roy Vilozny gives an estimation of the number of ḥadīths attributed to each Imam, with around 60% attributed to al-Ṣādiq and 15.6% attributed to al-Bāqir. Quantity, in this case, is a clear indicator of the scholarly and spiritual prestige of these men: “Hadith after Imam al-Ṣādiq (d. 148/765): Preliminary Observations on the Sayings attributed to the Seventh to Eleventh Imams,” in Shiʿi Hadith: History and Methodology, ed. Edmund Hayes and Kumail Rajani, forthcoming.

[12] For the earliest leg of this journey, see Edmund Hayes, Agents of the Hidden Imam: Forging Twelver Shi’ism, 850-950 CE (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022).

[13] Etan Kohlberg, “From Imāmiyya to Ithnā-ʿashariyya,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental Studies 39, no. 3 (1976): 521–34.

[14] Najam Haider, The Origins of the Shīʻa: Identity, Ritual, and Sacred Space in Eighth-Century Kūfa (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

[15] For the basic narrative of the events of the first fitna, in which ʿAlī and Muʿāwiya were set at odds, see, for example, chapter 3 of Hugh Kennedy, The Prophet and the Age of the Caliphates: The Islamic Near East from the Sixth to the Eleventh Century, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Routledge, 2016).

[16] See the relevant chapters in Al-Shakyh al-Mufīd, Kitab al-Irshad: Book of Guidance into the Lives of the Twelve Imams, trans. I.K.A. Howard, (London: Muhammadi Trust of Great Britain, 1988).

[17] See Edmund Hayes; The Institutions of the Shīʿī Imāmate: Towards a Social History of Early Imāmī Shiʿism,” Al-Masāq 33, no. 2 (2021): 188–204, doi:10.1080/09503110.2021.1907520.

[18] See, for example, Hossein Modarressi’s work, followed by many scholars, which is in many ways excellent, but does little to complicate this image. Crisis and Consolidation, 3–6, and the first chapter in general.

[19] For mention of the juristic conflation of the legal authority of Imams and Prophets as “the lawgiver” within the overall framework of Twelver legal theory, see Robert Gleave and Kumail Rajani “The Shiʿi ‘Family’ of Legal Theories: An Introduction,” in Shiʿite Legal Theory: Sources and Commentaries, ed. Kumail Rajani and Robert Gleave (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2023), especially 31–35, doi.org/10.1515/9781399520270-002.

[20] See ibid.

[21] See Edmund Hayes, “‘Smash His Head with a Rock’: Imāmic Excommunications and the Production of Deviance in Late Ninth-Century Imāmī Shīʿism,” Al-Masāq 35, no. 1 (2022): 54–75, doi:10.1080/09503110.2022.2133210; and Edmund Hayes, “The Epistolary Imamate: Circular Letters in the Administration of the Shiʿi Community,”  in Mechanisms of Social Dependency in the Early Islamic Empire, ed. Edmund Hayes and Petra M. Sijpesteijn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024), 206–31.

[22] Of course, the Imams do appear as authorities for ḥadīth reports scattered around the Sunnī ḥadīth corpus. For this, see Ahmed El Shamsy’s critique of Modarressi’s recent book on Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq for ignoring Sunnī sources in favor of the more hagiographical information supplied by Twelver ḥadīth books. “Review of Text and Interpretation: Imam Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq and His Legacy in Islamic Law, written by Hossein Modarressi,” Shii Studies Review 8, nos. 1–2 (2024): 297–304, doi:https://doi.org/10.1163/24682470-12340102. While non-Twelver sources should not be ignored, Sunnī ḥadīth compilers and historians are in general totally disinterested in the details of the lives of the Imams. To get the fullest picture of the lives of the Imams, one should also have recourse to Zaydī and Sunnī works of fiqh and ḥadīth, chronicles, heresiographies, bibliographical and rijāl works, hagiographical works, kalām works, tafsīr, poetry, numismatics, and so on.

[23] So, for example, Robert Gleave’s excellent encyclopaedia article on the sixth canonical Imam of the Twelvers, states that the Imam “refused to be involved in the ʿAbbasid uprising and offered no support even after the ʿAbbasids gained power in 132/750. His motives for this refusal were grounded in his belief that he alone was the imam, having been designated as such by the preceding imam, his father.” Robert Gleave, “Jaʿfar al-Ṣādeq i. Life,” Encyclopaedia Iranica, XIV/4, 349–51, http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/jafar-al-sadeq-i-life, last accessed May 15, 2025. It is unlikely that Gleave would argue that we can be sure what the Imam believed about his own imamate, and this phrasing is likely to be a shorthand. Elsewhere, in publications where he has more space, Gleave tends to refer to statements as being attributed to the Imams, rather than what the Imams believed. For example, Robert Gleave, “Imāmī Shīʿī Refutations of Qiyās,” in Studies in Islamic Legal Theory (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2002), doi: https://doi-org.ezproxy.leidenuniv.nl/10.1163/9789047400851_014. By contrast, Arzina Lalani takes a generally unskeptical attitude to the statements of the Imams, treating them as transparent representations of what the Imams thought and did. Early Shiʿi Thought: The Doctrines of Imam Muḥammad al-Bāqir (London: I.B. Tauris, 2000). Modarressi’s Traditional and Survival: a Bibliographical Survey of Early Shīʿite Literature (Oxford: Oneworld, 2003) provides a methodology for determining what lost books of Shīʿī ḥadīth might have contained, but gives little guidance for determining how to sift out the historical details of the Imams lives from tendentious material.

[24] Scholarship can broadly be divided into a sceptical orientation and a non-sceptical orientation. Etan Kohlberg rarely articulates scepticism directly, but his approach is always to focus on the circulation of texts in the post-Imamic period, even when he is discussing the ḥadīth works most likely to be early. See “Al-Uṣul al-arbaʿumiʾa,” Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 10 (1987): 128–66. For the non-sceptical approach, see Arzina Lalani’s biography, Early Shi‘i Thought: The Teachings of Imam Muhammad al-Baqir (London: I.B. Tauris, 2000). Very useful articles on the biographies of the Imams in works like the Encyclopaedia of Islam and Encyclopaedia Iranica tend towards the positivistic, often even when written by otherwise sceptical scholars.

[25] Matthew Pierce, Twelve Infallible Men: The Imams and the Making of Shiʿism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2016), 40, quoting John Renard.

[26] Modarressi’s Traditional and Survival was a pioneer in developing methodologies for the study of lost sources. See also Ansari, L’imamat et l’Occultation; and Kumail Rajani, “Between Qum and Qayrawān: Unearthing early Shii ḥadı̄th sources,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 84, no. 3 (2021): 419–42.

[27] Najam Haider, The Rebel and the Imām in Early Islam: Explorations in Muslim Historiography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019).

[28] Jonathan A.C. Brown, “Hadith,” in Oxford Bibliographies, Islamic Studies, https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/display/document/obo-9780195390155/obo-9780195390155-0030.xml,last accessed May 15, 2025.

[29] See Maria Massi Dakake, “Writing and Resistance: The Transmission of Religious Knowledge in Early Shi’ism,” in The Study of Shiʿi Islam: History, Theology and Law, ed. Farhad Daftary and Gurdofarid Miskinzoda (London: I.B. Tauris, 2014), 181–202; Kohlberg, “Al-Uṣul al-arbaʿumiʾa.”

[30] Important early Twelver bio-bibliographical works include Abū ʿAmr Muḥammad b. ʿUmar Kashshī, Ikhtiyār ma‘rifat al-rijāl, ed. Mahdī al-Rijāʾī  (Qum: Muʾassasat āl al-bayt, 1404 [1983–84]); Abū al-ʿAbbās Aḥmad b. ʿAlī al- Najāshī, Rijāl (or Asmāʾ muṣannifī al-shīʿa) ed. Mūsā al-Shubayrī al-Zanjānī (Qum: Muʾassisat al-nashr al-islāmī: 1407 [1986]); Aḥmad b. al-Ḥusayn, Ibn al-Ghaḍāʾirī, Rijāl, ed. Muḥammad Riḍā al-Ḥusaynī al-Jalālī (Qum: Dār al-ḥadīth, 1422 H); Muḥammad b. al-Ḥasan al-Ṭūsī,  Shaykh al-Ṭāʾifa, Rijāl, ed. Jawād al-Qayyūmī al-Iṣbahānī (Qum: Muʾassasat al-nashr al-islāmī, 1428 [1997]).

[31] See Etan Kohlberg, “Shiʿi Hadith. Introduction,” in The Study of Shi’i Islam: History, Theology and Law, ed. Gurdofarid Miskinzoda and Farhad Daftary (London: I.B. Tauris, 2014), 165–80.

[32] Haider, The Origins of the Shīʻa.

[33] Najam Haider demonstrates how Sunnī, Zaydī and Twelver accounts can all be seen to be influenced through their particular ideological biases, The Rebel and the Imām, 113.

[34] Edmund Hayes, “Between Practical Petitioning and Divine Intervention: Entreaties to the Shiʿi Imams in the Ninth Century CE,” The Medieval Globe 9, no. 2 (2023): 51–66, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/919409.

[35] See also the reconstruction from ḥadīth and rijālī reports of the use of letters by Imams and their agents, as instruments of authority and community guidance, in Edmund Hayes, “The Epistolary Imamate,” 206–31. I will return to the topic of letters in my third essay in this series.

[36] Andrew Newman talks about “pockets of believers,” The Formative Period of Twelver Shī‘ism: Hadīth as Discourse between Qum and Baghdad (Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press, 2000), 32–49.

[37] I will elaborate on this point in subsequent essays in this series.

[38] A classic case in which historical details from the lives of the imams are visibly made to conform to a pattern is the idea that the Imams were all murdered, usually poisoned. Pierce mentions this trope, Twelve Infallible Men, 77–85.

[39] See Edmund Hayes, “Between Implementation and Legislation: The Shiʿi Imam Muḥammad al-Jawād’s Khums Demand Letter of 220 AH/ 835 CE,” Islamic Law and Society 28, no. 4 (2021): 382–414. This article focuses on one particular report attributed to the Ninth Imam which is very likely to be historical, for a number of reasons. In particular, the Shīʿī tradition is uncomfortable with the contents of this report because it conflicts in some aspects with orthodox positions. In a further ḥadīth report, the Tenth Imam is questioned as to this conflict, and affirms the orthodox positions. It is very unlikely that the tradition would invent such conflicts between Imams, suggesting that the historicity of this report has to be taken seriously. There are further reasons to consider this report historical, discussed in the article.

[40] Who can famously be thought of as simultaneously alive and dead. Meg Matthias, “Schrödinger’s cat,” Encyclopedia Britannica, April 22, 2025, https://www.britannica.com/science/Schrodingers-cat.

[41] See Hayes, “Between Implementation and Legislation.”

(Suggested Bluebook citation: Edmund Hayes, Was There an Early Imāmī Shīʿī Legal System?, Islamic Law Blog (June 5, 2025), https://islamiclaw.blog/2025/06/05/was-there-an-early-imami-shi%ca%bfi-legal-system/)

(Suggested Chicago citation: Edmund Hayes, “Was There an Early Imāmī Shīʿī Legal System?,” Islamic Law Blog, June 5, 2025, https://islamiclaw.blog/2025/06/05/was-there-an-early-imami-shi%ca%bfi-legal-system/)