By Edmund Hayes
In my first essay, I raised the question: was there an early Imāmī Shīʿī legal system? In order to think about this question, it is convenient to think of the Imāmī community as having top-down influences emerging from the Imams and their representatives, and bottom-up processes emerging from actors working at a distance from the Imams. Thus, our sources depict a number of reports which we might term imamic “decrees” telling their Shīʿa what to do. We can also detect in our sources a space for community decisions, where issues are decided locally, for example as hinted in the ḥadīth known as the maqbūla of ʿUmar b. Ḥanẓala, mentioned in my previous essay. There are a lot of in-between cases like petitions and responsa that attest to mutual creation of legal meanings: communities send issues to an Imam for decision or clarification, and sometimes we see suggestions of a certain negotiation between Imam and community.
In my next essay, I will look at the bottom-up aspects of this dynamic, but first, in this essay, I am going to focus on the Imam-initiated aspect of the dynamic, while acknowledging that we can never really separate the two. While not all of what I will cover here is directly connected to Islamic law, it must be understood that a huge percentage of the queries and responses related to the Shīʿī Imams that survive are legal, and so a key aspect of their agency was presumably related to legal questions, in addition to other domains such as ethical and theological issues, and the resolution of practical problems. The survival of a large proportion of legal issues in our sources is of course a reflection of the interests of those collecting and preserving the reports, so we must also be cautious in using this as a reflection of the ratio of different activities making up the Imams’ day-to-day life.
It’s helpful make a distinction between the Imam as an individual actor and “the imamic institutions,” including all those in the Imam’s circle who operated on behalf of an Imam. The Imams were surrounded by a set of actors who represented them and extended their authority and agency out into the community. In particular, the men known as the Imam’s “agents” (wakīl, pl. wukalāʾ) were entrusted with collecting khums and zakāt and carrying letters conveying the Imam’s instructions. There were also various other servants, messengers and family members who were associated with the imamate. At certain moments in history a child was recognized as Imam; at such times, we might expect the circles around the Imams to have taken more control of the affairs of the imamate. Delegation and mediation were important aspects of the imamate in practice, just as in any institution.
From around 765 until 874 CE, the imamic institutions appear to have become gradually more well-established, though it is unclear exactly how and why this happened. Mushegh Asatryan has pointed out that the Sixth Imam, Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq, had a disproportionate number of financiers among his followers who could provide capital for the Imam’s projects.[1] The Seventh Imam, Mūsā al-Kāẓim, appears to have had a more developed system of delegation, with agents collecting large sums of canonical Islamic revenues on his behalf.[2] By the time of the collapse of the imamate in 874 CE, we see that the institutions of the imamate are established enough to persist without an Imam visibly present: For around 70 years after the death of the Eleventh Imam, certain agents attempted to assert their ongoing authority in the name of a hidden Imam.[3]
The majority of imamic statements preserved in Twelver ḥadīth works are reactive: the Shīʿa bring questions and problems to the Imams, and the Imams answer. However, we can see a few occasions in which the Imams take the initiative and send down decrees regarding legal questions. I have made the case for the historicity of one such decree: a letter written in the year 220/835, in which the Ninth Imam, Muḥammad al-Jawād, demanded his followers in the Jibāl to pay the fifth (khums) of the booty taken in a battle against the Khurramiyya, who were deemed heretics.[4] He also affirms various other levies on capital and income: on household goods, slaves and the agricultural produce of estates.[5] Some of these violate legal precedents established by earlier Imams (e.g., mention of 1/12 to be levied on agricultural estates instead of 1/10).[6] In the next generation, a question regarding this contradiction is brought to the Tenth Imam, who glosses over it, confirming earlier precedents.[7] It is unlikely that the tradition would have invented such a doctrinally inconvenient letter, and so the simplest explanation of this strange letter is that it represents a historical communication between the Imam and his followers: a tax demand letter from an Imam in Iraq to? his distant followers in central Iran.
But was this a legal ruling? The apparent contradiction between Jawād’s letter and earlier precedent perhaps arises due to a category error: the Imam was not necessarily attempting to establish a legal precedent, but only attempting to implement concrete actions on the ground: a question of implementation rather than legislation. Such a (perhaps mistaken) assumption is easy to make, given the overwhelming assumption of the Twelver tradition that the major function of the Imams was to establish a normative basis for law and other aspects of religion, ultimately in the form of ḥadīth. But we must also understand that Imams were also historical actors trying to get certain immediate jobs done. The contradiction with earlier precedent in the khums-demand-letter appears to suggest that the Imam believed himself to have a somewhat free hand in determining and administering the revenues due to him. But clearly there was pressure in the other direction, as members of the Shīʿa community preserved records of earlier imamic statements so as to be able to make legal decisions locally while the Imam was relatively inaccessible, in a different city. Thus, there was a pressure restricting Imams’ ability not only to legislate new laws, but even to interpret established laws in ways that might conflict with earlier decisions.
In the later Twelver tradition, discussions about this are carried on under the rubric of how to deal with contradictory evidence (taʿāruḍ al-adilla). But during the lifetimes of the Imams this represented a practical issue. In the occultation it became a pure question of hermeneutics: the ex post facto harmonization of contradictory reports through hermeneutic tools such as declaring that a particular report was articulated under a state of fear or duress (taqiyya); or the principle of preferring reports that conflict with Sunnī positions. But during the lifetime of the Imams, interpreting commands from the Imams was a practical structural-institutional issue. If someone wanted to resolve a legal issue, they needed to know what the legitimate channels of recourse were. Hermeneutics did not resolve the matter, because many different people could interpret imamic statements in different ways using the same hermeneutic principles. This problem is articulated in the imamic ḥadīth known as the maqbūla of ʿUmar b. Ḥanẓala, attributed to the Sixth Imam Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq, mentioned in my previous essays. In this ḥadīth, the Imam issues principles for local communities to appoint their own legal arbitrators to settle issues at a distance from the Imam; in other reports, we see more explicit mechanisms for naming specific people as authorized imamic agents. These seem to become more and more formal in later periods.
From the time of al-Ṣādiq, we see trusted followers of the Imams sometimes reported to have been delegated with a quasi-imamic epistemic authority for people who needed an answer in the absence of the Imam. Such reports become highly-charged with significance upon the eve of the occultation. Thus, the Tenth Imam, al-Hādī, is reported to have given a sweeping delegation to the man who would later be canonized as the first of the four envoys of the hidden Imam: “Al-ʿAmrī is my reliable one (thiqa), and what he delivers to you, he delivers that from me, and what he says to you, he says from me, so listen to him, and obey, for he is the reliable, the trustworthy (al-thiqa al-maʾmūn).”[8]
The preservation of such statements is certainly motivated by the crisis of the occultation, and the retrospective need to provide imamic credentials for the men who came to perpetuate the institutions of imamate after its collapse. Nonetheless, these kinds of statements probably preserve an authentic memory of imamic appointments that entrusted certain men with agency to extend the authority of the imamate.
We see reports about the appointment of other agents who are not significant for later orthodoxy. One such report gives us an unusually complete sense of how Imams delegated in practice. In it, an agent called Ibn Rāshid is appointed to handle the canonical monies for the community in “Baghdad and al-Madāʾin [Ctesiphon] and the Sawād and what adjoins to them.”[9]
In order to certify his appointment, Ibn Rāshid is given a letter from the Imam of the time,probably ʿAlī al-Hādī (d. 868) or al-Ḥasan al-ʿAskarī (d. 874). Ibn Rāshid is instructed to read this letter to “the entirety of the Imam’s followers” in these regions, and we are told that the letter was preserved and that “the copy of the letter was with Ibn Rāshid.”[10] This suggests that by the late imamate, letters from the Imam were physically recognizable, perhaps by a distinctive chancery style, and used to officially certify agents who would then keep the Imam’s letter as an ongoing proof of their delegation as imamic representatives.[11]
This system of delegation, while it might have worked well in some cases, clearly had intrinsic dangers: by giving power to such intermediaries, the system risked manipulation if agent and Imam did not see eye to eye. The system relied upon local communities trusting the agents who handled their canonical taxes. Removing an agent required destabilizing the trust which his community had placed in him. In one case in Iraq, the Imam attempts to excommunicate a man he calls an “imposter Ṣūfī,” but the community hold him in such high regard that the letters of the Imam appear to fall on deaf ears.[12] (The man in question is said to have made the Ḥajj 54 times.[13]) In another case, a man acting as agent for the Jibāl, Fāris b. Ḥātim, is accused of misappropriating the canonical monies due to the Imam.[14] When letters from the Imam fail to effect Fāris’s ostracism, the Imam orders his execution.[15]
Were these imamic agents part of a “legal system?” Perhaps. Most of these cases of appointment and excommunication seem to deal with money, but money that was apparently part of a system of imamic collection of khums and zakāt: ritual duties that can be seen as part of the sharʿī duties that other Muslims might fulfil via the state, or personal initiative, but within the Imāmī community were seen as most properly collected and distributed by the Imam. But in contrast to the prompting of the maqbūla of ʿUmar b. Ḥaẓala, we do not really hear of systems of legal arbitration operating locally. Perhaps such institutions represented mundane business as usual that do not require comment from our sources.
In the more clearly fiqhī domain, we do hear of procedures for submitting to the Imams petitions over legal questions, often by letter, and sometimes in person. I will look at these issues in my final essay regarding “bottom-up” legal production in the community.
Acknowledgements:
This research is supported by the European Research Council Starting Grant funded project, “Embodied Imamate: Mapping the Development of the Early Shiʿi Community 700-900 CE,” grant number 101077946, PI: Edmund Hayes.
Notes:
[1] See Mushegh Asatryan, “Bankers and Politics: The Network of Shiʿi Moneychangers in Eighth-Ninth Century Kufa and their Role in the Shiʿi Community,” Journal of Persianate Studies 7 (2014): 1–21.
[2] See Edmund Hayes, Agents of the Hidden Imam: Forging Twelver Shi’ism, 850-950 CE (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), 32.
[3] See ibid., 1–221.
[4] 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.
[5] Ibid., 382–414.
[6] Ibid., 382–414.
[7] Ibid., 382–414.
[8] Abū Jaʿfar Muḥammad b. Yaʿqūb al-Kulaynī, al-Kāfī, ed. ʻAlī Akbar al-Ghaffārī (Tehran: Dār al-Kutub al-Islāmīya, 1388 [1968]), 1:329–30.
[9] Abū ʿAmr Muḥammad b. ʿUmar Kashshī, Ikhtiyār ma‘rifat al-rijāl, ed. Mahdī al-Rijāʾī (Qum: Muʾassasat āl al-bayt, 1404 [1983–84]), 2:800.
[10] Edmund Hayes “The Epistolary Imamate: Circular Letters in the Administration of the Shiʿi Community,” in Structures of Social Dependency in the Early Islamic Empire, ed. Petra Sijpesteijn and Edmund Hayes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024), 219.
[11] For more on this and other comparable cases of “circular letters” attributed to Imams, see ibid., 206–311.
[12] Edmund Hayes, “‘Smash His Head with a Rock’: Imāmic Excommunications and the Production of Deviance in Late Ninth-Century Imāmī Shīʿism,” Al–Masāq (2022): 68–70, https://doi.org/10.1080/09503110.2022.2133210.
[13] Ibid., 68.
[14] Ibid., 61–66.
[15] Ibid., 65.
(Suggested Bluebook citation: Edmund Hayes, The Practical Agency of the Shīʿī Imams, Islamic Law Blog (June 19, 2025), https://islamiclaw.blog/2025/06/19/the-practical-agency-of-the-shi%ca%bfi-imams/)
(Suggested Chicago citation: Edmund Hayes, “The Practical Agency of the Shīʿī Imams,” Islamic Law Blog, June 19, 2025, https://islamiclaw.blog/2025/06/19/the-practical-agency-of-the-shi%ca%bfi-imams/)