The traditional account of the early occultation-era Imami Shi士i community depicts a series of four agents as mediating for the hidden Imam between 874 and 940 CE.
Hitherto, scholarship has taken the authority of these agents for granted. However, to understand the formation of Twelver Shi士ism, Dr Edmund Hayes (University of Leiden) argues that we must understand the ways in which the authority of the agents and other community leaders was contested. Then, it becomes clear that there was no inevitable assumption of authority by the agents.
Instead, authority was contested through different social and intellectual fields: including the legal-theological mastery of scholars; the institutional power of the agents; the leverage of courtiers operating within the supposedly hated Sunni government; and the appeal of charismatic esoteric 鈥済ateways鈥 (产腻产Lit. 鈥榞ate鈥 or 鈥榙oor鈥. In the vocabulary of Fatimid Ismailism, the term was used for the administrative head of the da士wa figures in Islamic history.) to the divine. The crisis of Occultation was contested through institutions, but also caused them to mutate as they were applied to legitimize new models for the era without a visible聽Imam.
