By Edmund Hayes
A great body of Twelver legal doctrines is expressed through the Twelver ḥadīth corpus. A large body of these reports, like Sunnī ḥadīth, take the narrative form of members of the community asking questions. This can be seen a trope: a literary device that conveniently allows for the conveying of specific information. However, unless one wishes to resort to an unnecessarily nihilistic skepticism, we should assume it also reflects an aspect of the Imams' real historical activity: The Imams were resources for their community and answered their questions. If we examine such reports in aggregate, there emerge certain patterns and granular details that illuminate certain specific social dynamics which would be unnecessary for the purely catechistic rehearsal of legal opinions. I don't think that we can see Imams answering questions as purely a kind of top-down distribution of legal content to the community. Instead, in this essay, I am going to think about the ways in which the community sustained decentralized forums for the production of legal meaning, alongside their recognition of the theoretical legal authority of the Imams.
It is sometimes unclear whether the questions sent to the Imams were practical issues that arose in the course of daily life, or merely casuistic problems generated through scholarly debate. Certainly, we see both. However, the Imams are not only asked scholarly questions, but also asked to intervene in cases related to specific troublesome people, as well as being asked to provide supplications, talismans, and prayers for health and children.
Members of the community asked the Imams questions in different ways: in person and by letter, through intermediaries and directly. In a number of cases, we see a single person gathering legal questions from the community, combining them together in a single document, and carrying it to the Imam for response, before bringing these responses back to the community.[1]
Imamic opinions disseminated to community members were often preserved and became a resource for future generations. We see various genres of literature developing that were based on collections of imamic opinions on questions of law and other issues: the uṣūl (well known to scholars of Shīʿīsm via a seminal article by Kohlberg[2]) had their origin in notebooks that represented one person recording their study sessions with the Imams. There are also works of responsa, some of which represented epistolary communications with the Imams.[3]
As time went on, different local communities of Shīʿa based in towns like Kufa and Qum, preserved libraries of Imams' answers to questions.[4] These collections of imamic opinions were a way of dealing with questions that arose locally without necessarily having to make the trek to ask the incumbent Imam a question directly. This local deployment of earlier imamic knowledge is explicitly sanctioned and recommended by Imams (see my first essay). It also means that the legal authority of incumbent Imams was increasingly restricted by the accumulating body of legal wisdom existing in textual form, held in decentralized collections by local scholars.
We even see members of the community using collections of earlier imamic opinions as a touchstone for testing whether Imams were true Imams. In a few cases, we have reports that at moments of succession, new candidates were tested by making them answer a series of questions. In one case, at the time when ʿAlī al-Riḍā (the Eighth Imam) was trying to succeed his father, Mūsā al-Kāẓim, but was opposed by the Wāqifa, we are told that one of Kāẓim's followers brought with him a written list of questions to test the new Imam.[5] In this story, the Imam displays a miraculous foreknowledge of the questions and sends a servant out with a list of correct responses, thereby convincing the man of the Imam's legitimacy.[6] In spite of the hagiographical nature of the narrative, it gives a sense of the two-way flow of legal scrutiny between Imams and their followers. Imams were recognized by their wisdom, and preserved reports from earlier Imams were used as a touchstone to authenticate this wisdom. In another story we hear of an Imam being rejected by this process. The Imam in question was one never canonized as part of the orthodox Twelver lineage: Jaʿfar, known to Twelver posterity as "the Liar" (al-kadhdhāb), the brother of the Eleventh Imam:
Jaʿfar wrote to Aḥmad b. Isḥāq al-Qummī [the agent and delegate of the people of Qum] demanding from him [the canonical taxes] that he had been carrying from Qum to Abū Muḥammad [al-ʿAskarī, the Eleventh Imam] . . . The people of Qum gathered with Aḥmad b. Isḥāq and they wrote a letter responding to [Jaʿfar's] letter, including questions which they asked of him. They said, "Answer these questions (masāʾil), just as our forefathers asked your forefathers, and which they answered with responses we have preserved, and which we take as a source of emulation, which we act in accordance with. So answer them as your earlier forefathers answered them, so that we may carry to you the dues [i.e., the canonical taxes] which we used to carry to them."
The man [Aḥmad b. Isḥāq] went out until he got to Samarra (al-ʿAskar) and delivered to [Jaʿfar] the letter and he stayed there regarding that matter for a while, asking about the answers to the questions, but Jaʿfar did not answer them nor the letter at all, ever.[7]
In this case, the localized preservation and deployment of imamic knowledge is not simply a top-down flow of information from Imams to the community: rather the community can use this reservoir of precedent to disqualify an Imam who is not versed in it.
The habit of keeping documents issued by Imams is attested in various clues throughout the Shīʿī ḥadīth corpus, and we sometimes have statements from later authors saying "I found a document and copied it," or "I wrote to him, asking him to send me a copy of the document."[8] This kind of activity reflects archival practices in the rest of society also: official legal documents like tax receipts, contracts, and judicial rulings were often kept in a decentralized manner in personal archives which could then be produced upon challenge.[9]
The preservation of imamic ḥadīth in a decentralized manner in local communities ultimately represented a restriction on legal innovation by the Imams themselves. Thus, earlier Imams had more creative legal capacity than later Imams. It is sometimes said that the occultation was the turning point for the Imāmī Shīʿa after which they were forced to embrace a Sunnī-style reliance on large collections of ḥadīth like Kulaynī's "The Sufficient Book" (al-Kāfī) and Ibn Bābawayh's "Book for He Who Has No Access to a Jurist" (Man lā yaḥḍuruhu al-faqīh) that acted as legal resources in the absence of Imams. Certainly, the occultation was a great spur to the systematization of non-imamic legal authority, but it is incorrect to say that this kind of non-imamic authority did not exist before the occultation. Instead, our sources suggest that the basic model for answering legal questions in cities like Kufa and Qum during the period of the late Imams before the occultation was first to have recourse to collections of imamic ḥadīth preserved locally, and to the local scholars who transmitted, preserved and interpreted these ḥadīth.
What probably did not exist in the pre-occultation period was a sophisticated set of hermeneutic and epistemological principles for deriving new legal decisions from reports. In one story, the existence of heretical doctrines articulated in imamic reports produces a minor epistemological crisis; we are told that one man wrote to the Tenth Imam regarding:
A group of people who speak and read hadith which they ascribe to you [the Imam], in which are things that disgust the hearts, but which we are unable to reject since they reported them from your forefathers (AS), but neither are we able to accept them due to what they contain.[10]
The heretical doctrines in question include ideas that are familiar to us from other cases of the "exaggerating" (ghulāt) Shīʿa,[11] like the idea that the ritual obligations of Islam can be interpreted allegorically. The Imam simply writes back, "This is not our faith, so avoid it."[12] This is far cry from the sophisticated hermeneutic strategies of later Uṣūlīs for treating imamic reports. With a present Imam, although in many cases legal questions could be answered locally, there was always the option to refer to the Imam for confirmation. Thus, in addition to the many reports in which an Imam answers a simple question, we also see various reports in which an Imam resolves unclarity between reports from earlier Imams.
So, for example the Ninth Imam's apparently unorthodox rulings mentioned in my previous essay were the object of a query from a follower of the Tenth Imam, who wrote a letter mentioning the ruling and saying, "that ruling contradicts those who came before us" (i.e., the earlier Imams).[13] The Tenth Imam responds by simply reaffirming the precedent established by earlier Imams.[14] Such cases suggest a certain tension may have existed in the opinions between successive Imams, differences that members of the local communities who stewarded knowledge strove to harmonise. A major tool for this effort to harmonize was recourse to the incumbent Imam. In a much later period, at the time of the occultation, we see agents of the hidden Imam providing an imprimatur to works of scholarship sent to them for certification. Perhaps similar mechanisms were at work also during the lifetimes of the Imams.
While the theoretical presence of the Imam as supreme legal authority is constant in early Imāmī Shīʿī reports, we see many hints that much production of legal meaning was achieved locally.
Already at the time of the Sixth Imam, if we accept the attribution, we have the report known as the maqbūla of ʿUmar b. Ḥanẓala, mentioned in my previous essay, which articulates the problem of local communities who needed legal recourse (the cases mentioned are disputes over debt or inheritance) without necessarily having easy access to the Imam himself. In the maqbūla, the Imam articulates principles for determining who could act as a legitimate arbitrator. That person should be versed in previous imamic opinions. If there are two appropriate arbitrators, then the more pious and understanding one should be chosen, and so on.
In practice, then, we must conclude that operational authority for the conduct of the law lay in the hands of the great men of the local communities who recognized the Imams: men who were not only scholars – as is visible in works like the Tārīkh-i Qom as well as Twelver Rijāl works – where we see scholars acting also as landowners and tax guarantors as well as community delegates who controlled contact between their peers and the imamic institutions. We see hints of the extent of the role of such men in the late 9th century, when Aḥmad b. Muḥammad b. ʿĪsā al-Ashʿarī, a member of the prominent clan of Ashʿarī Arabs in Qum took steps to purify the city from the epistemological threat of ḥadīth transmitters who were transmitting reports he deemed heretical: both by banishment, and, in one case, an attempt at execution.[15] While the Shīʿī ḥadīth corpus is laser-focused on the role of Imams as agents in the production of Islamic law and wisdom more generally, in practice we must assume the important role of the agency of such figures who are often invisible or only partially visible in our sources.
All of this means we need to reject the idealized image of a perfectly centralized system of legal knowledge and arbitration in which all wisdom relating to Shīʿī law flowed directly from the Imam and was recorded by his followers. Instead, if we read Shīʿī ḥadīth sources carefully, we can see glimpses of a system in which much legal authority was delegated to members of the community.
Notes:
[1] See 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.
[2] Etan Kohlberg, "Al-Uṣul al-arbaʿumiʾa," Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 10 (1987): 128–66.
[3] See Ihsān Surkhaʾī, "Kutub-e masāʾil dar negāresh-hā-ye ḥadīsī bā taʾkīd bar Masāʾil-i ʿAlī b. Jaʿfar," ʿUlūm-e ḥadīs 10, no. 4 (1382 Sh): 32; and Edmund Hayes, "Early Imami Shiʿi Responsa Works (Masāʾil): the Case of Muḥammad b. ʿAbd Allāh b. Jaʿfar al-Ḥimyarī," in Shiʿi Hadith: History and Methodology, ed. Edmund Hayes and Kumail Rajani, forthcoming.
[4] Perhaps the best guide to this regional distribution and process of redistribution is Hassan Ansari's study of the circulation of reports about the occultation, L'imamat et l'Occultation selon l'imamisme: Etude bibliographique et histoire des textes (Leiden: Brill 2017).
[5] This report appears in Ibn Bābawayh's ʿUyūn akhbār al-Riḍā, quoted by Ihsān Surkhaʾī, "Kutub-e masāʾil dar negāresh-hā-ye ḥadīsī bā taʾkīd bar Masāʾil-i ʿAlī b. Jaʿfar," ʿUlūm-e ḥadīs 10, no. 4 (1382 Sh/?): 33.
[6] See ibid.
[7] This comes from the non-canonical collection of imamic ḥadīth produced by the Nuṣayrī author, al-Ḥusayn b. Ḥamdān al-Khaṣībī, al-Hidāya al-kubrā (Diyār ʻAql [Lebanon]: Dār li-ajl al-maʿrifa, 2007), 289–90. The translation is taken from Edmund Hayes, Agents of the Hidden Imam: Forging Twelver Shi'ism, 850-950 CE (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), 103.
[8] Hayes, "Early Imami Shiʿi Responsa Works (Masāʾil)."
[9] See Petra M. Sijpesteijn, "The Archival Mind In Early Islamic Egypt: Two Arabic Papyri," in From al-Andalus to Khurasan (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2007), 163–86.
[10] Abū ʿAmr Muḥammad b. ʿUmar Kashshī, Ikhtiyār ma'rifat al-rijāl, ed. Mahdī al-Rijāʾī (Qum: Muʾassasat āl al-bayt, 1404 H [1983–84]), 2:802–803, discussed in 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): 67, doi:10.1080/09503110.2022.2133210.
[11] Defined as "an Arabic term originally used by Twelver Shiʿite . . . heresiographers to designate those dissidents who 'exaggerate' the status of the Imams in an undue manner by attributing to them divine qualities." Heinz Halm, "Ḡolāt," Encyclopaedia Iranica, https://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/golat/, accessed May 26, 2025.
[12] Hayes, "'Smash His Head with a Rock,'" 67.
[13] 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): 407–08.
[14] Ibid., 407–08.
[15] Abū al-ʿAbbās Aḥmad b. ʿAlī b. Aḥmad b. al-ʿAbbās al-Najāshī, Rijāl (or Asmāʾ muṣannafī
al-shīʿa), ed. Mūsā al-Shubayrī al-Zanjānī (Qumm: Muʾassasat al-nashr al-islāmī: 1407 [1986]), 329–30.
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