Shiʿi Islam

Shiʿi Islam is the second-largest branch of the faith, holding that leadership of the community rightly belongs to ʿAlī and his descendants, the family of the Prophet.

At a glance

Shiʿism — from shīʿat ʿAlī, “the party of ʿAlī” — arose from the conviction that the Prophet ﷺ had designated his cousin and son-in-law ʿAlī to lead after him, and that authority thereafter belonged to ʿAlī's descendants. Over time this claim acquired a full theology: the imam came to be seen not merely as a ruler but as a divinely-guided, authoritative interpreter of the faith. Shiʿi piety centres on devotion to the Prophet's household (the Ahl al-Bayt) and, above all, on the memory of the killing of his grandson al-Ḥusayn at Karbalāʾ, mourned each year.

Shiʿism is not a single body. Its largest branch, the Twelvers, recognises a line of twelve imams, the last of whom is held to be in occultation and awaited; the Ismāʿīlīs and the Zaydīs form distinct branches with their own histories. Shiʿi communities produced great dynasties — the Fāṭimids and, later, the Safavids, who made Twelver Shiʿism the state faith of Iran — and remain the majority in Iran, Iraq and elsewhere. Chronicle records the Sunni and Shiʿi accounts of the early history side by side, attributing rather than adjudicating the points on which they differ.

The branches divide at identifiable successions. The Zaydīs follow Zayd ibn ʿAlī, who rose in revolt and was killed in 740, and hold a comparatively restrained doctrine of the imamate in which the imam is the qualified descendant who claims leadership openly. The Ismāʿīlīs take their line through Ismāʿīl, son of the sixth imam Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq, and developed an elaborate esoteric theology and, in the Fāṭimids, a caliphate of their own. The Twelvers follow Jaʿfar's other son, Mūsā al-Kāẓim, down to the twelfth imam, whose disappearance in the later ninth century they understand as a concealment that will end with his return as the Mahdī. Common to the Shiʿi traditions is a doctrine of the imamate as a foundation of faith rather than a matter of political convenience, with the imam divinely protected from error; alongside it developed the licence of taqiyya, the concealment of belief under persecution, the intercession of the imams, the alms of khums, and the Jaʿfarī school of law, which differs from the Sunni schools on inheritance, on ritual detail, and on the validity of temporary marriage.

The absence of the imam made the question of who speaks in his place the central problem of Twelver history, and the answer was scholarly rather than dynastic: qualified jurists continued to practise ijtihād, and from the eighteenth century a hierarchy of senior authorities — the marjaʿiyya — emerged, whose rulings ordinary believers follow and whose independent funding through khums has generally kept them outside state control. Modern Shiʿi thought divides over how far that authority reaches into government: Ruhollah Khomeini's doctrine of the guardianship of the jurist (wilāyat al-faqīh), institutionalised in the Islamic Republic of Iran after 1979, asserts a mandate to rule, while the quietist tradition associated with the seminaries of Najaf holds that jurists should guide without governing. Both positions are argued from within the same jurisprudence, and Chronicle records the disagreement rather than settling it.

Related in Chronicle

Curated reference on Islamic belief and thought. On matters where traditions differ, positions are attributed rather than adjudicated; verify points of doctrine with qualified scholars.