Embodied Imamate: Mapping the Development of the Early Shiʿi Community 700-900 CE

The Shii Imams played a key role in early Islam.

Revered scholars descended from the Prophet Muammad, they posed an existential threat to the legitimacy of the ruling caliphs in the 8th and 9th century CE. Their leadership defined the quietist yet oppositional Imami Shii community scattered throughout the Islamic empire.

Imami Shiism was a key part of the turbulent thesis and antithesis which formed Islam, and it remains greatly influential until today. Remarkably, there is no comprehensive history of the Imamate.

There are a number of reasons for this, central among which are that scholarship on Imami Shiism has approached it as a doctrinal and intellectual phenomenon. However, religious groups are also fundamentally social phenomena. ImBod will result in the first comprehensive history of the Shii Imamate.

It will position the Imamate as a social phenomenon, framing it as an interaction between two aspects which are rarely explicitly theorised: the Imams, and the Imami community who recognised them.

ImBod will identify and study the key spheres in which the Imams and the Imami community operated, including the Imams household, elite Arab clans (especially the Prophets family and the dynasties of the caliphs), the network of Imamic agents, the scholars, and the communities who came to be associated with Shii Islam through kinship, conversion and migration.

ImBod will map out overlapping networks of interaction across these spheres and identify key actors and institutions responsible for mediating and performing the Imamate in the community.

ImBod will not conceive of the Imamate as an essence, but as a set of social processes, some, but not all, instigated and controlled by the Imams themselves.

Crucially, ImBod will study these processes as performed spatially and embodied materially by actors and physical objects linked to the Imams. ImBod will enrich Islamic history by providing a paradigm for studying how religious authority was embedded in society.