Sophia Babai

Thank you :)

Yes, if you read the thread you would have seen that I already said that 😉

He wouldn’t have been a Ja’fari because the Ja’fari didn’t exist until several imams later.

Thank you for the question! Basically yes: He was a Kharijite, which was a group that used to follow Ali but felt betrayed when he wanted to make peace with the Sunnis.

which in my opinion is just tacky. But it’s not as bad as the time HITLER claimed to be the Mahdi.

But it’s 12:21 AM, so that is a thread for another day.

That said, Iran’s government is frequently seen as not particularly *good* Ithna’asheri: secular Ithna’asheris dislike them for being fundamentalists; ultra-religious Ithna’asheris dislike them for selling out and going into politics.

Also sometimes politicians claim to represent the Mahdi

The idea that Twelvers are violent & antisemitic stems from the fact that the West has never forgiven Iran for overthrowing the dictator the West installed. Twelvers mostly get along with Jews (& Christians & Zoroastrians.) But not with Baha’i’s, who are fiercely discriminated against in Iran.

as we all know, there’s nothing worse than someone who almost believes what you believe BUT NOT QUITE, so we have fun things like ISIS claiming Shias are the world’s greatest threat to Islam (by which they mean Twelvers bc Twelvers are 85% of global Shia and something like 99% of SWANA-region Shia)

Ithna’asheri have similar beliefs to most Muslims — there is no God but Allah, Mohammed is His messenger, Allah has instructed us to do good and avoid evil, fast on Ramadan, pray, give charity, follow Shariah (note: Ismailis don’t follow Shariah but we already established Ismailis are weird) — but

(Of course then Ithna’asheri went and converted people by force as well, notably in Yemen. The Quran explicitly forbids converting anyone by force, and yet! And yet!!)

Arab rule of Iran was fairly brutal, and Iran was living in the awkward place many people who were coercively converted live — Islam was a beloved religion most people believed in, and it was also the religion of the conquerors. Becoming Twelvers/Ithna’asheri was appealing because it could be OURS.

Iran at this point was mostly Sunni, having mostly converted under Arab rule — before then, Iran was mostly Zoroastrian, and there remains a substantial Zoroastrian majority in parts of Iran, most notably Yazd (bsky.app/profile/swin...)

There’s a bunch of other stuff about gates and the Resurrection that I am not going to summarize correctly because I studied geopolitics not theology, but as far as geopolitics goes, the Twelvers had a huge, huge accomplishment: they converted Iran.

He’s also known as “the Hidden Imam,” because he’s not GONE you see, he’s just hiding, and of course he occasionally shows himself to true believers, and of course there are many stories of true believers who have encountered him.

The not-moosies had… less of a schism and more of a splintering, ranging from “this baby doesn’t exist” to “this baby absolutely will save us all.”

The latter group outlasted the others. They believe the occulted Imam is the Mahdi, who will restore peace and rid the world of injustice.

“Huh?” you might say.

Well, the eleventh imam died (probably assassination by poison) and his representatives said “he had a baby named Mohammed who has been occulted!”

The not-moosies had six more imams. They believe the twelfth imam, Muhammad al-Mahdi, was occulted (aka “he didn’t die, Allah just whisked him up to Heaven and will give him back before the Day of Resurrection,” which is also what Muslims and some Coptic Christians believe happened to Isa/Jesus.)

Ismailis for a while were the biggest branch of Shias but then the Mongols genocided most of us and we had to claw our way back from near-extinction by converting people from more polytheistic/shamanic religions and creating a much more mystical and esoteric version of Islam. See other thread.

Meanwhile, the Ja’faris were like “eh three schisms wasn’t enough we need a fourth” and split into followers of Ismail, also known as Ismailis (that’s me!) and followers of Musa al-Kazim, who missed a major opportunities in not calling themselves Musis 🫎

Of all Shias, Zaydis are the closest to Sunnis, presumably because they had the least time to get weird. They love jurisprudence and rationalism, and they ruled half of Yemen for a while. Zaydis are also called “Fivers” because they stopped after five imams.

Shias all agree on the first four Imams: Mowlana Ali, Mowlana Hussein, Mowlana Zainil Abideen, and Mowalana Mohammad al-Baqir (yes we had to memorize them. I HAD TO MEMORIZE FIFTY.)

For Imam #5, we split into followers of Ja’faris Sadiq and Zayd ibn Ali, reasonably called Ja’faris and Zaydis.

According to Shias, the Nur of Allah continued to pass down Prophet Mohammed’s bloodline through Ali’s descendants, who you may recall were also Prophet Mohammed’s descendants.

But of course as we have just demonstrated, when you have lines of descent you have SCHISMS.

Even as he died, Ali ordered that his assassin not be tortured or publicly humiliated or tied too tight; some claim he even requested his assassin’s life be spared (if so, his son did not honor this request.)

With him died any chance for unity between Sunnis and Shias.

The new guys called themselves Kharijites. As far as the historical record shows, they sucked, though of course history is written by the winners so who knows.

Ali, presumably groaning, “I just wanted to be an imam” fought them and won, so one of them STABBED HIM IN THE HEAD while he was praying.

Aisha lost, but Ali had her respectfully escorted home on account of how she was basically family.

At this point she might or might not have sent assassins, unclear. What IS clear is Ali insisted on making peace with the Sunnis, and some of his followers were so mad that we had a SECOND SCHISM.

demanded that they kill the people who assassinated the third caliph. This was a pretty standard thing to demand at the time.

Ali, who despite being caliph was still fundamentally the boy who wanted to be an imam and not kill anyone, said “no, we should make peace” so Aisha led an army against him.

If Ali had been a worse person or a better politician, this would have been a great opportunity to pull an “enemy of my enemy” and unite the two branches of Islam, because the religion was fairly young and everyone loved Ali.

But Aisha bint Abu Bakr, Abu Bakr’s daughter and Prophet Mohammed’s wife,

Eventually Abu Bakr died, and people wanted Ali to be the caliph and he repeated, “I’d rather be an imam.”

That caliph died, same thing.

The third caliph was MURDERED and there was a panicked power vacuum and Muslims across the board were like “ok now you GOTTA be caliph” and Ali went “UGH, FINE.”

Indeed, Ali’s followers were like “should we kill Abu Bakr?” and Ali was like “I’d rather be an imam and not kill anybody?”

Abu Bakr pulled some dick moves like stealing Fatima’s inheritance, but the factions lived in peace and Abu Bakr focused on attacking the Byzantines and Sassanids.

Meanwhile a lot of Mohammed’s followers elected Mohammed’s friend and father-in-law Abd Allah ibn Abi Quhafa (generally called Abu Bakr because look at all that words) the next caliph.

Now, there’s no particular reason Ali couldn’t have been the religious leader while Abu Bakr was caliph.