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6 - Rise and Fall

Ibn Rawḥ, Shalmaghānī, and the Rise and Fall of the Envoyship

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 January 2022

Edmund Hayes
Affiliation:
Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen
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Summary

The envoyship of Abū Jaʿfar al-ʿAmrī generated expectations of succession, culminating in Ibn Rawḥ al-Nawbakhtī’s accession to the role upon his death. Quasi-Imamic mechanisms of designation (naṣṣ) and initiatic inheritance (waṣiyya) were invoked to support this. However, it is argued in Chapter 6 that long-present pressures against a centralizing Imamate now led to the collapse of the envoyship. Ibn Rawḥ fell afoul of the complex machinations of the ʿAbbasid court. He was imprisoned, then was challenged by his aide, Shalmaghānī, who claimed to embody Imamate and divinity. Ibn Rawḥ issued a denunciation of Shalmaghānī, and the caliph al-Rāḍī had him executed as a heretic. However, soon after Ibn Rawḥ’s death, a rescript from the hidden Imam declared the termination of the office of envoy. Thereafter, the diffuse leadership of earlier elites, especially scholars, came to replace the centralizing bureaucratic leadership of the envoys, and the defunct envoyship was canonized as orthodox history.

Type
Chapter
Information
Agents of the Hidden Imam
Forging Twelver Shi‘ism, 850-950 CE
, pp. 172 - 215
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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  • Rise and Fall
  • Edmund Hayes, Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen
  • Book: Agents of the Hidden Imam
  • Online publication: 13 January 2022
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108993098.007
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  • Rise and Fall
  • Edmund Hayes, Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen
  • Book: Agents of the Hidden Imam
  • Online publication: 13 January 2022
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108993098.007
Available formats
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Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Rise and Fall
  • Edmund Hayes, Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen
  • Book: Agents of the Hidden Imam
  • Online publication: 13 January 2022
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108993098.007
Available formats
×