It is something of a trope in comparative scholarship on medieval institutions to consider Islamicate institutions less formal than those in contemporary Christian Europe or China. Much of this apparent informality may be due to the state of the archives, or rather the loss of archives, before the Mamluk and Ottoman periods, as well as the absence of the distinctive forms that scholars of institutions tend to seek in confirmation of dominant Eurocentric models of progress. In assessing these institutional contexts, it is also important to be aware that the medieval societies of western Asia and North Africa were not monolithic and that governmental institutions were not the only players in town. In this article, I will look at the institutions of petitioning within a persecuted minority: the Imami Shiʿa of the eighth to ninth centuries ce, as preserved by the Twelver Shiʿa, the group that succeeded the Imami Shiʿa. In doing so I do not aim to solve the greater issues of comparative institutional history, but rather to ensure that scholars start to take minority voices seriously when putting together our broader picture of the institutional landscape. While Shiʿi institutions may not be representative throughout Muslim imperial society as a whole, well, neither are governmental institutions: scholars should take note of both central and peripheral, hegemonic and non-hegemonic forms in order to appreciate the intersecting mosaic of institutions that operated in a given society. Thus, while the Shiʿi petitioning narratives I study here are certainly important for understanding the development of authority in Shiʿism, they are also instructive for broader understandings of authority and hierarchy in the early Islamic empire.

The petitions I will discuss were directed toward the symbolic centre of the Imami Shiʿa group: the incumbent imam of the community. The Imami imams were a line of hereditary religious leaders somewhat comparable to Christian popes or patriarchs, or the Dalai Lamas of Tibetan Buddhism: they were understood to be the supreme religious authorities of their community, though their actual supremacy may sometimes have been severely compromised in practice. The position of the imams in society was prestigious but fragile, because the Shiʿa were subjected to waves of governmental persecution. The imams embodied a particular kind of non-state authority with little coercive power to back it up.