Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

THE UMMA t 141
tionally speaking, the opposite seems closer to the truth. The
Christian bishop and the Shiite Imam show the same charismatically
transmitted powers and may speak definitively, if not infallibly,
on behalf of God. The Roman Catholic view of the papal magisterium
is in fact very close to that of the Shiites toward the Imam.
One difference, however, is that whereas in Islam the transmission
of that magisterium is by both designation and descent from the
Holy Family, the Christian episcopate is an office held by a clergy
that is celibate and so, by definition, without issue: the bishop receives
his teaching powers by designation alone.
The Hidden Imam
The eleventh Imam in the sequence followed by the so-called
Twelver Shiites was Hasan al-Askari, whose tenure began in 873.
He died the following year, but had was a son, it was reported,
born in 868 or thereabouts, bearing the Prophet’s own name of
Abu Qasim Muhammad. There were problems: some Shiites had
apparently not heard of this son and turned instead to Hasan’s
brother Jafar, who denied there had been any son. Most were convinced
that young Muhammad was the true Imam. He was nowhere
to be found, however, and thus there began to circulate the
same story of a concealment or an “occultation” that had earlier
been broached in extremist and Ismaili circles.
Note: The place of Muhammad’s final concealment was later identified
as a cave near the tombs of earlier Imams at Samarra in Iraq.
Within it was a well down which Muhammad was said to have disappeared.
The caliph al-Nasir had the place walled off in 1209, but
Shiites continue to visit and pray for the return of the Hidden Imam.
The new phenomenon of a Hidden Imam must then have
seemed little different from the prevailing custom of an Imam who
had little or no public presence. Thus the system continued to
function through the medium of a spokesman or delegate who,