In this chapter, a corpus of letters extracted from Imami Shiʿi hadith reports is analyzed to provide an overview of the system of imamic epistolary communications between imam and community members in Imami Shiʿism of the ninth century CE. The mechanisms by which letters reached the community are analyzed, including the mediation of agents (wakīl) of the imams. In particular, circular letters are looked at as illustrative of the ways in which the imam attempted to reach sections of his community beyond specific individuals, and the ways that these illuminate the distinctive aspects of Shiʿi community organization. The letters analyzed here indicate the existence of a relatively complex organizational web in the Imami Shiʿi community, whose efficacy was greatly dependent upon the trustworthiness of the individuals representing the claims of the imam to the constituencies in which they were embedded.

This introduction poses the central thesis of this volume: that the early Islamic empire was tied together by networks of social dependency that can be tracked through the linguistic and material traces of interconnectivity in our sources. It is suggested that the particular relationships that emerge from the granular case studies in this volume can illuminate the constituent parts of the early Islamic empire as a whole. Studies link material and textual sources, and in particular focus on the language and rhetoric used by sources to describe relations and interactions, and what they show of the modes, expressions and conditions that governed communication and interaction. It is suggested that empires are not ruled by top–down force alone, but that legitimacy and stability are created in various ways, both top–down and bottom–up.

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.

The authority of Abū Jaʿfar al-ʿAmrī, the second in the canonical sequence of envoys, emerged around the time when the old guard agents of the eleventh Imam were dying, two decades after the Imam’s death. The process of back-projection of the envoy paradigm to the earliest phase of the Occultation has obscured details of Abū Jaʿfar’s life, but we can piece together, in Chapter 5, some details from reports of opposition to Abū Jaʿfar from both skeptical agents and rival charismatic bābs. He established his authority through his father’s prestige, by forging alliances with other agents, by repudiating doubters, and issuing rescripts (tawqīʿāt) in the name of the hidden Imam. He also attempted to maintain revenues, giving concessions and dispensations for alms taxes, while asserting the legitimacy of the Imamic agents to continue revenue-collection, particularly from waqf endowments and Imamic estates. Through these activities he established the office of envoy firmly enough to survive him.