184 DESTINY DISRUPTED
and after that his son, and so on. In short, leadership of the group became
hereditary.
Second, somewhere along the way, these sheikhs developed political
ambitions. They enlisted chosen initiates into an elite corps who not only
learned techniques for refining their spiritual devotions but also learned
martial arts. They became the sheikh's bodyguards, then his enforcers, and
then they grew into a serious military caste.
As an emblem of membership in the Safavid guard, these soldier-mystics
wore special red hats, and so they were called the Qizilbash, Turkish for
"the redheads." The hat they wore had a distinctive twelve-fold design,
which reflected the third and most important change in the Safavid order:
their switch to Shi'ism.
The twelve folds stood for the twelve imams of mainstream Shi'ism. As
I mentioned earlier, Shi'i felt that absolute and hereditary religious au-
thority belonged to a figure called the imam, who was God's representative
on Earth. There was always one imam in the world; there were never two;
and the true imam of the age was always descended from Prophet Mo-
hammed through his daughter Fatima and her husband Ali.
Whenever an imam had more than one son, his death opened up the
possibility of disagreement about which of his progeny was truly the next
imam. Just such a disagreement over the fifth imam gave birth to a mi-
nority sect called the Zaidis (or Fivers.) Another disagreement over the sev-
enth imam had spawned the lsma'ilis (or Seveners).
The remaining Shi'i agreed on the imam all the way to the twelfth gen-
eration down from Ali, but the twelfth imam disappeared when he was a
little boy. Non-Shi'i assume he was murdered. Shi'i, however, believe he
never died but went into "occultation," a concept peculiar to Shi'ism: oc-
cultation meant he could (can) no longer be seen by ordinary people.
Mainstream Shi'i (or Twelvers) call this twelfth imam the "hidden
imam." Shi'ite doctrine holds that the Hidden Imam is and always will be
alive, that he is still in direct communication with God and is still guiding
the world in some unseen way. The doctrine doesn't say exactly how the
Hidden Imam remains hidden. It doesn't say whether he has become invisi-
ble, donned a disguise, changed form, gone to ground in some cave, or what.
Instrumental explanations like these belong to the world of science; occulta-
tion is a mystical concept to which instrumental explanations are irrelevant.