In the Footsteps of Martyrs 185had in the formation of Islamic jurisprudence made it the dominant
school in Shi‘ism. To this day, Shi‘ite law maintains the conviction
that “whatever is ordered by reason, is also ordered by religion,” to
quote the contemporary Shi‘ite legal scholar Hossein Modarressi.
There are now so many mujtahids in the Shi‘ite world that only
those who have attained the very highest level of scholarship and who
can boast the greatest number of disciples are still allowed to practice
ijtihad. At the top of this order of mujtahids are the ayatollahs (the title
means “the sign of God”), whose decisions are binding on their disci-
ples. Only a handful of authoritative ayatollahs exist today—primarily
in Iran and Iraq—but their religious and political authority over the
Shi‘ah is formidable. As we shall see, it was precisely this authority
that allowed the Ayatollah Khomeini to impose his will upon the
social, political, and economic forces that led to the Iranian Revolu-
tion in 1979.
Ja‘far died in 757, allegedly from poisoning, though this claim has
been made for every Imam who was not openly murdered by Sunni
authorities. Before dying, Ja‘far designated his eldest son Ismail as the
seventh Imam. But Ismail died before his father, and was therefore
replaced by Ja‘far’s second son, Musa al-Kazim. While the majority of
the Shi‘ah accepted Musa as the divinely guided leader of the commu-
nity, there were those who were disturbed by this apparent “switch-
ing” of designations. Is not the Imam a divinely appointed position,
they asked? How could Ja‘far, the infallible Imam, have chosen the
wrong successor? Ultimately, this faction was compelled by the force
of their theology to argue that Ismail had not died, but gone into hid-
ing, or “occultation,” in a spiritual realm from which he would return
at the end of time, not as Imam Ismail, but as the messianic restorer
known in Islam as the Mahdi.
The followers of Ismail—called the Ismailis, or “Seveners” be-
cause they accept the existence of only seven Imams—were not the
first to promulgate the doctrine of the Mahdi. The term means “one
who guides divinely” and was regularly employed from the beginning
of the Islamic era as an honorific title; Muhammad was called “Mahdi,”
as were Ali and his two sons, Hasan and Husayn. After the massacre
at Karbala, both Abd Allah ibn al-Zubayr and Muhammad ibn al-
Hanafiyyah were proclaimed the Mahdi during their unsuccessful