- Karen Armstrong
privilege the rich and oppress the weak, despite the clear
commands of the Quran. Shiis who followed Jafar as-Saddiq
may have abjured politics, but the passion for social justice
was at the heart of their piety of protest.
During the ninth century the hostility between the Ab-
basid establishment and the Shiis came to the fore again as the
caliphate declined. Caliph al-Mutawakkil (847-61) sum-
moned the Tenth Imam, Ali al-Hadi, from Medina to
Samarra and placed him under house arrest. He felt that he
could not risk allowing this direct descendant of the Prophet
to remain at large. Henceforth, the imams were virtually inac-
cessible to the Shiis, and could communicate with the faithful
only through "agents." When the Eleventh Imam died in 874,
it was said that he left behind a young son, who had gone into
hiding to save his life. Certainly there was no obvious trace of
the Twelfth Imam, who may already have been dead. But still,
the agents ruled the Shiis on his behalf, guiding their esoteric
study of the Quran, collecting zakat and issuing legal judge-
ments. In 934, when the Hidden Imam would have reached
the term of his natural life, the "agent" brought the Shiis a
special message from him. He had gone into "occultation,"
and had been miraculously concealed by God; he could have
no further contact with the Shiis. He would return one day to
inaugurate an era of justice, but only after a long time had
passed. The myth of the Occultation of the Hidden Imam was
not intended to be taken literally, as a statement of mundane
fact. It was a mystical doctrine, which expressed our sense of
the divine as elusive, absent or just out of reach, present in the
world but not of it. It also symbolized the impossibility of im-
plementing a truly religious policy in this world, since the
caliphs had destroyed Ali's line and driven ilm from the earth.
Henceforth the Shii ulama became the representatives of the
Hidden Imam, and used their own mystical and rational in-
sights to apprehend his will. Twelver Shiis (who believed in