School of the Shia. In addition to law, he was also
embraced as an authority in the fields of theology,
Arabic grammar, alchemy, and fortune telling.
Sufis included him in their genealogies of spiritual
authority, and an early qUran commentary with
mystical overtones has been ascribed to him.
According to Shii tradition, Jaafar, like his
father, was poisoned to death by an enemy; in
Jaafar’s case it was the caliph Mansur (r. 754–775).
Jaafar was buried in Medina’s Baqi Cemetery,
and his tomb was an object of pilgrimage until
destroyed by the Wahhabis centuries later. After
his death, there was a dispute among Shii fac-
tions over succession to the imamate. Those who
claimed that the seventh Imam was his eldest son,
Ismail (d. 760), eventually became the Ismaili
branch of shiism. Those who supported the can-
didacy of Jaafar’s son Musa al-Kazim (d. 799) and
his heirs later became the Twelve-Imam branch
of Shiism. One Shii faction, no longer extant,
claimed at the time that Jaafar was not really dead,
but that he had gone into a state of concealment
(ghayba) and would return as the Mahdi, or Mus-
lim messiah. This claim was attributed to other
imams in both branches of Shii tradition.
See also abbasid caliphate; aUthority; imam;
ismaili shiism; tWelve-imam shiism.
Further reading: Marshall G. Hodgson, “How Did the
Early Shia Become Sectarian?” Journal of the American
Oriental Society 75 (1955): 1–13; Moojan Momen, An
Introduction to Shii Islam (New Haven, Conn.: Yale
University Press, 1985), 37–39, 154–156; Michael
Sells, Early Islamic Mysticism: Sufi, Quran, Miraj, Poetic,
and Theological Writings (Mahwah, N.J.: Paulist Press,
1996), 75–88; Liyakat M. Takim, The Heirs of the
Prophet: Charisma and Religious Authority in Shiite Islam
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006).
Jahiliyya (Arabic: era of ignorance,
barbarism)
The state of affairs in Arabia and much of the rest
of the world before the rise of Islam in the sev-
enth century is known to Islamic tradition as the
Jahiliyya era, or the time of ignorance. Beginning
in the 13th century, some Muslims came to apply
this term to non-Muslims of later times.
The term has often been used to connote the
pagan polytheism of the Arabian Peninsula before
the revelation of the qUran. Muslims view this
period with particular disdain because polythe-
ism, or assigning partners to God (shirk), is
viewed as absolutely contradictory to Islam’s own
strict monotheism (tawhid). They believe that
Islam brought humanity true and ultimate knowl-
edge through the Quran and hadith, founded on
the recognition that there is one God and mUham-
mad is his prophet. In contrast, Muslims associate
Jahiliyya with total spiritual darkness.
A significant figure who developed the Muslim
understanding of the term Jahiliyya was the 13th-
and 14th-century Muslim intellectual taqi al-din
ahmad ibn taymiyya (d. 1328). As the Mongol
armies swept westward toward the central lands
of Islam, including Syria and Egypt, and as they
became Sunni Muslims over time, many people
living in those and other central lands faced a
dilemma. If the Muslims living in these regions
fought the Mongols, they would have been in
violation of the sharia’s injunctions forbidding
Muslims from killing each other. If those Muslims
did not engage in battle against the Mongols, their
regions would be conquered by this foreign group.
Supporting the Mamluk rulers of Egypt and Syria
against the Mongols, Ibn Taymiyya wrote that any
professed Sunni Muslim ceases to be one—and
automatically becomes part of jahili culture—
when he, among other things, breaks major
Islamic injunctions concerning life, limb, and
property. For Ibn Taymiyya, their offensive war
against other Muslims clearly made the Mongols
part of jahili culture, and as such the Muslims of
Syria and Egypt were justified—even obliged—to
wage war against them, even though they may
have adhered to other aspects of the sharia.
In the 20th century, certain Islamists, such as
sayyid qUtb (d. 1966), a Muslim intellectual whoJahiliyya 387 J