Conference | Call for Papers
The Institutional Embedding of Shiʿi Imams: Kinship, Caliphs, Courts and Companions (700-900)
- Date
- Wednesday 13 January 2027 - Friday 15 January 2027
- Location
- Herta Mohr
Witte Singel
- Room
- t.b.a.
CfP: The Institutional Embedding of Shiʿi Imams: Kinship, Caliphs, Courts and Companions (700-900) University of Leiden 13th-15th January 2027.
This conference seeks to illuminate the embedding of imams (and uncanonised candidates for imamate) as actors within their social, institutional and historical context before the canonization of an unbroken line of Twelve imams (260/874).
It will consist of a conference with traditional presentations, combined with a more workshop-style discussion of sources and approaches aimed at generating solid conversations about the state of the field.
The Imami imams are familiar as scholars and sources of knowledge, but they were, crucially, also elite members of the Islamic empire and as such occupied a pre-eminent place within society, serving as landowners, powerbrokers and community leaders. They also married into the other major families including the dynastic families of the Umayyad and Abbasids. Many of their followers occupied eminent positions within the polities of their day, while a number of imams (Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq, in primis) serve as transmitters of religious knowledge for non-Shiʿi communities. They were, thus, embedded within early Islamic society and played a role in its formation.
A core assumption of this conference will be that the institutions of the Imami Shiʿi imamate came into being in historical time at some point after the death of the Prophet Muhammad, but that it is not clear exactly when or how this occurred: key questions, then, will be to interrogate potential methodologies for tracing different aspects of when and how a distinctive Imami imamate emerged. The conference will not accept papers that are purely doctrinal or intellectual history, without a large component of social or institutional contextualisation.
The organisers welcome papers addressing the following themes for the period 700-900 CE:
- Imami vs Caliphal authority: in what sense were the imams, imams?
- The household of the imam
- Access to the imams
- Socio-political studies of the lives of individual imams
- The development or role of the “Shi’i” community in specific regions/cities (e.g., Qom, Kufa, Medina, Baghdad)
- Inheritance and bequesting practices
- Instruments of succession - waṣiyya, naṣṣ vs bayʿa
- Estates and property
- Kinship ties between the imams and other Arabian elites
- The role of companions of imams in the caliphal court
- Networks of companions (geographical and social)
- Imams at the caliphal court (politics, imprisonment etc.)
- Methodologies and sources for writing Shiʿi social and institutional history
- Comparisons between the social and institutional positioning, and followers of different candidates and conceptions of imamate: such as Zayd b. ʿAlī, ʿAbd Allāh al-Afṭaḥ, Abū Ḥanīfa, or the caliph al-Manṣūr
- Failed imams
- Alqāb as indicators of claims to authority
- Inscriptions and papyri as sources for the early Shiʿa
Presentations will be 45 minutes long and the organisers are open to allowing presenters to choose how they wish to use their time, whether as a traditional presentation (30 minutes talk + 15 minutes Q&A), by pre-circulating primary sources you wish to discuss or other suitable arrangements. The organisers intend to publish contributions from the conference as either an edited volume/special issue and will be in touch with further details and timeline once the speakers have been determined.
Please send abstracts to e.p.hayes@hum.leidenuniv.nl and l.f.pecorini.goodall@hum.leidenuniv.nl. Abstracts of no more than 300 words. Deadline: Monday, 20th of June