Paimana

Eighth of Muharram, 1448 AH

The act that this tradition reveres above all others is an act of refusal, and very nearly an act of rebellion. Al-Ḥusayn was asked for the oath of allegiance, the bayʿa, to Yazīd, and he refused it, and rose, and was killed for the refusing. Whatever else Karbalāʾ is, it is a man saying no to the ruler of his world and dying rather than withdraw the no. And here is what should puzzle us more than it usually does. The same tradition that places this refusal at the centre of its devotional life went on to build the most fully developed theology of political quietism in Islam. It made a doctrine of precautionary concealment, taqiyya, and a doctrine of waiting, intizār. It transmitted, from the very Imams it venerates, traditions condemning anyone who rises before the appointed hour, one of them declaring in so many words that every banner raised before the rising of the Qāʾim belongs to a tyrant.[^1] So a tradition founded on a refusal counsels patience, and reveres a man who rose while it instructs his followers not to rise.

Two parties have always claimed him, and claim him still. To the revolutionary, Karbalāʾ is the standing summons to rise against every tyrant, and the slogan, that every day is ʿAshura and every land is Karbalāʾ, is a call to arms. To the quietist, Karbalāʾ is to be mourned and not copied, an event whose like will not come again until the Qāʾim comes, a grief rather than a programme. I want to ask how one tradition can hold both, and whether either party has it right. The answer, I think, requires separating two things that both of them have run together, and once they are separated the apparent contradiction at the heart of the tradition turns out not to be a contradiction at all.

Let me first set the difficulty in its sharpest philosophical form, because the theological puzzle is an instance of a problem that is perfectly general. The problem is whether a single act can be exemplary, can be held up as the highest thing a person ever did and offered for the reverence and emulation of everyone after, without thereby becoming a general rule. The natural assumption, and it is Kant’s, is that to hold an act up as exemplary is to commit oneself to a maxim, and that a maxim by its nature is universal. If it was right for him to do it, then it is right for anyone relevantly like him to do the same, and the act carries an implicit “and so should you.”[^2] If that assumption holds, then the revolutionary is simply reading Karbalāʾ correctly, and the quietist is engaged in a kind of bad faith, revering the act while refusing the universal that revering it entails. But the assumption does not obviously hold, and there are at least two reasons, drawn from quite different quarters of philosophy, to think that some exemplary acts resist the universal they seem to imply.

The first reason comes from the theory of political foundings. A founding act, the act that establishes a new order or a new people, has a peculiar logical character that has occupied political theorists from Arendt back to the seventeenth century. It cannot be authorized by the order it founds, since that order does not yet exist when the act is performed; it stands outside and before the framework of rules it brings into being, and for just that reason it cannot be a move within those rules.[^3] One cannot found a city by following the laws of the city, because there are as yet no laws. Foundings are therefore singular in a strong sense. They are not the first instance of a repeatable practice but the unrepeatable condition of a practice, and the attempt to treat a founding as a general rule, to found again and again, every day, is a kind of category error about what a founding is. If Karbalāʾ is a founding, an act that constitutes the political and devotional identity of a community rather than an act within the ongoing life of one, then its non-repeatability is not a quietist’s evasion but a feature of its logic. The second reason comes from the older ethics of the exemplar. Long before anyone spoke of universalizable maxims, moral life was organized around exemplary persons, the saint and the sage, whose excellence one revered and approached without supposing that revering them committed one to reproducing their every deed. We do not think that admiring the martyr obliges us to seek martyrdom, any more than admiring the ascetic obliges us to the desert. The exemplar guides by being admired and approximated in spirit, not by furnishing a rule that one is inconsistent not to apply.[^4]

So the bare inference from “exemplary” to “general rule” is not secure, and the door is open to a reading on which Karbalāʾ is revered without being a literal instruction to rise. But this is so far only a possibility, and to make it more than that I have to say what, precisely, in the act is exemplary, since an act is a complex thing and may be exemplary under one description and not under another. Here is the heart of the matter. Al-Ḥusayn’s act contains two things, and the revolutionary and the quietist each fasten onto one of them and call it the whole. The first is the refusal of the bayʿa, the withholding of allegiance and legitimacy from a ruler judged unfit to receive it. The second is the armed rising, the marching out to a battle he knew he would lose and a death he knew he would die. These are not the same act, and they do not stand or fall together, and nearly everything turns on holding them apart.

Consider the refusal of allegiance on its own. It is, I want to argue, fully generalizable, and it is in fact the standing and perennial principle of the whole tradition, the thing that most sharply distinguishes Shīʿī political theology from the Sunnī kind. Sunnī political thought, faced with the disorder of the early civil wars, tended toward a doctrine on which the holder of power is owed obedience and accorded legitimacy simply by virtue of holding power, provided he does not command outright impiety, on the reasoning that the tyranny of an established ruler is a lesser evil than the chaos of contesting him. Shīʿism never made this concession. For the Shīʿa the legitimate authority is the Imam and the Imam alone, and every temporal power that is not his is a usurpation, owed no allegiance and granted no legitimacy, whatever prudence may dictate about open resistance to it.[^5] This withholding of legitimacy is exactly the refusal that al-Ḥusayn enacted at Karbalāʾ, and it is universal in the strictest sense. It applies to every believer and to every unjust ruler, in every age, without exception. The refusal of the bayʿa is a rule, and the tradition has always treated it as one.

Now consider the rising. To universalize this, to derive from Karbalāʾ the maxim that one ought to march out, sword drawn, against the tyrant of one’s day and die in the attempt, is precisely the move the tradition spent centuries resisting, and the resistance was not cowardice but a considered judgment encoded in its eschatology. The legitimate armed rising, in classical Shīʿī thought, is not forbidden in principle; it is reserved. It belongs to the Qāʾim, the awaited one, whose very title means “the riser,” the one who will at the end rise sword in hand to fill the earth with justice. The traditions condemning premature rising, the banner before the Qāʾim that belongs to a tyrant, are not a renunciation of the rising as such. They are an insistence that the rising is the Qāʾim’s to lead and that to mount it oneself, in the wrong hour, is to usurp his office and to spend lives that the proper rising will need. And the doctrine of waiting, intizār, was never, in its classical form, a passive resignation. The Imams describe the one who waits, who keeps himself in readiness with piety and good conduct, as standing already, in merit, where the Qāʾim’s own soldiers will stand.[^6] The waiting is an active fidelity, a holding of oneself in reserve for a rising that is coming but is not yet. So the two halves of al-Ḥusayn’s act receive, in the mature tradition, two different treatments, and rightly. The refusal of allegiance is universalized and made a permanent obligation. The armed rising is honoured in him and reserved in everyone else, deferred to the one whose rising it properly is.

This is the resolution of the aporia, and I want to state it without hedging. The tradition is not incoherent in revering a refusal while counseling quietism, because the thing it universalizes from Karbalāʾ is the refusal and not the rising. To withhold legitimacy from the unjust is the rule, binding always; to take up the sword is the exception, al-Ḥusayn’s by his unrepeatable station and the Qāʾim’s by his appointed office, and no one else’s in the interval between them. The quietist who mourns Karbalāʾ and does not rise is not betraying the act. He is keeping its universal half, the refusal, while observing the reservation of its singular half, the rising. And the deepest expression of this is the doctrine that the revolutionary reading finds most embarrassing, the doctrine of taqiyya. For concealment is not acceptance. The one who practices taqiyya hides his rejection of the illegitimate order; he does not abandon it. Taqiyya is the refusal continued by other means, the no spoken under the breath when it cannot be spoken aloud, and it preserves through long centuries of powerlessness exactly the non-recognition that al-Ḥusayn proclaimed in the open. Seen this way, the open refusal of al-Ḥusayn and the concealed refusal of the Imams who came after him are not opposites but two tactics of a single, constant rejection, the mode shifting with what the hour permits while the refusal itself never wavers. He said no with his life because his hour allowed it; they said no in the dark because theirs did not; and the no is the same no.

It is worth dwelling on this last point, because the equation of concealment with submission is so natural and so wrong, and a body of work from outside the Islamic tradition has shown precisely how wrong it is. The political anthropologist James Scott, studying how subordinated peoples conduct themselves under a domination they cannot openly resist, distinguished two transcripts. There is the public transcript, the deferential performance staged for the powerful, and there is the hidden transcript, the dissent rehearsed and preserved offstage, in the quarters and the songs and the coded speech of the dominated, where the refusal that cannot be voiced in the master’s presence is kept alive among themselves.[^8] Taqiyya is a hidden transcript raised to a theological principle. It is the institutionalised maintenance of a rejection that the believer is too weak to declare in the open, and its whole point is that the rejection survives the concealment intact, carried in the gathering and the lament and the private conviction until a day when it can be spoken aloud again. The revolutionary who sees in taqiyya only a counsel of timidity has mistaken the public transcript for the whole. He has missed what the centuries of concealment were preserving, which was the very refusal he wishes to revive. He could not revive it had it not been kept, and it was kept, under concealment, by the quietists he disdains.

I should record, too, that the reservation of the rising was a choice and not a necessity, because there was within Shīʿism itself a branch that chose otherwise, and the contrast throws the Imāmī decision into relief. The Zaydīs, the followers of Zayd b. ʿAlī, al-Ḥusayn’s grandson, who rose against the Umayyads at Kūfa in the year 122 and was killed much as his ancestor had been, made the rising constitutive of legitimate authority itself. For the Zaydī the true imam is the one who rises, sword in hand, and openly summons the community against injustice. An imam who sits quietly, who practises taqiyya and defers, forfeits his claim by the very quietism that the Imāmī tradition made a virtue.[^9] Zaydism universalized the rising in just the way the classical Imāmī tradition refused to, and made of al-Ḥusayn’s act not a reserved exception but the standing template of what an imam is for. The two branches drew opposite lessons from the same Karbalāʾ. The existence of the Zaydī alternative is the proof that the Imāmī reservation of the rising was a substantive position and not a reading-off of the obvious. And it locates the modern revolutionary reading with some precision. In universalizing the rising, in making al-Ḥusayn’s act a general summons rather than a reserved one, the Imāmī revolutionaries of the twentieth century were moving their tradition, whether they said so or not, toward the Zaydī pole it had spent a thousand years declining to occupy.

I have been describing the classical settlement, and I have now to be honest about the fact that it is not the only one, and that the most consequential Shīʿī movement of the last century overturned it. The reading on which Karbalāʾ is a standing call to rise, on which every day is genuinely to be made ʿAshura and every land a Karbalāʾ, is not the inherited reading but a modern reconstruction. It is the work of the middle decades of the twentieth century, of thinkers like Jalāl Āl-e Aḥmad and ʿAlī Sharīʿatī and clerics like Ṣāliḥī Najafābādī, and above all of Khomeini.[^7] It is worth being exact about what they changed, because the change was precise and deliberate. Khomeini took the old devotional slogan, which had meant that the grief of Karbalāʾ is always present and everywhere available to the mourner, and he glossed it explicitly as a summons to action, insisting that its true meaning was not that we should weep every day but that we should rise every day against injustice and make the place we stand a Karbalāʾ. He took the doctrine of intizār, the waiting, and rejected its quietist construction, the construction on which every government is illegitimate in the Imam’s absence but is to be tolerated for want of a better, and he replaced it with an active intizār, a duty to labour now to establish just rule and so to prepare the ground for the return. And to fill the gap that the deferral of the rising had left, the gap where legitimate authority was supposed to be absent until the Qāʾim, he advanced the doctrine of the guardianship of the jurist, wilāyat al-faqīh, on which the qualified jurist may exercise, in the Imam’s absence, the very political authority the tradition had reserved. In the terms I have been using, the revolutionary reading is the universalization of the rising, the conversion of al-Ḥusayn’s singular and reserved act into a general maxim binding now.

I do not intend to adjudicate that question here, and I want to be clear that the analysis I have offered does not adjudicate it either, though it may look as though it favours the quietist. It does not favour the quietist, and seeing why is important. The classical reservation of the rising rested on a premise, that the legitimate rising is the Qāʾim’s and that the interval is to be one of waiting. The revolutionary’s deepest claim is that this premise had become, by the twentieth century, a rationalization of acquiescence, a way for the comfortable to dignify their inaction while the tyrant ruled and the poor suffered. On this reading the Imams’ own quietism had been a tactic forced on them by weakness, and not a principle binding in strength. That is a serious claim and it may be true. If it is true, then the hour had come to shift from the concealed mode of the refusal to the open one, and the revolutionary was doing exactly what my own analysis says the tradition has always done, judging that the circumstances now permitted the no to be spoken aloud. The quietist’s reply is equally serious: that the reservation of the rising was never mere tactics but a genuine conviction that premature risings devour the future they mean to serve, that the history of such risings is a history of catastrophe, and that wilāyat al-faqīh is an innovation that quietly assumes the Imam’s own authority for a fallible jurist. What separates the two is not finally a disagreement about the meaning of Karbalāʾ. Both can agree that Karbalāʾ founds a permanent refusal. It is a disagreement about the hour, about whether this is a time for the open refusal or the concealed one, and that is a question the philosophy cannot settle, because it turns on a judgment of circumstance and consequence that no reading of an ancient act can make for us.

There is a further wrinkle that the theory of foundings brings to light, and it cuts in a complicated direction. If Karbalāʾ is a founding, and foundings are by their nature exceptional and unrepeatable, then the slogan that every day is ʿAshura looks, on its face, like an attempt to make the exception permanent, to convert the founding moment into a standing condition. The logic of foundings seems to forbid exactly this. One cannot be founding at every moment, any more than a state can be in perpetual revolution without dissolving the very order that a revolution exists to establish. This is the quietist’s sharpest philosophical card. But the revolutionary has a reply, and it is the distinction I have been pressing all along. To say that every day is ʿAshura need not mean that one re-founds, or rises afresh, every day. It can mean that the refusal the founding established is to be kept live every day, present and operative rather than embalmed in an annual rite. Read so, the slogan is not the incoherent demand for a permanent founding. It is the demand that the founding’s permanent product, the refusal, not be allowed to lapse, and in that reading it converges, perhaps to the revolutionary’s own discomfort, with the stance-and-not-tactic account I am about to give. The disagreement, once again, is not over whether the refusal is permanent. It is over the form the permanent refusal should take in this hour.

I have treated the dispute, so far, as turning on the rising and on the hour, on whether al-Ḥusayn’s taking up of the sword is a general maxim or a reserved exception, and on when its open form is due. There is a deeper level beneath this, which I have written about elsewhere under the name of a religion without a state, dīn without dawla, and bringing it in changes what is at stake.[^10] Notice something about al-Ḥusayn’s rising that the language of rebellion obscures. It was not a bid for the state. He did not march on Damascus to seize the caliphate and rule in Yazīd’s place; he knew, on every account the tradition gives, that he was going to his death and not to a throne. Whatever Karbalāʾ was, it was not an attempt to win power. And this is not incidental to the act but close to its centre. It renounces the very logic of the dawla, the logic of coercion and victory and rule, and chooses instead the logic of witness, the bearing of a truth unto death without regard to whether it prevails. The deepest current of the Shīʿī tradition, on this reading, is not merely the deferral of the rising. It is the decoupling of religious authority from state power as such. The Imam’s authority is walāya, a spiritual and cognitive thing grounded in designation and knowledge, and it is complete without the dawla and arguably purer without it. The Imams did not merely fail to win the state. They withdrew from the contest for it, and made of that withdrawal a theology, the theology of a religious authority that does not need, and is compromised by, the holding of coercive power.

It helps here to borrow a distinction Arendt drew with great care, between power and authority.[^11] Authority, in her analysis, is recognized legitimacy that commands assent without force and even without argument; it is what remains when both coercion and persuasion are subtracted, and it rests on a recognition that the one who holds it does not have to compel. Power, and still more the violence that backs a state, is a different thing, and the two can come apart. A figure may possess unquestioned authority and no power at all, as the Imams did under the Umayyads and the ʿAbbāsids, recognized by their followers as the sole legitimate authority while commanding not a single garrison. Dīn without dawla is precisely this condition, authority without power. The tradition’s claim, at its most radical, is that the condition is not a misfortune to be cured but the proper state of religious authority, one corrupted in the measure that it takes up the coercive apparatus of rule. This sets the Shīʿī current sharply against the slogan that has dominated modern Islamic political thought, that Islam is religion and state together, al-islām dīn wa dawla.[^12] Against that fusion, the classical Shīʿī tradition stands as the great internal counter-example, a vision of Islam as dīn precisely without dawla. And this is what makes the guardianship of the jurist so consequential a move, and on this reading so deep a break. Wilāyat al-faqīh does not only universalize the rising. It re-fuses dīn and dawla. It takes the religious authority that Karbalāʾ had unbound from power and weds it again to the coercive machinery of a state, and so abandons the distinctive Shīʿī counter-current for the very dīn-wa-dawla model that the tradition’s deepest instinct had refused.

I have put this strongly, and in fairness the revolutionary must have his strongest reply, because dīn without dawla is itself a position in the quarrel and not a neutral description of it. A religion that renounces the state, he says, abandons the world to the tyrant and the poor to their oppression, and buys the purity of its authority at the price of its responsibility for justice. To refuse the dawla is a luxury of the powerless, who could not take it in any case, and of the comfortable, who do not suffer its absence; it is cold comfort to the man under the lash that the authority which might have lifted it has chosen to keep its hands clean. And the tradition does not finally renounce the state, the revolutionary presses, for the Qāʾim will seize it. The eschatological rising is exactly the moment when dīn becomes dawla at last, when the long-waiting authority takes up the power to fill the earth with a justice it could never before impose. If dīn is to become dawla at the end, then the decoupling was always provisional, a waiting and not a renunciation, and the one who labours to build just rule now is only refusing to leave to the last day what might be begun today. This is a serious answer, and the dīn-without-dawla reading does not defeat it, any more than it is defeated by it. What the two finally disagree about is whether the unbinding of religious authority from state power is the permanent truth of the tradition or a temporary discipline of its powerlessness, and that, like the question of the hour, is not a thing that any reading of Karbalāʾ can settle for us.

There remains an objection aimed not at any of these conclusions but at the analytic move that produced them, and it is the revolutionary’s again, and I have been circling it. The objection is that by splitting the act into a generalizable refusal and a singular rising I have performed a quietist’s trick, that I have kept the icon of rebellion while disarming the rebellion, venerating the man who took up the sword precisely in order to excuse everyone else from taking it up. Al-Ḥusayn, the objector says, did not merely withhold his bayʿa and wait; he rode out and fought and died, and a reading that honours the withholding while reserving the riding has kept the safe half and quietly discarded the dangerous one. I feel the force of this, and the reply is not to deny that the rising matters but to say what it is for. The rising is a founding and a witnessing, and I have argued in earlier essays of this series that its worth lies there, in the act freely willed and in the testimony borne, rather than in any policy it recommends. Its political work is real, but it is done through the permanent refusal it establishes and through the conscience it forms in those who mourn it, not through being a literal instruction that each generation is delinquent for not obeying with its own blood. To say this is not to disarm the refusal. The refusal is total and it is binding now, on everyone, in every age. It is only to say that whether the refusal takes the open form that al-Ḥusayn gave it or the concealed form that his sons gave it is not itself dictated by the act, and cannot be, and is left, as it must be, to the terrible judgment of those who have to decide whether their own hour is a Karbalāʾ or a time to wait.

What Karbalāʾ founds, then, is not a tactic but a stance, and the perennial temptation, into which both parties fall, is to collapse the stance into one of its tactics. The revolutionary collapses it into the open refusal and reads the founding act as a standing order to rise. The quietist, in his degenerate form, collapses it into the concealed refusal and lets the waiting harden into acquiescence, the taqiyya that was a hidden no decaying into a comfortable silence that has forgotten it ever meant no at all. Against both, the thing founded at Karbalāʾ is the refusal itself, the absolute withholding of legitimacy from the unjust, which is bound to no single form and survives in all of them, spoken with a life when the hour allows and under the breath when it does not. Al-Ḥusayn said it once, aloud, and paid for it, and the tradition has gone on saying it ever since, sometimes in the open and sometimes in the dark, and the whole of its political wisdom lies in knowing that the saying is what matters and that the choice of voice is a thing each age has to make for itself, and to answer for.

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[^1]: The tradition, transmitted by al-Kulaynī (d. 329/941) in al-Kāfī with a chain its proponents regard as sound, from Abū Baṣīr from Imam Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq: “Every banner (rāya) raised before the rising of the Qāʾim, its bearer is a ṭāghūt (a tyrant worshipped besides God).” The quietist construction takes the criterion of invalidity to be the time of the rising and not its aim, so that “every banner” (the phrase is emphatically general) condemns any pre-messianic uprising whatever; activist readers, including Khomeini’s school, argue that the traditions were meant to keep followers from following false Mahdis and from being destroyed to no purpose, not to forbid all political action. The dispute over this report’s scope is, in miniature, the dispute this essay is about.

[^2]: Immanuel Kant, Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten (1785): the requirement that one act only on a maxim one can at the same time will to be a universal law. The assumption I am questioning is that to commend an act as exemplary is implicitly to will its maxim as universal, so that the quietist who reveres al-Ḥusayn’s rising without willing its general performance is in a kind of practical contradiction.

[^3]: On the paradox of foundation, that a founding act cannot derive its authority from the order it establishes, see Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (1963), on the “abyss of freedom” and the problem of the absolute that haunts every new beginning; and, for the distinction between constituent power (pouvoir constituant), which makes constitutions, and constituted power, which operates under them, Carl Schmitt, Verfassungslehre (1928). The relevant feature for my argument is the singularity of the founding: it is the condition of a normative order and so cannot be a repeatable move within one.

[^4]: For the exemplar as a mode of moral guidance distinct from the application of universal rules, see Aristotle on the role of the person of practical wisdom (phronimos) in the Nicomachean Ethics, and, in recent moral philosophy, the particularist case (e.g. Jonathan Dancy) that moral knowledge need not take the form of codifiable principles. I am not endorsing particularism wholesale, only observing that the inference from “admirable act” to “binding universal maxim” has long been contested.

[^5]: On the contrast between the Sunnī tendency to accord legitimacy to the de facto holder of power (subject to his not commanding open impiety) and the Shīʿī refusal to grant legitimacy to any non-Imamic authority, see the standard treatments of early Islamic political thought; and, on the consolidation of Shīʿī quietism under Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq (d. 148/765), who declined the political opening of the ʿAbbāsid revolution, the analysis of M. G. S. Hodgson, who credits al-Ṣādiq with constituting Shīʿism as a religious community distinct from a political faction, with taqiyya among its disciplines. The crucial point is that the quietist turn withheld legitimacy from temporal power even as it withdrew from contesting it.

[^6]: For intizār as active expectant readiness rather than passive resignation, see the tradition from al-Ṣādiq, in al-Nuʿmānī’s Kitāb al-Ghayba and al-Majlisī, Biḥār al-anwār, vol. 52, that one who dies awaiting the Qāʾim in a state of true waiting is as one who was with him in his tent, or who fought at his side. The title al-Qāʾim (“the one who rises,” “the riser”) itself frames the awaited deliverance as a rising, which is precisely why a rising in the interim can be cast as a usurpation of his office.

[^7]: On the twentieth-century reinterpretation of Karbalāʾ from a paradigm of mourning into a paradigm of revolution, see Kamran Scot Aghaie, The Martyrs of Karbala: Shiʿi Symbols and Rituals in Modern Iran (2004), on the “Karbalāʾ paradigm”; and the studies of ʿAlī Sharīʿatī, Jalāl Āl-e Aḥmad, and Nematollah Salehi Najafabadi (whose Shahīd-i Jāvīd recast Ḥusayn’s aim as the establishment of government). The slogan “every day is ʿAshura, every land is Karbalāʾ,” sometimes traced to al-Ṣādiq, was popularized in its activist sense by Sharīʿatī and deployed by Khomeini, who glossed it explicitly as a summons to rise rather than to weep, modified intizār into an active duty to prepare for the return, and advanced wilāyat al-faqīh (the guardianship of the jurist) to supply, in the Imam’s absence, the authority the classical tradition had reserved. The doctrine remains contested among Shīʿī jurists, a number of the senior marājiʿ holding to more quietist constructions; I have discussed the broader question of Shīʿī political theology in an earlier essay, “Dīn Without Dawla.”

[^8]: James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (1990), and earlier Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (1985), on the distinction between the “public transcript” performed before the powerful and the “hidden transcript” of dissent preserved among the subordinated, and on the disguised, undeclared resistance of those who cannot resist openly. The reading of taqiyya as a hidden transcript institutionalized into doctrine is my own.

[^9]: On the constitutive role of the rising (al-khurūj, al-qiyām bi-l-sayf) in Zaydī political theology, the doctrine that the imamate belongs to the qualified ʿAlid who rises sword in hand and openly summons the community to himself, so that quiescence disqualifies a claimant, see the standard accounts of Zaydism; the eponymous paradigm is the Kūfan rising of Zayd b. ʿAlī b. al-Ḥusayn (d. 122/740) against the Umayyads. The contrast with the Imāmī reservation of the rising, and the Zaydī rejection on these grounds of the politically quiescent Imams of the Imāmī line, is exactly the point of the comparison.

[^10]: I have argued this at greater length in “Dīn Without Dawla,” on the decoupling of religious authority from state power as the deepest current of Shīʿī political theology, and on the modern doctrine of clerical rule as its reversal. The present essay applies that argument to the specific problem of how the founding act of refusal relates to the quietism that followed it.

[^11]: Hannah Arendt, “What Is Authority?” in Between Past and Future (1961), and On Violence (1970), on the distinctions among authority, power, and violence: authority commands recognition without recourse either to coercion or to argument, and is to be distinguished both from the power that may lack it and from the violence that may be substituted for it. The Imams’ condition, recognized authority joined to the absence of power, is a textbook instance of the distinction.

[^12]: The formula al-islām dīn wa dawla (“Islam is religion and state”), a watchword of much twentieth-century Islamist thought (Rashīd Riḍā, then Ḥasan al-Bannā and the Muslim Brotherhood, and the wider current after them), asserts the inseparability of religion from political power. Whether classical Islam in fact fused the two, or whether the unitary “Islamic state” is largely a modern construction, is itself contested in the scholarship; my point is only that the quietist Shīʿī tradition is the sharpest internal counter-instance to the fusion.