The Ismāʿīlīyah, like the Twelveans, make profession of a loyal attachment to the cause of ʿAlī. Their schism was occasioned by a dispute regarding the succession to the Imāmate on the death of Imām Jaʿfar Ṣādiq. Jaʿfar had four sons, the eldest of whom was Ismāʿīl. One day, however, Ismāʿīl was seen in a state of inebriety, and his father disinherited him, and appointed his son Mūsā. The greater number of the Shīʿahs accepted this decision, but a small number, who regarded the drunkenness of the Imām as an evidence that he accepted the hidden meaning and not the legal precepts of Islām (!), remained attached to Ismāʿīl. They say from the time of ʿAlī to the death of Muḥammad, the son of Ismāʿīl, the Imāms were visible, but from his death commenced the succession of concealed Imāms. The fourth of these “concealed” Imāms was a certain ʿAbdu ʾllāh, who lived about the third century of the Hijrah.
The contentions of the Shīʿahs regarding the succession have become endless, and of the proverbial seventy-three sects of Islām, not fewer than thirty-two are assigned to the Shīʿahs, and, according to the Sharḥu ʾl-Muwāqif, there are as many as seventy-three sects of the Shīʿahs alone.
According to the Sharḥu ʾl-Muwāqif, the three principal sects of the Shīʿahs are (1) G͟hulāt, or Zealots, the title generally given to those who, through their excessive zeal for the Imāms, have raised them above the degree of human beings. (2) Zaidīyah, those who separated after the appointment of Muḥammad Bāqir to the K͟halīfate, and followed Zaid. (3) Imāmīyah, or those who acknowledged Jaʿfar Ṣādiq as the rightful Imām, to the exclusion of Ismāʿīl, and which appears to be what may be called the orthodox sect of the Shīʿahs. Out of these three great divisions have grown innumerable sects, which it would be tedious to define. All Shīʿah religionists are more or less infected with mysticism.
Many of the Shīʿahs have carried their veneration for ʿAlī so far, as to raise him to the position of a divine person, and most of the sects make their Imāms partakers of the divine nature. These views have their foundation in the traditions already quoted, which assert the pre-existence of Muḥammad and ʿAlī, and they have undoubtedly been fostered by the gnostic tendencies of all forms of Persian belief, especially Ṣufīism. [[SUFI].]
Since the accession of Ismāʿīl, the first of the Ṣūfī dynasty, A.D. 1499, the Shīʿah faith has been the national religion of Persia. Nādir Shah, when at the summit of his power, attempted to convert the Persians to the Sunnī form of Islām, in order to assist his ambitious designs, but the attempt failed, and the attachment of the Persians to the Shīʿah faith has remained as decided as ever.
Sir Lewis Pelly remarks:—
“Though the personal history of Ali and his sons was the exciting cause of the Shiah schism, its predisposing cause lies far deeper in the impassable ethnological gulf which separates the Aryan and Semitic races. Owing to their strongly centralised form of government, the empire of the Sassanides succumbed at once before the onslaught of the Saracens; still, Persia was never really converted to Islam, and when Mohammed, the son of Ali, the son of Abdullah, the son of Abbas, the uncle of the Prophet Mohammed, proclaimed the Imamate as inherent of divine right, in the descendants of the Caliph Ali, the vanquished Persians rose as one man against their Arab conquerors. The sons of Abbas had all espoused the cause of their cousin Ali against Moawiyah, and when Yezid succeeded to the Caliphate, Abdullah refused to acknowledge him, and retired to Mecca. It was he who tried to dissuade Husain from going to Cufa. His son was Ali, who, by order of the Caliph Walid, was flogged and paraded through the streets of Damascus, mounted on a camel, with his face to its tail, and it was to avenge this insult on his father that Mohammed resolved to overthrow the dynasty of the Ommiades.
“The Persians, in their hatred of the Arabs, had from the first accepted the rights of the sons of Ali and Fatimah to the Imamate; and Mohammed cunningly represented to them that the Imamate had been transmitted to him by Abou Hashim, the son of Mohammed, another son of the Caliph Ali, whose mother was a daughter of the tribe of Hanifah. This was a gross fraud on the descendants of Fatimah, but the Persians cared not so long as they threw off the Arab yoke.” (Miracle Play, Intro., p. xvi.; W. H. Allen & Co., 1879.)
The Muḥammadans of the province of Oudh in British India are for the most part Shīʿahs, and there are a few in the region of Tīrah, on the frontier of India. With the exception of the province of Oudh, the Muḥammadans of India are for the most part Sunnīs of the Ḥanafī sect, but practices peculiar to the Shīʿahs have long prevailed in certain localities. In most parts of India, where the parties are Shīʿahs, the law of this school of jurisprudence is always administered, especially with regard to marriage and inheritance.
It is not correct, as stated by Sale (Introduction to the Koran) and others, that the Shīʿahs reject the Sunnah, or Traditions; for although the Shīʿahs do not receive the “six correct books of the Sunnīs,” they acknowledge five collections of their own, namely: (1) Al-Kāfī, (2) Man-lā-yastaḥẓirahu ʾl-Faqīh, (3) Tahẕīb, (4) Istibṣār, (5) Nahju ʾl-Balāg͟hah. [[TRADITIONS].] The works written on the traditions are very numerous.