Twelver Shia Islam
A living tradition within Shia Islam. The disagreements in the sources are shown rather than settled.
Twelver Shia Islam is a living tradition within Shia Islam. Also written Ithna 'Ashariyya, Imamiyya, Ja'fari school (in law).
Origin
No founding year is given below, because the sources read do not agree on one and a date has not been chosen for them. The reference points given by scholarship are events, not a foundation. The twelfth imam's disappearance is dated 260/874; the lesser occultation (al-ghayba al-sughra) ran 260/874 to 329/941, during which the imam was represented by four successive safirs, followed by the greater occultation, 'whose duration is known only to God'. A BSOAS article, 'From Imamiyya to Ithna-'ashariyya', places the distinguishing doctrine - that there are twelve imams, the last concealed until his return as Mahdi - only in the mid-fourth/tenth century. No founding year is asserted.
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Citation
English
The language and the date you read it belong in the citation: this corpus is multilingual and articles are revised after publication.
John Shaqi. “Twelver Shia Islam.” English version. 11 August 2026. https://johnshaqi.com/articles/sect-twelver-shia-islam.
@misc{johnshaqi-sect-twelver-shia-islam-en,
author = {John Shaqi},
title = {Twelver Shia Islam},
year = {2026},
howpublished = {English version},
url = {https://johnshaqi.com/articles/sect-twelver-shia-islam},
note = {Accessed n.d.}
}The word count is counted from this edition. The minute estimate uses 238 words a minute, the silent reading rate for English non-fiction reported by Brysbaert (2019). The Urdu, Hindi and Roman Urdu editions carry a word count and no estimate, because no comparable rate has been published for those scripts.