To provide a rudimentary framework for the historical development of Shi'ism in Iran, we may identify at least seven overlapping historical episodes. First, from proto-Shi'i trends of the time of the Shi'i imams in the eighth and ninth centuries to the Shi'i legal and hadith scholarship of the ninth to eleventh centuries as represented by the Persian Nawbakhti family and later by theologians such as Shaykh Ja'far Tusi and Ibn Babuya. Second, the movements of dissent inspired by Zaydi and Isma'ili (and Qarmati) brands of Shi'ism against the caliphate and Sunni establishment active during the ninth to thirteenth centuries. Among these the most well known is the community of the Alamut and other Isma'ili fortresses in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Third, the Sufi-Shi'i trends of the post-Mongol period between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, with implicit or explicit messianic expressions of which the Safavid movement was the most powerful synthesis. Fourth, the speculative endeavors of the philosophical schools of Isfahan and Shiraz in the seventeenth century, represented by the likes of Sadr al-Din Shirazi and its resonances throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Fifth, the hadith and legal scholastic studies of the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries represented by such influential theologians and jurists as 'Abd al-'Ali Karaki (d. 1533), Mulla Muhammad Baqir Majlisi (d. 1699) and Sayyid Muhammad Baqir Bihbahani, the founder of the Usuli school (d. c.1792) that endured in Najaf, Isfahan, and Qom circles. Sixth, modern developments in clerical and communal Shi'ism in the late twentieth century and the politicization of Iranian Islam that culminated in the Islamic Revolution of 1979 and its aftermath, the establishment of the Islamic Republic.
Shia Islam and Formation of Iranian Peoplehood
