The Princeton Encyclopedia of Islamic Political Thought

Zaydis

The Zaydis, Twelvers, and Isma‘ilis form the major contemporary Shi‘i communities. In 2010 there were approximately 13 million Zaydis worldwide, with the greatest number in northern Yemen, which served as the bastion for a Zaydi state from 897 until the republican revolution of 1962. Shorter-lived Zaydi states also existed in Iran and North Africa. Zaydism goes back to the failed uprising in 740 of Zayd b. ‘Ali, the great-great-grandson of the Prophet Muhammad. Zayd’s revolt against the Umayyad regime set the pattern for further Zaydi insurgencies against the Umayyads and Abbasids, and Zayd became the symbol of the revolutionary movement within Shi‘ism.

The Zaydis are commonly said to stand closest to Sunnism of all the Shi‘i groups, and in some sense this is true, particularly with respect to the question, critical to Shi‘ism, of the imamate, the succession to Muhammad. The qualifications of legal learning, masculine gender, physical integrity, moral character, and courage required of Zaydi imams mirror those set down by Sunni jurists for the caliph, with the important difference that the Zaydis require descent on the father’s side from one of Muhammad’s grandsons, Hasan and Husayn. Once in office, the Zaydi imams, like the Sunni caliphs, are regarded primarily as administrators rather than inspired religious teachers. (According to Zaydis, only ‘Ali and his two sons, Hasan and Husayn, whom they regard as infallible, were directly appointed imams by Muhammad.) The path to office is another matter. While Sunni caliphs are elected by representatives of the umma (community of believers), the Zaydi imam elects himself, in the sense that a candidate for the imamate decides whether he is under a religious obligation to assert his claim, and political success or failure does not settle the matter. Rule does not make an unqualified candidate imam, and the rightful imam retains his office even when the people fail to support him as they are obligated to do. Some of the most highly respected Zaydi imams in fact have devoted far more time to scholarship than to governance.

Zaydi theorists generally regard the question of which rival claimant, if any, is the rightful imam as admitting of an unambiguous answer, known to God, but not necessarily to the rival claimants themselves, their contemporaries, or later Zaydis. It is thus not possible to draw up an uncontroversial list of Zaydi imams. In theory Zaydi imams, apart from their lineage, are self-made men, although de facto dynastic succession was not entirely foreign to Zaydi history, and in 1926 the Zaydi imamate in Yemen officially became a monarchy.

The Zaydi imam is invested with enormous authority. Unlike other legal scholars, he can at his discretion give his determinations the binding force of law, a principle that extends even to determining the framework of the imamate itself. Zaydi imams act as constitutional framers, legislators, judges of last resort, and commanders in chief. Among the prerogatives of the imam are the imposition of the ḥudūd punishments, the collection of Islamic taxes, and the use of coercive measures to insure compliance with affirmative religious duties such as prayer.

Although Zaydi doctrine holds that there will always be a qualified candidate for the imamate, circumstances may make a claim to office untimely. In such cases the community may find itself headed by a so-called muḥtasib, who need not meet all the requirements of an imam such as prophetic descent. Like the imam, the muḥtasib is charged with “commanding right and forbidding wrong” but outside of warfare is restricted in his use of force to averting wrongs, not to the enforcing of positive duties.

For some centuries Zaydism suffered significant erosion, as a number of influential thinkers abandoned Zaydism for Sunnism. The best known of these are Muhammad b. Isma‘il al-San‘ani (d. 1769), Muhammad b. ‘Ali al-Shawkani (d. 1834), and more recently Muqbil al-Wadi‘i (d. 2001). In addition to a scathing critique from within, Zaydism has suffered inroads from Wahhabism. After the 1962 Yemeni revolution, traditional Zaydis found themselves marginalized by the state, when not in armed opposition to it, as in the case of the so-called Huthi rebellion that began in 2004. Since the mid-1990s, there has been a noteworthy political and intellectual resurgence of Zaydism, including a lively debate on the future of the imamate.