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The Twelve Imams (Arabic: ٱلْأَئِمَّة ٱلْٱثْنَا عَشَر, al-ʾAʾimmah al-ʾIthnā ʿAšar; Persian: دوازده امام, Davâzdah Emâm) are the spiritual and political successors to the Islamic prophet Muhammad in the Twelver branch of Shia Islam, including that of the Alawite and Alevi.
The line of imams of the Nizari Ismaili Shia Muslims (also known as the Agha-khani Ismailis in South and Central Asia) continues to their present living 50th hereditary imam, Aga Khan V (son of Aga Khan IV). They are the only Shia Muslim community today led by a present and living (Hazir wa Mawjud) imam. [31]
Hafizi Ismaili Muslims claimed that al-Amir died without an heir and was succeeded as Caliph and Imam by his cousin al-Hafiz. The Musta'li split into the Hafizi, who accepted him and his successors as an Imam , and the Tayyibi , who believed that al-Amir's purported son At-Tayyib was the rightful Imam and had gone into occultation.
The Shia scholars of the fourth and the fifth centuries of the Islamic calendar defined the infallibility of Muḥammad and the Twelve Imams in an increasingly stringent form until the doctrine came to exclude their commission of any sin or inadvertent error, either before or after they assumed office.
Sunni Islam does not conceive of the role of imams in the same sense as Shia Islam: an important distinction often overlooked by non-Muslims. In everyday terms, an imam for Sunni Muslims is the person charged with leading formal Islamic prayers —even in locations besides the mosque—whenever prayer is performed in a group of two or more. The ...
In Shia Islam, the figure of imam dominates the belief system. [9] Necessarily a descendant of the Islamic prophet Muhammad, [10] imam is the supreme leader that combines both temporal and religious authorities, [11] for the two were combined in Muhammad. [12] Various Shia sects, however, disagreed over the identity of these imams. [10]
Sanctuary of Imam Reza in Mashhad, Iran, is a complex which contains the mausoleum of Ali al-Rida, the 8th Imam in Shia Islam. 25 Million Shias visiting the shrine each year. [80] After Mecca and Medina, the two holiest cities of Islam, the cities of Najaf, Karbala, Mashhad and Qom are the most revered by Shīʿa Muslims.
Unlike Sunni Islam, however, the belief in Mahdi of the lineage of the prophet is central to Shia Islam, in general, and to Twelver Shia, in particular, [41] where Mahdi is identified with the twelfth Imam. [159] Distinctive to Shia is also the doctrine of occultation or the temporary absence of Mahdi. [84]