ABSTRACT
Shiism represents Islam’s largest minority branch with up to 15% of the world’s 1.5 billion Muslims. Like the majority Sunnis, the Shia further divide into several sects of which the Imami or Twelver Shias are the largest and politically the most significant. This has not always been the case. If this account had been written almost any time in Islam’s first millennium, the Ismaili or Sevener sect, the founders and rulers of the Fatimid empire in the eleventh and twelfth centuries and several other states in later periods, would have formed its main focus. But this being the twenty-first century and a short chapter, I concentrate on Imami Shiism and discuss its political impact with reference to Iran, its main home since the Safavids made it the religion of the empire they founded in the sixteenth century. After Iran’s revolution in 1979, the country’s status as Shia Islam’s core state was further enhanced by the establishment of Islam’s first and only full fledged (clerical) theocracy.
