ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the period between the emergence of a distinct Shii group identity in the early part of the eighth century in the Iraqi town of Kufa, and the period when the line of the living Imams ceased to exist, thus ushering a new period in the history of Shiism. The identity of the Shii community was mainly centered on the notion of the guiding role of the Imams, and was marked by various rituals, such as prayer and pilgrimage. The cosmological and cosmogonic accounts of the Shii hadith corpus are "numerous, disorderly, coming from diverse horizons, and at times contradictory". With regard to the world of humans, the Shii hadith corpus articulates a starkly dualist worldview, where the believers are pure and luminous, and the unbelievers evil and dark. The dualism found in the early Shii hadith corpus is articulated much more systematically in the Ghulat writings.
