After a Break in the Sequence: Moses and the Messiah in Early and Modern Shi`i Literature

The image of pre-Islamic prophets in the corpus of Twelver Shi`i messianic literature has to date received little scholarly attention. This paper will be the first attempt to examine the changing conceptions of Moses, the prophet mentioned more than any other in the Qur’an, as encountered in Shi`i classical and contemporary works written to prove the occultation (ghayba) of the Shi`i messiah known as the Qa’im or hidden Imam. Events in the life of Moses as recounted in the Qur'an come to represent a template for the life of the Qa'im in Shi`i hadiths. One particularly important and lengthy hadith casts Moses's role as the messianic deliverer of the Israelites as a typological prefiguration of the mission of the Qa'im, defining occultation as the interregnum between two prophets (in this case, Joseph and Moses) when the earth is bereft of a prophet or messenger. This hadith bares striking similarity to a set of controversial Traditions recorded by early Shi`i scholars stipulating that the Qa’im will only rise after an interval or break in the series of Imams (`ala fatra min al-a’imma), i.e., after a period of time when there are no Imams, just as the Prophet Muhammad appeared after a break in the sequence of Messengers. After presenting these hadiths, this paper will focus on attempts by Shi`i scholars and Qur'an commentators to negotiate such Traditions. As we will see, although such Traditions are found in early Shi`i works, they are either passed over in silence or at times blatantly distorted by some contemporary works, including Persian translations.