Given the capital role that this presence plays...

Given the capital role that this presence plays, it is obvious why there were such substantial modifications in Imamite religious life after the final Occultation. One question inevitably comes to mind when we examine the evolution of Imamite doctrine: after the Occultation, is Imamite religious life deprived of all collective characteristics, of all community practice, of all social application?

This question is at first glance provocative; it nevertheless appears to find a partial answer in certain “distinctive characteristics” of the doctrine. Although our work here has been a study of early Imamism, we might do well at this point to outline the historical evolution of the doctrine, in order to be able to look at the influence that this evolution has had on Imamism’s basic teachings.

Such an outline will help us to understand better the historical fate of Imamism, on the one hand, and to evaluate the relationship that the faithful believer is supposed to maintain with the imam during the Occultation, on the other. 693 Let us look first at the case of Imamite jurisprudence (fiqh), since it is the discipline that touches daily religious life most closely.

It is jurisprudence that codifies and regulates the most concrete aspects of dogma, and it appears to have been the discipline that was most immediately touched by the problems posed by the Occultation.

Imamite fiqh came into existence as a discipline of its own, so to speak, during the Imamates of Muhammad al-Baqir -asws and especially Jafar al-Sadiq -asws , even though its systematic methodology was not worked out until later.694 For a long time the principles of jurisprudence (Usul al-fiqh) included only the Quran and the hadith, the latter comprising the traditions of the Prophet and those of the imams, those of the imams being able to abrogate those of the Prophet.

As we have seen, the imams are extremely critical of both reasoning by analogy (qiyas) and the use of personal opinion (raay) in religious matters.695 We have also seen that in the early “esoteric non-rational” tradition, \u2018aql\u2019 not only had the meaning of a dialectic faculty of discernment, but it also referred to a cosmic force, like the Imam of Creation, actualized in individuals in the form of a faculty of metaphysical apperception and considered as the individual imam of each faithful believer.696 Even among the first great “rationalist” theologians like al-Mufid (d.

413\/1022) and his disciple al-Murtada (d.