An exhaustive scrutiny of the sources may well prove that he...

An exhaustive scrutiny of the sources may well prove that he was a devoted follower of the House of 'Ali and a sincere supporter of their cause, but whatever the case may be, the fact remains that he has generally been treated rather unsympathetically by the sources of different schools for different reasons. The Twelver Shi'i sources present him in an unfavourable light since it was he who for the first time began propaganda for the Imamate of Muhammad b.

al-Hanafiya, thus deviating from the line of Fatima. The non-Shi'i sources, on the other hand, seem to have been influenced by the anti-Mukhtar propaganda launched by both the sympathizers of Ibn az-Zubayr and those of the Umayyads. No serious study has so far been done on Mukhtar, and the sketchy accounts given by some of the modern scholars[^1] are generally influenced, without a critical assessment, by the sources usually hostile to him.

Recently, however, Hodgson has hinted that the blackening of Mukhtar's reputation and the attempt to discredit him began from the time of his death.[^2] The fact, however, remains that Mukhtar, in all probability due to the quiescent policy of Zayn al-'Abidin,-to be discussed below, was responsible for shifting the Imamate from the descendants of the Prophet through Fatima to another son of 'Ali! Muhammad b. al-Hanafiya, thus creating the first deviation from the legitimist body of the Shi'a.

The word legitimist may not be a good expression, but it is perhaps the nearest English approximation to the idea of a central body of the Shi'a, where the Imamate remained strictly restricted in the line of 'Ali and Fatima, coming from Hasan to Husayn and then through explicit nomination from father to son, usually to the eldest surviving son, until it ended with the twelfth Imam.

Our intention in the following chapters is, therefore, to restrict our attention to the survey of this legitimist or central body of the Shi'a, which was reduced to an almost insignificant number after the death of Husayn by the newly emerging revolutionary or Messianic branches of the Shi'a.

The use of the term legitimist and central body may seem at this stage arbitrary and a premature description of a later development; nevertheless, the fact remains that it was this legitimist faction which ultimately re-emerged as the largest and thus the central body of the Shi'a, and was eventually to be known as the Imamiya or Ithna-'ashariya (Twelver) Shi'a.