The authority of Abū Jaʿfar al-ʿAmrī, the second in the canonical sequence of envoys, emerged around the time when the old guard agents of the eleventh Imam were dying, two decades after the Imam’s death. The process of back-projection of the envoy paradigm to the earliest phase of the Occultation has obscured details of Abū Jaʿfar’s life, but we can piece together, in Chapter 5, some details from reports of opposition to Abū Jaʿfar from both skeptical agents and rival charismatic bābs. He established his authority through his father’s prestige, by forging alliances with other agents, by repudiating doubters, and issuing rescripts (tawqīʿāt) in the name of the hidden Imam. He also attempted to maintain revenues, giving concessions and dispensations for alms taxes, while asserting the legitimacy of the Imamic agents to continue revenue-collection, particularly from waqf endowments and Imamic estates. Through these activities he established the office of envoy firmly enough to survive him.

Chapter 1 surveys the rise of the pre-Occultation Imamic agents, and their role in ensuring the stability of the Imamate. While previous scholarship has tended to conflate the various roles of the followers of the Imams as a bloc of men (rijāl), it is argued that we must distinguish between different roles, in particular between scholars and agents, although these roles sometimes overlapped. Unlike pure scholars, the prestige and authority of the agents rested upon the fiscal institutions of the Imamate: the systems for collecting the canonical alms taxes, the zakāt and the khums, which were instrumental in ritually and materially connecting the community with their Imams. It is argued that, though the precise origins of an institutionalized Imamate are unclear, by the time of the tenth Imam, legal conventions and institutional protocols for defining the Imamate and its operations had emerged, setting the scene for Occultation-era contestations.