The Yemeni and Caspian Imamates as Zaydi Doctrine in Practice

The doctrine was not a theoretical position; Zaydi history is largely the record of imams who acted on it. Al Hadi ila'l Haqq Yahya, a descendant of Hasan ibn Ali, answered a request from feuding tribes in the Yemeni highlands and openly proclaimed his imamate at Sada in 897, founding a state that, with long interruptions, persisted in various forms into the twentieth century, ending only with the 1962 revolution that abolished the imamate and established the Yemen Arab Republic. A separate Zaydi imamate rose along the southern Caspian coast in Tabaristan and Daylam beginning in 864, when al Hasan ibn Zayd led a rising against Abbasid governors, a state that likewise depended on imams willing to fight and, in several cases, to die in battle rather than withdraw from public claim. Historians of these two imamates, both founded by descendants of Ali answering an open call rather than inheriting settled thrones, treat them as the clearest demonstration that Zaydi doctrine was lived rather than merely argued: an imamate could lapse for generations when no qualified claimant was willing to rise, and it resumed only when one was. The Encyclopaedia of Islam's entries on both dynasties record repeated cases of imams killed in the field, a cost the doctrine of open rising accepted as the price of a valid claim.