Shia: imams must be Alawites

Shia: imams must be Alawites

All Shia sects agreed that caliphs must be descendants of Ali bin Abi Talib. However, Zaidi Shias believed Alawites who met the requirements of the caliph were eligible.

On the other hand, the Twelver Shias restricted the caliph title to 12 people, the last of whom – The Mahdi – they believe will spread justice across the globe upon his appearance. As for the Ismaili Shias, they believed that the descendants of Ismail ibn Jafar can be caliphs.

The Persian Buyids were Shia yet they never called for the establishment of a caliphate, since according to their beliefs, The Mahdi – who has yet to materialise – is both caliph and imam.

The Battle of Chaldiran: in 1514 an Ottoman army of approximately 60-212,000 janissaries, under the Ottoman Sultan Selim I, defeated a Persian Safavid army of ca 12-40,000 men under Ismail Abul-Mozaffar bin Sheikh Haydar bin Sheikh Junayd Safawi, the Shah of Iran

There is a lot of doubt and suspicion surrounding the origins of the Ismaili Fatimid Caliphate's founders. According to many Sunni history books – including "Albidaya wa'l-Nihaya by Ibn Kathir – the founder of the caliphate, Abdullah Al-Mahdi Billah, was not descended from the lineage of Ali bin Abi Talib as was believed at the time, but from Maimoon Al-Qadah who is believed to have had Persian forebears.

Proving the origins of the Fatimids remains difficult, because most of the history books that mention them were written in the context of fierce doctrinal and political struggles.

The third Shia state was the Safavid dynasty, which was founded in the early 16th century, the 10th in the Islamic calendar. Unlike the Ottomans, the Safavids disallowed the caliph position due to the Twelver belief, which forbids raising the caliphate flag before the arrival of The Mahdi.

Nonetheless, the Sufis were keen to keep their state a theocracy. They brought a number of Shia scholars from Bahrin and Jabal Amel, south of Lebanon, and invited them to fill leading state offices. Al-Muhaqqiq Al-Karaki was one of the most prominent scholars the Sufis brought in.

As with the rest of the ruling Islamic dynasties, the Sufis sought to prove they were descended from Quraish. They claimed they were descendants of Musa Al-Kadhim, the seventh of the twelve Shia imams. However, their ethnicity remains a bone of contention to this day; they were most likely of Persian, Turkmen or Kurdish ancestry.