Imamat in stone: Theologies of the present in the Karakoram Mountains

Abstract

In Pakistan’s Karakoram Mountain range, two Shi‘i Muslim communities write monumental messages in stone. Nizari Isma‘ilis celebrate the continuation of their Imamate, a divine political institution led by a Hazar [present] Imam. Twelver Shi’a signal their loyalty to their own system of Imamat, which paused at the concealed twelfth Imam whose return promises to restore justice to the world. Shi‘i mountain writing is found in direct conversation, surfacing the theological schism that bifurcates these Muslim communities, and inviting acts of comparison between two interpretations of the divine institution of Imamate. This article contends that the scale of analysis in this comparative exercise is the present, understood here as a theological interface that connects immediate and latent situations, and affairs that lie beyond the human horizon.