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  • Hiding in Plain Sight:The Practical and Doctrinal Significance of Secrecy in Shi`ite Islam
  • Maria Dakake (bio)

To hide and to unveil, to contain and to release—this is the rhythm of secrets and also of the sacred.1

As Paul Johnson makes poetically clear in the introduction to his study of the Afro-Brazilian religion, Candomblè, there is an etymological and practical connection between conceptions of the sacred as found in many religions and the imperative of secrecy with regard to those same sacred realities. The sacred is precisely that which is "secreted" away, preserved, and protected by silence from the profane and the ordinary, but also selectively "secreted" or revealed to those properly initiated. Secrecy and the sacred are perhaps understandably most associated in religions or religious tendencies that have more esoteric conceptions of religious truth and/or hierarchical notions of human spiritual qualification and access to that esoteric truth, as well as in religions affiliated with minority, marginalized, or threatened communities. Secrecy is correspondingly less pronounced in religions that stress the transparency of religious truth, are founded upon more egalitarian conceptions of access to religious knowledge and experience, or are socially secure, perhaps even [End Page 324] hegemonic, within their major spheres of influence (Johnson gives the example of Protestantism; we could also give the example of Sunni Islam).

Much of the work on secrecy and religion in recent years has been done in the context of anthropological studies of contemporary religious groups, whose use of secrecy is largely related to their minority or marginalized status. The practice of secrecy serves a number of important aims for such religions—from the need for survival, to the need to deflect social criticism, to the desire to attract new members, drawn by the allure of access to secret knowledge and experience and membership in an exclusive society. Given the sociological and anthropological nature of these studies, most of the authors devote their efforts precisely to understanding the social practices and purposes of secrecy, rather than to discovering, evaluating, or "exposing" the actual content (real or imagined) of the secrets themselves. In short, they are committed to examining secrecy as a "discursive strategy" with practical, social aims and argue that the phenomenon of secrecy in religion can and should only be studied in this way. Hugh Urban (1998) is concerned with this issue, in part, as a matter of scholarly ethics—seeking to define not only what it is possible for an academic researcher to know, but also what is proper for the researcher to seek to know, or to disclose, about the object of his/her study. At what point, he asks, do the boundaries of the sacred, as defined by the religion in question, have to be respected by the scholar's agnostic and/or respectful silence?

In this study, I intend to examine the phenomenon of secrecy in a very different, medieval Islamic context—namely, that of Shi`ism in its formative period. While a number of intellectual and ideological tendencies are represented in early Shi`ite literature, all groups and tendencies within the movement stressed the importance of secrecy regarding the leadership, membership, and doctrines of the Shi`ite community. This entailed both discreetly concealing controversial doctrines of, or information about, the Shi`ite movement, as well as employing active—and at times surprisingly deceptive—strategies of "dissimulation" (taqiyyah) with regard to one's affiliation with it. Many non-Shi`ite Muslims and Western scholars view Shi`ite doctrines about secrecy and concealment skeptically, seeing in them nothing more than a pragmatic tactic for ensuring survival in a context of public opprobrium and political persecution.2 In this article I will argue that secrecy was more than merely [End Page 325] pragmatism, that it had both a practical and a doctrinal significance for the early Shi`ite community. To the extent that Shi`ites considered their unique spiritual beliefs to be esoteric in nature, and their leadership and membership to be divinely selected on the basis of their intrinsic spiritual character, secrecy was a natural, doctrinal corollary to the sacredness of both. Given the controversial nature of such beliefs, and Shi`ite opposition (sometimes open...

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