Prudential Concealment in Shi'ite Islam: A Strategy of Survival or a Principle?

Minorities have always sought strategies of survival when living, under the political domination of the majority, in a hostile social and religious environment. Historically, Shī'ite leaders and their followers have found themselves employing taqīya ("precautionary dissimulation" or "prudential concealment") to avoid confrontation with Sunni majorities and governments. Shī'ite sources point to a number of justificatory traditions in which the Shī'ite imams had encouraged their followers to practice taqīya and not press for the overthrow of the illegitimate caliphate and for establishment of the legitimate rule of the imam. In some hazardous circumstances, when one's life or honor was in danger, the imams declared taqīya to be actually a duty. Through application of this strategy of survival, moderate elements in the community avoided expressing their true opinions publicly or in such a way as to cause misunderstanding or enmity. The main motivation for prudential concealment seems to have been an eagerness in Shī'ite minorities to identify themselves socially and even in religious practice with majority Sunni communities. However, for those who wished to work for gradual change under unjust and autocratic rule, taqīya functioned as a legitimate, if underground, political activity.

Prudential concealment is morally problematic because it requires hiding one's true feelings or intentions behind a feigned appearance. As such, taqīya cannot be treated as a moral principle; yet an equally critical moral responsibility - to protect oneself from destruction when endangered - renders the practice a religious duty when required. The moral imperative against casting yourself "by your own hands into destruction" (wa lā tulqū bi-aydīkum ila al-tahluka) is Qur'anic (Qur'an 2:195). But the disapproval of pretense, of feigning an appearance, of giving a false impression about oneself, is Qur'anic as well. Thus conditions were set for the practice of taqīya. Listed in most of the standard juridical-theological sources, these conditions include (in descending order of importance): threat to one's life and name, fear of causing sedition and social unrest, and fear leading to chaos in general. Ironically, the Sunnites have often criticized the Shī'ites for practicing taqīya (which the Sunni regard as contrary to the Sharī'a), when Sunni governance has so often been intolerable that the Sunni ulema have adopted a strategy not very different in its outcome from taqīya. The Sunni ulema invoke the principle of "averting probable harm" (daf' al-ḍarar al-muḥtamal) in order to control the outrage that their own people have felt against injustices practiced by their own governments.

Besides these two religious duties, both deriving from the Qur'an but necessitating development of a set of legal conditions to reconcile them, there is a third relevant duty, which makes that reconciliation all the more difficult. This third duty, sanctioned in books of Islamic social ethics, is to uphold justice at all levels of social and political interaction. Adherents must "command the good and forbid the evil" (al-amr bi-l-ma'rūf wa nahy 'ani-l-munkar), which in the context of political tyranny may translate into revolutionary activity against a standing government. Thus can the practice of "prudential concealment" justify the delay of action until the arrival of an opportune time to overthrow an unjust regime. Under unjust regimes, taqīya has functioned both as a principle of survival and as a strategy that enables political regrouping. Among minority groups, it counts as an act of resistance to unjust authority, because this kind of political quietism leads incrementally, if not swiftly and overtly, to fulfillment of the obligation to "forbid evil."

Despite the subjectivity, contingency, and context dependence involved in determining whether a regime counts as unjust by any Muslim definition, this doctrine has been an important one in Islamic public theology. According to its practitioners, the "wait and see" activity of taqīya is the only legitimate and prudent approach to regime change. In Muslim political culture, participation of the governed in decision making has been virtually nonexistent; only covert acts of opposition, therefore, could intelligibly...