Note 575 — Chapter VI

We have (see note 1, p. 367. 368) given the names of the twelve Imáms. The tenth, Alí, born in the year of the Hejira 212, A. D. 827, being kept a close prisoner all his life in the city of Askar, called also Sermenrai, in Syria, he devoted himself to study and religious exercises, but did not succeed in calming the jealousy of the ruling khalif, an Abbaside of the family of Motavakel, the mortal enemy of the whole race of Alí, and was poisoned in 868 A. D.

The name “Askerite,” from the city of Askar, was also given to his son Hasan, above-mentioned, the eleventh Imám, whose son, Muhammed, born in 868 A. D., also called Abu ’l Cassem, as the prophet Muhammed, was the last of the twelve Imáms. He is distinguished by the surnames Mantazar, “the expected;” Kayim, “the stable;” Mahdi, “the director, guide;” and others. The followers of this Imám say, that in his ninth year he was concealed by his mother in a cell or grot, from which he had not returned in the year 899 A. D.—(See Abulfeda, Hist. Moslem., vol. II. p. 223.) The Sonnites say that he was drowned in the Tigris in 879 A. D. Some Shiâhs maintain, he died in 941, in his seventy-fifth year; other Shiâhs pretend that he is still living in the grot where he was concealed; and all agree in the belief that he will reappear in the world, immediately before the second coming of the Messiah, for uniting all the Muselman sects into one, and all the different religions in Muhammedism. Several impostors assumed the name of Mahdi, but in vain; nevertheless, two great dynasties were founded under that name, viz.: the Almohads and Fatemites.—(Herbelot.)