End of the Time and Mystical Experience: Eschatology and the Hidden Imām in Early Modern Shiʿi Sufi Exegesis

The theme of the hidden Imām occupies, quite obviously, a privileged place in Twelver Shiʿism, to the point of becoming the heart of its eschatology. While the return of the Imām (ẓohūr) at the end of the time has hardly been debated by Twelver scholars in its historical reality, the idea that this event might take place at the individual and spiritual level as well as at the collective and historical one, has crossed – with different degrees of intensity – twelver theosophy since the very time in which the doctrine was formulated.
At a time, the 19th century, where messianic fervour was particularly ardent in Iran, and the wait for the return of the Imām triggered the worldly, albeit ephemeral, success of chiliaistic movements, resurgent Sufism contributed its insights to the discourse on occultation (ghayba) and parousia (ẓohūr), emphasising their microcosmic dimension without denying their macrocosmic one. One of the places where this dialectic is at play is the exegetical masterpiece of the Neʿmatollāhī master Solṭān ʿAlī Shāh Gonābādī (d. 1909), the tafsīr Bayān al-saʿāda fī maqāmāt al-ʿebāda. This so far understudied work, which combines features of the pre-Buwayhid, hadith-based commentaries with those of the classical mystical tafsīrs, and is a fundamental chapter of the history of Shiʿi exegesis, and represents a compendium of the order’s, clad in the form of a Qur’anic commentary. In this paper I intend to analyse how the eschatological doctrines of Twelver Shiʿism are exposed by Solṭān ʿAlī Shāh through his relying on the recurrent pattern of the correspondence between the macro and the microcosmic dimensions of reality.