Arresting the Eschaton

Stories of encounters between the concealed Shi‘i messianic saviour known as, inter alia , the Hidden Imam, and his privileged devotees (mostly from the ranks of the ulama) during the period that is known as his occultation ( ghayba ) occupy a recurring theme in many of the works dedicated to this figure. The encounter topos was revivified in the late nineteenth century by the prolific Shi‘i scholar Mirza Husayn Tabarsi Nuri (d. 1902). Nuri lived at a time in which many of the messianic and eschatological tensions concerning the Hidden Imam — tensions that had remained unresolved for a thousand years — exploded onto the religious landscape, due in most part to the birth of the Babi religion and its metamorphosis into the Baha’i Faith. This article will focus on Nuri's relationship with and links to the Babi and Baha’i religions in an attempt to understand his own motives for promoting stories of contact with the Hidden Imam

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