Moslem priests

Usage examples of imams.

Buzhazi noticed with delight that Nateq-Nouri had just realized that both Imams representing the Leadership Council were present for this meeting.

One of the Imams, the Ayatollah Bijan Kalantari, raised his hand, and a crier behind the Imams ordered silence.

But the Imams representing the Leadership Council were heading for the door, eyes averted, refusing to speak.

You had to choose your preachers carefully, since not all the imams saw Islam the way Mohammed did.

Also, their ancient religious and cult practices encouraged the notion that the Prophet must have given 'Ali special spiritual gifts: he and his descendants seemed the only legitimate Imams on grounds other than the purely secular.

The Mongols were tolerant toward religions, and priests of every type crowded the bursting city: Buddhist monks in their saffron robes, turbaned imams from the Moslem lands, Nestorian Christian priests, Chinese Taoists in their silks and brocades, and many others whom I could not recognize.

He knew that there was no God - at least, not as the bishops and imams whom he had so recently disciplined and humiliated imagined God to be.

These imams lived in medieval times, except for the twelfth, who is not dead but believed by Shi’ites “to be in occultation,” or somehow hidden from view.

As Keddie points out, from the eighteenth century through the 1940s, the Shi’ite clergy had their locus of power in An Najaf and Karbala, that is in Mesopotamia (just west of the Iranian plateau), where the tombs of the first imams are located.