Contempt, cursing, and defamation all actively caused harm to others and threatened to destabilize social hierarchies of gentility. As politeness became the political language that enabled the exercise of power by elites and allowed them to recognize each other as the rightful possessors of public authority, criminal prosecutions of uncivil speech helped define political roles and relationships. Contempt prosecutions punished impolite speech from the lower orders, but the law also rewarded appropriately submissive speech (such as apologies) from them. The fact that these negotiations occurred exclusively among men reflects how both the politeness regime and the king’s peace itself were increasingly marginalizing women. The vast majority of those prosecuted for cursing were men of relatively low social status; this offense was understood to threaten the polite ethos and the civil order. Defamation became in the eighteenth century a crime of the lower orders, while polite gentlemen channeled their own defamatory impulses into a highly specific and legally protected written form: satire.

The envoyship of Abū Jaʿfar al-ʿAmrī generated expectations of succession, culminating in Ibn Rawḥ al-Nawbakhtī’s accession to the role upon his death. Quasi-Imamic mechanisms of designation (naṣṣ) and initiatic inheritance (waṣiyya) were invoked to support this. However, it is argued in Chapter 6 that long-present pressures against a centralizing Imamate now led to the collapse of the envoyship. Ibn Rawḥ fell afoul of the complex machinations of the ʿAbbasid court. He was imprisoned, then was challenged by his aide, Shalmaghānī, who claimed to embody Imamate and divinity. Ibn Rawḥ issued a denunciation of Shalmaghānī, and the caliph al-Rāḍī had him executed as a heretic. However, soon after Ibn Rawḥ’s death, a rescript from the hidden Imam declared the termination of the office of envoy. Thereafter, the diffuse leadership of earlier elites, especially scholars, came to replace the centralizing bureaucratic leadership of the envoys, and the defunct envoyship was canonized as orthodox history.

Chapter 2 examines the doctrines of two sociopolitical factions that influenced later Sunnī thought: the Umayyads and the ʿUthmāniyya. These two factions were most active in the earliest periods of Islamic history (the seventh and eighth centuries). Historians have attributed the earliest expressions of anti-ʿAlid sentiment to members of these groups (alongside the Khawārij). Since anti-ʿAlids active before the fall of the Umayyads did not leave primary documents discussing ʿAlī, this chapter relies on ḥadīth and on biographical and historical literature to elucidate the doctrines of the two groups. The case studies in Chapter 2 include Companions of the Prophet and other early Muslims who were portrayed as anti-ʿAlids. A commitment to the belief in the righteousness of the Companions played an important role in the reception of anti-ʿAlid ḥadīth in Sunnī Islam. It created an incentive for scholars to reject or charitably reinterpret not only texts that disparaged ʿAlī but also those that portrayed other Companions despising him.