Shi’ism in By God Alone
Devs, I don’t know if you will see this, but can you please not make Shi’ism a single faith that’s split into rites? For non-Zaydi Shi’ism, an enormous amount of emphasis is placed on knowing the imam of the time. For example, from Kitab al-Kafi, “One will not be considered a Mu‘min until he knows Allah, His Messenger and all of the Imams and the Imam of ones time, acknowledges his Divine authority and submits his affairs to the Imam.”
Basically, differing about who the imam is represents the difference between salvation and damnation. It would be like a Christian claiming that John the Baptist, rather than Jesus, was the incarnation of God on earth. The Twelvers and early Isma’ilis were similar in many respects, but that doesn’t prevent them being two totally different faiths which consider each other to be damned.
As I already alluded to, Zaydism is its own thing and is very different from the other branches of Shi’ism.
To implement rites as subdivisions of Twelverism or Isma’iliam makes complete sense. There are loads of examples of divergence within these faiths. An early example is Abu al-Khattab, a follower of Ja’far al-Sadiq who promoted new doctrines and is considered to be the originator of many extremist (ghulat) ideas. To me, that seems a close parallel to the idea of rites in Christianity. In Fatimid Isma’ilism, the da’wa (missionary) network stretched across a huge geographical region and presumably saw considerable variation across different regions, again just like Catholicism. For example, many modern scholars have commented on an overarching theological distinction between the Arab and Persian lands, with the former supporting a mythical concept of cosmogenesis (Kuni-Qadar) and the latter supporting more Neoplatonist ideas (from the Creator emanate a series of intellects, the last of which created the world). Under Imam al-Mu’izz, the Arab doctrine was abandoned in favour of the Persian doctrine to promote unity. In return, many Persian Isma’ilis came to explicitly acknowledge the imam’s authority.
In conclusion, I hope you can see that it makes far more sense to have rites acting within faiths such as Twelverism and Isma’ilism. Shi’ism is not a faith but a category of faiths that all acknowledge the imamate.
NB Parallels between Roman Catholicism and Isma’ilism are very extensive. Both have a centralised church structure (the Church vs the Da’wa), both are structured into regions (archdioceses vs jaziras), both have a hierarchy of clergy (priest->bishop->archbishop->pope vs da’i->bab->imam), both had doctrinal disputes solved through negotiation (as I already explained), both made adaptations to local contexts and beliefs, both had an identifiable centre (Rome vs Mahdiyya->Mansuriyya->Cairo), both sought to control or stamp out deviant beliefs and heresies (the Fatimids famously struggled against the Qarmatians), both had a leader whose pronouncements have absolute authority (I know the concept of infallibility didn’t develop in Catholicism until later, but it’s a very close parallel to the well-established doctrine in Isma’ilism that the imam is infallible). I don’t expect Isma’ilism to be given Catholic mechanics, I’m just mentioning this to show Isma’ilism’s uniqueness.