Tradition and re-elaboration of a Shiʿite account of the prophet Idrīs

The dogmatic works incorporate very rich materials drawn from the archive of stories of the prophets circulating in Shiʿite environments, in which, as in other types of works, it is not uncommon to find parallels between the lives of prophets of antiquity and those of the imams. Included in this typology is the Kamāl al-dīn wa tamām al-niʿma fī ithbāt al-ghayba wa kashf al-ḥayra (Perfection of the religion and the completion of [God’s] favour by the attesting of concealment and the eliminating of confusion) by Muḥammad Ibn Bābawayh al-Qummī (Qumm, about 310/923-Ray, 380/991), one of the first work dedicated to the theme of the ghayba. This contribution focuses on the story of Idrīs, the antediluvian prophet, verifying in particular how the experience of Idrīs’s absence is interpreted and paralleled with that of Muḥammad al-Mahdī, the Messiah, the twelfth imam, who himself went into hiding in 260/874, in Samarra, at the time of the death of his father al-Ḥasan, the eleventh imam.