Al-Muhtadi (Nizari imam)
Imam of the Nizari Ismailis
Muhammad (I) al-Muhtadi (Arabic: محمد المهتدي, romanized: Muḥammad al-Muhtadī), was the 21st Imam of the Nizari Ismailis. He was a concealed Imam.
According to Ismaili historiography, al-Muhtadi (the Rightly Guided) was the elder son of the 20th Nizari Imam, al-Hadi, who moved around 1094 from Egypt to Northern Persia close to the region around Alamut. Here he was under the protection of the Nizari leaders Hasan-i Sabbah (d. 1124) and Kiya Buzurg-Ummid (d. 1138).
Life
Muhammad bin Ali, surnamed al-Muhtadi is reported to have been born in 502/1109 at the castle of Lambsar. He was the first Ismaili Nizari Imam to be born in Persia. He is also known as Muhtadi and Muhammad I. He became the Imam of the Nizari Ismailis after the death of his father, Imam al-Hadi, in the year 530 AH.
His first move was to shift his headquarter to the fortress of Alamut and he focused on developing the Ismaili Army (Fidais) to be able to defend the Ismaili fortresses from the invaders. He also paid attention to the organisation of the Da'is and to introducing them to the core principles of the Shia Ismaili Islamic beliefs.
“Al-Muhtadi (Nizari imam)” enters the record as imam of the Nizari Ismailis. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Al-Muhtadi, Nizari and imam can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 7, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q29368567. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1094, 1124, 1138 and 1109.
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This entry incorporates text from “Al-Muhtadi (Nizari imam)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.