Shia Islam Trivia
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40 free Shia Islam trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Shia Islam is the faith of roughly one in eight Muslims, yet most quizzes stop at the split over the succession to Muhammad. This one starts there and keeps going: the twelve Imams by name and order, the agents who spoke for a hidden Imam, and the shah who made a whole country change its creed. The 40 questions cover the Twelver, Ismaili and other branches and what separates them, the jurists and the titles they bear, the levy paid on surplus income, the clay tablet used in prayer, the shrine cities of Iraq and Iran, and the terms a newcomer meets first. Beliefs and practices are described as the traditions themselves hold them. It suits a world-religions class, an interfaith quiz night or anyone who has wondered what the black and white turbans mean.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Iran marks the birth anniversary of Fatimah, on 20 Jumada II, as which national observance?
Mother's Day
Mother's Day in Iran is tied to Fatimah's birthday because Shia tradition holds the Prophet's daughter up as the model for women, so the holiday drifts through the solar year with the lunar calendar.
Q 02Among Shia clerics, who otherwise wear white turbans, what does a black turban signal about its wearer?
Descent from Muhammad
Descent from Muhammad: a black turban marks its wearer as a sayyid, while every other Shia cleric wears white, so the colour announces a cleric's lineage and says nothing of his rank or learning.
Q 03Pew's 2009 study found Shia Muslims are 10–13% of all Muslims but a majority in Iran, Iraq and which former Soviet republic?
Azerbaijan
Azerbaijan owes its Shia majority to the Safavid shahs of Iran, who ruled it from the sixteenth century and made Shia Islam the state religion there.
Q 04The hereditary Imam of the Nizari Ismailis, a community of some 12–15 million people, is known by which title?
Aga Khan
Aga Khan was first granted by Iran's Fath-Ali Shah to the 46th Imam, Hasan Ali Shah, who later revolted against the Iranian crown, was defeated and fled to India.
Q 05Which mountain fortress, seized by Hassan-i Sabbah in 1090, was the Nizari Ismaili headquarters until 1256?
Alamut
Alamut was surrendered in 1256 to Hulegu's Mongols, who had been taking the Nizari castles of Iran one by one, and its fall ended the power of the sect in Iran.
Q 06What term names the practice, associated mainly with the Shia tradition, of concealing one's faith to escape danger?
Taqiyya
Taqiyya rests on Quran 3:28, and it became tied to the Shia above all because they were so often persecuted, not least by the Sunni majority.
Q 07What do Twelver Shia call the small tablet of clay or soil on which many rest the forehead in prayer?
Turbah
Turbah tablets are often pressed from the soil of Karbala, where Husayn was killed, because Twelver law has worshippers prostrate on earth or what grows from it, never on anything eaten or worn.
Q 08Which Ismaili movement based in eastern Arabia sacked Mecca in 930 and carried off the Black Stone?
Qarmatians
Qarmatians held the Black Stone for ransom for about twenty years before it went back to the Kaaba.
Q 09The largest Shia branch groups the Prophet, his daughter and its Imams together as how many Infallibles?
Fourteen
Fourteen Infallibles: Muhammad, his daughter Fatima and the Twelve Imams. Twelvers hold all of them to be divinely kept from sin and error, which is why they treat their teaching as an authoritative guide.
Q 10Which sixth Imam, eponym of the Twelver law school, taught the Sunni jurists Abu Hanifa and Malik ibn Anas?
Ja'far al-Sadiq
Ja'far al-Sadiq died in Medina in 765, and his following then fractured: the larger group followed his younger son and became the Twelvers, while partisans of his eldest son Isma'il became the Ismailis.
Q 11The title ayatollah, borne by senior Twelver jurists, is usually rendered into English as what?
Sign of God
Sign of God is the usual rendering of ayatollah, a title that only spread widely in the 20th century and that no office hands out: it is conferred on leading jurists by popular usage.
Q 12The messianic title Mahdi, central to Shia expectations of the end of time, translates from Arabic as what?
The Guided
The Guided One is the literal sense of Mahdi. Twelvers identify him with their twelfth Imam, in concealment since the ninth century, which is why his other famous title is the Hidden Imam.
Q 13Which shah, crowned at Tabriz in 1501, made Twelver Shia Islam the official religion of his new Iranian state?
Ismail I
Q 21What term, Arabic for 'visit', names a Shia pilgrimage to the shrine of an Imam, as distinct from the hajj?
Ziyarat
Ziyarat is made in the hope of the Imam's intercession, and it is no minor rite: the yearly Arbaeen walk to Husayn's shrine at Karbala draws pilgrims by the million.
Q 22Which Iranian city holds the tomb of Fatima Masumeh, sister of the eighth Imam, and is a major seminary centre?
Qom
Qom became a pilgrim city after Fatima Masumeh fell ill and died there around 816, on her way to join her brother in Khorasan.
Q 23The Iranian shrine city of Mashhad takes its name from an Arabic word meaning what?
Place of martyrdom
Place of martyrdom is the meaning of Mashhad, which was a small village on the Silk Road beside Tus before pilgrims settled around the Imam's burial place. It is now Iran's second-most-populous city.
Ismail I was still in his early teens at his coronation, and he set about converting Iran's Sunni majority by force. The Ottomans ended his conquests at Chaldiran in 1514.
Q 14Which Shia branch, concentrated in northwestern Yemen, is typically considered the closest to Sunni Islam?
Zaydi
Zaydi Shia, unlike Twelvers and Ismailis, do not hold their Imams to be infallible: an Imam gains his knowledge by learning. Their name honours a grandson of Husayn whose revolt against the Umayyads failed.
Q 15Which group, founded in the ninth century by Ibn Nusayr and living mainly in Syria, is an offshoot of Shia Islam?
Alawites
Alawites were long called Nusayris after their founder, a disciple of the tenth and eleventh Twelver Imams, and they form the dominant religious group along the Syrian coast. The older name is now often considered derogatory.
Q 16Which ethnic group of central Afghanistan, among the country's largest, is predominantly Shia Muslim?
Hazaras
Hazaras come from the central highlands known as Hazarajat, but decades of poverty and war have scattered many of them across Afghanistan and into neighbouring countries.
Q 17Pew's 2009 study found 68–80% of the world's Shia in four countries: Iran, Iraq, India and which other?
Pakistan
Pakistan's Shia are only 10–15% of its Muslims by Pew's estimate, yet at 17–26 million they form one of the largest Shia populations outside Iran, on a par with Iraq's and India's.
Q 18What term names a Shia seminary, the collective institution that trains clerics in cities such as Najaf?
Hawza
Hawza is the collective name for a city's network of seminaries, each college within it a madrasa; Najaf's is often traced to the scholar al-Tusi, who settled there to teach after his Baghdad house was burned in sectarian riots.
Q 19Which Arabic term names the fixed-term marriage contract, duration set in advance, that Twelver law permits?
Mut'ah
Mut'ah, Arabic for 'pleasure', is agreed by every legal school to have been practised in Muhammad's time. Most Sunni scholars hold that he later abrogated it, while Twelvers hold that he never did.
Q 20Which levy, Arabic for 'one-fifth', do Twelver Shia pay on yearly surplus income to a senior jurist?
Khums
Khums is paid on top of zakat. With the twelfth Imam out of reach, Twelvers hand it to a jurist of their own choosing, who receives it as the Imam's deputy.
Q 24Twelver Shia celebrate the birth of the hidden twelfth Imam on the fifteenth of which Islamic month?
Sha'ban
Sha'ban's fifteenth night is kept by Sunni Muslims too, as a night of prayer for forgiveness; Twelvers add the twelfth Imam's birthday, though accounts of his birth date differ.
Q 25Which seventh Imam, whose succession Ismailis dispute, died in a Baghdad prison in 799 after years of detention?
Musa al-Kazim
Musa al-Kazim attracted the largest following after his father's death, and that following developed into Twelver Shi'ism. His grandson, the ninth Imam, lies beside him in their Baghdad shrine.
Q 26Which eighth Imam did the caliph al-Ma'mun name his heir in 817, switching the Abbasid colour from black to green?
Ali al-Rida
Ali al-Rida's appointment backfired: Iraq rose in revolt against the caliph, and the Imam died the next year as the court headed back toward Baghdad.
Q 27Which ninth Imam succeeded his father at about seven, a succession many early Shia at first found controversial?
Muhammad al-Jawad
Muhammad al-Jawad was the son of the eighth Imam; he was betrothed as a boy to the caliph al-Ma'mun's daughter Umm al-Fadl and died in Baghdad in 835. Many came to recognise his learning.
Q 28The fifth Imam's title al-Baqir, short for baqir al-'ilm, describes him as doing what with knowledge?
Splitting it open
Splitting it open, or bringing it to light, is one reading of al-Baqir; the other is 'the one who possesses great knowledge', both nods to his fame as a scholar. His idea of imamate rested on knowledge rather than political power.
Q 29Which book of supplications attributed to the fourth Imam is honoured as the 'Psalms of Muhammad's Household'?
Al-Sahifa al-Sajjadiyya
Al-Sahifa al-Sajjadiyya ranks in Shia tradition behind only the Quran and Nahj al-Balagha, and its 54 prayers were handed down through so many chains of narrators that Shia scholars treat its attribution to the fourth Imam as secure.
Q 30The Fatimid caliphs ruled from Mahdia, a purpose-built capital on which modern country's coast, before conquering Egypt in 969?
Tunisia
Tunisia is where the Fatimid state began: its first caliph, an Ismaili imam living in hiding, was fetched from Sijilmasa in Morocco by the Berber army a missionary had raised for him.