Previous existential challenges to the faith can be associated with specific dates – 1055 and 1258, for example, may be said to have been military-political challenges: libraries were lost and scholars were scattered as the result of specific conquests.

Over the nearly two centuries from the death of al-Allama al-Hilli in 1325 to the capture of Tabriz by the Safawids in 1501, the faith faced an existential challenge of a very different sort. Over these years the faith faced the prospect of slow absorption into the plethora of messianic, heterodox Sufi-style movements that had their origins in earlier periods, but may be said to have peaked across the region in these centuries. To make matters worse, the scholarly centres of the faith were still based to the west, far from, and thus not engaging actively with, these millenarianist movements. The continued limited availability of both key older and even more recently composed texts in these years, coupled with the continued low level of scholarly activity across the region, but in Iran especially, where many of these movements had their greatest influence, can only have further hindered any effective response to this challenge.

By the late 1400s, little if anything of the legacy of the late Buyid period's rationalist discourse was at all discernible across the region.

The state of the faith in the fourteenth century

Al-Allama died in al-Hilla in 1325 and was buried in Najaf. Despite his apparent success in converting Uljaitu, the Mongols did not suddenly adopt and promote any form of Shiism, let alone Twelver Shiism, as their official faith.