A term used in modern scholarship to designate proto-Ismaili groups, especially the so-called Qarmatis, who restricted the number of imams to seven (ending with Muḥammad b. Ismāʿīl). The term ‘seveners’ was used in another sense in authors such as al-Qāḍī al-Nuʿmān (d. 974), who counted the imams in cycles of seven or heptads. The term seveners is still wrongly used to designate all other Ismaili communities who continued the line of imams beyond the number seven.
