The Druze movement emerged in Fatimid Cairo in 1017 CE, in the reign of the caliph al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah, whom the new teaching regarded as the locus of the divine. Historians of the community describe the following quarter century as the period of the call, the dawa, during which the movement's founding figures composed the letters, responses and doctrinal statements that became its scripture.
Hamza ibn Ali, the movement's chief theologian, is credited with the foundational epistles; the writings of al-Tamimi belong to the same first circle; and after the persecution that followed al-Hakim's disappearance in 1021, leadership of the correspondence passed to al-Muqtana Baha'uddin, who guided the scattered communities by letter for another two decades. When al-Muqtana withdrew in 1043, the call was closed, and with it the canon: no epistle written afterwards could enter it, and the community has held ever since that the door of enrolment into the faith closed at the same time. The collected corpus, 111 epistles arranged in six books, was copied and transmitted within the community from that point onward. Scholars studying manuscripts describe the epistles as varied in genre, doctrinal exposition, refutation, pastoral instruction and correspondence with named recipients, reflecting their origin as the working papers of a movement rather than a single composed book.