The Princeton Encyclopedia of Islamic Political Thought

Isma‘ilis

Isma‘ilism is a branch of Shi‘ism best known for postulating a hidden, interior sense of the law and emphasizing it over the plain, exterior meaning. First attested in the late ninth century as a collection of cells spread throughout the Islamic lands and directed by leaders in Syria, the political thought of the first Isma‘ilis was reduced to messianism. The last imam was to return from hiding as the Mahdi expected to usher in the end of days and abrogate the law (i.e., ritual worship). There would then be no need for conventional religion; believers would worship God directly, as Adam had done in paradise.

In 899, the leader in Syria had declared himself to be the Mahdi, thereby splitting the movement into two: Old Isma‘ilis (often known as Qarmatis) and Fatimid Isma‘ilis, so called because their leader fled to North Africa, where, in 909, he founded the Fatimid caliphate, which moved to Egypt in 969. In the writings of Isma‘ili missionaries working for the Fatimid caliphs (r. 909–1171), the imam was no longer an absent figure expected to return to usher in the end of days but rather a religiopolitical leader in the here and now, as among non-Isma‘ilis. The imam—that is, the Fatimid caliph—was God’s representative on Earth, the political and religious leader for all humankind. As a political leader, his duties were identical to those that non-Isma‘ilis ascribed to the imam: he was charged with executing the law, collecting and distributing alms and taxes, protecting the weak, defending the borders, and eventually bringing all humankind under God’s rule. As a religious leader, he was divinely guided, sinless, and infallible; his example was a source for law. The imam alone possessed perfect knowledge necessary for salvation and was thus the supreme teacher, the gate of salvation for humankind. He alone was thought to know the true, inner sense of scripture and religion, and he disclosed these truths to high-ranking believers in his mission, who, in turn, distributed them to the community.

Just as the Fatimids transformed the role of the imam, so too did they modify his identity and devise explanations for the shifts. Early Isma‘ilis believed the last imam and future Mahdi to be Muhammad b. Isma‘il, a descendant of the Prophet’s cousin ‘Ali b. Abi Talib. In 899, the future Fatimid caliph announced to the missionary in Iraq that the awaited redeemer was not Muhammad b. Isma‘il but himself. “Muhammad b. Isma‘il” had been a cover name for a series of seven Hidden Imams. It was over this that the movement split. Fatimid missionaries explained that the end of days would unfold in stages. Now, with the rise of the Fatimid caliphs, the end of days had moved from a cycle of Hidden Imams to a “cycle of disclosure,” in which the imams would fight their tyrannical enemies openly until the entire world was subdued.

Most Isma‘ilis lived outside Egypt, where many of them remained faithful to the old doctrine. Some proceeded to prepare for the end of days, and in the 930s the so-called Qarmatis in Bahrain put an extreme form of antinomianism into practice. In 930, they attacked Mecca, slaughtered pilgrims, and abducted the black stone as a sign that conventional Islam had come to an end. In 931, they accepted a young Iranian captive as the Mahdi, apparently seeing him as a manifestation of God, and engaged in ritual violation of the law under his leadership. Non-Isma‘ilis came invariably to associate Isma‘ilism with the behavior seen in Bahrain, but in fact antinomianism is quite rare in Isma‘ili history, and it never took so violent a form again.

Other Isma‘ilis, including those in Iran and Transoxiana, taught that the present was an “interim” period—a period between imams. During such interims in which the imam was absent, the mission would be led by lieutenants of the imam. To appease these communities, the Fatimid caliph Mu‘izz (r. 953–75) reinstated Muhammad b. Isma‘il as the awaited redeemer and claimed that the Fatimid imams were his spiritual representatives who would rule until the final phase of the end of days.

Several authors unaffiliated with the Fatimids combined Isma‘ili doctrine and Neoplatonic philosophy to develop highly original syntheses that would later be incorporated by Fatimid missionaries such as Hamid al-Din al-Kirmani (d. ca. 1021).

Fatimid-Isma‘ili missionaries also debated with non-Isma‘ilis over the identity of the imam. They claimed that their arguments rested on authoritative transmitted knowledge and logic. Proof from transmitted knowledge consisted of verses of the Qur’an that they believed referred to the authority of the family of the Prophet and traditions in which the Prophet explicitly designated ‘Ali as his successor at a pond in Khumm. Proof from logic came, for example, in an attack on the Sunni notion that the first caliph, Abu Bakr, was nominated by “consultation” (shūrā) of the early Companions. How could the inferior have the capacity to identify and elect the superior? Through the Prophet, God Himself appointed ‘Ali as His representative. Against the claims of the Twelver Shi‘is, who argued that it was impossible for the imam Ja‘far al-Sadiq’s son Isma‘il to be imam, since he had predeceased his father, Isma‘ili missionaries produced traditions that showed that Ja‘far had explicitly claimed Isma‘il as his successor, claiming that he, in turn, had appointed his son Muhammad b. Isma‘il. For the Fatimid missionary Abu al-Fawaris, the truth of all this was demonstrated by the fact that the current imam, the caliph Hakim (996–1021), was unparalleled in descent, knowledge, and generosity.

Expectations of the (spiritual) resurrection nonetheless resurfaced in the wake of the disappearance of Hakim in 1021, when a number of missionaries declared this caliph to have been a manifestation of God and the law to have been abolished, founding a community of breakaways in Syria known as the Druzes. In 1164 another breakaway community abolished ritual worship, this time at Alamut in northwestern Iran, but they restored it some 50 years later. After the fall of the Fatimids and the eclipse of small Isma‘ili principalities in mountainous regions of Iran and Syria in the 13th century, Isma‘ilism has persisted through quietist, minority subsects in Western China, South Asia, Syria, Yemen, and East Africa as well as Europe and North America.