Isma'ilism

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When the sixth imam Ja’far al-Sadiq died at Medina in 765, the community of his followers faced a question that admitted no easy settlement: through which of his sons did the imamate descend? One body recognized Isma’il ibn Ja’far — the son whose name the movement would carry — and the line that flowed from that recognition became the Isma’iliyya. Another followed a different son, Musa al-Kazim, and grew into the larger body of Twelver Shi’ism. The dispute looked, at first, like the ordinary mechanics of succession in a house where authority passes by designation. It became something larger. Over the centuries that followed, the Isma’ilis worked out a vision of knowledge, cosmos, and scripture so distinctive that the original quarrel over an heir had turned, in effect, into a quarrel over how the revealed word itself is to be read.

The outer letter and the hidden sense

The hinge of Isma’ili thought is the distinction between zahir and batin — the outer, manifest sense of revelation and its inner, concealed meaning. The law and the letter of the Qur’an are real and binding; the ritual obligations stand; the prophet’s word is the prophet’s word. But the letter is not the whole of it. Beneath the zahir lies a batin, a depth of meaning that the surface both carries and veils, and that surface was given so that the depth could be transmitted under guard. Scripture, on this account, is not a flat record to be paraphrased but a coded one to be unlocked.

The unlocking is ta’wil. The word means a leading-back — a carrying of the text back to its origin, to the realities it figures. It is not the philological commentary of Sunni tafsir, which moves from a verse to the circumstances of its revelation and on to a legal or moral ruling. Ta’wil moves the other way: from the word to the cosmic correspondence it encodes. The pen of the Qur’an is read as the Universal Intellect; the tablet as the Universal Soul; the seven heavens as the seven prophetic cycles of history; the triad of speaking-prophet, foundation, and imam recurs at every level of the order. Scripture, in this reading, exists for the sake of the intelligible structure it points to, and not the structure for the sake of the scripture.

Such a reading cannot be open to anyone, or it would dissolve into a thousand private allegories. It descends, instead, through the imam — a living guide of the Prophet’s house whose presence the community holds to be a permanent necessity, never an interregnum the earth can do without — and through the teaching and missionary hierarchy, the da’wa, that served him. The grades of that hierarchy were arranged to mirror the grades of the cosmos itself, so that to be admitted by stages into the inner knowledge was, on this understanding, to retrace in instruction the soul’s own descent and to climb back toward its source. To belong was to be brought, step by step, into a sense the surface text only kept. This is why the tradition is rightly counted among the world’s bodies of esotericism: not because it hides for the sake of hiding, but because it holds that the highest truths are graded, transmitted through initiation, and authorized by a person rather than left to the unaided reader.

The cosmos as a descent

Into this frame Isma’ili thinkers drew the Neoplatonism then circulating through the Arabic-reading world, much of it carried by the paraphrase of Plotinus that passed under the title Theology of Aristotle. The result is the current treated at length under Fatimid Neoplatonism and, in its wider setting, under Islamic Neoplatonism — but its outline belongs to any account of the tradition. In the systems of Abu Ya’qub al-Sijistani, writing in tenth-century Khurasan, all things proceed by emanation from a first principle so far beyond the categories that it can be called neither existent nor non-existent. He disciplined this into a double negation: one does not say God exists, for that subordinates God to the predicate of being; one does not say God does not exist, for that relates God to the negation. Both affirmation and denial are withdrawn, and what remains is the One held past all relation — a rigor of unsaying that runs parallel to, though it develops apart from, the apophatic vocabulary of the Sufis.

From the divine command issues the first Intellect, complete and at rest — the nous of the philosophers, here the highest of created realities; from the Intellect, the Universal Soul, which sets the spheres turning and the lower world unfolding; from Soul, the ordered cosmos of the heavens and the elements. The human soul, sunk into matter, ascends the same ladder in reverse by knowledge. Crucially, the same proportion that orders the heavens orders revelation and its interpreters: the structure of the cosmos and the structure of the da’wa are two readings of one design. To study one was to study the other.

The tradition did not stand still. In the early eleventh century Hamid al-Din al-Kirmani, working in Cairo and Iraq in the age of the Fatimid caliph al-Hakim, judged the older two-principle scheme of Intellect and Soul too thin to carry the weight placed on it, and rebuilt the cosmology on the model of the ten separate intellects that Islamic philosophers had drawn from a Neoplatonized Aristotle — the scheme of al-Farabi, recast so that the prophetic and imamic hierarchy on earth answered, rank for rank, to the intelligences above. His revision did not abolish the earlier system so much as run beside it, and later Isma’ili writing drew on both. What unites the two is the conviction that knowing the cosmos and knowing scripture are one act, performed under a guide.

Beside this doctrinal core stands a body of work that gathered the whole of the sciences into the same vision: the Rasa’il, the encyclopedic Epistles of the Brethren of Purity, an anonymous tenth-century collection of fifty-two treatises long associated with Isma’ili circles though its exact authorship remains contested. Mathematics, music as audible number, astronomy as cosmic number, the natural sciences, and a soteriology of intellectual ascent are bound together there by the conviction that proportion and analogy run through every level of being. The Epistles became part of the intellectual furniture of the tradition; whether they were written by the da’wa or merely adopted by it is one of the live questions of the field, taken up in their own account.

The cycles of prophecy

History, in this scheme, is not a straight line but a graded sequence. Time moves through great cycles, each opened by a speaking-prophet — Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, Jesus, Muhammad — who brings a new revealed law, and each sustained between prophets by a foundation and a series of imams who keep and disclose the inner sense the prophet’s law conceals. The cycles ascend toward a culmination: a final figure, the qa’im — the riser — sometimes identified with the awaited Mahdi, who will close the age of veiled law and bring the batin fully into the open, so that the inner truth the whole sequence has been carrying need no longer be hidden behind any letter. In the earliest, sevener form of the doctrine — from which the line that recognized Isma’il took its name — the cycle turned on seven imams and the seventh as the culminating riser; the later Fatimid synthesis loosened this arithmetic into a continuous imamate. The expectation of a coming unveiling, and the conviction that the present age is one of concealment awaiting it, runs through Isma’ili thought from the conspiratorial-seeming early da’wa to the cosmologies of the Fatimid court. It is what places the tradition, for all its borrowed Neoplatonism, squarely within the world of Shia messianic hope rather than within Islamic philosophy as a self-standing discipline: the metaphysics is in service of a prophetology, and the prophetology points toward an end.

A caliphate and its afterlives

For nearly three centuries the movement was not only a school but a state. The Fatimid dynasty, claiming descent from the Prophet through his daughter Fatima and her husband ‘Ali, proclaimed an Isma’ili caliphate in North Africa in 909, setting an imam-caliph at the head of a rival order to the Sunni Abbasids of Baghdad. From Ifriqiya the Fatimids advanced east, conquered Egypt in 969, and founded a new capital — Cairo, al-Qahira, the Victorious — together with the mosque-college of al-Azhar, raised as a center for the propagation of their teaching. At their height they governed Egypt, much of the Levant, the Hijaz with its holy cities, and for a time North Africa and Sicily, and they ran a da’wa that reached far beyond their borders, into Iraq, Persia, and Yemen, sending missionaries to win adherents in lands the dynasty never ruled.

The Fatimid period closed in 1171, but the deeper divisions of the tradition were already set by the succession crisis at the death of the caliph-imam al-Mustansir in 1094, and by a second at the disappearance of the young imam al-Tayyib soon after. From the first crisis came the line of Nizar, al-Mustansir’s eldest son; from the second came the line that followed al-Tayyib into concealment. The two survive today as the tradition’s principal communities, and they answer the central Isma’ili question — where is the imam? — in opposite ways.

The Nizari hold the imamate to be continuous and embodied in a living, present imam, descended through Nizar — the community of the mountain fortress of Alamut in the medieval centuries and, since the nineteenth, the followers of the Aga Khan, whose imamate has passed from father to son into the present. Theirs is the rare case of a major Shia community whose imam is a contemporary figure rather than a hidden or awaited one. The Tayyibi or Bohra communities, surviving chiefly in Yemen and then among the Bohras of western India, hold instead that their imam went into concealment and that authority passes, in his absence, through a line of deputies — the da’i mutlaq, the supreme summoner who governs the community until the hidden imam returns. The contrast is exact: a present imam who teaches, against an absent imam represented by a deputy who teaches in his place. Both keep the same conviction that the inner sense requires a living authority; they disagree only on where that authority now sits.

The recovery of a buried library

For most of recorded history, the Isma’ilis were known to outsiders almost entirely through the writings of their enemies. Sunni heresiographers and Abbasid polemicists cast them as conspirators, as a secret organization whose graded initiations led the credulous, rung by rung, to the abolition of the law and the denial of religion altogether — a picture sharpened by the medieval European legend of the Assassins, the Nizari fighters of Syria and Persia recast in crusader and traveler’s tales as drugged killers under a master’s spell. The heresiographies preserved real information, distorted by hostility; the legends preserved almost none. Together they stood, for centuries, as nearly the whole of what could be said.

That picture has been remade within living memory. Beginning in the early twentieth century — with the Russian-born scholar Vladimir Ivanow, engaged by the Aga Khan of his day to catalog and edit the surviving texts, and continuing through the establishment of dedicated centers of study — the Isma’ilis’ own literature was brought into print and read on its own terms. Manuscripts long guarded in Yemen and Gujarat, in Syria and Central Asia, were edited; the Neoplatonic treatises of al-Sijistani and al-Kirmani, the Persian works of the poet-missionary Nasir-i Khusraw, the haqa’iq or realities literature of the Tayyibi tradition, were studied as the documents of a sophisticated philosophical theology rather than as the cipher of a conspiracy. The hostile heresiographic image gave way, across a century of scholarship, to the record of a tradition that had argued in the idiom of the schools and closed, characteristically, on the salvation of the soul.

Sources and scholarship

The standard reference for the field is Farhad Daftary’s The Isma’ilis: Their History and Doctrines (Cambridge University Press, 1990; second edition 2007), encyclopedic and balanced, with the caveat that its author writes from within the institutional perspective of the contemporary Nizari community whose tradition he studies. For the Neoplatonic core, Paul E. Walker’s Early Philosophical Shiism: The Isma’ili Neoplatonism of Abu Ya’qub al-Sijistani (Cambridge University Press, 1993) is the indispensable study of al-Sijistani’s metaphysics, and Daniel De Smet’s La quiétude de l’intellect (Peeters, Leuven, 1995) the systematic reconstruction of al-Kirmani’s ten-intellect cosmology. The Fatimid political rise is narrated authoritatively in Heinz Halm’s Das Reich des Mahdi (C. H. Beck, Munich, 1991; English as The Empire of the Mahdi, Brill, 1996), and the wider Iranian Shia setting in Wilferd Madelung’s Religious Trends in Early Islamic Iran (Bibliotheca Persica, 1988).

The most ambitious primary-text project of the present is the bilingual edition and translation of the Brethren of Purity’s Epistles, edited under Nader El-Bizri for Oxford University Press in association with the Institute of Ismaili Studies; its scope and contents are set out in the publisher’s series catalog (Epistles of the Brethren of Purity). For readers seeking a public-domain anchor, the cleanest is the Persian text and French translation of Nasir-i Khusraw’s Safarnama by Charles Schefer (Paris, 1881), digitized by the Bibliothèque nationale de France on Gallica, while the early European reception can be read in T. J. de Boer’s The History of Philosophy in Islam (Luzac, London, 1903), a pre-1931 work long in the public domain. The first complete printed Arabic text of the Epistles — the Bombay edition of 1887–1889, drawn from Indian Bohra exemplars — and Friedrich Dieterici’s nineteenth-century German series remain the principal openly available witnesses to the Rasa’il; the greater part of the modern scholarly apparatus, produced since the late 1990s through the Institute of Ismaili Studies and its publishing partners, is of high standard and consistently aligned, by its origin, with the community whose texts it edits.

The anchor of the inner sense

Other currents that prize an inner knowing sit close enough to the Isma’ili batin that the kinship has often been remarked: the Neoplatonic ascent toward the One, the gnostic spark seeking return, the illumination of the Ishraqi sages, the Sufi’s ma’rifa or experiential knowing of God. What sets the Isma’ili reading apart is not the depth it claims but where that depth is fastened. The hidden sense is not a private attainment, reached by the gifted soul in solitude, nor a text decoded by method alone. It is bound throughout to the law it interprets and to the authority of a particular living line, without which the hidden sense does not open at all.

→ Related: Ishraqi Illuminationism · Neoplatonism · Emanation · The One · Gnosis · Nous · Fatimid Neoplatonism · Nizari Isma Ilism · Musta Li Tayyibi Bohra · Ikhwan Al Safa Brethren Of Purity · Islamic Neoplatonism · Islamic Philosophy · Sufism · Esotericism · Initiation · Twelver Shi Ism · Ja Far Al Sadiq · Qur An · Mahdi