Isma'ilism

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Isma’ilism is a branch of Shia Islam that takes its name from Isma’il ibn Ja’far, the son whom one part of the community recognized as imam after the death of the sixth imam, Ja’far al-Sadiq, in 765. The split over that succession set the Isma’ili line apart from the larger body of Shia who followed a different son — and over the centuries that followed, the Isma’ilis developed a body of thought distinctive enough that the disagreement about an heir became a disagreement about how scripture itself should be read.

The governing distinction is between zahir and batin — the outer, plain sense of revelation and its inner, hidden meaning. Isma’ili teaching holds that the law and the letter of the Qur’an are real but not final; beneath them lies a batin, a deeper truth accessible only through authorized interpretation, ta’wil. That interpretation is not open to anyone. It descends through the imam, a living guide of the Prophet’s house whose presence the community holds to be a permanent necessity, and through the teaching hierarchy that served him. To belong was to be initiated by stages into a knowledge the surface text only veiled.

Into this frame Isma’ili thinkers drew the Neoplatonism then circulating in the Islamic world. Writers such as al-Sijistani and, later, al-Kirmani described creation as a descent: from God, beyond all attributes, proceeds a first Intellect, and from it Soul, and from Soul the ordered cosmos — a graded emanation in which the structure of the heavens mirrored the structure of revelation and its interpreters. The encyclopedic Epistles of the Brethren of Purity, an anonymous tenth-century collection often linked to Isma’ili circles, gathered philosophy, mathematics, and the sciences into the same vision of a single ascending order.

The movement was for a time a political power. The Fatimid dynasty, claiming descent from the Prophet through Fatima and ‘Ali, ruled an Isma’ili caliphate from 909, governing North Africa, Egypt, and much of the Levant, and founding Cairo and its mosque-university of al-Azhar. After the Fatimid period the community divided again — most enduringly into the Nizari line, whose present imam is the Aga Khan, and the Tayyibi or Bohra communities, who hold their imam to be hidden and follow a deputy in his absence.

Scholarship long described the Isma’ilis through the writings of their enemies, who cast them as conspirators and heretics; the recovery and study of their own texts in the twentieth century replaced much of that picture with the record of a sophisticated philosophical theology. Other currents that prize an inner knowing — the Neoplatonic ascent, the gnostic spark, the Sufi’s ma’rifa — sit close enough that the resemblance has often been remarked. What sets the Isma’ili batin apart is where the knowing is anchored: 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