Ismailism
Chaper in Islamic Spirituality: Foundations, Ed. Seyyed Hossein Nasr, London: Routledge & Keegan Paul Ltd, 1987, pp. 179-198.
Abstract
This overview article on Ismailism focuses on some of the key concepts, underlying the Ismaili interpretation of Islam governing Ismaili beliefs. The article starts off with a brief historical background. It touches upon the da’wa activities and some of the challenging circumstances under which it operated.
The early literature of the Ismailis is preserved in Arabic and then Persian languages. Some of the major works of the more prominent dai’s such as Abu Ya’qub al-Sijistani, al-Mu’ayyad fi’l-din Shirazi and Nasir Khusraw are discussed in the article.
Ismailism is a part of the Shi’ite branch of Islam whose adherents constitute at present a small minority within the wider Muslim ummah. They live in over twenty-five different countries, including Afghanistan, East Africa, India, Iran, Pakistan, Syria, Yemen, the United Kingdom, North America, and also parts of China and the Soviet Union.
Historical Background
(continues from Part I , Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V, Part VI, Part VII, Part VIII & Part IX)
Cosmos and History
Ismaili spirituality is ultimately rooted in two essentially Islamic themes – a cosmos-mirroring “Unity” and a sacred history reflecting the working out of Divine Will and human destiny. These themes as illustrated in the literature reveal a pattern in Ismaili thought where human life is an exalted destiny whose movement in its highest stage mirrors a return to its origin, as in the following Quranic verse: “From Him we are and to Him we return” (II, 156).
However, this goal has as its context the material world, where matter and spirit exist in a state of complementarity. The zahir which defines the world of matter is the arena in which the context for a spiritual life is shaped. The essence of Ismaili thought shows no propensity for rejecting this material world; in fact, without action in it, the spiritual quest is regarded as unworthy. It is in this juxtaposition of zahir with batin, of the material with the spiritual, that the world of the believer comes to be invested with full meaning. Such is the continuing heritage that daily inspires Ismaili life and is summed up in its most universal aspect, in the words that conclude a memorable passage in the Memoirs of the forty-eighth Nizari Ismaili Imam, Shah Sultan Muhammad Shah, Agha Khan III:
Life in the ultimate analysis has taught me one enduring lesson. The subject should always disappear in the object. In our ordinary affections one for another, in our daily work with hand and brain, we most of us discover soon enough that any lasting satisfaction, any contentment that we can achieve, is the result of forgetting self, of merging subject with object, in a harmony that is of body, mind and spirit. And in the highest realms of consciousness all who believe in a Higher Being are liberated from all the clogging and hampering bonds of the subjective self in prayer, in rapt meditation upon and in the face of the glorious radiance of eternity, in which all temporal and earthly consciousness is swallowed up and itself becomes the eternal.22
1. General summations of Ismaili history and more detailed references to specialised works will be found in the following: Encyclopaedia of Islam, s.v. “Isma`iliyya” (by W. Madelung); Shorter Encyclopaedia of Islam, s.v. “Ismailiyya” (by W. Ivanow); Aziz Esmail and Azim Nanji, “The Ismailis in History,” in Ismaili Contributions to Islamic Culture, ed. S. H. Nasr (Tehran: Imperial Iranian Academy of Philosophy, 1977) 225-65; S. Stern, Studies in Early Ismailism (Tel Aviv: Magnes Press, 1983).
2. For the Fatimids see Encyclopaedia of Islam s.v. “Fatimids” (by M. Canard); see also Abbas Hamdani, The Fatimids (Karachi: Pakistan Publishing House, 1962).
3. For an overview of the early period, see S. M. Stern, “The Succession to al-amir, the claims of the later Fatimids to the Imamate and the rise of Tayyibi Ismailism,” Oriens 4 (1951) 193-255; and Encyclopaedia of Islam, s.v. “Bohoras” (by A. A. Fyzee).
4. The most thoroughly researched study on the Niz’ari Isma`ili movement is M. G. S. Hodgson, The Order of Assassins (The Hague: Mouton, 1955). A summary of this work appears in Hodgson, “The Ismaili State” in The Cambridge History of Iran, Vol. 5, ed. I. A. Boyle (Cambridge: University Press. 1968) 422-82.
5. The most comprehensive survey of Ismaili literature is I. K. Poonawala, Biobibliography of Ismaili Literature (Malibu, CA: Undena, 1977).
6. Translated from the quotation in H. Corbin, Histoire de la philosophie islamique (Paris: Gallimard, 1964) 17.
7. Quoted by Eugene Vance, “Pas de trois: Narrative, Hermeneutics and Structure in Mediaeval Poetics, in Interpretation of Narrative, ed. M. J. Valdes and Owen Miller (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978) 122.
8. Nasir-i Khusraw, Kitab Jami` al-hikmatayn, edited with a preliminary study in French and Persian by H. Corbin and M. Moin (Paris: Adrien-Maisonneuve, 1953).
9. See Heinz Halm, Kosmologie und Heilslehre der fruhen Ismailiya: Eine Studie zur islamischen Gnosis Weisbaden: F. Steiner, 1978)
10. The analysis is drawn from Azim Nanji, “Shi`i Isma’i1i Interpretation of the Qur’an,” in Selected Proceedings of the International Congress for the Study of the Qur’an, Australian National University, 8-13 May 1980 (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1982) 40-42. For the cosmology, see Halm, Kosmologie; and W. Madelung, “Aspects of Isma’i1i Theology: The Prophetic Chain and the God beyond Being,” in Ismaili Contributions, 51-65.
11. A. Nanji, “Shi’i Ismaili Interpretation,” 43-46.
12. Reference to the account is made by W. Madelung, “Ismailiyya,” 204; see also B. Lewis, “An Ismaili Interpretation of the Fall of Adam,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 9 (1938) 691-704.
13. The Book of Faith from the DaŸa’im al-Islam of al-Qadi al-Nu’man, trans. A. A. A. Fyzee (Bombay: Nachiketa Publications, 1974) 6. A complete translation is to be published soon by the Institute of Ismaili Studies in London.
14. See A. Nanji, “Shi’i Ismaili Interpretation,” 43-46.
15. Quoted by H. Corbin, “Nasir-i-Khusraw and Iranian Ismailism,” in The Cambridge History of Iran, vol. 4, ed. R. N. Frye (Cambridge: University Press, 1975) 523.
16. For a description and analysis see H. Corbin, “Un roman initiatique du Xe siècle,” in Cahiers de civilisation médievale 15 (April-June 1972) 1-25, 121-42.
17. For the literature and its background, see Azim Nanji , The Nizari Ismaili Tradition in the Indo-Pakistan Subcontinent (New York: Caravan Books, 1978). The theme of transformation is dealt with on pp. 101-10.
18. For his “conversion” and contribution to Ismaili esoterics, see Corbin, “Nasir-i-Khusraw”; for his works, see Poonawala, Ismaili Literature, 111-24. The relevant portion of the qasidah has been translated in Nasir-i-Khusraw Forty Poems from the Divan, trans. P. L. Wilson and G. R. Aavani (Tehran: Imperial Iranian Academy of Philosophy, 1977) 4-9.
19. H. Corbin, “Divine Epiphany and Spiritual Birth in Ismailism Gnosis, in Papers from Eranos Yearbooks (Bollingen Series 30; New York: Pantheon Books, 1964) 5:71. Here, as elsewhere in this article, Corbin’s contribution and influence in the interpretation of Ismaili spirituality will be very evident. Some of his articles are to be made available in English translation in the near future; also H. Corbin, Cyclical Time and Ismaili Gnosis (London: Kegan Paul International/Islamic Publications, 1983).
20. Nasir-i-Khusraw, Forty Poems from the Divan, 8-9.
21. The translation is part of a project on the ginans supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and is from a series of compositions entitled Sloka.
22. Sultan Muhammad Shah, Agha Khan, The Memoirs of Agha Khan (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1954) 335.
From the Institute of Ismaili Studies
Ismailimail 