Download PDF | An Apocalyptic History of the Early Fatimid Empire (Edinburgh Studies in Islamic Apocalypticism and Eschatology), By Jamel Velji (Author), Edinburgh University Press 2016.
186 Pages
Acknowledgements
It is a great delight to acknowledge the generosity of those who helped this project come to fruition.
Michael Sells, David Dawson and Anne McGuire initially cultivated my interest in the study of religion as an undergraduate at Haverford, and it was under the careful and inspiring guidance of Michael Sells that I wrote my undergraduate thesis on the Nizari declaration of the giyama. At McGill’s Institute of Islamic Studies I had the pleasure of working with Eric Ormsby and A. Uner Turgay on matters apocalyptic and Islamic. At the University of California at Santa Barbara | benefitted from the outstanding guidance of Richard Hecht, a model mentor who gave me the tools to call myselfa religionist. As I train my own students I continue to draw on his wisdom and that of my other UCSB committee members: Stephen Humphreys, Racha El-Omari, and Christine Thomas. Ahmad Ahmad, Rudy Busto, Mark Juergensmeyer, Stefania Tutino, and Thomas Carlson were always generous with their advice and their time, as was Sally Lombrozo, who somehow ensured that all of us were right on track.
I had the great fortune of spending a very fruitful year at the University of Toronto working with Todd Lawson. Professor Lawson encouraged my interest in Shia apocalypticism, suggesting that I take a closer look at the Kitab al-kashf. My work with him over the course of that year was formative for my thinking and I am grateful that he was able to serve as an external member of my dissertation committee.
At the Institute of Ismaili Studies in London, I had the pleasure of discussing an iteration of my project with the many scholars there: Professors Farhad Daftary, Delia Cortese, Nader El-Bizri, Aziz Esmail, Azim Nanji, Rashida and Faquir Hunzai, Omar Ali-de-Unzaga and Professor Eric Ormsby. Professor Michael Brett from SOAS was also incredibly generous with his keen insights. Ata wonderful conference on Islamic eschatology in Germany, Professor Hermann Landolt provided exceptional organisational advice. Professors Fred Donner and Carel Bertram patiently listened to a description of the project and also offered their valuable suggestions. Professors Jonathan Bloom and Sheila Blair helped me to sharpen the focus of this project. Professor Ali Asani kindly invited me to present my work in progress to his class on Ismaili history and thought at Harvard University. The Goldberg family, Rebecca Mackenzie, and Benjamin Martinez were instrumental with this book’s cover design. Professor Ismail Poonawala kindly read through the entire manuscript and offered excellent feedback.
Along with Racha El-Omari, Andrew Lane and Himmet Taskomur deserve special thanks for their Arabic language training, which was crucial in helping me to decipher the complexities of Ismaili texts. Alnoor Dhanani meticulously reviewed the translations in this book. It was a great pleasure to work with him on this project.
During my return to Haverford College as a faculty member, I benefitted tremendously from the advice of my departmental colleagues: David Dawson, Tracey Hucks, Terrence Johnson, Anne McGuire, Ken and Naomi Koltun-Fromm, and Travis Zadeh. James Gulick provided very helpful support for research and teaching, and Rob Haley located many difficult to obtain sources. Members of the Provost’s Office helped to facilitate research and teaching at the College, especially Arpi Harnett, Julie Sheehan, Susan Penn, Lisa Griffin, Wendy Sternberg, Rob Fairman, Judy Young, and Fran Blase.
One of the benefits of working in the Tri-College consortium is the opportunity for intellectual exchange across campuses. The department of Religion at Swarthmore College has become a familiar place.
and I am grateful to have benefitted from the advice of members of that outstanding department, in particular Tariq al-Jamil, Stephen Hopkins, and Ellen Ross. Our annual colloquium also facilitated the visits of Shahzad Bashir and Bruce Lincoln, two scholars whose work has had a tremendous influence on my own.
Iam tremendously grateful to Cristina Fuller for her keen editorial eye and dedication in seeing this project to fruition; to Valerie Joy Turner for her exceptional edits and for taking on this project in the midst of so many others; to Nicola Ramsey and other members of the editorial staff at Edinburgh University Press; and to the series editors, Christian Lange and David Cook. Christian in particular deserves special thanks for reading through the entire manuscript in great detail and providing such detailed feedback with characteristic precision and generosity.
I am delighted to embark upon a new academic adventure at Claremont McKenna College, and am grateful to my colleagues in the Department of Religious Studies here, Esther Chung-Kim, Stephen Davis, Gaston Espinosa, Gary Gilbert, Cynthia Humes and Dan Michon, for their incisive questions and comments on this project. They and many other members of the CMC and wider Claremont community have been very welcoming and supportive.
Financial support for this project was provided by the US Department of Education (Javits and FLAS Fellowships); the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada; the UCSB Interdisciplinary Humanities Center; the Institute of Ismaili Studies, London; the Josephine de Karman Fellowship Trust; the Provost’s Office at Haverford College, and the Dean’s Office at Claremont McKenna College. I am grateful for their support.
I am grateful for the guidance and friendship of Elizabeth Alexandrin and Michael Jerryson who helped me think through various aspects of this project; Randy Ko for providing a consistent supply of delicious coffee; Anthony Distinti for his always wise council; to Omid Ghaemmaghami for stimulating conversations related to Shiism and its study; and to Benji, Barbara, Adam and Susan Green for adopting us as family on the East Coast.
I thank Jeremy Steinberg, Lindsey Palmer, and Alison Marqusee for providing valuable comments on portions of an earlier draft of this book and | thank my former students at Haverford and UCSB for so many wonderful conversations.
My family has provided boundless support throughout this endeavour. Special thanks are due to my parents, Anvar and Pari Velji, who have done so much for me, and have modelled what hard work and service to humanity are all about. My brother, Badier Velji, deserves thanks for perennial enthusiasm. My wife Chloe Martinez possesses superhuman tolerance for my tendency to be caught up in my work and somehow also continues to be nothing but encouraging, funny and boundlessly optimistic. I thank her and our daughter Amina (and now her new sister Saafia) for their support.
Introducing Ismaili Apocalypses
This is a book about apocalypticism, a mode of religiosity so powerful and generative that it has been implicated in a variety of major events across geographies and time periods. Apocalypticism played a significant role in the rise of major religious traditions such as Christianity! and Islam.” It is inexorably intertwined with the ‘founding’ of the Americas? and more recently has been channelled destructively in horrific acts of violence, including the Holocaust.’ As a religionist, I am fascinated by the nature of apocalypticism - its mythic framework and how it is deployed to effect social transformations.
This long-standing interest has led me to investigate a host of related questions. How, for instance, are apocalyptic predictions made and then reinterpreted? Who makes these predictions and where does their authority come from? How do apocalyptic orators describe heaven and hell or the damned and the saved? Why do people believe them? How does time function in apocalyptic contexts? And perhaps most importantly for this study, how does apocalypticism, despite its spectacular failure rate, not only endure, but operate to continuously reorder societies across geographies and cultures? The rich global history of apocalypticism has been well documented.° Yet in the Islamic context - where apocalypticism figures quite prominently - only a handful of studies exist on the subject.
These works - many of which are outstanding - reflect the disciplinary conventions of Islamic studies and tend to focus on specific intellectual, philological or historical trends rather than addressing wider social and theoretical questions concerning the nature of apocalypticism more broadly. This book is an attempt to address some of these wider questions using sources from an empire that was, like so many other movements in Islamic history, brought to power on the heels of an apocalyptic revolution. It examines how rulers of the Fatimid Empire (909-1171) used apocalyptic imagery to establish and maintain a substantial empire in North Africa.
Fatimid revolutionary activity capitalised on the question of Shia leadership after the disappearance of the twelfth imam in 874. From this political vacuum emerged a secret society claiming that the Shia mahdi’ was at hand. Representatives of this mahdi paid special attention to converting politically marginalised communities, particularly in present-day Tunisia and Morocco; those who converted to Ismailism were told that they were the divine’s chosen instruments, entrusted with restoring the leadership of the Muslim community to its rightful custodians, the Shia imams.’ Like many other apocalyptic movements, the Fatimids employed esoteric interpretation of scripture (ta’wil), areligious hierarchy and apocalyptic expectation to consolidate power and build legitimacy.
They succeeded in establishing a substantial empire, in the process founding the city of Cairo in 969. While scholars have acknowledged that apocalypticism served as a motivating force for revolution and the establishment of the state,’ there remains little scholarship on what this apocalypticism actually looked like. First, what were some of the structures of this apocalypticism that helped convince people to join this movement? And second, what were the rhetorical methods that the Fatimids used to reinterpret the imminence of the end of time while simultaneously building a successful empire?
These questions - concerning the anatomy of apocalyptic propaganda, its persuasive force and the hermeneutics ofits reinterpretation — are questions that have cross cultural and contemporary relevance. To briefly cite three examples: messianic or apocalyptic rhetoric appeared in the 2008 American presidential election of Barack Obama, in which supporters labelled him the messiah and his detractors called him the Antichrist (or the representative of the Antichrist). In 2011, Harold Camping recruited thousands of supporters across the country based on his calculations concerning the imminent end of time (twice); and globally we have recently witnessed predictions of the Mayan apocalypse. These predictions have come and gone - the world is still here - but apocalypticism endures: through a study of the Fatimids I wish to posit why this might be the case.
Addressing these questions from the Fatimid perspective has a number of advantages: the Fatimid vision of Islam represents an interpretation of Islam that is not widely known outside of the world of specialists in Islamic studies; there are various Muslim communities today, numbering in the millions, who lay claim to a Fatimid lineage and for whom the Fatimid tradition is very much alive in shaping communal memory; and while much scholarly work on apocalypticism has been conducted outside the Islamic tradition, there are only a handful of studies focusing on apocalypticism within the Islamic tradition. Thus this cross disciplinary engagement not only enriches religious studies with material from the Islamic tradition, it also infuses the study of Islam with perspectives and methods from other fields - heeding a call that many Islamicists have been making for decades.'°
There is another more pragmatic reason for studying the Fatimids: we possess a wealth of extant materials from this period - from material culture such as numismatic evidence,"' to art and architecture,” to texts such as historical records and theological works.'3 In addressing our tripartite issues of apocalyptic imminence, reinterpretation and relationship with authority, Fatimid theological texts are quite rich in evidence. It is these texts therefore that will serve as our chief subjects of study.
As we will soon discover most of these texts are works of ta’wil (symbolic or esoteric interpretation) that bring us into the world of the unseen, the world that only the initiated or elect can perceive. And while this hermeneutical method was certainly not unique to Fatimid exegesis - we see ta’wil in Sufi and Twelver Shia works as well, for instance - Fatimid exegesis is remarkable for its creativity, its ability to synthesise and integrate an eclectic range of interpretive modalities into its form.
This book examines three works of ta’wil in detail: the Kitab al-rushd wa-l-hidaya (Book of righteousness and true guidance), attributed to Ibn Hawshab (d. 914), the Kitab al-kashf (Book of unveiling) attributed to his son Ja‘far b. Manstr al-Yaman (d. c. 957), and the Ta’wil al-da‘a’im (Esoteric interpretation of the pillars of Islam) by Qadi ]-Nu‘man (d. 974). Each of these works was penned by an influential member of the Fatimid hierarchy. The first two texts concern the anticipation of the mahdi as it relates to the Fatimid revolution and provide us with insights into the interplay between the dissemination of hidden knowledge and preparation for the mahdi's advent, while the latter illustrates some of the hermeneutics of this reinterpretation.
The Kitab al-kashf, for instance, reinterprets the Quranic narrative through ta’wil to construct new meaning, framing the eschatological figure’s imminent arrival as the definition of utopia itself.!° The dualities undergirding the Quranic narrative’® become refashioned here as well. They become refracted through the prism of waldya, a term connoting spiritual inheritance, divine friendship and love for the imam.’ Those who do not possess walaya for the proper religious authority - here the Fatimid mahdi - can never obtain salvation. The refashioning of the Quranic narrative through ta’wil makes the preservation of secret knowledge - as well as absolute obedience to the mahdi’s cause — true Islam. For those who believe in this true cause the revolution signals nothing other than an imminent and permanent restoration of true leadership of the community to its rightful custodians, the Shia imams, as well as the vindication and eternal salvation of the oppressed throughout history.
As the Fatimids translated expectations of the mahdiintoa successful empire, this imminence had to be reinterpreted. Ta’wil once again served as a vehicle for expressing narratives linking theology and history. Here I examine the Ta’wil al-da‘a’im, the esoteric analogue to a book of Fatimid laws penned by one of the most important ideological architects of the Fatimid Empire, Qadil-Nu‘man. The Ta’wil al- da‘a’im is remarkable for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that it illustrates how the ta’wil of regularly performed rituals such as Friday prayers and fasting during the month of Ramadan tell a deeper story of the messianic figure’s new place in sacred history.
Other Fatimid authors, those contemporary to al-Nu‘man and those who came after him, spent much time writing about the eschatological figure of the mahdi, indicating that the apocalyptic and messianic impulse was very much alive and in some cases difficult to contain. Indeed messianic claims and counter claims punctuated early Fatimid history, finding powerful expressions in events such as the rebellion of Abi Yazid, a Kharaji who invaded the capitol city of al-Mahdiyya in 332/943, and in the founding of the Druze tradition in 1017 during the reign of al-Hakim.
While this book does not trace the rich apocalyptic history of these or other Fatimid-era movements, it does examine in detail another major apocalyptic event in Ismaili history: the Nizari declaration of the qiyama or resurrection. In a dramatic event that took place on 8 August 1164, the leader of the Nizari Ismaili community publicly declared the qgiyama, signalling the end of the world. Through an examination of ritual and textual evidence from the period, | argue that the giyama was a potent manifestation of apocalypticism that served to powerfully reify a major shift in the leadership of the Nizari community.
The application of the terms ‘apocalyptic’ or ‘apocalypticism’ to a modality of religiosity operating outside the Christian context will no doubt cause some readers pause. This is understandable, as the interdisciplinary study of apocalypticism remains constrained by the concept’s continued tethering to its theological and disciplinary origins.
To cite but one example: the editors of the invaluable three-volume Encyclopaedia of Apocalypticism state that apocalypticism is a recent term which ‘refers to the complex of ideas associated with the New Testament Apocalypse,’ especially the imminent end of the world and its associated events. They state that the term is multivalent - it ‘is an analogous term, and it admits of different emphases.’ The editors write: ‘In these volumes we have not attempted to impose a strict definition, but rather to include a broad range of materials that may be regarded as apocalyptic in various senses.’!® While the editors allow for definitional latitude - indeed, the volume contains essays on everything from contemporary secular apocalypticism to apocalypticism in the classical Islamic context - the paradigmatic apocalypse still appears to be the textual and theological Book of Revelation. This paradigmatic apocalyptic construct has also influenced scholarship on apocalypses in the Islamic tradition.’”
Following the work of religionist Bruce Lincoln, I consider apocalypticism not as a theological category but as a type of myth, a mode of authoritative discourse by which actors may construct society through the evocation of certain sentiments.” Using data from Christian traditions, Stephen O’Leary has shown that time, evil and authority constitute the three ‘essential topoi of apocalyptic discourse.”? Examining apocalypticism as a mythic construct whose rhetorical force is mediated by certain topoi allows us to consider diachronically the evolving structures of Fatimid apocalypticism with a concomitant concern for the persuasive aims of this discourse.
To capture the apocalyptic narratives embedded in these works, I focus on reading my sources with a modified conception of O’Leary’s topoi in mind, particularly on discussions of temporality; descriptions of the identity and advent of the eschatological figure; and correlations between the construction of communal boundaries with depictions of heaven and hell. In casting such a wide taxonomical net for apocalyptic phenomena, | frequently use a number of terms interchangeably throughout this work - in particular apocalypse, apocalypticism and mahdism.
This rhetoric-based analysis of apocalyptic data has a number of advantages. First, it allows us to consider the various media through which apocalyptic sentiments are conveyed: whether that is through numismatic materials, rituals, theological texts or sermons. This more composite view of apocalypticism allows us to gain a fuller picture of not only how the phenomenon was expressed but also how it evolved. Second, this approach allows us to interface our findings with wider conversations occurring in the field of religious studies. Much work has been done on the nature of apocalyptic prophecy and the hermeneutics of reinterpretation outside the Islamic context.”? It is hoped that this book will encourage new comparative trajectories between various iterations of Islamic apocalyptic movements as well as between these movements and those outside the tradition.
Third, these comparative trajectories allow us to contribute this data to our understanding of major theoretical questions in the field of religious studies. Here my study of Fatimid and Nizari materials advances our knowledge of the ways in which apocalyptic discourse may help to reorder the premises of authority within a society - a theme that is developed throughout this study. Reflecting upon my Fatimid and Nizari data as a means through which I may make wider claims about the category of apocalypticism and its constituent elements mirrors the methodological approach articulated by historians of religion such as Jonathan Z. Smith and Thomas Tweed concerning the category of religion itself.2? Both Smith and Tweed stress the responsibility religionists have in reflecting upon how their own data may help to shape our understanding of the wider category of religion. Hence, here I use Fatimid and Nizari materials to broaden our understanding of the category of apocalypticism.
The production of any piece of scholarly work involves a set of choices that inevitably results in ‘necessary violence’** to one’s subject of study. My choice to situate primary source material within a wider set of questions related to the study of religion while retaining some of the disciplinary conventions of Ismaili studies - particularly an emphasis on philology and intellectual history - results in work that continues to privilege a historical version of an official theology. In this case, it is the history of a particular myth: a history of early Fatimid apocalyptic deployment. Second and once again resulting from disciplinary legacy, this study also perpetuates the reification of the categories ‘Ismailism’ or ‘Fatimid’. In reality this was a dynamic identity whose boundaries were often quite diffuse.
In fact some of these same apocalyptic tropes were shared by other early Shia communities. A major question for a future study would involve examining how some of these same tropes may have been interpreted differently by other Shia groups.”> Fourth, while this study does illuminate certain aspects of Fatimid apocalypticism, it cannot make claims about what is distinctive about the phenomenon. A fuller study of the discrete elements of Fatimid apocalypticism would involve an examination of a wider sample of materials from the period along with an elucidation of similarities and differences between these materials and materials from other apocalyptically charged movements in Islamic history.
Finally a note about sources. Fatimid ta’wil poses a particular set of challenges for those who study it. Ta’wil - an esoteric mode of scriptural interpretation that can only be performed by certain individuals - represents a modality of religiosity that is at once mystical and political, poetic and ephemeral. As we see it is not uncommon for authors of ta’wil to produce scriptural interpretations that have a multiplicity of symbolic referents for the same term or verse of the Quran.
This multiplicity points to the potency of ta’wil as a mode of mystical exegesis, a point that Henry Corbin has made in a number of his works.?’ Scholars have also recently pointed out the importance of ta’wil’s correlate, secrecy, as a means of communal boundary making.”® While scholarly discussions of ta’wil as a mode of exegesis are in their infancy, an examination of the ways in which various authors address, through ta’wil, iterations of the apocalyptic construct allows us greater insight into the inner workings of this particular mode of exegesis. To allow the non-specialist reader access to this highly complex world, I have chosen to include translations of large portions of previously untranslated texts.
This bookis divided into eight chapters. The first chapter provides the reader with a brief introduction to early Shia hermeneutics and the theology of the Fatimids. Chapter 2 discusses the myriad ways in which Fatimid mahdist expectation was tied to the crafting of utopia, particularly through rituals of oath-taking and tithing. Chapters 3 and 4 provide a detailed textual analysis of the Kitab al-kashf and the Kitab al-rushd. | read these texts not only as examples of ta’wil and early Fatimid apocalyptic rhetoric, but also as a means of elucidating connections between apocalypticism and early Fatimid authority. Ultimately I argue that these authors’ ta’wil of Quranic visions of the end of time helped to provide potent symbolic currency for the rise of the Fatimid caliph-imams.
Like all apocalyptically charged religious movements, expectations tied to the imminent end had to be reinterpreted when the apocalypse failed to arrive. Chapter 5 examines a key document related to the hermeneutics of reinterpretation: the caliph al-Mahdi’s letter to his Yemeni community that outlines his relationship to the eschatological mahdi. I then explore, through an extensive discussion of Qadi ]-Nu‘man’s Ta’wil al-da‘a’im, the interplay between ta’wil and Fatimid reinterpretations of the arrival of this eschatological figure.
There | show how al-Nu‘man’s ta’wil of various rituals, which so often related to the eschatological figure, helped to decouple mahdist expectation from a linear temporality while maintaining apocalypticism’s overall theological importance in narratives of Fatimid sacred history. Chapter 6 focuses in detail on al-Nu‘man’s ta’wil of the hajj, and argues that his symbolic interpretation helped to devise a spiritual itinerary to a new eschatological centre.
If the Fatimid case reflects apocalypticism’s ability to bring an empire to power, then the Nizari declaration of the end of time reflects apocalypticism’s ability to chart a new trajectory for a religious tradition. Chapter 7 moves us forward in time two-and-a-half centuries and westward more than 1,000 miles, from North Africa to the fortress of Alamut about sixty miles from present-day Tehran, to another major apocalyptic event in Ismaili history: the declaration of the giyama or resurrection made by Hasan “ald dhikrihi al-salam on 8 August 1164.
An analysis of the context from which Hasan’s declaration emerges shows us that his declaration cannot be dismissed as an aberrant manifestation of Islamic antinomianism. Rather we see here how apocalypticism emerges as an elegant solution to two particular logistical problems facing the Nizari community: a prolonged stalemate against the Seljuks and the prolonged physical absence of the imam. Through an examination of the Haft-bab, a text recounting that event, chapter 8 shows how Hasan’s declaration, commensurate with Quranic and Ismaili expectations concerning divine disclosure at the end of time, inaugurated a new phase of history in which all becomes apparent.
This divine disclosure included new soteriological practices that required seekers to recognise Hasan and his progeny in their true spiritual form. This declaration became a vital means for communal restructuring, inaugurating a newly dynamic and distinctively Persianate phase of Ismailism. The concluding chapter of this book explores in more detail the theoretical features of Fatimid and Nizari apocalypticism using our case studies to reflect more broadly on the relationship between apocalypticism and authority.
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