A Code of Conduct: A Treatise on the Etiquette of the Fatimid Ismaili Mission. A critical edition of the Arabic text and English translation of Aḥmad b. Ibrāhīm al-Naysāburī’s al-Risāla al-mūjaza al-kāfiya fī ādāb al-du͑āt ed. by Verena Klemm and Paul Walker (review)

This is the fifteenth volume in the Ismaili Texts and Translations Series by the Institute of Ismaili Studies. This series has made classics of Isma‘ili Shi‘ism available to scholars and students of Shi‘ism as well those investigating Isma‘ili contributions to the development of Islam itself. With the exception of two volumes on the Fatimid dynasty by Taqi al-Din al-Maqrizi, the fifteenth century Sunni Mamluk historian, and one by Nasir al-Din al-Tusi, the thirteenth century author who is associated with Twelver Shi‘ism, the remaining texts in this series span Isma‘ili contributions to philosophy, history, and manners or adab literature, as well as political treatises. This latest edited text and translation is a manual intended for instruction of the da‘wah, or missionary organization of the Isma‘ili Shi‘a, produced during the Fatimid period (909–1171) by one of its leading luminaries.

Its author, Ahmad ibn Ibrahim al-Naysaburi (active in the early eleventh century), was a da‘i or missionary of the Shi‘a Fatimid state and its Isma‘ili branch during the reign of two Fatimid imam-caliphs: al-‘Aziz bi-Allah (d. 996), and al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah (d. 1021). It was during al-Hakim’s reign in particular that al-Naysaburi was active in defence of this imam-caliph, for whom he wrote three seminal treatises: two on imamah, and the Risalah al-Mujazah on and for the da‘wah. Al-Hakim became infamous of course as the Fatimid imam-caliph whose reign was marked by seemingly erratic policies affecting minorities, women, and others among his subjects (his alleged animosity toward Christians for example, led to the destruction of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, then under Fatimid control, which presumably instigated the Crusades). Al-Hakim was also known for his relationship with what became the Druze offshoot of Isma‘ili Shi‘ism. Clearly the Fatimid dynasty, the state it established in Egypt, and the Isma‘ili community it led as imams, were all undergoing a crisis during his time, and thus Naysaburi’s works played a critical role in the attempt to set the record straight, as it were, for the Isma‘ili community of this period.

Klemm and Walker’s edition and translation of the Risalah represents yet another solid achievement in this series of texts and translations. As Klemm notes in her Acknowledgements and the Introduction, her interest in al-Naysaburi’s Risalah arose from its relation to her doctoral work on another later da‘is works (xi). A few manuscript copies of Naysaburi’s Risalah existed in anthologies of Yemeni origin available at the American University of Beirut, and now at the Institute of Isma‘ili Studies (16–22). It is from some of these manuscript copies that Klemm prepared her edition of the text. Paul Walker contributes to this edition not only a wonderfully lucid translation, but also information on the dating of the text itself (23–31).

As Klemm notes, the importance of the Risalah has as much to do with form as with content. In other words, Naysaburi’s Risalah is arguably the earliest work devoted to instruction of da‘is on their role...