In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

33 CHAPTER ONE Antecedents and Precursors The Historical Contexts of Ismaʿili Globalization Who Are the Ismaʿilis? A Simplified Sketch The role of leadership, succession, and schism in the history of Islam warrants careful (albeit brief) consideration here.1 It is only through an understanding of these processes that the story of Ismaʿilism can be fully explained . At almost every historical moment, how the Ismaʿili community defined and redefined itself revolved around questions of succession and rightful authority.This was always an issue in Shiʿism in general, since legitimate authority was the domain of the Ahl al-Bayt, the “people of the house” of the Prophet Muhammad, especially through the line of his nephew and son-in-law ʿAli. The Shiʿa opposed the Sunni notion of rule by consensus (ijmaʿ) of the community, because they believed that leadership should only be in the hands of the qualified, especially since leadership involved elucidation of the underlying truth of the religion. The criteria among the Shiʿa for the selection of qualified leaders were lineal; only the descendants of ʿAli were seen to be qualified to lead Islamic society. The question, then, revolved around who was in fact the rightful heir in the line of ʿAli. Since the inception of the religion, and especially after the death of the Prophet, Islamic societies and polities have devoted a great deal of attention to these questions. After all, the Islamic leader, or caliph, was charged with prescribing both religious and worldly conduct. Leadership has remained more of a concern for Ismaʿilism than for most other branches of Islam; Sunni populations no longer have a centralized caliph, nor do the Ithnaʿashari Shiʿa, who believe in the messianic return of the twelfth imam as Mahdi. Ismaʿilis, however, retain a leader whom they believe to be a direct descendant of ʿAli and thus uniquely qualified to explain and interpret the meaning of their religion. 34 ANTECEDENTS AND PRECURSORS In sum: after Muhammad’s death, questions of succession caused a rift between thosewho favored ʿAli as the leaderof the Muslim community, and thosewho favored Abu Bakr, Muhammad’s successor.Those loyal to ʿAli and his cause would become known as the Shiʿa, the “party” of ʿAli; those who favored the caliphs beginning with Abu Bakr would later be referred to as Sunni. The Shiʿa felt that ʿAli had been wronged and cheated of his rights. Each group slowly developed its own distinctive religious orientation. The Shiʿa too split into many sects, often over questions of succession.The Shiʿi Ismaʿilis were born in one such dispute: The major branch of Shiʿa and the proto-Ismaʿilis shared all the same imams through Jaʿfar al-Sadiq, the sixth imam by current Nizari Ismaʿili reckoning (and the fifth in other reckonings ). When Jaʿfar’s son and heir-apparent, Ismaʿil, died before his father, a dispute arose over who was the rightful successor. Those who believed that it was Ismaʿil would become the Ismaʿiliyya (Daftary 1990: 1). The various formations referred to as the “Ismaʿiliyya” have been commonly perceived as taking a somewhat radical and oppositional stance in the Islamic world; this reputation has been at the center of the attributes bestowed upon them by other groups. They have gone through cycles of great prominence and complete obscurity over the course of their history and have been divided by schism a number of times. Beginning in the tenth century, significantly, the Ismaʿilis established a territorial state, the Fatimid Empire, which included much of North Africa and western Asia. The Fatimids built the city of Cairo (including the famous Al-Azhar mosque and university), which quickly became a cosmopolitan center; their territory incorporated Morocco and Mecca, Jerusalem and Sicily, and their religiopolitical network stretched from Africa to India (Daftary 1990: 2; Robinson 1996). These facts would become ethnographically important later for the influence they had on Ismaʿilis’ views of themselves, but their actual relationship to contemporary Ismaʿilism is difficult to discern. In fact, despite Ismaʿili institutions’ insistence on their historical salience for modern Ismaʿilism, their real shared continuity is rooted more in interpretation than historical fact. As the Fatimid Empire began to fall apart, another major schism over succession to the Ismaʿili imamate divided the sect into branches that became the Mustaʿlawiyya (or Mustaʿlian Ismaʿilism, out of which emerged the Tayyibis and...

Share