The Ismailis in the Middle Ages: A History of Survival, A Search for Salvation

To cite this: Virani, Shafique N. The Ismailis in the Middle Ages: A History of Survival, A Search for Salvation. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. www.academia.edu/43674448/ The_Ismailis_in_the_Middle_Ages_A_History_of_Survival_A_Search_for_Salvation www.shafiquevirani.org The Ismailis in the Middle Ages A History of Survival, A Search for Salvation }O SHAFIQUE N. VIRANI 1 2007 Harken ye Who quest for union Who boasts That he seeks Heed my words For I am The Book of God That speaks! h Imam ^Abd al-Salam Contents NOTE ON THE TEXT xi Map of the Near East xvi Map of the Iranian Lands xviii INTRODUCTION 3 Emerging from Obscurity 9 Signposts for the Way 13 O N E W RECOVERING A LOST HISTORY 19 History Is Written by the Victors 22 Asking the People of the House 25 T W O W THE EAGLE RETURNS 29 A Corrective to ^Ata-Malik Juwayni’s Narrative 30 In the Shadow of the Ilkhanids 33 The Trials of the Kushayji Family 34 The Appearance of Khudawand Muhammad 35 Continued Ismaili Activity 37 Testimony from Latin, Khurasani, and South Asian Sources 39 Conclusion 43 T H R E E W VEILING THE SUN 47 Imamate of Shams al-Din Muhammad 49 Nizari Quhistani (d. 720/1320) 60 F O U R W SUMMONING TO THE TRUTH The Da^wa 72 Imam Qasimshah 77 Qasim Tushtari (or Turshizi) 87 71 x W CONTENTS F I V E W POSSESSORS OF THE COMMAND 91 The Command and the Commander 91 The Imams Islamshah b. Qasimshah and Muhammad b. Islamshah 94 S I X W QIBLA OF THE WORLD 109 Transference of the Seat of Imamate to Anjudan 112 Imamate of Mustansir bi’llah (d. 885/1480) 116 Imamate of ^Abd al-Salam (d. ca. 899/1493) 119 Imamate of Gharib Mirza (d. 904/1498) 121 S E V E N W THE WAY OF THE SEEKER 133 Veiling and Unveiling: The Workings of Taqiyya 136 The Workings of the Da^wa 148 E I G H T W SALVATION AND IMAMATE 165 ‘‘You have done this, and yet you have not done it’’ 165 Seekers of Union 168 Conclusion 182 AFTERWORD 183 GLOSSARY 187 ABBREVIATIONS 195 NOTES 197 BIBLIOGRAPHY INDEX 291 265 ONE }O Recovering a Lost History Know that from [the time of the Imam] Rukn al-Din Muhammad onwards, the annals of this illustrious family do not appear in a single history that the eyes of this pauper have perused. This is because the family no longer possessed a worldly kingdom as in bygone times. . . . Hence it must be known that the Master of the House knows better than outsiders what goes on in his own household. h Fida\i Khurasani in Guidance for the Seeking Believers In her historical mystery, Daughter of Time, Josephine Tey tells the tale of Inspector Alan Grant of Scotland Yard, who is bedridden in a London hospital with multiple injuries after a fall. A friend, knowing the sleuth’s passion for faces, brings him a portfolio of historical portraits, hoping to make his convalescence less tedious. Scrutinizing the features of one particular character, he reads power and suffering in a face he associates with conscience and integrity. He is startled to discover that this is the likeness of one of history’s most infamous villains, King Richard III. How could his astute intuition have so misjudged the face of such a monster? Most people remember Richard as Shakespeare had depicted him, a hideous hunchback who heartlessly murdered and plundered his way to the crown of England, whose most lamented victims were his own innocent nephews, ‘‘the little princes in the Tower.’’ Grant begins to distrust the accusations against King 19 20 W THE ISMAILIS IN THE MIDDLE AGES Richard, England’s most vilified monarch, and is convinced by his keen instincts that the portrait could not be that of a killer. This suspicion leads the detective to turn historian, plunging with vigor into the archives and chronicles of the last half millennium. The more he learns, the more he begins to wonder: Could the history books be wrong? Could Richard have been innocent of the brutal double murder? The conclusions the author draws about the innocence or guilt of Richard are less important than her insightful discoveries along the way about the complexities of the past. History is written by the victors, she finds, and so alternative accounts must be found to balance it. Following Grant as he investigates the facts surrounding the life of the maligned monarch, readers vicariously share the delight he feels as he finds Richard to be less a vicious tyrant than the victim of propaganda spread by the Tudors, the dynasty at whose hands Richard’s Yorkist forces were defeated. Almost all the ‘‘authoritative’’ accounts, it turns out, were the products of Tudor patronage, which would hardly have been kind to the figure of the vanquished king. Virtually no testimony contemporary with Richard himself exists. Cross-examining these documents as he would cross-examine a witness in a criminal investigation, Grant finds many holes in the arguments. He discovers that once an accusation is made, it is often unquestioningly accepted, not to mention repeated. Historians following Sir Thomas More accepted his account as indisputable, though he could only have obtained his facts secondhand, almost certainly from John Morton, King Richard’s bitterest enemy. In today’s courtroom, such evidence would be inadmissible as hearsay. There is great insight in the words of one of the characters in Daughter of Time: Give me research. After all, the truth of anything at all doesn’t lie in someone’s account of it. It lies in all the small facts of the time. An advertisement in a paper. The sale of a house. The price of a ring. . . . The real history is written in forms not meant as history. In Wardrobe accounts, in Privy Purse expenses, in personal letters, in estate books. If someone, say, insists that Lady Whoosit never had a child, and you find in the account book the entry: ‘‘For the son born to my lady on Michaelmas eve: five yards of blue ribbon, fourpence halfpenny’’ it’s a reasonably fair deduction that my lady had a son on Michaelmas eve.1 These ‘‘small facts of the time’’ are precious—and often all we have to study communities like the Ismailis. Such discoveries force the historian investigating the case to question all that came before. In this particular instance, it is not enough simply to decide that Lady Whoosit had a son (as the entry in the account book apparently proves). One has to wonder why there was such insistence that she did not. It may or may not be possible to find out, but in searching for the answer, the ONE Recovering a Lost History W 21 investigator would have to uncover other casual documents, investigate the psychologies of those involved, and try to find more information about the good lady, her family, and their situation. A single clue, intriguing for its oddity, becomes the center of a web that spreads out in all directions. Information on the Ismailis in the aftermath of the Mongol irruption is scattered. Not a single primary source containing a continuous historical narrative of the community in this period is known to exist. What survive are often nothing more than disparate references, laconic allusions, and suggestive passages in a sometimes bewildering array of sources. We have, as it were, snapshots, occasionally clips from a film, all strewn in sundry albums and spliced into a medley of reels. A single sentence in a fourteenth-century book by a Damascene geographer informing us that Ismailism survives in Egypt, a Siraiki poem heralding the Imam’s advent in Multan, the travelogue of a Moorish voyager mentioning the Ismaili castles of Syria, the Latin tome of a Dominican traveler reporting on the holy land to the crusading King Philippe VI of France, a tract addressed to Tamerlane’s son advising him to rid his lands of this community, the inscriptions on tombstones, a passage purporting to contain the words of an Ismaili Imam in a mislabeled Persian manuscript—these and sources like these constitute the bases of our inquiry. While the task is daunting, a careful sifting and assembling of the materials and a minute examination of the pictures they create allow us to see certain motifs appearing repeatedly, certain hues that are suggestive of themes, certain silhouettes that allow us to speak of continuity and change. While it is fruitless, with the resources available, to attempt a sustained historical account of these centuries, it is possible to bring together the remnants of what has been preserved of this period and to see the broadest outlines of a continuous, and fascinating, narrative. What follows in this chapter is an exposition of some of the more prominent sources used in writing The Ismailis in the Middle Ages. It is, as it were, a roll call of the most important witnesses called to testify in the court of history. Some witnesses may be more credible than others on certain points, but less credible on others. Each has a point of view and particular strengths and weaknesses. In many instances, there may be but a single witness for a particular event—oftentimes one who lived centuries later, or whose testimony went through uncertain chains of transmission. Unfortunately, until such a time as a more credible witness comes to light, if one ever does, we are forced to rely cautiously on such testimony. For the academic specialist, this discussion of sources is essential information because it reveals in a summary form where the evidence for this book comes from. Further information on these and other materials used will, of course, also be found in the text of the chapters. For the more casual reader, the following analogy may be useful. If you are the type of person who watches a film and is then eager to read the credits to know who did what and how the film was put together, you’ll want to give this chapter a close reading; but if you’re already packing up your popcorn by FIVE }O Possessors of the Command The meaning of the Book of God is not the text, it is the man who guides. He is the Book of God, he is its verses, he is scripture. h Shams-i Tabrizi in Conversations THE COMMAND AND THE COMMANDER h In his Book of Assemblies and Travels (Kitab al-Majalis wa-al-Musayarat), the tenth-century jurist, al-Qadi al-Nu^man, recounts an illuminating episode from the life of the Fatimid Imam-Caliph al-Mu^izz. One day, al-Mu^izz was searching for a book in the palace library. In its time, this was possibly the largest trove of literature anywhere on earth. The Twelver Shi^i chronicler Ibn Abi Tayyi\ had described it as a ‘‘wonder of the world.’’1 When the librarian came back emptyhanded, al-Mu^izz decided to take a look for himself, though it was already past nightfall. He set himself in front of one of the cabinets, where he thought the book may be, and pulled a volume off the shelf. As he leafed through it, he became fascinated by certain passages and began to read more closely. Before he knew it, he was reaching for another volume, and then another, and another. In the Imam’s own words, ‘‘I completely forgot why I was there and didn’t even think of sitting down. It wasn’t until I felt a shooting pain in my legs from standing so long that I even realized where I was!’’2 Book enthusiasts will immediately identify with the Fatimid sovereign’s absorption in his reading till the wee hours of the morning. The enchantment of the 91 92 W THE ISMAILIS IN THE MIDDLE AGES written word transcends boundaries of space and time. The Fatimids and their successors at Alamut were great lovers and patrons of books, and their vast libraries attracted scholars of every creed from far and wide. The Imam al-Hakim even provided ink, pens, paper, and inkstands free of charge for all who sought learning in the ‘‘House of Knowledge’’ (dar al-^ilm).3 We can only imagine the horror the Ismailis would have felt when they witnessed the destruction of the literary legacy they had so painstakingly fostered. al-Maqrizi (d. 845/1442) describes how great hills of ashes were formed when the slaves and maids of the Luwata Berber tribe burned the Fatimid books. As an act of further desecration, they used the precious bindings of the volumes to make sandals for their feet.4 Similarly, Juwayni exults at torching the Ismaili library of Alamut, ‘‘the fame of which,’’ he adds, ‘‘had spread throughout the world.’’5 It ranks among history’s great ironies that one of the world’s oldest manuscripts of Juwayni’s own History of the World Conqueror is today carefully preserved at the library of the Institute of Ismaili Studies, an organization established by the Ismaili Imam in 1977. The destruction of the Alamut library was not the first time books had been the victims of a conqueror, nor would it be the last. In 1562, as Spanish troops entered Mexico, a Franciscan friar decreed that thousands of volumes containing Mayan hieroglyphics should be burned. The obliteration of this store of local spiritual beliefs was to pave the way for the spread of Christianity. In a single afternoon, the recorded memory of an entire civilization was turned to ashes; it is believed that only four codices ever survived. The Belgian city of Louvain was the site of another such travesty. When the German army invaded in 1914, in a senseless act of wanton destruction with no military significance whatsoever, the city’s splendid library, containing 300,000 volumes, including close to a thousand irreplaceable illuminated manuscripts, was set ablaze.6 Invaders throughout history have not been content with massacring their foes, but have often sought to destroy every possible trace of a people’s recorded memory. Such was the fate of the vast Ismaili libraries. George Orwell, with his penetrating insight, identified well the motivation of conquerors in his celebrated novel Nineteen Eighty-four. Describing the situation of his main character, Winston Smith, who worked for the Ministry of Truth, the government agency responsible for putting forth the version of history approved by those in power, Orwell writes: The Party said that Oceania had never been in alliance with Eurasia. He, Winston Smith, knew that Oceania had been in alliance with Eurasia as short a time as four years ago. But where did that knowledge exist? Only in his own consciousness, which in any case must soon be annihilated. And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all FIVE Possessors of the Command W 93 records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. ‘‘Who controls the past,’’ ran the Party slogan, ‘‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’’7 Seeing the accumulated knowledge of generations go up in flames would have been heartrending for the Ismaili community, passionate as it was about its books. But The Voyage (Sayr wa-Suluk), a spiritual autobiography of Nasir al-Din Tusi, one of Islam’s greatest luminaries, in which he recounts how he became an Ismaili, sheds light on why the literary devastation, in itself, could not have crushed the community’s spirit. One of only a handful of Ismaili texts to survive Juwayni’s torch, this work informs us that Ismailism, for all its love of books, gave primacy not to the recorded word, but to the living Word. It is not simply to the command ( farman) that the hearts of the believers should be attached, but to the one who issues the command ( farman-dih).8 The Commander is the Prophet in his age and the Imam in his own time. Hence, Muslims are divided into two groups—those who hold solely to the command, and those who hold fast to the Commander. ‘‘By this distinction the hypocrites are distinguished from the faithful, the people of external forms from those of inner meaning, the partisans of the law from those of the resurrection, and the adherents of multiplicity from those of divine unity.’’9 Echoing this identical sentiment, Shams-i Tabrizi, the master of the great mystic Jalal al-Din Rumi, asserted that it is a person, and not a bound volume, that liberates the believer: ‘‘The meaning of the Book of God is not the text, it is the man who guides. He is the Book of God, he is its verses, he is scripture.’’10 The Shi^a had always laid particular emphasis on the Quranic injunction to ‘‘obey God and obey the Messenger and the Possessors of the Command’’ (4:59). An old command may be superseded by a new command, and at that point to hold to the old command is to stray into error. However, those who held fast to the Commander could never be led astray, for he is the ever-present, ever-living Word of God.11 The Possessors of the Command succeed one another in a never-ending chain, until the Day of Judgment.12 It was therefore imperative that the Imam Rukn al-Din Khwurshah shield his offspring from the Mongols, and so, Ismaili tradition informs us, his son Shams al-Din Muhammad, the next ‘‘Possessor of the Command,’’ was taken to safety in Azerbaijan. It was not without reason that the coin described in the last chapter identified the Imam as the Commander of the Faithful (amir al-mu\minin). This, in itself, was a declaration that the descendants of the Prophet were the rightful Possessors of the Command (amr). This chapter is a study of the lives of two of the Possessors of the Command, the successors of the Imam Qasimshah, known as Islamshah and Muhammad b. Islamshah. It also includes an examination of the situation of the non-Iranian Ismaili communities in this period and a comparison of the modes of taqiyya in Quhistan and Syria.