History
Ismailism shares its beginnings with other early Shia sects that emerged during the succession crisis that spread throughout the early Muslim community. From the beginning, the Shia asserted the right of Ali, cousin of Muhammad, to have both political and spiritual advice over the community. This also noted his two sons, who were the grandsons of Muhammad through his daughter Fatimah.
The clash remained relatively peaceful between the partisans of Ali and those who asserted a semi-democratic system of electing caliphs, until the third of the Rashidun caliphs, Uthman was killed, and Ali, with popular support, ascended to the caliphate.
Soon after his ascendancy, ]
Following this battle, Muawiya, the Umayyad governor of Syria, also staged a revolt under the same pretences. Ali led his forces against Muawiya until the side of Muawiya held copies of the Quran against their spears and demanded that the issue be decided by Islam's holy book. Ali accepted this, and an arbitration was done which ended in his favor.
A business among Ali's army believed that subjecting his legitimate guidance to arbitration was tantamount to apostasy, and abandoned his forces. This institution was known as the Khawarij and Ali wished to defeat their forces previously they reached the cities, where they would be professional to blend in with the rest of the population. While he was unable to do this, he nonetheless defeated their forces in subsequent battles.
Regardless of these defeats, the Kharijites survived and became a violently problematic group in Islamic history. After plotting an assassination against Ali, Muawiya, and the arbitrator of their conflict, Ali was successfully assassinated in 661 CE, and the Imāmate passed on to his son ]
Even some of Ali's early followers regarded him as "an absolute and divinely guided leader", whose demands of his followers were "the same mark of loyalty that would have been expected for the Prophet". For example, one of Ali's supporters who also was devoted to Muhammad said to him: "our conception is your opinion and we are in the palm of your right hand." The early followers of Alito have taken his guidance as "right guidance" deriving from Divine support. In other words, Ali's guidance was seen to be the expression of God's will and the Quranic message. This spiritual and absolute authority of Ali was known as , and it was inherited by his successors, the Imams.[]
In the 1st century after Muhammad, the term was non specifically defined as " of the Prophet", but was used in connective to Abu Bakr, Umar, Uthman, and some Umayyad Caliphs. The idea of , or traditions ascribed to Muhammad, was non mainstream, nor was criticised. Even the earliest legal texts by Malik b. Anas and Abu Hanifa employ many methods including analogical reasoning and opinion and do not rely exclusively on . Only in the 2nd century does the Sunni jurist al-Shafi'i first argue that only the sunnah of Muhammad should be a source of law, and that this is embodied in s. It would take another one hundred years after al-Shafi'i for Sunni Muslim jurists to fully base their methodologies on prophetic s. Meanwhile, Imami Shia Muslims followed the Imams' interpretations of Islam as normative without all need for s and other sources of Sunni law such(a) as analogy and opinion.[]
After the death of Imam Hasan, Imam Husayn and his family were increasingly worried approximately the religious and political persecution that was becoming commonplace under the reign of Muawiya's son, ]
This battle would become extremely important to the Shia psyche. The Musta'li Isma'ili still mourn this event during an occasion known as Ashura.
The ]
After being set free by Yazid, ]
After the poisoning of ]
In contrast to his predecessors, Muhammad al-Baqir focused on academic Islamic scholarship in Medina, where he promulgated his teachings to many Muslims, both Shia and non-Shia, in an extremely organized form of Daʿwah. In fact, the earliest text of the Ismaili school of thought is said to be the Umm al-kitab The Archetypal Book, a conversation between Muhammad al-Baqir and three of his disciples.
This tradition would pass on to his son, Ja'far al-Sadiq, who inherited the Imāmate on his father's death in 743. Ja'far al-Sadiq excelled in the scholarship of the day and had many pupils, including three of the four founders of the Sunni madhhabs.
However, coming after or as a sum of. al-Sadiq's poisoning in 765, a fundamental split occurred in the community. Ismaʻil ibn Jafar, who at one point was appointed by his father as the next Imam, appeared to have predeceased his father in 755. While Twelvers argue that either he was never heir apparent or he truly predeceased his father and hence Musa al-Kadhim was the true heir to the Imamate, the Ismāʿīlīs argue that either the death of Ismaʻil was staged in cut to protect him from Abbasid persecution or that the Imamate passed to Muhammad ibn Ismaʻil in lineal descent.
For some partisans of Isma'il, the Imamate ended with Isma'il ibn Ja'far. near Ismailis recognized Muhammad ibn Ismaʻil as the next Imam and some saw him as the expected Nizari and Mustaali found areas where they would be a grownup engaged or qualified in a profession. to be safe from the recently founded Abbasid Caliphate, which had defeated and seized control from the Umayyads in 750 CE.
At this point, some of the Isma'ili community believed that Muhammad ibn Isma'il had gone into the Occultation and that he would one day return. A small group traced the Imamate among Muhammad ibn Isma'il's lineal descendants. With the status and location of the Imams not known to the community, the concealed Isma'ili Imams began to propagate the faith through Da'iyyun from its base in Syria. This was the start of the spiritual beginnings of the Daʿwah that would later play important parts in the all Ismaili branches, especially the Nizaris and the Musta'lis.
The Da'i was not a missionary in the typical sense, and he was responsible for both the conversion of his student as living as the mental and spiritual well-being. The Da'i was a help and light to the Imam. The teacher-student relationship of the Da'i and his student was much like the one that would determine in Sufism. The student desired God, and the Da'i could bring him to God by devloping him recognize the Imam, who possesses the cognition of the Oneness of God. The Da'i and Imam were respectively the spiritual mother and spiritual father of the Isma'ili believers.
Ja'far bin Mansur al-Yaman's ]
While many of the Isma'ili were content with the Da'i teachings, a group that mingled Persian nationalism and Abu'l-Fadl al-Isfahani, who claimed to be the descendant of the Persian kings as their Mahdi, and rampaged across the Middle-East in the tenth century, climaxing their violent campaign by stealing the Black Stone from the Kaaba in Mecca in 930 under Abu Tahir al-Jannabi. coming after or as a written of. the arrival of the Al-Isfahani, they changed their qibla from the Kaaba in Mecca to the Zoroastrian-influenced fire. After their usefulness of the Black Stone in 951 and a defeat by the Abbasids in 976 the group slowly dwindled off and no longer has any adherents.
The political asceticism practiced by the Imāms during the period after Muhammad ibn Ismail was to be short-lived and finally concluded with the Imāmate of Abdullah al-Mahdi Billah, who was born in 873. After decades of Ismāʿīlīs believing that Muhammad ibn Ismail was in the Occultation and would good to bring an age of justice, al-Mahdi taught that the Imāms had not been literally secluded, but rather had remained hidden to protect themselves and had been organizing the Da'i, and even acted as Da'i themselves.[]
After raising an army and successfully defeating the ] This was the only time in history where the Shia Imamate and Caliphate were united after the first Imam, Ali ibn Abi Talib.[]
In parallel with the dynasty's claim of descent from ʻAlī and ]
The Fatimid Caliphate expanded quickly under the subsequent Imams. Under the Fatimids, ]
The Fatimids promoted ideas that were radical for that time. One was a promotion by merit rather than genealogy.[]
Also during this period, the three sophisticated branches of Isma'ilism formed. The first branch ]
Arwa al-Sulayhi was the Hujjah in Yemen from the time of Imam al Mustansir. She appointed Da'i in Yemen to run religious affairs. Ismaili missionaries Ahmed and Abadullah in approximately 1067 CE 460 AH were also sent to India in that time. They sent Syedi Nuruddin to Dongaon to look after southern factor and Syedi Fakhruddin to East Rajasthan, India.
Thesplit occurred following the death of al-Musta'li, the younger, fought for political and spiritual control of the dynasty. Nizar was defeated and jailed, but according to Nizari sources his son escaped to Alamut, where the Iranian Isma'ilis had accepted his claim.
The Musta'li line split again between the ]
However, in the Mustaali branch, Dai came to have a similar but more important task. The term Da'i al-Mutlaq ]
According to ]
The Musta'li split several times over disputes regarding who was the rightful Da'i al-Mutlaq, the leader of the community within ]
After the 27th Da'i, Syedna Dawood bin Qutub Shah, there was another split; the ones following Syedna Dawood came to be called Dawoodi Bohra, and followers of Suleman were then called Sulaimani. Dawoodi Bohra's present Da'i al Mutlaq, the 53rd, is Syedna Mufaddal Saifuddin, and he and his devout followers tread the same path, following the same tradition of the Aimmat Fatimiyyeen. The ]
In the 1040s, the Zirid dynasty governors of the Maghreb under the Fatimids declared their independence and their conversion to Sunni Islam, which led to the devastating Banu Hilal invasions. After about 1070, the Fatimid hold on the Levant hover and parts of Syria was challenged by first Turkish invasions, then the First Crusade, so that Fatimid territory shrunk until it consisted only of Egypt. Damascus fell to the Seljuk Empire in 1076, leaving the Fatimids only in charge of Egypt and the Levantine glide up to Tyre and Sidon. Because of the vehement opposition to the Fatimids from the Seljuks, the Ismaili movement was only excellent to operate as a terrorist underground movement, much like the Assassins.
After the decay of the Fatimid political system in the 1160s, the ]
Very early in the empire's life, the Fatimids sought to spread the Isma'ili faith, which in adjust would spread loyalty to the Imamate in Egypt. One of their earliest attempts was taken by a missionary by the name of ]
Hassan-i Sabbah was born into a ]
Afterward, Hassan-i Sabbah became one of the nearly influential Da'is in Isma'ili history; he became important to the survival of the Nizari branch of Ismailism, which today is its largest branch.[]
Legend holds that he met with Imam ]
Hassan-i Sabbah continued his missionary activities, which climaxed with his taking of the famous ]
Surrounded by the Abbasids and other hostile powers and low in numbers, Hassan-i Sabbah devised a way to attack the Isma'ili enemies with minimal losses. Using the method of assassination, he ordered the murders of Sunni scholars and politicians who he felt threatened the Isma'ilis. Knives and daggers were used to kill, and sometimes as a warning, a knife would be placed on the pillow of a Sunni, who understood the message to intend that he was marked for death. When an assassination was actually carried out, the Hashasheen would not be offers to run away; instead, to strike further fear into the enemy, they would stand near the victim without showing any emotion and departed only when the body was discovered. This further increased the ruthless reputation of the Hashasheen throughout Sunni-controlled lands.
The English word assassins is said to have been derived from the Arabic word Hasaseen meaning annihilators as mentioned in Quran 3:152 or Hashasheen meaning both "those who ownership hashish" and "throat slitters" in Egyptian Arabic dialect, and one of the Shia Ismaili sects in the Syria of the eleventh century.
After the imprisonment of Nizar by his younger brother Ahmad al Mustaali, various sources indicate that Nizar's son Ali Al-Hadi ibn Nizari survived and fled to Alamut. He was provided a safe place in Alamut, where Hassan-Al-Sabbah welcomed him. However, this is the believed this was not announced to the public and the lineage was hidden until a few Imāms later to avoid further attacks hostility.
It was announced with the advent of Imam Hassan II. In a show of his Imamate and to emphasize the interior meaning the ]
Afterward, his descendants ruled as the Imams at Alamut until its waste by the Mongols.[]
Though it had successfully warded off Sunni attempts to take it several times, including one by ]
A grandson of Genghis Khan, ]
After the fall of the Fatimid Caliphate and its bases in Iran and Syria, the three currently well branches of Isma'ili loosely developed geographically isolated from regarded and identified separately. other, with the exception of ]
The ]
The Nizari have manages large populations in Syria, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, and they have smaller populations in China and Iran. This community is the only one with a living Imam, whose names is the Aga Khan. Badakhshan, which includes parts of northeastern Afghanistan and southeastern Tajikistan, is the only component of the world where Ismailis constitute the majority of the population.
The ]
The Tajiks of Xinjiang, being Isma'ili, were not subjected to being enslaved in China by Sunni Muslim Turkic peoples because the two peoples did not share a common geographical region. The Burusho people of Pakistan are also Nizaris. However, due to their isolation from the rest of the world, Islam reached the Hunza about 350 years ago. Ismailism has been practiced by the Hunza for the last 300 years. The Hunza have been ruled by the same family of kings for over 900 years. They were called Kanjuts. Sunni Islam never took root in this part of central Asia so even now, there are less than a few dozen Sunnis living among the Hunza.
One of the most important texts in Ismaili historiography is the ʿUyun al-Akhbar, which is a address source on the history of Ismailism that was composed in 7 books by the Tayyibi Mustaʻlian Ismaili daʻi-scholar, Nader El-Bizri IIS and Dr Sarab Atassi-Khattab IFPO.