of “hidden Imams.” Abd Allah proclaimed that
he was the Mahdi in 899 and later established the
F
atimid
dynasty
, which ruled from c
airo
, e
gypt
,
between 969 and 1171. The Fatimid
daawa
made
converts in different parts of North Africa and the
Middle East, especially in Syria, Persia, and the
region of Sind in i
ndia
.
The Fatimid form of Ismaili Shiism suffered a
schism stemming from a succession dispute after
the death of the eighth caliph-imam, al-Mus-
tansir (r. 1036–94). Egyptian Ismailis supported
the candidacy of al-Mustali (r. 1094–1101), the
younger son of al-Mustansir, but Ismailis in Syria
and Persia supported his older son Nizar. The
Mustali branch of the Ismailis continued in Egypt
until the end of the Fatimid dynasty in 1171,
when it moved to Yemen and eventually India.
With the end of their caliphate, they claimed that
Mustali’s baby grandson Tayyib had become a
hidden imam who would return at some time in
the future.
The third form of Ismaili Shiism was the one
that developed from supporters of Nizar’s claim
to the imamate, the Nizaris. Nizar was executed
in a Cairo prison, but his dai in Persia, Hasan-i
Sabbah (ca. 1056–1124), became the head of his
sect. Hasan was both a scholar and a man of action
who established fortresses on mountaintops in
Persia and Syria, the main one being Alamut in
the Elburz Mountains near the Caspian Sea. He
continued the Ismaili challenge to Sunni Abba-
sid rule in the Middle East and was known for
his use of assassination as a tactic against Sunni
leaders. Hasan and his successors claimed that
they governed the Nizari state on behalf of the
hidden Imams. In 1162, a second dai named
Hasan became the Nizari leader. Claiming to be
the imam, Hasan announced during the month
of r
amadan
in 1164 that he had been instructed
by the hidden imam to announce that the resur-
rection had come. This was the beginning of a
new spiritual age in which the sharia was abol-
ished for the Nizaris. Hasan claimed to be the
hidden Imam’s
caliph
, and all members of the
community were told that they were to follow
his spiritual teachings and commands instead
of the sharia. This doctrine remained in effect
until a later caliph-imam, Jalal al-Din Hasan (r.
1210–21), declared that the resurrection was not
the final one and that his followers should respect
the sharia. He did this to establish better relations
with the Sunni caliphate in b
aghdad
. Nizaris
continued to rule their own states in Persia and
Syria until the Mongol invasions of the mid-13th
century destroyed them, and Nizari communities
became fragmented.
The fourth form of medieval Ismaili Shiism
was the philosophical one. Neoplatonist
phi
-
losophy
appears to have been embraced by the
early Ismailis in Iraq and Syria. This included a
respect for human knowledge as a manifestation
of divine truth (
haqiqa
), the distinction between
outer and inner levels of reality, and a concep-
tualization of God as the supreme Intellect from
which the universe had come forth through ema-
nations. A famous example of the Ismaili respect
for knowledge and learning was the Fatimid
House of Wisdom (ilm) in Cairo, which accumu-
lated a library of several hundred thousand books
on subjects ranging from the Quran and
hadith
to logic, astronomy, and
mathematics
. Many of
the dais and Ismaili caliph-imams were reputed
to be learned in these subjects, in addition to
having mystical insights into divine truth. Lead-
ing Ismaili scholars in the Middle Ages included
the North African Qadi al-Numan (d. 974), who
wrote the leading compendium of Ismaili law;
the Persian traveler, Ismaili dai, and philosopher
Nasir-i Khusraw (d. ca. 1075); and Nasir al-Din
al-Tusi (d. 1274), the Persian theologian, philoso-
pher, and scientist.
Today the major branches of Ismaili Shiism
are the Khojas and the Bohras. The Khojas belong
to the Nizari form of the sect and the Bohras to
the Mustali. Both are the result of Ismaili daawa
activities in the Indus Valley region of modern
Indo-Pakistan that may date to the time of the
Fatimid dynasty in Egypt. The Khojas, the larger
K 378
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