أصول الفاطمية والإسماعيلية والقرمطية

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Because of the secrecy with which the Ismailis shrouded their literature, most contemporary discussions we have of early Is’maili practice and doctrine comes from hostile Sunni outsiders. The confusion surrounding Is’mailism has produced heated debates on a number of issues, from the origin of the idea that Is’mail was the proper seventh Imam to the nature of the relationship between the Is’maili Fatamid caliphs and the Carmathian Muslims in Bahrain. In The Origins of Is’mailism, Bernard Lewis argues that Is’mail himself, along with his son and a number of companions, founded the Is’maili school of thought; that the Fatimid movement and, subsequently, the Fatimid caliphate were a direct continuation of the movement founded by Is’mail; that the Carmathians’ origins are uncertain, but may have been founded by the Is’maili, Abdallah ben Maimun; and that the Carmathian-Fatamid split was a division between radicals and moderates following the founding of the Fatamid State. Lewis argues convincingly that Is’maili thought was radically different from that of orthodox Islam — both Sunni and Twelver Shi’a. Based on a “quasi-masonic” hierarchy of initiation and an elitist attitude towards the uninitiated, Is’mailism opposed the Sunnis’ relatively egalitarian ideas about access to knowledge. But Is’mailism was, paradoxically, more egalitarian in many social matters than Sunnism. It was more liberal in its treatment of women. It appealed to the artisan classes, and may have organized the first guilds of the Islamic world. In its Carmathian variety, it practiced an economic order that the orthodox confused with communism. There may be a connection between Is’maili elitism and Is’maili liberalism. After all, if the truth was properly the property of an initiate few, who cared what the unenlightened masses did? Both tendencies provoked the horrified reactions among the orthodox, who viewed the first — with some justification — as a front for a “secret doctrine” of materialism, libertinism, even atheism, and who saw the second as a threat to their established order.

Lewis’ book is not just an attempt to sketch a history of the early Is’mailis. It is a history of the perceptions the non-Is’maili had of those early Is’mailis, a historiography combined with a history. In many ways, this story of the general perception of a potentially subversive heresy is more interesting than the story of the heresy itself, if only because our knowledge of the former is more substantial. The popular paranoia towards Sevener Shi’ism should remind the reader of similar attitudes throughout Western history: At various times, the orthodox attempted to tar the Is’mailis with patently untrue reports of non-Islamic origins and with non-Islamic secret teachings.

This book was originally written as a doctoral dissertation and, as such, is not the best introduction to the subject — it was not written for a popular audience, and it assumes a lot of knowledge on the part of the reader. It is also in many ways out of date: First issued in 1940, the preface to the edition I read — published in 1975 — makes it clear that much has been made obsolete by later discoveries . Still, it’s a fascinating study.