THE SECOND-CENTURY
ŠĪʿITE ĠULĀT
WERE THEY REALLY
GNOSTIC?
Tamima Bayhom-Daou
This paper questions
the suggestion of our sources that gnostic currents had already appeared among
Šīʿites by the early second/eighth century.* It contends that
gnosticism did not surface in Šīʿism until the third/ninth
century and that our information on its existence among second-century
Šīʿites is the result of retrospective ascription to groups and
individuals who, on account of their (real or
alleged) messianic beliefs, had already been identified by moderate
Imāmīs as ġulāt. That information would have served
to distance Imāmism and its imāms from gnostic teachings by
associating those teachings with repudiated figures from the past. The paper
examines evidence showing that in his work on firaq Hišām b. al-Ḥakam (d. 179/795) was not aware
of the existence of gnostic ideas in Šīʿism. Other examined
evidence also shows that references to gnostic ġuluww are conspicuous by their absence
from sources on Šīʿism that are datable to before the third/
ninth century.
Gnosticism is the term given by modern
scholarship to a religious and philosophical movement that emerged in the
[14] The basic principle of gnosticism is
that the material world is evil, created by a demiurge who is subordinate to
the supreme God and creator of the spiritual sphere or sphere of light—the
pleroma. The human soul originated in that
sphere, but subsequently fell into the hostile world of matter and
forgot about its origin. Its redemption, envisaged as a return or an ascent,
comes through acquiring esoteric or secret knowledge about its origin and
destiny. This higher knowledge is reserved for an elite and is acquired not by
transmission, observation, or speculative thought, but by revelation from
above. Here, the figure of a saviour often plays a key role: it is he who
awakens the soul to such knowledge and enables the gnostic to experience
revelation.[2] When
awakened, the soul goes through stages of spiritual transformation, produced by
the visions that a gnostic experiences, and upon death it begins its ascent to
its place of origin. Some gnostics believed in metempsychosis, or
transmigration of the soul, where the soul comes to inhabit the body of a
lesser being or a better believer, depending on one’s deeds.[3]
These conceptions are expressed in a
number of myths about the origin of the universe and the creation and destiny
of the soul. The myths draw upon material from the traditional religions but
serve to convey the gnostic experience. Gnostics often resorted to allegorical
interpretations of the scriptures and other religious writings in order to
extract from them what they perceived as the deeper esoteric truths. [4]
The emphasis on the redemptive power of
esoteric knowledge meant that the religious law usually acquired secondary
significance or, in some cases, became totally irrelevant. Some schools of
gnostics rejected all [15] aspects
of conventional worship, including prayer and fasting, as irrelevant to the
attainment of salvation, and it was largely due to this attitude that in the Christian heresiographical tradition gnostics were
accused of libertinism.[5]
The
Gnostic Ġulāt
Most of the
Šīʿite ġulāt
(extremists or, literally, exaggerators) of our Muslim sources have concepts and beliefs ascribed to them
that have close parallels in the gnosticism of late antiquity.[6]
The resurfacing of gnosticism in
Šīʿism may be explained in terms of the fact that Šīʿism
is based on devotion to a holy family, the Family of the Prophet, and this
Family provided figures to whom could be ascribed one or more redemptive roles.[7]
Whilst some Šīʿites looked to their [16] imām/Mahdī as a political
redeemer, and Imāmīs regarded him as one of a line of guardians of
the law, the gnostic ġulāt
regarded their imām mainly as a revealer of a higher knowledge. [8]
Evidence suggests that it was
Imāmī scholars who first took an interest in and began to write about
those gnostic currents.[9]
Their aim was to refute them and to distinguish between what they saw as
moderate and essentially legalistic Imāmism and the extreme and
antinomianist doctrines of the gnostics. According to a common view in modern
scholarship, Imāmism emerged as a separate Šīʿite sect
largely by defining itself in contradistinction to ġuluww, although opinion remains divided as to when this process
actually began, what exactly ġuluww
signified, and how, despite its attacks on ġuluww,
Imāmism came to be influenced by its doctrines.[10]
Ġulāt of the gnostic type are reported to
have existed in the second and third centuries among the followers of ʿAlid
and ʿAbbāsid imāms [17] and of ʿAbdallāh b. Muʿāwiya,
a Ṭālibid, that is, a descendant of ʿAlī’s brother Ǧaʿfar
b. Abī Ṭālib. The doctrines ascribed to them include the
existence of a transcendent God, metempsychosis or the transmigration of souls
(tanāsuḫ), and the denial
of the Resurrection. Belief in tanāsuḫ,
cycles (dawr/adwār)
of spiritual transformation, and the primordial world of shadows (aẓilla) is sometimes mentioned as
the hallmark of ġuluww.[11]
The ġulāt are also said to
have resorted to allegorical interpretation of the Qurʾān in order to
support these doctrines. [12]
Regarding the nature of their imām,
the ġulāt are said to have
believed that he was an incarnation of the divine spirit or light, a prophet,
an apostle, or an angelic being. Some said he was a demiurge or a lesser god (ilāh al-arḍ) who was
responsible for the creation of the world.[13]
One of the most recurring themes in descriptions of the ġulāt concerns their
(real or supposed) antinomianism and libertinism (ibāḥa).
Thus, they are said to have preached that acknowledging the imām
was the sole means of salvation, or that it renders all religious duties
redundant and all prohibitions licit.[14]
Many of the leaders of the ġulāt are said to have claimed
to be prophets, apostles, imāms, or angelic beings and to have been
venerated by their followers as such. These claims too are said to have been
justified on the basis that the divine light or the spirit of a particular
prophet or imām had come to rest in them, that is to say, in terms of beliefs
concerning the transmission of divine light and the transmigration of souls.[15]
[18]
Messianism
and the Ġulāt
In addition to the conception of the
imām as a source of esoteric knowledge and ideas about the soul and other
beliefs that are clearly rooted in gnosticism, most of the ġulāt are credited with messianic doctrines of the more
traditional kind. Thus, they are said to have looked to their imām as the
Mahdī/Qāʾim, a political saviour who would inaugurate a Golden
Era and fill the earth with justice and equity. This Mahdī is a figure
whose death was usually denied, and it was expected that he would return (raǧʿa) from a state of earthly
or heavenly occultation (ġayba)
in order to fulfil this role. Upon his return he would raise the dead and would
triumph over the enemies of the Šīʿa. Some believed that those
who had died fighting for his cause would return to life “before the Day of
Resurrection”, presumably at the time of his reappearance.[16]
At first sight, the existing
descriptions of the ġulāt
seem to suggest that already by the early second century two redemptive roles
had become fused in the figure of the Šīʿite Mahdī: his
role as a source of esoteric knowldege, and the other, older, idea of him as an
apocalyptic saviour whose task was mainly political.[17] In theory, there is nothing implausible
about such a fusion taking place so early in the development of Šīʿism.[18]
The two roles go well together. The apocalyptic saviour who was expected to
inaugurate the era of justice could easily be transformed at the hands of his
gnosticizing followers into one whose task was also to reveal the divine
secrets and to help the souls of the elect attain salvation.
This fusion, however, is not always
apparent in the literature on the second-century
ġulāt. Sometimes within the
same work, and this is [19] mostly
in the early firaq literature, we
have two separate portrayals of a ġuluww
sect. In one the emphasis would be on their esotericism with no mention of
their mahdist beliefs, and in the other, on their mahdist doctrine with one or
two references to their esoteric ġuluww.[19]
This might indicate that different groups within a sect looked upon the same
imām in different ways, or that the gnostic doctrine was adopted at a
later stage in the life of a sect. The sources, on the other hand, do not seem
to be at all aware of the existence of such doctrinal alignments within the
same sect, or of a distinction between earlier beliefs and later developments.
The aim of this article is to draw
attention to evidence that could suggest that gnostic doctrines did not surface
in Šīʿism until the third/ninth century, and that our
information on their existence among second-century Šīʿites has
no historical basis. That information would have been the result of
retrospective ascription to groups and individuals who in reality had nothing
to do with gnosticism but were messianists (or had come to be identified as
messianists) and were known to have been active supporters of members of the ahl al-bayt. An attempt to account for
this tendency to regard second-century Šīʿite groups as ġulāt of the gnostic type will
be made at the end.
The Sources and the Question of their Authenticity
Almost all of our information on the
phenomenon of ġuluww in
Šīʿism comes from external and hostile sources, both
Imāmī and non-Šīʿite sources. There is, therefore, the
possibility of distortion and misrepresentation due to bias and/or lack of
understanding. In the heresiographical tradition, where we have some of the
most elaborate descriptions of the doctrines of the ġulāt, there is in addition a tendency to schematize and
to trace the origins of sects and doctrines to much earlier periods.[20]
[20] There are also
indications that the beliefs of the ġulāt
tended to be exaggerated with time. This was observed by Hodgson, who believed
that it was a direct consequence of the process by which some of their ideas
became acceptable in mainstream Imāmism.[21]
Modern scholars have in general been of
the opinion that although the available sources on the second-century ġulāt pose a number of
problems, they are fundamentally historical.[22]
A main reason for this seems to be that reports on the activities and doctrines
of the ġulāt are scattered
in various genres of literature and in both Šīʿite and
non-Šīʿite sources, which gives the impression that they are
independent and reasonably reliable testimonies.[23]
Another reason is that the two extant works that originate from within ġuluww circles appear to
corroborate the evidence of the external sources. These two works, the Umm al-kitāb and the Kitāb al-aẓilla, purport to
transmit the esoteric knowledge revealed, respectively, by the imām
al-Bāqir (d. between 114/732 and 122/740) to his disciple Ǧābir
b. Yazīd al-Ǧuʿfī (d. 128/745 or 132/749) and by the
imām al-Ṣādiq (d. 148/765) to al-Mufaḍḍal b. ʿUmar
al-Ǧuʿfī (d. before 179/795).[24]
They have been studied by Halm who has shown that many of the ideas expounded
in them have close parallels in the doctrines ascribed by the heresiographers
to the Kūfan ġulāt in
the time of al-Bāqir and al-Ṣādiq. According to Halm, they were
probably composed in the third century, but their ideas (or at least layers of
them) go back to early second-century Kūfa—a conclusion based on the
assessment that the heresiographers and the ġulāt
texts corroborate each other.[25]
To date no one has questioned the overall picture presented by the sources,
which is that gnostic doctrines were already being preached in Šīʿism
in the early second/eighth century. The evidence examined here suggests that
this [21] picture is in
need of reappraisal and that gnostic doctrines did not surface in Šīʿism
until the third/ninth century.
This evidence comes mainly from the
Imāmī heresiographical tradition. The first work on Muslim sects,
most of which was devoted to the description of the divisions in Šīʿism,
was composed by the Imāmī scholar Hišām b. al-Ḥakam
(d. 179/795) in the late second/eighth century. The original (Kitāb iḫtilāf al-nās
fī ʾl-imāma) is no longer extant but it has been preserved
in Firaq al-Šīʿa of
Nawbaḫtī (d. ca. 310/923) and constitutes the first part of that
work—the part that ends with the divisions in Šīʿism following
the death of Ǧaʿfar al-Ṣādiq (or thereabouts).[26]
The work also appears to have been used by the earlier Muʿtazilī
heresiographer pseudo-Nāšiʾ (Ǧaʿfar b. Ḥarb, d.
236/851),[27] though
to a much lesser extent than Nawbaḫtī, who seems to have retained
most of it.
My analysis of key sections of the part
derived by Nawbaḫtī from Hišām has shown that the latter
had expressed ideas about the imāmate and the sources of its knowledge
that are distinctly at variance with the ideas found in classical Imāmism.
It has also shown that Nawbaḫtī made a number of changes in order to
update the descriptions he found in that work and to make them more in line with
current Imāmī beliefs and conceptions.[28]
The analysis carried out here will reveal that the earliest layer of the
heresiographical tradition on second-century ġulāt leaders and the sects they allegedly founded, which
goes back to Hišām, is not aware of the existence of gnostic ideas
among them and perceived them mainly as messianists/apocalyptists.[29]
This provides a strong indication that in Hišām’s time gnostic
doctrines had not yet entered Šīʿism, for had they already
existed Hišām would have known of them and there is no reason to
suppose that he would have chosen to remain silent about them. In [22] fact, given his own conception of the
imāmate,[30] he
would have had every reason to refute any doctrine centred on the idea of the
imām as a spiritual saviour.
NawbaḪtī’s
Sources Reconsidered
According to Madelung’s analysis of
Nawbaḫtī’s work, the part which is based on Hišām consists
of three main consecutive sections. They will be referred to here as A, G, and
B.[31]
Sections A and B are organized
chronologically, according to the order of
succession of the imāms. There the Imāmiyya are portrayed
anachronistically as having come into existence as a separate sect (and
distinguished from the Batriyya and the Ǧārūdiyya—the future
Zaydīs) soon after the death of the Prophet.[32]
The other sects or divisions in Šīʿism appear mainly as
deviations from Imāmism, each arising upon the death of an imām.
Section G describes second-century ġulāt groups and examines the
doctrines of two of them (the Ḫaṭṭābiyya and the Ḥārithiyya)
in detail. It comes between A and B and interrupts the mainly chronological
organization of the work. With one exception, the Manṣūriyya, all
the named groups described in the ġulāt
section also appear in the chronological sections.[33]
The Bayāniyya, who appear in section A, are not dealt with in section G,[34]
while the Muġīriyya
and the Kaysāniyya receive only brief mention, when their position on the
doctrine of raǧʿa is
reported.[35] The
author [23] concludes
his treatment with the statement: “These are the ġulāt who declared allegiance to Šīʿism”.
Madelung’s view concerning
Hišām’s authorship of a separate section on the ġulāt was based solely on the observation that all the ġulāt sects that are mentioned
there were active in the second century. Later ġulāt groups, such as the Bašīriyya, which
supposedly emerged after the death of Mūsā al-Kāẓim (d.
183/799) and are classified accordingly in Nawbaḫtī,[36]
but which would have been unknown to Hišām, do not appear in section
G.
This argument turns out to be a weak
one, and there are a number of reasons for thinking that Hišām did
not compose, or include in his work, a separate section on the ġulāt, and that Nawbaḫtī
derived most of his information in section G
from a source (or sources) other (and later) than Hišām. If we
compare, for example, Nawbaḫtī’s description of the Ḫaṭṭābiyya
and its sub-sects in section G with the parallel passages in Ašʿarī
(d. 324/935)[37] and Saʿd
al-Qummī (d. 301/914),[38]
both of whom also have separate sections on the ġulāt, we find the following: that although not identical
with that of Ašʿarī, Nawbaḫtī’s description has
several features in common with it;[39]
and Saʿd al-Qummī’s parallel sections have supplementary statements
that also correspond to Ašʿarī.[40]
It is on the basis of similar parallels with Ašʿarī that
Madelung has argued that the work of the Muʿtazilite Abū ʿĪsā
al-Warrāq (d. after 250/864 A.H.) was a common source for Ašʿarī,
Nawbaḫtī, and Saʿd.[41]
[24] Secondly, in the section of his work
which follows a chronological order, as also in the section on the ġulāt, Ašʿarī
does not include any of the later ġulāt
groups such as the Bašīriyya and the Namīriyya;[42]
the latter are mentioned only briefly at the end of his passage on the much
earlier group of al-Šarīʿī.[43]
This would suggest that his source, Warrāq, though writing after 250 A.H.,
did not include the later ġulāt
in his account, and it would be consistent with the argument made here that
Warrāq, rather than Hišām, was (one of) Nawbaḫtī’s
source(s) for section G. In other words, the question of authorship of Nawbaḫtī’s
section G (whether Hišām or Warrāq) cannot be determined on the
basis of the dates of these authors and the dates of the sects described, since
the third-century Warrāq, whom Madelung recognized as the source of
Ašʿarī’s description of the ġulāt,
also describes only second-century sects. On the other hand, the proposition
that Nawbaḫtī derived (much of) his material for section G from
Warrāq is supported by the similarities with Ašʿarī’s
parallel section; and as will be seen later, it is also supported by evidence
indicating that some of the variations were due to Nawbaḫtī making a
conscious decision to diverge from the account of Warrāq.[44]
Thirdly, and more importantly, a comparison of G with A and [25] B reveals that in terms of structure,
content, ascertainable aim, and conception of ġuluww, section G could not have come from the pen of the same
author as A and B.
Section G
Section G opens with the statement that “ġuluww started with them (the Ḥārithiyya)”[45] and proceeds to give a general description of ġuluww. This is then followed by detailed descriptions of
the Manṣūriyya, the Ḥārithiyya, and the Ḫaṭṭābiyya
and its subsects.[46]
Ġuluww, as it is treated and defined in this
section, belongs mainly to the gnostic kind described above.[47]
It is defined as belief in aẓilla
(the world of “shadows”), tanāsuḫ (metempsychosis), and
dawr (cyclical
transmigration). Its advocates are said to have denied the Resurrection and the
Final Judgement and rejected the law. They believed that the [26] salvation and damnation of the soul (or
its transmigration in human or animal form) is dependent upon their acts and
degree of obedience to the imāms.[48]
The section comes right after the passages
(in A) which describe the splits among the followers of ʿAbdallāh b.
Muʿāwiya, the Ḥārithiyya, after his death (130/747).[49]
The reason for placing it there is to support the contention, made a little
earlier towards the end of section A, that (gnostic) ġuluww began among them and that it was they who introduced it
among some of the disciples of al-Ṣādiq. The passage asserts that ġuluww was not preached or
introduced by Ǧābir b. Yazīd and Ǧābir b. ʿAbdallāh
al-Anṣārī, who are known in the tradition as trusted disciples
of the Imāmī imāms;[50]
rather, Ibn al-Ḥārith falsely ascribed (asnada) it to them. The polemical purpose is also clear from the
opening statement in this section.
Sections A and B and Evidence of “Updating”
By contrast, in the chronological
sections ġuluww is conceived
mainly as messianism or the doctrine of the Mahdī, in which the denial of
his death and the belief in his ġayba
and raǧʿa appear as main
elements. Although the term does not occur frequently as a designation of
messianism or messianic sects, this is how ġuluww
is defined (or rather, would have been defined by the original author) near the
beginning of the work, where its origin is ascribed to ʿAbdallāh b.
Sabaʾ and where there is no suggestion of it being conceived as
esotericism.[51]
Moreover, the [27] statement
with which the author of section A sums up his description of the sects of the
Kaysāniyya, including the Ḥārithiyya, shows that what concerned
him was to refute their messianism and not any gnosticism of theirs. It reads: “..
and so all the (sects of the) Kaysāniyya have no imām but await the
(return of the) dead, except the ʿAbbāsiyya who affirm the
imāmate in the descendants of al-ʿAbbās and believe that it
continues in their line until today”. [52]
It is true that, alongside the
statements that describe the messianic beliefs of second-century groups, there
are in A and B some references to esoteric ġuluww.
But these tend to be brief and far less prominent than the elaborate treatments
in section G, and they often appear to be poorly integrated within the text.
Thus, there are only a couple of references to the doctrines of aẓilla, tanāsuḫ, dawr,
and ḥulūl;[53]
whereas in section G these appear as the hallmarks of ġuluww. One of those references occurs in connection with the
already mentioned passage on the Ḥārithiyya, where it serves to show
that (gnostic) ġuluww originated
with them and to establish some correspondence between their description in A
and that in G. In A and B there is only one reference to allegorical
interpreting of the Qurʾān, whereas it is pervasive in descriptions
of the ġulāt in section G.[54]
The idea that recognition of an imām renders all legal prohibitions licit
occurs in connection with some of the messianic sects in A and B.[55]
And some groups are said to have claimed that their (ʿAlid, ʿAbbāsid,
or Ṭālibid) imām is a god (or God), or an incarnation of the
divine spirit or light,[56]
and that their non-ʿAlid founders are imāms, prophets or messengers.[57]
That the statements that ascribe gnostic
ġuluww to the messianic and
other sects in A and B are secondary additions is indicated by various
inconsistencies, discontinuity in the narrartion, or awkwardness in passage or sentence structure.[58] A close examination of the relevant [28] passages reveals that portrayals of
sects as messianists have been transformed into portrayals of them as gnostics
by means of superimposing onto earlier texts statements ascribing to those
sects one or more of the following features of gnostic ġuluww: deification of an imām, the idea of a sect’s
founder as a prophet or visionary, antinomianism, and the belief in
metempsychosis.[59]
Not all the editorial alterations in A
and B can be said to have had the aim of making the description of a messianic
sect correspond to other descriptions of it as gnostic. Some alterations appear
to have been necessitated by the change in the Imāmī attitude to
messianism. This is because whereas for
Hišām any form of messianic expectation or mahdism would have amounted to ġuluww, since it involved a belief in the existence of “prophetic”
knowledge in the period after Mu-ḥammad,[60]
the adoption by Imāmism of the doctrine of the twelfth imām as the Mahdī meant that, for Nawbaḫtī, similar messianic doctrines could
no longer be refuted categorically or designated as ġuluww. In [29] these
cases, too, there is evidence of recourse to the usual technique of
transforming messianists into gnostics, effected by introducing into
Hišām’s text one or more of the features of gnostic ġuluww mentioned earlier; or, that
the problem has been resolved by introducing the idea that the sect exaggerated
the status of its non-Hāšimite leader and making it appear as though
its ġuluww lay in that rather
than in its messianic belief concerning its imām.[61]
To illustrate the last point let us
consider the passage that describes the
doctrines of al-Muġīra.
The characterization of his movement as messianic is clear. It is
depicted as having split off from Imāmism after the death of Muḥammad
al-Bāqir and adopted the belief in the imminent rise of the Mahdī,
the Ḥasanid Muḥammad b. ʿAbdallāh (known as al-Nafs
al-Zakiyya; d. 145/762). But we also find statements that describe al-Muġīra
and his followers as heretics of another sort—they claim that after
al-Bāqir the imāmate passed to al-Muġīra, that the latter
will be the imām until the rise of the Mahdī, that he is a
messenger-prophet and receives revelations,
that he raises the dead, and that he believes in tanāsuḫ. The structure and distribution of these
statements provide clues that they are secondary: the text moves between the
claims of al-Muġīra about al-Nafs al-Zakiyya, the claims he made
about himself, and the claims of his followers about him and about al-Nafs
al-Zakiyya in a haphazard and confused manner; and the idea that al-Muġīra
believed in tanāsuḫ occurs
at the very end of the passage and bears no clear relationship to any other
doctrine mentioned earlier. Moreover, comparison with pseudo-Nāšiʾ,
who also relied on Hišām,[62]
suggests that the statements in Nawbaḫtī that make al-Muġīra
claim to be imām and exaggerate his own abilities are distorted versions
of Hišām’s text. In pseudo-Nāšiʾ, al-Muġīra
exaggerated the status of al-Nafs al-Zakiyya, not his own. He claimed that the
imāmate passed from al-Bāqir to al-Nafs al-Zakiyya and believed that
it was the latter, as the awaited Mahdī, who will raise the dead and
receive knowledge of the ġayb.[63]
Nawbaḫtī’s revisions can be explained on the basis that
Hišām’s text presented him with a problem, since it portrayed al-Muġīra’s
doctrine of the Mahdī as heretical even though his Mahdī, like the
Imāmī one, was a living imām [30] (as opposed to one who had died, whether
or not his death had been denied). In other words, Nawbaḫtī could
not be seen to be condemning al-Muġīra’s messianic doctrine, since
the Imāmīs themselves had come to accept a similar form of messianic
belief concerning their “living” twelfth imām. So he introduced those
changes that make al-Muġīra appear to be an exaggerator not on
account of his messianic belief but on account of claims about his own status
and abilities and belief in tanāsuḫ.[64]
Of course, not every reference to a sect’s
leader as a prophet or visionary or to an imām as a divine king or
heavenly messiah can be shown to be secondary, although it may well be. Still,
sometimes the context or other clues indicate that the sect in question would
have been characterized unambiguously as messianic by the original author—its
imām as the messiah, its leader as his herald, and the latter’s visions or
revelations as prognostic and apocalyptic, not gnostic. Take, for example, the
passage that describes the ʿAbbāsid sect of the Rāwandiyya and
refers to the events known in the historical sources as yawm al-rāwandiyya.[65]
In that passage, which probably goes back to Hišām,[66]
the caliph al-Manṣūr is said to have been deified by his
Rāwandī followers and Abū Muslim to have been regarded by them
as a prophet who knew the ġayb.[67]
They believed that the caliph had knowledge of people’s thoughts and absolute
power over the fate of mankind, including his own prophets whom he might decide
to kill or to spare—which looks like an [31] allusion to a belief
(held by, or ascribed to, the Rāwandiyya) that the caliph was able to know that Abū
Muslim was plotting against him and that this is why he decided to have him
killed. The account shows no awareness of the existence of a gnostic doctrine
among the adherents of that group. Moreover, some of the reports in the
historical sources envisage the actions of the Rāwandiyya as having been
messianically inspired; members of the sect are said to have jumped off cliffs
and off the roof of al-Manṣūr’s
palace, believing that they were angels who could fly.[68]
In the light of these reports, Hišām’s passage may be interpreted as
depicting a messianic cult centred on al-Manṣūr, with Abū
Muslim as his herald and his killing at the orders of the caliph as an
apocalyptic sign. [69]
Two
Descriptions of the ḪaṬṬābiyya
In what follows an attempt will be made
to support the conclusion that Hišām
was not aware of the existence of gnostic forms of ġuluww among second-century Šīʿites. To
this end, we will take a close look at two descriptions of the doctrines of
Abū ʾl-Ḫaṭṭāb and the Ḫaṭṭābiyya
in Nawbaḫtī. The Ḫaṭṭābiyya has been chosen
for detailed analysis because we possess on it ample material for comparison,
both in Nawbaḫtī and in [32] other sources, and a number of good
clues indicating where and why Hišām’s text has been edited and
revised. Its description in the chronological section B will be translated and
analysed in detail and compared with the description in section G, which is
only summarized here.[70]
This will be followed by a discussion of other proposed reasons as to why
section G is unlikely to have come from Hišām and, more generally,
reasons for thinking that gnostic ġuluww
did not arise among Šīʿites until after his time. Finally, an
attempt will be made to explain how and why gnostic ġuluww came to be ascribed to second-century Šīʿites.
I. The Ḫaṭṭābiyya in
Section G
Abū ʾl-Ḫaṭṭāb
is known in the literature for his uprising and execution in Kūfa during
the reign of the ʿAbbāsid caliph al-Manṣūr (136/753–158/774)
and the governorship of ʿĪsā b. Mūsā (132/749–147/764).
He is also associated with the preaching of (gnostic) ġuluww. He is said to have been disowned by Ǧaʿfar
al-Ṣādiq, and his followers are said to have split into subsects.
Nawbaḫtī tells us that the split occurred when it reached them that
al-Ṣādiq had disowned them and their leader. But he is not very
clear as to why or when al-Ṣādiq disowned them—whether it was at the
time of the uprising and because of it, or previously and on account of their
preaching of gnostic ġuluww. The
following is a summary of the main points in the description of the sect in
this section, and some comments that are relevant to the comparison with the
passages in section B:
1. The followers of
Abū ʾl-Ḫaṭṭāb split up into four sects when
they heard that Ǧaʿfar al-Ṣādiq had cursed him and
disavowed him and his followers.
2. Abū ʾl-Ḫaṭṭāb
used to claim that Ǧaʿfar made him his custodian and the waṣy after him and taught him the
Greatest Name of God. He then progressively claimed to be a prophet, an
apostle, one of the angels, the messenger of God to mankind and the Proof unto
them.
3. All the sects of the Ḫaṭṭābiyya
are said (or assumed) to have deified Ǧaʿfar, believed in tanāsuḫ and ḥulūl, preached antinomianism
and libertinism, and practised allegorical interpretation of the Qurʾān.
There is no mention of the idea, found in section B, that they venerated
Ismāʿīl or Muḥammad b. Ismāʿīl. And no
mahdist doctrines of any sort are ascribed to them.
4. They are portrayed as having differed
in matters of detail and in [33] their
particular formulations of the doctrine of the soul. They also differed concerning
the spiritual rankings of their leaders Abū ʾl-Ḫaṭṭāb,
Bazīġ, al-Sariyy, and Muʿammar
or Maʿmar: the Muʿammariyya regarded Muʿammar as the
demiurge (ilāh al-arḍ),
and the other leaders were venerated by their
followers as prophets, messengers, and/or angels.[71]
In these passages
there is no mention of the uprising of Abū ʾl-Ḫaṭṭāb
in Kūfa, which is the main subject of
interest in the passage on the Ḫaṭṭābiyya in
section B. And, as we shall see, in section B there is no clear reference to
al-Ṣādiq’s disavowal of Abū ʾl-Ḫaṭṭāb
or of the doctrines preached by him at the time of the uprising. Hence, the
presumption in our passage (G) might seem to be that al-Ṣādiq
disavowed Abū ʾl-Ḫaṭṭāb and his companions on
account of their esoteric doctrines and the exaggerated
beliefs they held about him, and not on account of that uprising or of
the messianic beliefs associated with it. This is also the common view in the
secondary literature, where, in addition, it is believed that the rupture with
al-Ṣādiq took place before
Abū ʾl-Ḫaṭṭāb’s uprising during the caliphate
of al-Manṣūr.[72]
There are, however, a number of reasons
for thinking, firstly, that, according to an earlier (i.e., Hišām’s)
version of the passage in section B, al-Ṣādiq was said to have
dissociated himself (barāʾa)
from Abū ʾl-Ḫaṭṭāb and that this was on
account of the latter’s staging of his revolt in the name of the imām;
and, secondly, that Nawbaḫtī took the idea of al-Ṣādiq’s
declaration of barāʾa from
the account in section B and introduced it
into the account in section G as part of his attempt to link
Hišām’s characterization of the sect with that of Warrāq. The
secondary nature of this link will become clear after our reconstruction of
Hišām’s text from the relevant passages in section B. Here one could
mention two points: (1) the irrelevance of the idea that the Ḫaṭṭābiyya
split up as a result of repudiation of their (gnostic) doctrines to the rest of
the passage in section G, where there are no significant differences in the
doctrines supposedly held by the subsects or between their doctrines and those
said [34] to have been
preached by Abū ʾl-Ḫaṭṭāb;[73]
and (2) evidence suggesting that in the account of Warrāq, a probable
common source on the Ḫaṭṭābiyya for Ašʿarī
and Nawbaḫtī, those subsects would have been envisaged as already in
existence in the Umayyad period, that is to say, before not after the uprising
of Abū ʾl-Ḫaṭṭāb. That element of the report
(which indicated that the subsects existed in the Umayyad period) would have
had to be suppressed by Nawbaḫtī when he decided to link the two
reports by making the subsects come into existence after the uprising and as a
result of its repudiation by Ǧaʿfar al-Ṣādiq. [74]
II. The Ḫaṭṭābiyya in
Section B
The description of the Ḫaṭṭābiyya
in this section occurs in the part that deals
with six sects that allegedly arose after the death of Ǧaʿfar al-Ṣādiq. The second
of these is said to have been the Ismāʿīliyya who denied
Ismāʿīl’s death during his father’s lifetime and continued to
expect his return as the Qāʾim. Two passages later, and after the
description of the third sect, the Mubārakiyya, the author goes on to
identify the Ismāʿīliyya as the Ḫaṭṭābiyya
and to report on their activities during the lifetime of al-Ṣādiq.[75]
The following are partial translations of the three relevant passages, which
are here divided into numbered paragraphs for [35] ease of reference.
Bi: The Pure Ismāʿīliyya
1. One group
claimed that the imām after Ǧaʿfar was his son Ismāʿīl
and denied Ismāʿīl’s death in his father’s lifetime.
2. They said
that this (Ismāʿīl’s disappearance) had been a case of
deliberately misleading the people on the part of his father because he was
afraid [for his safety], so he hid him from them (ġayyabahu ʿanhum).
3. They claimed
that Ismāʿīl will not die until he rules the earth and assumes
the task of governing people (yaqūm
bi-amr al-nās), and that he is the Qāʾim.
4. . . . this
is because his father had designated him as his successor for the imāmate
and entrusted them (his followers) with this designation and informed them that
he (Ismāʿīl) was his (their?) ṣāḥib. And the imām speaks only the truth, so
when his (Ismāʿīl’s) death was proclaimed, we knew that (Ǧaʿfar)
had told the truth and that (Ismāʿīl) was the Qāʾim and
had not died. . . .
5. This sect
is the Pure Ismāʿīliyya.
Bii: The Mubārakiyya.
A third sect
claimed that the imām after Ǧaʿfar is Muḥammad b.
Ismāʿīl. and said that the appointment (the matter) had
pertained to Ismāʿīl during his father’s lifetime, so when he
died before his father Ǧaʿfar, the latter appointed Muḥammad b.
Ismāʿīl. . . . The advocates of this teaching are
called the Mubārakiyya.
Biii: The Ismāʿīliyya/Ḫaṭṭābiyya.
1. As for the
Ismāʿīliyya, they are the Ḫaṭṭābiyya, the
companions of Abū ʾl-Ḫaṭṭāb Muḥammad b.
Abī Zaynab.
2. One group
of them entered the group of Muḥammad b. Ismāʿīl (i.e.,
the Mubārakiyya) and [like them] acknowledged the death of Ismāʿīl
in his father’s lifetime.
3. They (the Ḫaṭṭābiyya)
were those who revolted during the lifetime of Ǧaʿfar and fought ʿĪsā
b. Mūsā, the governor of Kūfa.
4. It reached
him about them that they had manifested libertinism and called (the people) to
(recognize) the prophethood of (daʿaw
ilā nubuwwat) Abū ʾl-Ḫaṭṭāb, and that
they were gathered in the mosque in Kūfa. . . .
5. So he
dispatched (a force) to deal with him (them?), but they fought him and resisted
him. They were seventy men.
6. He killed
them all except one who escaped. (The man) was wounded but was counted among the dead and so was saved. He
used to claim that he had died and come back to life.
7. They fought
ʿĪsā hard with stones, sticks, and knives. . . . Abū ʾl-Ḫaṭṭāb
said to them: “Fight them, for your sticks work on them like spears and swords
and their spears and swords will not harm you”.
8. When about
thirty of them had been killed they said to him (Abū ʾl-Ḫaṭṭāb):
“Do you not see what these people are inflicting upon us and that our [36] sticks do not affect them?” . . . He
said to them: “It is not my fault that God has changed his will (badāʾ) concerning you”.
9. Abū ʾl-Ḫattāb
and a group of them were taken prisoner . . . and burnt, . . . and their heads
sent to al-Manṣūr.
10. Some of
his companions said that he was not killed nor were any of his companions killed, rather the qawm (non-Šīʿite opponents) were confused.
[They also said that] they (the rebels) had fought at the orders of Ǧaʿfar;
that (when) they left the mosque, no one saw them and none of them was wounded;
and that the qawm started to kill one
another thinking that they were killing the companions of Abū ʾl-Ḫaṭṭāb.
. . .
11. They were
those who taught that Abū ʾl-Ḫaṭṭāb was a
messenger-prophet sent by Ǧaʿfar and that later, after the occurrence of
this matter, he (Ǧaʿfar)
made him into one of the angels. . . .
12. Then, after the killing of
Abū ʾl-Ḫaṭṭāb, those of the people of
Kūfa and others who advocated his doctrine went over to (ḫaraǧū ilā) Muḥammad
b. Ismāʿīl and advocated his imāmate and upheld it.
When Madelung examined these texts he
expressed the opinion that it is not certain that the description of the splits
after the death of al-Ṣādiq, including that of the Ismāʿīlī
sects, is based on Hišām, and that here too Nawbaḫtī may
have been following Warrāq who was a common source for him and Ašʿarī.[76]
Madelung’s view is based on the observation that there is confusion in the
names of the Ismāʿīlī sects,[77]
which, as he says, could not have come from someone who had played such an
important role in the events after al-Ṣādiq’s death.[78]
However, as Madelung himself observed, Nawbaḫtī not only inserted a
recent report on the movement of the Qarāmiṭa, but also attempted to
show the dependence of this movement on the Ḫaṭṭābiyya.
Hence, any confusion in names is likely to [37] have been caused by Nawbaḫtī’s
tampering with the text of his source. As we shall see in the analysis below,
when the text is restored to its probable original contents, the discrepancies
are resolved and the nature of the link that
Hišām had proposed as having existed between the Ḫaṭṭābiyya
and the Ismāʿīliyya becomes clear. There is also the fact that
this description of the Ḫaṭṭābiyya conforms in method
and style to the rest of sections A and B. The narrative components which
supplement statements describing the beliefs and loyalties of the sectaries are
a recurring feature in those sections.[79]
It is also typical of the method of the author of A and B to introduce
information about the founder of a sect and about claims that he made during
the lifetime of a particular imām only when he comes to describe the
beliefs and allegiances of the founder’s followers after the death of that
imām.[80] For all
these reasons, and others that we shall come across later, I take it that
Hišām’s authorship of the three passages is not in doubt.
In passage Biii the messianic character
of the movement led by Abū ʾl-Ḫaṭṭāb is
unmistakable. Its members fight with stones and wooden weapons and believe that
in their hands they are as effective as swords and spears (7). They believe in the raǧʿa, or return to life, of Šīʿite
martyrs (6). The belief in badāʾ
(8) is closely associated with Šīʿite messianism.[81]
The idea that the participants experienced docetic transformation and a
miraculous escape is also meant to convey an apocalyptic setting (10).
The other beliefs ascribed to Abū ʾl-Ḫaṭṭāb
and his followers serve to show them as ġulāt
of the esoteric/gnostic type. These are: ibāḥa
(4), the divinity of Ǧaʿfar (implied in the idea that he elevated
Abū ʾl-Ḫaṭṭāb to angelic status) and the
prophethoood of Abū ʾl-Ḫaṭṭāb, and beliefs
concerning the ascent or transfer of the soul (11). As we shall see below, the
relevant statements are not part of the original text but the product of
conscious updating by Nawbaḫtī.
Comparison of Biii with the other two
passages (Bi, Bii) reveals a number of discrepancies and clues indicating where
Biii has undergone [38] revisions
and alterations. Firstly, at the beginning of Biii we are told that “one group”
of the Ḫaṭṭābiyya/Ismāʿīliyya left the
belief in Ismāʿīl and joined (daḫala fī) the group of Muḥammad b. Ismāʿīl
(Biii, 2), whereas at the end we find that after the killing of Abū ʾl-Ḫaṭṭāb
“all the Kūfans and others who advocated
his doctrine” went over to (ḫaraǧū
ilā) Muḥammad b.
Ismāʿīl (Biii, 12). Secondly, and contrary to what we expect to
find, there is nothing in the rest of the passage to suggest that Ismāʿīl occupied a place in the
doctrines of Abū ʾl-Ḫaṭṭāb or of the Ḫaṭṭābiyya
after Abū ʾl-Ḫaṭṭāb’s death: the aim of the
uprising is said to have been “to call to the prophethood of Abū ʾl-Ḫaṭṭāb”
(Biii, 4); and when we are told that after
his death his followers “went over to Muḥammad b. Ismāʿīl”
the implication is that they abandoned the belief in Abū ʾl-Ḫaṭṭāb
not in Ismāʿīl. These two statements make nonsense of the idea
that the Ḫaṭṭābiyya are identical with the Ismāʿīliyya
(Biii, 1). For according to the description of the Ismāʿīliyya
in the first passage (Bi), they believed that Ismāʿīl (not Muḥammad
b. Ismāʿīl) was the next imām after Ǧaʿfar, and
after his “disappearance” they expected that he would return as the Mahdī
and did not recognize any other imām.
III. Reconstruction of Hišām’s
Account
If we make four small amendments we end
up with a much more coherent (though not
necessarily a historical) description of the Ḫaṭṭābiyya and of how they came to be identified as Ismāʿīliyya,
and the intentions of the original author become clearer and make more sense:
1. Abū ʾl-Ḫaṭṭāb and his followers “called the people to
recognize Ǧaʿfar”, not “to recognize the prophethood of
Abū ʾl-Ḫaṭṭāb”.
2. Ǧaʿfar reacted by dissociating himself (barāʾa) from them. The idea is absent from our
present text but, as we shall see, it is likely to have been removed in the
course of redaction.
3. After the execution of Abū ʾl-Ḫaṭṭāb,
the Kūfan and other Ḫaṭṭābīs “went over to
Ismāʿīl”, not “to Muḥammad b. Ismāʿīl”.
4. The two statements regarding the preaching of antinomianism by Abū ʾl-Ḫaṭṭāb and his companions, the Ḫaṭṭābiyya’s
deification of Ǧaʿfar, and their belief that the latter
elevated Abū ʾl-Ḫaṭṭāb to the rank of angels
are not part of the original text.
According to this reconstruction,
Abū ʾl-Ḫaṭṭāb himself would have had nothing
to do with Ismāʿīl,[82]
and his call to the people to recognize Ǧaʿfar would have probably
signified that he regarded him as the ʿAlid Mahdī.[83]
[39] Ǧaʿfar
would have denied that he was the Mahdī and dissociated himself from
Abū ʾl-Ḫaṭṭāb. After the death of Abū ʾl-Ḫaṭṭāb
those who had supported his call to
Ǧaʿfar would have “gone over to Ismāʿīl”, that is to
say, they would have abandoned their belief in Ǧaʿfar as the Mahdi
and turned their messianic expectations to Ismāʿīl. The reason
for this switch would have been that when they heard that Ǧaʿfar had
denied he was the Mahdī and dissociated himself from Abū ʾl-Ḫaṭṭāb
and his uprising, they interpreted this as being based on his belief that
Ismāʿīl, and not he himself, was going to be the Mahdī.
This reconstruction of the text of Biii
fits in with the events and chronology indicated in the passage on the
Ismāʿīliyya, where it is claimed that Ǧaʿfar pointed
to Ismāʿīl as ṣāḥibuhu(m),
i.e., as the Mahdī,[84]
when Ismāʿīl was still alive (Bi, 4). And when Ismāʿīl
died (during the lifetime of Ǧaʿfar and presumably after the
Kūfan uprising and the killing of Abū ʾl-Ḫaṭṭāb),
they denied his death and expected his reappearance (Bi, 3). They (or most of
them) continued to hold such beliefs, that is, to be Pure Ismāʿīlīs,
after the death of Ǧaʿfar (Bi, 1, 5), while some of them joined the
Mubārakiyya, the firqa of Muḥammad
b. Ismāʿīl (Bii; Biii, 2). There is no other way in which the
identification of the Ismāʿīliyya with the Ḫaṭṭābiyya
would make sense, or in which the whole passage under consideration could be
read as a coherent account.
Other pieces of evidence would seem to
support this reconstruction. The idea that at the time of the uprising Abū
ʾl-Ḫaṭṭāb and his party were calling the people to
recognize Ǧaʿfar and that Ǧaʿfar reacted by disavowing them
is found in the parallel passage of Kitāb
al-Zīna of Abū Ḥātim al-Rāzī.[85]
Rāzī is often a summary of Nawbaḫtī, but he must have [40] had access to early traditions which
preserved the link between the uprising (and the ideology behind it) and “the
disavowal”. The link is also indirectly
reflected in an additional passage in Saʿd al-Qummī’s parallel
description of the Ḫaṭṭābiyya.[86]
And although the idea of disavowal by Ǧaʿfar is not in our text Biii,
it is nevertheless reflected in the claim (or reaction) of some members of the Ḫaṭṭābiyya
that Abū ʾl-Ḫaṭṭāb and his party “had fought
at the orders of Ǧaʿfar” (Biii, 10).
That the identification of the Ḫaṭṭābiyya
as Ismāʿīliyya had already been made by Hišām (and was
not invented by Nawbaḫtī) would seem to be confirmed by the fact
that the same identification is found in pseudo-Nāšiʾ.[87]
As for the idea of a link between the Ismāʿīliyya and the
Mubārakiyya, or that “some of the Ismāʿīliyya later joined
the Mubārakiyya”, presumably after the death of Ǧaʿfar (Biii,
2), it is likely that this too was part of Hišām’s text. According to
Biii, 2, the lapsed Ḫaṭṭābīs/ Ismāʿīlīs abandoned their
messianic doctrine concerning Ismāʿīl and adopted the “imāmī”
doctrine of the Mubārakiyya. This is compatible with the characterization
of the Mubārakiyya in Bii as an “imāmī” and non-messianic sect
and with that of the Ismāʿīliyya in Bi as a messianic sect.
Moreover, it is possible to identify a motive for Hišām’s association
of the Mubārakiyya with the Ismāʿīliyya/Ḫaṭṭābiyya.
According to Imāmī reports, Muḥammad b. Ismāʿīl,
the imām of the Mubārakiyya, contested his brother Mūsā’s
claims and even betrayed him to Hārūn al-Rašīd.[88]
If these reports have any basis in fact, this would have provided
Hišām—an advocate of Mūsā’s imāmate—with a motive to
discredit Muḥammad b. Ismāʿīl and his followers
by giving them a Ḫaṭṭābī heritage and [41] associating them with a discredited
heresiarch.
IV. The Purpose of Nawbaḫtī’s
Editorial Revisions in Biii
The evidence from
the analysis of Nawbaḫtī’s passages on the Ḫaṭṭābiyya
in sections B and G points to an account of a messianic sect by Hišām
linked with difficulty to a very different account of the same sect as gnostic
by Warrāq. The divergent accounts and the internal contradictions and
inconsistencies point to Nawbaḫtī as the editor responsible for
introducing changes and linking the two accounts; they also provide us with
clues to his purpose in doing so.
As we have seen, the changes in Biii
would have resulted in suppressing two ideas: that Abū ʾl-Ḫaṭṭāb
had called the people to recognize Ǧaʿfar, presumably as the
Mahdī, and that after Abū ʾl-Ḫaṭṭāb’s
death and Ǧaʿfar’s disavowal of the claims he had made on his behalf
the Ḫaṭṭābiyya transferred their messianic expectations
to Ismāʿīl. The suppression of
these ideas would have been achieved by making the Ḫaṭṭābiyya
venerate Abū ʾl-Ḫaṭṭāb as a prophet (instead
of Ǧaʿfar as the Mahdī; cf Biii, 4) and Muḥammad b.
Ismāʿīl as the next imām (instead of Ismāʿīl
as the Mahdī; cf. Biii, 12). This suggests that the problem for Nawbaḫtī
would have been that his source had appeared to condemn Abū ʾl-Ḫaṭṭāb
and the Ḫaṭṭābiyya for having attached their messianic
hopes on living imāms (first Ǧaʿfar, later Ismāʿīl).
Unlike Hišām, who would have been critical of all forms of
messianism, Nawbaḫtī, who was writing in the early post-ġayba period, could not be seen to
be critical of that particular kind of messianic belief.
As for the statements that portray
Abū ʾl-Ḫaṭṭāb and his followers as gnostics,
and that clearly stand out as intrusive in an account occupied with the sect’s
messianic beliefs, Nawbaḫtī would have introduced them here in order
to establish some correspondence between this account (in section B) and the description of the sect in
section G. Consider the statement in Biii, 11, that the
Ḫaṭṭābiyya were “those who taught that Abū ʾl-Ḫaṭṭāb
had been a messenger-prophet, sent by Ǧaʿfar, and that later, after
the occurrence of this matter (viz., after his execution), he (Ǧaʿfar)
made him into one of the angels”. It is clearly a later addition and reflects
an attempt by Nawbaḫtī to link the sect’s messianic belief in the raǧʿa of Abū ʾl-Ḫaṭṭāb
and his companions (Biii, 6, 10) to the gnostic doctrine of ḥulūl/tanāsuḫ and
speculations on the spiritual ranks of their leaders,[89]
ascribed to the subsects of the Ḫaṭṭābiyya in section G.[90]
[42] The artificial
nature of this link is indicated by the fact that in passage B it is still
clear that raǧʿa is
conceived as return from the dead and in the same body, and not as tanāsuḫ or ḥulūl: in Biii, 6, raǧʿa is return from “real”
death, and the concept of “apparent or docetic” death (such as that of Abū
ʾl-Ḫaṭṭāb and his companions in Biii, 10) always
occurs in connection with raǧʿa, not tanāsuḫ. The Ḫaṭṭābiyya’s
deification of al-Ṣādiq, implied in the claim that he
dispatched Abū ʾl-Ḫaṭṭāb as a rasūl and later elevated him to
angelic status, is also clearly out of place in Biii and in all probability was suggested to Nawbaḫtī by section G, where it appears as a
basic component of the sect’s gnostic ġuluww.
Finally, the removal from Biii of the
idea that Abū ʾl-Ḫaṭṭāb and his companions
were repudiated by Ǧaʿfar, and its use in the opening statement of
the passage on the Ḫaṭṭābiyya in section G, would have
helped to create the impression that the repudiation of Abū ʾl-Ḫaṭṭāb
and the Ḫaṭṭābiyya was mainly on account of their
preaching of gnosticism. I am not suggesting here that Nawbaḫtī
would have had reason to eliminate the idea that Ǧaʿfar repudiated
Abū ʾl-Ḫaṭṭāb at the time of the uprising. On the contrary, this idea may have
been simply obscured by his attempt to make their “repudiation by Ǧaʿfar”
appear to be on account of their teaching of an esoteric doctrine and the cause
of the divisions described in G; by moving the “repudiation” statement from B
to G his aim would have been to link two completely different descriptions of
the sect, which he derived from different sources, and to provide an
explanation for the classification of the Ḫaṭṭābiyya in
G into a number of sects. The link he sought to establish would have been that
the uprising of Abū ʾl-Ḫaṭṭāb and his
companions was motivated by the aim of preaching a (gnostic) ġuluww doctrine centered on Ǧaʿfar
and Abū ʾl-Ḫaṭṭāb (B), that Ǧaʿfar
reacted by repudiating them (which is implicit in B and clearly stated in G),
and that this resulted in divisions and the formation of subsects (G).[91]
[43] To sum up the results of the analysis.
Shorn of Nawbaḫtī’s additions and alterations, the passage indicates
that in Hišām’s view the deviance of Abū ʾl-Ḫaṭṭāb
and the Ḫaṭṭābiyya lay mainly in their messianism. This
messianism was conceived as having entailed a conviction that ḫurūǧ and shedding blood
on behalf of the Mahdī was licit, a belief in badāʾ, and a belief in the docetic death and return/raǧʿa of those martyred in the Šīʿite cause and (later) of the
Mahdī Ismāʿīl himself. The analysis also shows that Hišām identified the
messianist Ismāʿīliyya as Ḫaṭṭābiyya,
in the sense of one-time followers of Abū ʾl-Ḫaṭṭāb
and his doctrine of the mahdiship of Ǧaʿfar, who adopted the belief
in the mahdiship of Ismāʿīl after
the killing of Abū ʾl-Ḫaṭṭāb and Ǧaʿfar’s
disavowal of the latter. According to Hišām’s account, Abū ʾl-Ḫaṭṭāb’s
own messianic doctrine and uprising had nothing to do with Ismāʿīl.
He also identified the “imāmī”
Mubārakiyya as consisting partly of former members of the Ismāʿīliyya.
More significantly, the analysis shows that Hišām’s account would not
have included any references to esoteric doctrines in the circle of Abū ʾl-Ḫaṭṭāb
and his followers, either before or after the latter’s death.
Other
Arguments against Hišām as the Source of Section G
From the foregoing it is clear that
comparison of this reconstructed description of the Ḫaṭṭābiyya
in section B with the description of the sect in section G reveals the
existence of pronounced differences between the two and strong evidence of
editorial revision in B. Similar conclusions could be reached by analysing the
other passages on second-century groups, as we have seen from our brief
examination of the passages on the Muġīriyya, the Ḥārithiyya
and the Rāwandiyya. The nature of the divergences in the characterizations
of each of those sects is such that it [44] raises serious doubts about
Hišām’s authorship of a separate section on the ġulāt.
It might be objected that the editorial
revisions and the divergent accounts do not in themselves exclude the
possibility that section G had formed part of Hišām’s work. For,
theoretically speaking, it is possible, firstly, that the divergent accounts—the
“messianic” and the “gnostic”—represented the beliefs of different groups
within second-century Šīʿite sects or two phases in the
development of those sects,[92]
and, secondly, that section G was compiled by Hišām from other
sources[93]
and incorporated into his work at a later stage, in which case he (and not
Nawbaḫtī) would be responsible for most of the editorial changes and
updating that we have detected in sections A and B.[94]
However, the fact remains that our sources are not at all aware of the
existence of such phases in the lives of those sects or of any such doctrinal
divergences at any one time among members of the same sect. And the second
possibility would only be valid on the further (and unlikely) assumption that
when Hišām first composed his work
gnostic doctrines had already existed among the mahdist sects that he
described but he was not yet aware of their existence.
We could, alternatively, start from the
assumption that gnostic ġuluww
had already fused with messianic ideas and that all this information had been
available to Hišām all along. But if this were the case, he would
have had no reason to resort to this dual treatment of those sects. From the
introductory passage of his work it is clear that Hišām intended to
follow a certain organizing pattern, namely, the order of succession of the
imāms. His stated aim was to record the divergent views of the sects of
the community on the question of the imāmate, the views that arose “in
every age and in the time of each imām, after his death and during his
lifetime”.[95] He
would occasionally digress in order to elaborate on one [45] of the groups he treated earlier, or to
discuss further divisions, but he would soon go back to where he left off. Had
all this material on gnostic ġuluww
been available to him, and as part of the tradition on the second-century
messianic sects, we would expect to find it incorporated in the appropriate
chronological passages and not in a separate section. And we would not expect
to find the sort of revisions that exist in our present text (A and B). In short, the usual dating for the
emergence of Šīʿite gnosticism and the suggestion that
section G comes from Hišām fail to account for the structural and
other features of Nawbaḫtī’s work—for the divergent treatments of
sects, for the disjointed sections, and especially for the editorial changes in A and B; whereas a later dating for its
emergence and for the literature describing it would.
A notable fact in this respect is that
it was only in the third/ninth century, i.e., after Hišām’s time,
that there began to appear works by Imāmī scholars, devoted to
refuting the doctrines of the ġulāt
(al-radd ʿalā al-ġulāt).
The list compiled by al-Qāḍī of seventeen Šīʿite
authors named in Imāmī sources as having written such works points to
the first half of the third century as the period of such activity.[96]
This provides an indication that the incorporation in firaq works of separate sections on the ġulāt is unlikely to have occurred earlier;[97]
both would have been a response to the same
phenomenon, namely, the spread of gnostic ġuluww. Moreover, the likelihood that Hišām did not
compose a separate section on gnostic ġuluww
(and was not aware of its existence among Šīʿites) would seem to
be indirectly confirmed by the fact that there are [46] virtually no
references to him as having been involved in polemics against its Šīʿite
adherents. He is nowhere said to have written a radd ʿalā al-ġulāt and, as far as I know, none
of the traditions and biographical reports in which he figures shows him as
having disputed with Šīʿite gnostics or refuted their doctrines.[98]
The tradition, on the other hand, does have some recollection of him as an
anti-messianist. A report in Kaššī refers to him as someone who
would have dismissed Šīʿite apocalypticism as mere fables.[99]
Other
Early Sources on Šīʿism
It must be significant in the present
context that none of the early (i.e., pre-third century) sources on
Šīʿism seems to be aware of the existence of gnostic beliefs
among its adherents. In the doctrinal epistles such as the Kitāb al-irǧāʾ, the sermon of Abū Ḥamza
al-Ḫāriǧī, and Sīrat
Sālim, which have been dated to the second half of the second century
at the latest,[100]
and sections of which engage in polemics against the Šīʿa, there
are a number of references to Šīʿite messianism but none to
specifically gnostic beliefs.[101]
In the Šīʿite poetry of
Kuthayyir (d. 105/723), Abū ʾl-Ṭufayl (d. before [47] 110/728), al-Sayyid al-Himyarī (d.
173/789),[102] and
al-Kumayt al-Asadī (d. 126/744),[103]
we encounter messianic concepts and imagery,[104]
but there is no hint of an esoteric doctrine in the thoughts or sentiments that
they express or in the beliefs of Šīʿite opponents whom they
attack.[105] In the
lines of Maʿdān al-Šumayṭī (d. after 169/786),[106]
who attacks Šīʿite opponents including groups and individuals
identified elsewhere as ġulāt,[107]
there are references to their murderous practices and advocacy of activist
politics but hardly anything which may be interpreted
as evidence of esoteric beliefs among them. Maʿdān also speaks
of his own imām Muḥammad b. Ǧaʿfar al-Ṣādiq in
terms that are clearly messianist.[108]
Thus, when al-Ǧāḥiẓ
(d. 255/869) speaks of al-Kumayt as a Šīʿī
min [48] al-ġāliya, he probably has in mind his (supposed)
belief in the ġayba and raǧʿa of Ibn al-Ḥanafiyya.[109]
The same would apply to Kuthayyir, who is described as ġālī fī ʾl-tašayyuʿ ʿalā
maḏhab al-kaysāniyya and as a believer in raǧʿa and tanāsuḫ.[110]
The reference would be to his messianic beliefs, which are well attested in his
poetry.[111] As for
his alleged belief in tanāsuḫ,
this is probably a later ascription. We have seen above that the gnostic ġulāt were said to have
interpreted the doctrine of raǧʿa
as tanāsuḫ.[112]
So it is not difficult to see how Kuthayyir’s messianic doctrine of raǧʿa could have come to be
reported in later sources as a belief not only in raǧʿa but also in
tanāsuḫ.
Some of the datable early material, such
as brief references to Šīʿite beliefs and concepts in poetry and
in titles of works no longer extant, might be, and in some cases has been, interpreted
as evidence of the existence [49] of gnostic tendencies among
second-century Šīʿites. However, upon closer examination this
material turns out to be either too unspecific
to be of any value or open to other interpretations. Thus, when Hārūn b. Saʿd al-ʿIǧlī, reputed to have been a Zaydī and an
active supporter of the uprising of al-Nafs al-Zakiyya, attacks in his
poetry Rāfiḍītes, “some of whom believe that Ǧaʿfar
is an imām and others that he is an impeccable prophet”, and refers to
their claim that they have the ǧafr,[113] the reference is probably to those who looked to Ǧaʿfar as a messianic figure (a priest-
or a prophet-messiah) and believed that he had knowledge of an apocalyptic
nature, not gnosis.[114]
Also of debatable significance in this
regard is the report that Ḍirār b. ʿAmr (d. 194/809), a
contemporary of Hišām b. al-Ḥakam, composed a work against the
Muġīriyya and the Manṣūriyya criticizing their belief that
“the earth will never be devoid of a nabī”[115]
References to this belief [50] in connection with gnostic ġuluww are very rare but they do
exist.[116]
Nevertheless, on its own the statement does not tell us anything specific about
Ḍirār’s conception of the system of ideas that those groups adhered
to or how they perceived the role of a prophet.[117]
In the reports on Abū Manṣūr and the Manṣūriyya and
al-Muġīra and the Muġīriyya there are many inconsistent
statements on their conceptions of the imāmate, none of which can be said
to correspond closely to the idea that “the earth will never be devoid of a
prophet”.[118] What
early characterizations of them have in common are references to their
messianism and the corollary that “prophecy does not come to an end” or, as
Abū Manṣūr is alleged to have put it, that “God’s messengers
never come to an end”.[119]
This is not necessarily the same thing as “continuous
uninterrupted [51] prophecy” or as the ḥuǧǧa
(divine proof) doctrine, which probably
originated as a gnostic doctrine.[120]
Nor is it a close parallel to the Clementine doctrine of the “true Prophet” who
appears in various ages under different names and forms.[121]
It is rather the antithesis of the orthodox doctrine of “the last prophet” and
an expression of the belief that God will continue to send prophets (or
saviours) to mankind, not that prophets will
necessarily succeed one another in an uninterrrupted manner. One can see
though that the two slogans could easily have been construed as references to
the same doctrine and came to be used interchangeably. This leads one to
suspect that the title given by Ibn al-Nadīm may not be the exact original
or may be an inaccurate description of the subject matter of the work, and that
Ḍirār’s polemic was directed against the messianism of those sects.[122]
A critical view of messianism, on the grounds that it undermined the doctrine
of “the last prophet”, would have reflected the attitude of many in scholarly
circles, both Šīʿite and non-Šīʿite. As we have
seen, a similar attitude pervaded the work of Hišām.
Retrospective
Ascription and the Formation of the Tradition on Gnostic Ġuluww in the Second Century
What remains to be explained is how and
why gnostic doctrines came to be ascribed to
second-century individuals and groups. A process along [52] the following lines would be both
plausible and consistent with much of the
available evidence. When in the early third century (or possibly
slightly earlier) gnostic doctrines began to be preached in Šīʿite
circles there would have been a tendency to ascribe them to al-Bāqir or
al-Ṣādiq rather than to a current imām. As we have seen, the
extant works which preserve the gnostic traditions of the ġulāt themselves, and which, according to Halm, were
probably composed in the third century, trace these traditions to al-Bāqir
and al-Ṣādiq and some of their well known disciples.[123]
These two imams were widely recognized for their contribution to the
Šīʿī religious tradition, as evidenced by the fact that the
bulk of Imāmī ḥadīṯ
is related on their authority.[124]
The later imāms do not appear to have enjoyed the same status or wide
recognition,[125] and
hence the teaching of gnostic ideas in their name would not have carried the
same authority. Moreover, a current imām might publicly dissociate himself
from such doctrines and those spreading them.
Those opposed to the gnosticizing
tendencies would have reacted by circulating traditions on the authority of
these (and later) imāms denying that they (or their predecessors) ever
taught or condoned such doctrines. But in circumstances where the beliefs of
the gnostic ġulāt were
catching on, a more effective way of dissociating Imāmism from these
teachings would have been to ascribe them to discredited disciples and other Šīʿites. Figures such as Bayān,
Abū ʾl-Ḫaṭṭāb, Muġīra, and Ibn al-Ḥārith/Ḥarb would have already come to be regarded by moderate
Imāmīs as heretical Šīʿites or seceders from
Imāmism and as having been repudiated by al-Bāqir and al-Ṣādiq—this
being on account of their activism or messianism or on account of their support
of other ʿAlids, as we have seen from our reconstructions of
Hišām’s work. Hence, they could easily be cast as bearers of all
forms of ġuluww. In other words,
the Imāmī legalists/moderates would have responded to the attempts of
[53] gnosticizers
to attach themselves to Imāmism (or to trace their doctrines to an
Imāmī imām)[126]
by showing that this kind of belief was spread by Šīʿite
heretics and not by the imāms themselves or by their trusted disciples.
Thus, for example, where Nawbaḫtī (or his third-century source)
assigns a role to the followers of ʿAbdallāh b. Muʿāwiya in
the origination of (gnostic) ġuluww
and accuses them of having falsely attributed its teaching to the followers of the Imāmī imāms, this would
not be a statement of historical fact but a reflection of the process
envisaged here, namely, that third-century
polemics between legalists/moderates and gnostics/extremists were
projected into the past and that one of the ways in which the moderates sought
to dissociate Imāmism from ġuluww
was to attribute it to early Šīʿites who were known to have been
followers of “non-Imāmī” imāms. By the same token, when a
certain Ibrāhīm b. Abī Ḥafṣ al-Kātib, a
disciple of the eleventh imām, composed a Radd ʿalā al-ġāliya wa-abī al-ḫaṭṭāb
wa-aṣḥābihi[127]
almost a hundred years after the death of Abū ʾl-Ḫaṭṭāb,
the aim would have been to distance Imāmism from gnostic teachings and to
discredit them by associating them with a repudiated heretic from the past.[128]
Another factor in the tendency to
asccribe gnostic ġuluww to past figures
[54] and groups
might have been a reluctance on the part of Imāmī (and perhaps other)
polemicists and heresiographers to name the contemporary ġulāt and the imām(s) at the center of their
speculations and thereby to endanger their lives. Judging by the evidence of
the heresiographical tradition, third-century ġulāt do not begin to be named or dealt with until later
in the century. None of those later groups or figures appears in the accounts
of pseudo-Nāšiʾ or Warrāq (as preserved in Ašʿarī),[129]
both of whom are likely to have relied on Imāmī sources and may have
shared their reluctance to name the contemporary ġulāt.[130]
It is from Nawbaḫtī, who was writing shortly before 286/899,[131]
that we first get to hear about the Namīriyya/Nuṣayriyya whose ġuluww was allegedly centered on
the tenth imām ʿAlī al-Hādī (220/835–254/868) during
his lifetime.[132] The Namīriyya is in fact the only group of ġulāt that he mentions as
supporters of an Imāmī imām in his description of the divisions
that occurred between the death of al-Riḍā and the disappearance of
the twelfth imām. But this cannot have been right. An examination of
Imāmī biographical sources suggests that there were many more ġulāt who professed allegiance
to an imām from among the descendants of al-Riḍā.[133]
This belated attestation of the identities and allegiances of the gnosticizers
of the first half of the third/ninth century would be consistent with the
suggestion that contemporary Imāmīs preferred to conduct their war on
ġuluww in the past.
As for the tradition on gnostic ġuluww among the ʿAbbāsid
Šīʿa in the second century, this too would have been
retrospective and the product of similar circumstances, except that here Muʿtazilite
and proto-Sunnī scholars are likely to have played the main role in the formation
of the heresiographical tradition, and the circumstances in question would have
been that gnostic currents in the Iranian world were beginning to be [55] Islamized and their doctrines attributed
to a ʿAbbāsid imām and other revered figures from the past such
as Abū Muslim.[134]
In his account of the ʿAbbāsid Šīʿa,
pseudo-Nāšiʾ speaks of the Ḫurramiyya (neo-Mazdakites)[135]
of Ḫurāsān and Ǧibāl in his own time (“today”). These
are said to trace their doctrines to the ʿAbbāsid Muḥammad b. ʿAlī
and the dāʿīs Abū
Muslim and Ḫidāš (ʿAmmār or ʿUmāra b.
Yazīd) and claim that the imāmate had passed to
non-Hāšimites. Most of their current imāms are said to be ʿaǧam and the Arabs among them non-Hāšimites.
Pseudo-Nāšiʾ also relates a story which serves to show
that Muḥammad b. ʿAlī himself had nothing to do with ġuluww: it was preached in his name
by Ḫidāš whilst acting as his dāʿī in Ḫurāsān, and when Muḥammad
learnt of it he cursed and repudiated (barāʾa)
the latter.[136] The
pattern he follows is a familiar one: Ḫidāš, who had already
been identified as a deviant dāʿī
in pro-ʿAbbāsid accounts, is now said to have been repudiated by the
imām for preaching Ḫurramī doctrines.[137]
[56] Examination of
pseudo-Nāšiʾ’s description of the Hurayriyya/ Rāwandiyya (followers of Abū
Hurayra al-Rāwandī) and the related group the Rizāmiyya,[138]
and comparison with other characterizations of the sect in some of the early
sources, could also shed some light on the process whereby gnostic ġuluww came to be ascribed to
second-century supporters of the ʿAbbāsids. It is noteworthy that
whereas Nawbaḫtī uses the term Rāwandiyya as the generic name
of the ʿAbbāsid Šīʿa and as synonymous with (gnostic) ġuluww,[139] pseudo-Nāšiʾ classifies the
Rāwandiyya (he actually uses the name Hurayriyya) as a subsect of the ʿAbbāsiyya
and does not label them as ġulāt,
nor does he ascribe to them any doctrines that may be identified as gnostic. In
his account the Hurayriyya are said to have advocated the idea of a pure ʿAbbāsid
line of imāms and the Rizāmiyya among them are credited with a
doctrine of the imām’s knowledge that is rather moderate by Šīʿite
standards: they regarded the ʿAbbāsid imām as an arbiter whose
opinion must be sought [57] in the event of disagreement (iḫtilāf ) in religious matters, and they
believed that his decisions would be infallible by virtue of his receipt of
divine inspiration (ilhām) of an
ad hoc nature.[140]
Here, as in his passages on the ʿAbbāsid
ġulāt (the Ḫurramiyya),
there is a good indication that pseudo-Nāšiʾ is referrring to
doctrines that were current in his time (or, as he would have seen it, that
were still current in his time).[141]
Moreover, there is reason to believe that his concern with the exact definition
and nature of the ʿAbbāsid imām’s ilhām, as conceived by the Hurayriyya, reflects the existence
of current debates on the subject; those debates would have been triggered by
al-Maʾmūn’s miḥna and
his attempts to impose his religious authority on the scholars.
Pseudo-Nāšiʾ, who was probably writing during or shortly after
the reign of al-Maʾmūn and had close relations with the ʿAbbāsid
court,[142] would
have been familiar with, and perhaps a participant in, those debates. It is
true that al-Maʾmūn is only very rarely credited with ilhām,[143]
and we do not hear of scholars who adovcated this particular kind of belief
about the role of the caliph (i.e., that of arbiter whose decisions are
infallible and divinely inspired).[144]
But this does not mean that scholars with such [58] a view did not exist. Al-Maʾmūn
had his supporters among Muʿtazilīs and Ḥanafīs,[145]
hence it is not unlikely that some of them would have approved of the role that
he envisaged for the caliphate and even adduced the doctrine of ilhām in order to justify the
caliph’s decision to impose his authority.[146]
We may also assume that those who opposed al-Maʾmūn’s religious
policy would have had to deny that he had ilhām.
Pseudo-Nāši’s account also
suggests that those ʿAbbāsid “imāmīs” who advocated ilhām tried to distance themselves
from any association with the Rāwandiyya, who were known in the tradition
as fanatical supporters of al-Manṣūr and his son al-Mahdī and,
like themselves, as advocates of the idea of a pure ʿAbbāsid line.
The apparent preference for the name “Hurayriyya” and the explanation that they
originated in the reign of al-Mahdī (not in that of al-Manṣūr),
when Abū Hurayra al-Rāwandī (not ʿAbdallāh
al-Rāwandī) put forward his idea of a “pure ʿAbbāsid line”
(and, presumably, Rizām his doctrine of the imām’s knowledge), seem
to reflect an attempt by them to set the record straight and to refute the
charge that their doctrine is rooted in ġuluww.[147]
Moreover, the fact that pseudo-Nāšiʾ does not include
Hišām’s (or any) report on al-Manṣūr’s Rāwandiyya may
be explained on the basis that he accepted the assertions of the ʿAbbāsid
“imāmīs” of his time that those who advocated the idea of a “pure ʿAbbāsid”
imāmate and held a moderate view of the imām’s knowledge were not the
ideological successors of the Rāwandiyya.[148]
These assertions would have been made in response to attempts to discredit them
by opponents who disliked the idea of an ʿAbbāsid Šīʿite
imāmate and were opposed to the [59] attempts of al-Maʾmūn and his
successors to assert the religious authority of the caliphate[149]
and, for that reason, would have been inclined to identify and brand the “imāmīs”
as Rāwandīs.
In these polemical
exchanges about the validity of ʿAbbāsid “imāmism” we have a likely context
for the emergence of the material on gnostic ġuluww among the Rāwandiyya in the time of al-Manṣūr[150]
and [60] for the
attempts to locate the origins of Rāwandī ġuluww in the time of the daʿwa
in Ḫurāsān.[151]
This also would have been the time when the name Rāwandiyya began to be
used of the ʿAbbāsid Šīʿa in general. [152]
In short, the material which deals with
gnostic ġuluww among the ʿAbbāsid
Šīʿa at the time of the daʿwa
in Ḫurāsan and among the Rāwandiyya in the time of al-Manṣur
would have originated at about the same time as the Imāmī material on
other second-century groups and owed its existence to similar pressures and
developments; in this case, the tendency of Iranian gnostics to present their
doctrines in Islamic form and to attribute them to earlier Muslim authorities,
the attempts of Muʿtazilite and proto-Sunnī scholars to refute this
gnosticism by attributing it to disobedient and heretical dāʿīs, and the attempts of proto-Sunnīs to
discredit ʿAbbāsid “imāmism” by portraying it as rooted in
gnostic ġuluww.
I would therefore suggest that our
information on gnostic ġuluww
among second-century Šīʿites is not historcial, but is based
ultimately on sources composed in the first half of the third century;
Imāmī sources such as radd ʿalā
al-ġulāt works and works on the imāmate, Muʿtazilī
[61] heresiographies, and Sunnī reports. The wealth of that information,
the differences in detail between one source and another, the contradictory
statements, and the numerous inconsistencies would not have been the result of
multiple eyewitness accounts having undergone a long process of oral
transmission. Rather, this wealth and diversity would have been due to the
creative and selective activities of later scholars who drew on material
created, circulated and published by Imāmīs and others in the early
third century, and who would have had no reason to question the authenticity of
ascription to second-century Šīʿites or the authenticity of the
accounts in general.
* An earlier draft of this paper was presented at a conference of Classical Islamic Studies hosted by the Middle East Center of the University of Pennsylvania, on the theme “ʿIlm and Imāma”, where I benefited from the comments of Michael Cook and the other participants. I have also benefited from the comments of Michael Brett, Patricia Crone, Gerald Hawting, and Christopher Melchert.
[1] For a general introduction to the
subject, see K. Rudolph, Gnosis: The Nature and History of Gnosticism,
translation edited by R. M. Wilson (San Francisco, 1987). The following
articles in the Encyclopedia of Religion,
ed. M. Eliade (New York and London, 1987) are also useful: “Gnosticism”, “Manda
d-Hiia”, “Mandaean Religion”, “Manichaeism”, “Marcionism”. See also the Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics,
ed. J. Hastings (Edinburgh and New York, 1908–1926),
s.vv. “Gnosticism”, “Mandaeans”, “Manichaeism”, “Mazdak”, “Marcionism”.
For a good bibliography see the Oxford
Dictionary of the Christian Church, ed. and rev. F. L. Cross and E. A.
Livingstone (Oxford, 1974), s.v. “Gnosticism”.
[2] This saviour was often Jesus, or
rather the high-ranking celestial being who used him as his instrument in order
to reveal the hidden knowledge; “Gnosticism”, Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics; “Manda d-Hiia”, Encyclopedia of Religion; G. Filoramo, A History of Gnosticism (Cambridge,
Mass., and Oxford, 1990), chap. 7. Other
saviours included Seth, Adam, Enoch, and the Light-Bearer (D. Merkur, Gnosis: An Esoteric Tradition of Mystical
Visions and Unions [Albany, N.Y., 1993]), 125. Some Gnostics adopted the
idea of a saving power of pleromatic origin which assumes various forms
throughout the history of salvation (Filoramo, History, 113).
[3] Filoramo, History, 129–30, 136–37.
[4] Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, s.vv. “Gnosticism”, “Mandaeans”.
[5] Filoramo, History, chap. 11.
[6] For the identification of the
phenomenon of Šīʿī ġuluww
as gnosticism, see H. Halm, Die
islamische Gnosis: Die extreme Schia und die Alawiten (Zurich and Munich, 1982); id., Kosmologie und Heilslehre der frühen Ismāʿīliyya
(
The
question of how much of the beliefs of the ġulāt,
or those ascribed to them, were rooted in ancient gnosticism will not concern
us in this paper. Some of those beliefs and characteristics, which are not
clearly or typically gnostic, may reflect the developments in the period before
the rise of Islam and after gnosticism moved to
[7] In the present state of our
knowledge, the sources of Šīʿite gnosticism are not possible to
identify specifically. The gnosticism that the Muslims encountered would have
been represented by the various schools and sects that are known to have
existed in Iraq and Iran in the pre-Islamic and early Islamic periods and by
other schools that presumably existed but about which little or nothing is
known (Halm, Shiism, 156–57; id., Kosmologie, 123–27). On the Mandaeans in
early Islamic Iraq and
[8] EI2, svv. “al-Mahdī”, “Ghulāt”; M. G. S.
Hodgson, “How Did the Early Šīʿa Become Sectarian?” Journal of the American Oriental Society
75 (1955).
[9] Madelung, “Bemerkungen zur
imamitischen Firaq-Literatur”, Der Islam
43 (1967); W. al-Qāḍī, “The Development of the Term Ghulāt in Muslim Literature with Special Reference to the Kaysāniyya”,
Akten des VII. Kongresses fur Arabistik und Islamwissenschaft, ed. A.
Dietrich (Göttingen, 1976).
[10] Hodgson, “Early Šīʿa”;
al-Qāḍī, “The Term Ghulāt”; Madelung, “Hishām b. al-Ḥakam”;
id., Der Imām al-Qāsim ibn
Ibrāhīm (Berlin, 1965), 46; H. Modarressi, Crisis and Consolidation in the Formative Period of Shīʿite
Islam: Abū Jaʿfar ibn Qiba al-Rāzī and His Contribution to
Imāmite Shīʿite Thought (Princeton, 1993), chap. 2; M. A.
Amir-Moezzi, The Divine Guide in Early
Shiʿism: The Sources of Esotericism in Islam, trans. from French D.
Streight (Albany, N.Y., 1994); T. Bayhom-Daou, “Hishām b. al-Ḥakam
(d. 179/795) and His Doctrine of the Imām’s Knowledge”, Journal of Semitic Studies 48 (2003): 71–108.
[11] For example, al-Ḥasan b.
Mūsā al-Nawbaḫtī, Firaq
al-Šīʿa, ed.
H. Ritter (
[12] Nawbaḫtī, Firaq, 32–42 and passim; Saʿd b. ʿAbdallāh
al-Qummī, Kitāb
al-maqālāt waʾl-firaq, ed. M. J. Maškour (
[13] Nawbaḫtī,
Firaq, 40; Saʿd, Maqālāt, 53, and
60–61, pars. 118–20,
where the belief in question is identified as tafwīḌ and
the reference is to the idea that the supreme God has “delegated” to an
individual being the task of creation of the world. The merging of the figures
of demiurge and saviour is not unknown in classical gnosticism, and in some
systems the saviour is the son of the demiurge (A. F. Segal, Two Powers in Heaven: Early Rabbinic
Reports about Christianity and Gnosticism [Leiden, 1977], 251–52).
[14] For example, Nawbaḫtī, Firaq, 25, 29, 30, 31, 38, 39, 42, and
passim; cf. Hodgson, “Ghulāt”.
[15] For example, Nawbaḫtī, Firaq, 25, 30, 34, 38–41.
[16] For
example, ibid., 19–20 (Sabaʾiyya), 25–29 (Kaysāniyya), 31–32 (Ḥārithiyya),
41–42 (Abū Muslimiyya), 54–55 (Muġīriyya), 57–60
(Nāwūsiyya, Ismāʿīliyya, Mubārakiyya, Ḫaṭṭābiyya,
and so on). See also EI2, s.vv. “al-Mahdī” (Madelung),
“Radjʿa” (Kohlberg).
[17] The sources indicate that ʿAlī
himself was looked upon as an apocalyptic saviour by some of his followers. But
this is unlikely to be historical. The belief that the saviour would be one of
the ahl al-bayt or a descendant of ʿAlī
is first attested for ʿAlī’s son Muḥammad Ibn al-Ḥanafiyya,
who was also the first ʿAlid to be given the epithet al-mahdī (EI2, s.vv. “Kaysāniyya”, “al-Mahdī”).
[18] In later Šīʿism the
fusion of apocalyptic messianism and gnosticism is attested among the early
Ismāʿīlīs of the second half of the third/ninth century (Madelung, “Ismāʿīliyya” in EI2; Halm, “The Cosmology of
the Pre-Fātimid Ismāʿīliyya”, in Mediaeval Ismaʿili History and Thought,
ed. F. Daftary [Cambridge, 1996]).
[19] The most noticeable and significant
differences are in the portrayals of the Ḫaṭṭābiyya and
the Ḥārithiyya; see below.
[20] The need for caution in using the firaq literature has been voiced by a
number of scholars: I. Goldziher in his review of Badr’s edition of Baġdādī’s
Kitāb al-farq bayn al-firaq, in Zeitschrift der Deutschen
Morgenländischen Gesellschaft 65 (1911): 349–63, at 350–51; I.
Friedlander in “The Heterodoxies of the Shiites in the Presentation of Ibn Hazm”,
Journal of the American Oriental Society
28 (1907): 1–80, at 4–9; and, more recently, W. M. Watt, The Formative Period of Islamic Thought (Edinburgh, 1973), 1–6. For
a more serious objection to the uncritical use of this material for
reconstructing the history of the early Islamic sects, and a systematic attempt
at source criticism, see K. Lewinstein, “The Azāriqa in Islamic
heresiography”, Bulletin of the School of
Oriental and African Studies 54 (1991): 251–68. See also my “Hishām b.
al-Ḥakam”.
[21] Hodgson, “Early Shīʿa”,
4–6, 12–13.
[22] Halm, Gnosis, 27–32, 194, 242 and passim. In most other studies this
opinion is usually implicit, rather than stated.
[23] The methodological weaknesses of
this approach will become clear later.
[24] On
Ǧābir and Mufaḍḍal, see Muḥammad b. ʿUmar al-Kaššī, Iḫtiyār maʿrifat al-riǧāl,
ed. H. Mostafavi (Mašhad, 1960), 191–98, 321–29; Aḥmad b. ʿAlī
(Abū ʾl-ʿAbbās) al-Naǧāšī, Kitāb al-riǧāl, ed. Ǧ. D.
al-Ġurawī al-Āmulī (
[25] Halm,
Kosmologie, 142–68;
id., “Das ‘Buch der Schatten’: Die Mufaḍḍal-Tradition der Ġulāt und die Ursprünge
des Nuṣairiertums”, I and II, Der Islam 55 (1978) and 58 (1981); id., Shiism, 156–57.
[26] Madelung, “Bemerkungen”. On the
question of Hišām as a common source for Nawbaḫtī and the
other Imāmī firaq author Saʿd
al-Qummī (d. 301/914) and the relation between their two works, see below.
[27] van
Ess, Häresiographie, 26, 39, 54;
Madelung, “Frühe muʿtazilitsche Häresiographie: Das Kitāb al-Uṣūl des Ǧaʿfar
b. Ḥarb?”, Der Islam 57 (1980):
225.
[28] Bayhom-Daou,
“Hishām b. al-Ḥakam”; cf.
Madelung, “Bemerkungen”, 40–41, 44–45, where he suggests that Nawbaḫtī
preserves Hišām’s text almost intact.
[29] I shall not address here the
question of the historical value of Hišām’s descriptions, or whether
groups such as the Muġīriyya and the Ḥārithiyya were in
reality messianists and held the beliefs that Hišām attributed to
them.
[30] In
his work on the imāmate Hišām portrays true Šīʿism
(i.e., his own Imāmism) as legalist, quietist, anti-messianist, and
doctrinally moderate. He insists that the imām’s role is simply that of
infallible transmitter of the revealed law and that he does not receive any
additional knowledge from divine sources. He
refutes the juridical doctrine of ilhām,
which he associates with the Ǧārūdiyya, and the messianic
doctrine of the muḥaddaṯ,
which he associates with the Kaysāniyya (Bayhom-Daou, “Hishām b. al-Ḥakam”).
[31] Nawbaḫtī, Firaq, 2–32 (section A), 32–41 (section
G), 41–60 (section B).
[32] Ibid., 16–19.
[33] Ibid., 34–35.
[34] The Bayāniyya is described in
two places in section A: ibid., 25 (where they are identical with the Karbiyya
who believed in the mahdiship of Ibn al-Ḥanafiyya) and 30 (where they are
believers in the mahdiship of Abū Hāšim, son of Ibn al-Ḥanafiyya).
[35] Ibid., 37; the raǧʿa (return from death) in question
is here presumed to be a general one and not specifically that of the
Mahdī from his ġayba.
[36] Ibid.,
70–71. But cf. pseudo-Nāšiʾ who identifies them as followers of
Ǧaʿfar al-Ṣādiq (Uṣūl
al-niḥal, 41).
[37] Nawbaḫtī, Firaq, 37–41; Abū ʾl-Ḥasan
ʿAlī b. Ismāʿīl al-Ašʿarī, Kitāb maqālāt
al-islāmiyyīn wa-iḫtilāf al-muṣallīn, ed.
H. Ritter (
[38] Saʿd al-Qummī, Maqālāt, 50–54.
[39] The terminology, some of the Qurʾānic
citations, and the names of three of the subsects, are common to both.
[40] Saʿd al-Qummī, Maqālāt, 51, lines 1–2, 4; cf.
Ašʿarī, Maqālāt,
10, lines 11–12; 11, line 7; Saʿd, 54, lines 15–17; cf. Ašʿarī,
12, lines 3–5. Cf. also the description of the Manṣūriyya in Nawbaḫtī,
Firaq, 34–35; Saʿd, Maqālāt, 46–48; Ašʿarī,
Maqālāt, 9–10, 24–25.
[41] According to Madelung’s analysis,
the work of Warrāq was a main source for Ašʿarī, especially
in his section on the ġulāt
and the divisions among the Rāfiḍa, and the likely source of Nawbaḫtī’s
passages on the sects after al-Ṣādiq and al-Kāẓim and of
Saʿd’s supplementary statements and short passages on the early ġulāt. Also according to
Madelung, Saʿd has copied extensively from Nawbaḫtī and added
his own observations and material from other sources, mainly Hišām,
Yūnus b. ʿAbd al-Rahmān (d. 208/823) and Warrāq. It may be
noted, however, that the close similarity between Nawbaḫtī and Saʿd
in the passages that originate from Hišām is probably due to Saʿd
copying directly from Nawbaḫtī. The minor additions that occur in Saʿd’s
parallel sections are not necessarily derived by him directly from
Hišām; these may be accounted for by Saʿd possessing a more
complete copy of Nawbaḫtī than the one on which our present edition
is based. Cf. Madelung, “Bemerkungen”, esp. 45, 47–52, and the references therein;
see also Bayhom Daou, “The Imāmī Shīʿī Conception of
the Knowledge of the Imām and the Sources of Religious Doctrine in the
Formative Period: from Hishām b. al-Ḥakam to Kulīnī”
(Ph.D. diss., School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London,
1996), 65–66, 116, n. 17. On evidence suggesting that some of the variations
between Nawbaḫtī and Ašʿarī in their parallel
sections on the ġulāt are
due to a conscious decision by Nawbaḫtī to diverge from the account of Warrāq, see below, the section entitled “The
Ḫaṭṭābiyya in Section G”, and esp. n. 74.
[42] Ašʿarī, Maqālāt, 23–31, 5–16; cf.
Nawbaḫtī, Firaq, 70–71,
78.
[43] Ašʿarī, Maqālāt, 14–15. On al-Šaʿīrī
(al-Šarīʿī), see Saʿd, Maqālāt, 56, and Kaššī, Riǧāl, 398ff.
[44] See notes 41 above and 74 below.
The possibility that the firaq
authors derived some of their material on gnostic ġuluww from the radd ʿalā
al-ġulāt works that proliferated in the third century is not
considered by Madelung; for a list of those works, see al-Qāḍī,
“The Term Ghulāt”, 316–15. The
title of a work by Ibrāhīm b. Abī Ḥafṣ
al-Kātib, referred to by Naǧāšī (Riǧāl, 16) as al-Radd
ʿalā al-ġāliya wa-Abī al-Ḫaṭṭāb
(wa-aṣḥābihi,
according to Ibn Šahrāšūb, Maʿālim al-ʿulamāʾ, ed. ʿA. Iqbāl [Tehran, 1353/1934], 3),
fits part of Nawbaḫtī’s section on the ġulāt. Ibn Abī Ḥafṣ was a companion of
the eleventh imām, al-Ḥasan al-ʿAskarī (d. 260/873), so
his work is likely to have been known to Nawbaḫtī and Saʿd, and
it may well have been known to Warrāq. Nawbaḫtī’s own interest in
the phenomenon of (gnostic) ġuluww
is evidenced by the titles of two of his works: al-Radd ʿalā aṣḥāb al-tanāsuḫ
and al-Radd ʿalā al-ġulāt
(Ibn al-Nadīm, Kitāb al-Fihrist, ed. R. Taǧaddud
[Tehran, 1971], 225; Naǧāšī, Riǧāl, 50). Saʿd also is reported to have written
refutations of the ġulāt: al-Ḍiyāʾ fī ʾl-radd
ʿalā al-muḥammadiyya waʾl-ǧaʿfariyya and al-Radd ʿalā al-ġulāt
(Naǧāšī, Riǧāl,
134).
[45] It might appear that by “them” the
author means the Kaysāniyya and its subsects the Ḥārithiyya and
the ʿAbbāsiyya. But the ʿAbbāsiyya is not covered in this
section and there is only a brief mention of the Kaysāniyya’s views on raǧʿa. Hence, the desire to
show that (gnostic) ġuluww
originated with the Ḥārithiyya in particular is likely to have
influenced Nawbaḫtī’s organization of his material (Nawbaḫtī,
Firaq, 32, lines 6–7).
[46] Ibid., 32–41.
[47] The exception again is in the
description of the Manṣūriyya, where the beliefs ascribed to them
cannot be identified as specifically gnostic (ibid., 34–35). On the Manṣūriyya’s belief
that prophethood and apostleship passed from ʿAlī to four imāms
down to al-Bāqir and were then transferred to Abū Manṣūr
and six of his descendants, see below notes 107, 118, 119.
[48] For more details, see above, the
section “Gnostic Ġulāt”.
[49] Nawbaḫtī, Firaq, 31–32. The Ḥārithiyya
are also identified as one-time followers of Abū Hāšim, and some
of them are said to have become followers of the ʿAbbāsid imām
Muḥammad b. ʿAlī (ibid., 29–30).
[50] Ibid., 31. On these disciples, see
Kaššī, Riǧāl,
40–43, 191–98. On the significance of these and similar polemics in the
formation of the tradition on gnostic ġuluww
in the second century, see below, the last section entitled “Retrospective
Ascription.”
[51] Nawbaḫtī, Firaq, 19–20. The passage mentions both ġuluww and waqf as having been introduced by Ibn Sabaʾ. For the argument
that the reference to waqf came from
Nawbaḫtī and not from Hišām, and that according to
Hišām the doctrine of ġayba/raǧʿa
was ġuluww, see Bayhom-Daou, “Hishām
b. al-Ḥakam”, n. 82. Note also that Ibn Sabaʾ is said by
Hišām to have adopted “this belief” about ʿAlī, which he
had held concerning the role of “Joshua after Moses” when he was still a Jew,
after the death of the Prophet, when he converted to Islam and took ʿAlī
as his walī. In other words, Ibn
Sabaʾ is thought to have looked to ʿAlī as a messianic figure
during his lifetime, and not only after his death. This implies that from
Hišām’s point of view messianic belief per se, and not just the doctrine of ġayba/raǧʿa or a specific form of it, is ġuluww. For more evidence of
Hišām’s negative attitude to Šīʿite messianism, see
below.
[52] Nawbaḫtī, Firaq, 32.
[53] Ibid., 31, lines 7–8, 55, line 6.
[54] Ibid., 30, lines 11–12.
[55] Ibid., 25, 29, 30, 31, 59.
[56] Ibid., 25, 29, 46.
[57] Ibid., 25, 30, 46, 55, 59, 60.
[58] Thus, for example, we are told
that after the death of Abū Hāshim (son of Muḥammad b. al-Ḥanafiyya)
“one group maintained that he (Abū Hāshim) is the Qāʾim and
Mahdī. . . . They are the Bayāniyya. . . . They maintained that
Abū Hāshim had informed Bayān about God, so Bayān is a
prophet (inna abā hāshim nabbā bayānan ʿani ʾllāh,
fa-bayān nabī). After the death of Abū Hāshim
Bayān claimed prophethood” (Nawbakhtī, Firaq, 30). “Ḥamza
b. ʿUmāra al-Barbarī claimed that he is a prophet, that Muḥammad
b. al-Ḥanafiyya is God, and that Ḥamza is the imām” (ibid,
25).
[59] For each of these features, there
are variations on the theme and various ways of describing them. Thus, a sect
may be said to have regarded its imām as God, as an incarnation of Divine
Light, or as omniscient (ibid., 29, 30, 46, 47); a leader may be said to have
claimed that he is a prophet, that he knows the ġayb, that he saw God during an ascension to heaven, or that
he receives waḥy; he may be
said to have claimed that he is the imām or that the imāmate was
transferred to him by his Hāšimite imām (ibid., 30, 34, 46, 55);
a sect may be said to have preached that whoever acknowledges the imām can
do what he likes, or that belief in the imām renders all prohibitions
licit, or its leader may be said to have made his followers turn away from all
religious duties (ibid., 25, 29, 30, 31).
[60] It may be said that this
anti-messianism influenced Hišām’s particular formulation of the
theory of the imāmate. His strict adherence to the idea of Muḥammad as the last prophet is reflected not
only in his critical description of
the messianic sects and, most clearly, of the doctrine of the muḥaddaṯ prophet/imām,
but also in his conception of the Imāmī imām’s knowledge as
strictly “non-prophetic” and based completely on transmission (Bayhom-Daou, “Hishām
b. al-Ḥakam”).
[61] The best examples of editorial
revisions necessitated by change in the Imāmī attitude to messianism
are in the texts on the Kaysāniyya (see previous note for the reference), the
Muġīriyya, and the Ḫaṭṭābiyya (on both of
which see below).
[62] See above, n. 27.
[63] Uṣūl al-niḥal, 41, in van Ess, Häresiographie.
[64] In addition to the messianic
beliefs concerning al-Nafs al-Zakiyya, pseudo-Nāšiʾ ascribes to
al-Muġīra doctrines which are clearly esoteric. But these cannot have
been derived from Hišām. Had they been, Nawbaḫtī would
have included them. The likelihood that Nawbaḫtī did not have at his
disposal written sources depicting al-Muġīra and his followers as
gnosticizers is also enhanced by the fact that all he has to say on the Muġīriyya
as ġulāt in section G is
that they refused to take a position on the question of raǧʿa. And judging by the next passage on the
Kaysāniyya, the Muġīriyya’s doctrine of raǧʿa is here conceived as return from death and is
distinguished from the idea of raǧʿa
as tanāsuḫ that Nawbaḫtī attributes to the gnostic Ḥārithiyya a few lines earlier (Nawbaḫtī, Firaq, 37).
[65] Kohlberg, “Rāwandiyya”, EI2.
[66] Bayhom Daou, “The Imāmī Shīʿī
Conception,” 95–103. According to my analysis of the material on the ʿAbbāsid
Šīʿa in the early firaq
sources, the other passages in which the ʿAbbāsid ġulāt are classified into
three sects are unlikely to have come from Hišām. Cf. Madelung, “Bemerkungen”,
41, 43.
[67] Nawbaḫtī, Firaq, 46–47.
[68] Muḥammad b. Ǧarīr
al-Ṭabarī, Taʾrīḫ
al-rusul waʾl-mulūk, ed. M. J. de Goeje (Leiden 1879–1901),
3:418–19; other references in J. van Ess, Theologie und Gesellschaft im 2. und 3.
Jahrhundert Hidschra: Eine Geschichte des religiösen Denkens im frühen
Islam, 6 vols. (Berlin
and New York, 1991–95), 3:10–11. Van Ess is inclined to the view that “jumping
off cliffs” was not part of the events of yawm
al-rāwandiyya (11, n. 2), although some of the dates given in the
historical sources would suggest that it was (or that some of the reporters of
those events thought so). On “jumping off cliffs” as an expression of the
belief in the rise of the messiah and the imminent end of time, see I.
Friedlander, “Jewish-Arabic Studies”, Jewish
Quarterly Review 2 (1911–12): 481–516, at 503–7; J. Starr, “Le mouvement
messianique au dʾbut du VIIIe siècle”, Revue
des ʾtudes juives 102 (1937): 81–92, at 83; S. Wasserstrom, Between Muslim and Jew (Princeton,
1995), 48, 54, 58.
[69] Like Hišām, the
historical sources imply that the Rāwandiyya were massacred by al-Manṣūr
because of the heretical beliefs they held about him. There, however, the
heretical beliefs ascribed to them include gnostic ones such as ḥulūl and tanāsuḫ. See, for example, Ṭabarī,
Taʾrīḫ, 3:129–30;
al-Balāḏurī, Ansāb
al-ašrāf, vol. 3, ed. ʿA. ʿA. al-Dūrī (Beirut
and Wiesbaden, 1978), 235. For a suggestion
as to how and when the Rāwandiyya came to be associated with
gnostic ġuluww, see below, last
section, on “Retrospective Ascription”.
[70] Nawbaḫtī, Firaq, 37–41 (G), 58–60 (B).
[71] Ibid., 37–41.
[72] For example, Madelung, “Khaṭṭābiyya”,
EI2; F. Daftary, The
Ismāʿīlīs: Their History and Doctrines (
[73] They
all venerate Ǧaʿfar as a god
and Abū ʾl-Ḫaṭṭāb as a messenger-prophet or an angelic
being, exaggerate the status of their other leaders, and espouse esoteric
doctrines.
[74] See above and n. 41. In the case
of two particular variations between the account of Nawbaḫtī and the
parallel account of Ašʿarī it is possible to identify a reason why Nawbaḫtī would have wanted to diverge from the
account of Warrāq. Unlike Ašʿarī, Nawbaḫtī
does not include the Mufaḍḍaliyya and the ʿUmayriyya in his
list of Ḫaṭṭābī subsects. This is because, in the
case of the first, al-Mufaḍḍal would have been regarded favourably
in some Imāmī circles (cf.
Kaššī, Riǧāl, 321–29, at 327–28 and passim) and, in the case of
the ʿUmayriyya, Warrāq’s account would have presented Nawbaḫtī
with a “chronological” problem. According to Warrāq’s account (Ašʿarī,
Maqālāt, 12–13), the ʿUmayriyya
would have already existed in the Umayyad period since ʿUmayr is said to
have been killed for his ġuluww
regarding al-Ṣādiq by the governor Yazīd b. ʿUmar b.
Hubayra (gov. 129–31). Thus, when Nawbaḫtī tried to link the two
accounts of Hišām and Warrāq and to make the subsects emerge
after the uprising of Abū ʾl-Ḫaṭṭāb and his repudiation by Ǧaʿfar al-Ṣādiq
in the ʿAbbāsid period, he could not include the ʿUmayriyya
as one of those subsects. Cf. Madelung, “Khaṭṭābiyya”, EI2.
[75] Nawbaḫtī, Firaq, 57–60.
[76] Madelung, “Bemerkungen”, 46–47,
where he points to the similarities between Nawbaḫtī and Ašʿarī
in the number and names of the sects after al-Ṣādiq. However,
pseudo-Nāšiʾ who often relied on Hišām is also close
to Nawbaḫtī in his listing of 6 sects after the death of al-Ṣādiq
and, like Nawbaḫtī, he identifies the Ismāʿīliyya
with the Ḫaṭṭābiyya (Uṣūl
al-niḥal, 46–47).
[77] At one point the Ismāʿīliyya
are identical with the Ḫaṭṭābiyya and distinguished from the Mubārakiyya (Nawbaḫtī, Firaq,
58–59). In the passage describing the Ḫaṭṭābiyya
before the death of Ǧaʿfar, they are said to have gone over to Muḥammad
b. Ismāʿil, although they are introduced as identical with the
Ismāʿiliyya and advocates of the imāmate of Ismāʿil
after the death of Ǧaʿfar (ibid., 58–60). In the next passage the Ḫaṭṭābiyya
are identical with the Mubārakiyya (ibid., 61 above).
[78] “Bemerkungen”, 46–47.
[79] Nawbaḫtī, Firaq, 19–20, 21–22, 25, 42–45.
[80] Ibid., 19–20, 29, 53–55.
[81] The concept is said to have been
adduced by messianic pretenders and groups when the predictions they had made
were not fulfilled (I. Goldziher and A. S. Tritton, “Badāʾ”, EI2; M. Ayoub, “Divine
Preordination and Human Hope: A Study of the Concept of Badāʾ in Imāmī Shīʿī Tradition”,
Journal of the American Oriental Society
106 [1986]: 623–32).
[82] In fact most of the sources do not
seem to be aware of a relationship between
Abū ʾl-Ḫaṭṭāb and Ismāʿīl and tend to
associate the latter with al-Mufaḍḍal b. ʿUmar
(Daftary, Ismāʿīlīs,
98–99, and the references therein).
[83] The idea that at the time of his
uprising Abū ʾl-Ḫaṭṭāb looked upon Ǧaʿfar
as the Mahdī is reflected in a report in Balāḏurī’s Ansāb, according to which Abū ʾl-Ḫaṭṭāb
used to say of Ǧaʿfar that weapons do not harm him (3:255–56; cf.
above, Biii, 7, and next note).
[84] I suggest emending to ṣāḥibuhum and that the
term denoted a messianic status on the basis of comparison with the previous
passage. In that passage the Nāwūsiyya are said to have denied Ǧaʿfar’s
death and claimed that he was the Mahdī and that he himself had told them:
“for I am ṣāḥibukum, ṣāḥib
al-sayf” (Nawbaḫtī, Firaq,
57).
[85] Abū Ḥātim Aḥmad
b. Ḥamdān al-Rāzī, Kitāb
al-Zīna, vol. 3, in ʿA. S. al-Sāmarrāʾī, al-Ġuluww waʾl-firaq al-ġāliya
fī ʾl-ḥaḍāra al-islāmiyya (
[86] Saʿd, Maqālat, 54–55. The Ḫaṭṭābiyya are said
to have interpreted a Qurʾānic statement (18:80) as a reference to Ǧaʿfar’s
cursing and disavowal of Abū ʾl-Ḫaṭṭāb and his
companions. They identified the “ship” as Abū ʾl-Ḫaṭṭāb,
“the poor men who toiled upon the sea” as his companions, and “the king who is
behind them” (i.e., the one who, according to the Qurʾān, “was
seizing every ship by brutal force”), as ʿĪsā b. Mūsā,
the ʿAbbāsid governor who suppressed the uprising and had Abū ʾl-Ḫaṭṭāb
killed. They claimed that although Ǧaʿfar cursed them openly, in
reality he meant their opponents.
[87] Uṣūl al-niḥal, 47.
[88] Muḥammad
b. Yaʿqūb al-Kulīnī, al-Kāfī, ed. ʿA. A. Ġaffārī, 4th ed., 8 vols. (
[89] Nawbaḫtī was familiar
with the idea that the gnostic ġulāt
denied the bodily resurrection and interpreted the doctrine of raǧʿa as tanāsuḫ. It is found in two passages in section G, though not specifically in connection with the
Ḫaṭṭābiyya (Firaq,
33, line 3; 37, line 6). Hence, he is likely to have had this idea in mind when
he introduced the passage in question (Biii, 11) and tried to link the two
descriptions in B and G.
[90] Ibid., 38, 39, 41.
[91] I would not rule out completely
the possibility that the process of redaction was achieved in two stages, the
first stage by an Imāmī redactor earlier than Nawbaḫtī and
involving incorporation of the separate (or some of the separate) descriptions
of gnostics and the additional statements on gnostic ġuluww in the chronological sections, and the second stage by
Nawbaḫtī, involving mainly those changes which would have been
necessitated by the adoption of the doctrine of the twelfth imām as the
Mahdī. For the sake of simplicity, I have done the analysis on the basis
that there was only one stage in the process and one redactor, Nawbaḫtī.
“One stage” is in any case preferable since no Šīʿite firaq work, on which Nawbaḫtī
could have built, is known to have been composed in the period after
Hišām (cf. Madelung, “Bemerkungen”, 47–48 and notes 59, 60). For the
argument against Hišām as a redactor (or the first redactor) of the
separate section on the ġulāt,
see below.
[92] Ivanow has made such a suggestion
concerning the Ḫaṭṭābī doctrines in Nawbaḫtī,
but he has not identified, or distinguished between, a messianic phase and a
gnostic phase (Ibn al-Qaddāḥ,
105ff).
[93] In this case the assumption would
be that if such sources existed they would have been oral not written. As a
heresiographer of Islam, Hišām had no predecessors (cf. Madelung, “Häresiographie”,
in Grundriss der arabischen Philologie,
ed. H. Gätje [Wiesbaden, 1987], 374–78, at 374), and as we shall see
below, no radd works, from which he
could have derived his material, had yet come into existence.
[94] I say “most” because the changes
necessitated by the adoption of a messianic element could have only come from
Nawbaḫtī.
[95] Nawbaḫtī, Firaq, 2.
[96] W. al-Qāḍī, “The
Term Ghulāt” 316–17.
[97] Like Nawbaḫtī,
pseudo-Nāšiʾ (Uṣūl
al-niḥal) has dual treatments of second-century Šīʿite
sects (e.g., the Muġīriyya, 41 and 46, and the Ḫaṭṭābiyya,
41 and 47) and separate sections on their gnostic ġuluww (32–33, 37–41). There are some parallels between him
and Nawbaḫtī in their descriptions of gnostic ġuluww, and these are mainly in their passages on ġuluww in general and on the Ḥārithiyya/Ḥarbiyya.
These may be accounted for on the grounds that they are derived ultimately from
the same 3rd century radd works and
not necessarily from Hišām (cf. Madelung, “Häresiographie”, 225;
van Ess, Häresiographie, 26, 39–40,
54). Moreover, some of the differences between pseudo-Nāšiʾ and
Nawbaḫtī would be difficult to account for if we assume that
Hišām was the common source. Compare, for example,
pseudo-Nāšiʾ’s descriptions of the Manṣūriyya,
Bayāniyya, and Muġīriyya (40–41) with Nawbaḫtī’s (34–35,
25, 30–31, 37, 52, 54–55). See also n. 64 above regarding the gnostic material
on al-Muġīra in pseudo-Nāšiʾ, which Nawbaḫtī
does not appear to have had knowledge of.
[98] Contrary to Ivanow’s view, the
frequently cited reports of Hišām’s encounters with Abū
Šākir al-Dayṣānī do not shed any light on the state
of affairs inside Šīʿism or whether Šīʿism was
already coming under the influence of gnosticism (cf. Ivanow, Ibn al-Qaddāḥ, 85). In these
reports Hišām appears as a defender
of Islamic monotheism against a non-Muslim dualist/gnostic
(Kulīnī, al-Kāfī, 1:79–80).
[99] Kaššī, Riǧāl, 258–63 at 263. That
there is not much on his anti-messianism is
also understandable. Given that Imāmism later came to adopt a messianic
element, there would have been a reluctance to depict him in the light of an
anti-messianist.
[100] van Ess, “Untersuchungen zu
einigen ibāditischen Handschriften”, Zeitschrift
der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft 126 (1976); id., “Das Kitāb al-irǧāʾ des Ḥasan
b. Muḥammad b. al-Ḥanafiyya”, Arabica
21 (1974); id., Anfänge muslimischer
Theologie (Beirut, 1977); M. Cook, Early
Muslim Dogma (Cambridge, 1981), esp. pt. 3; N. Calder, review of Cook, Dogma, in Journal of Semitic Studies 28 (1983): 180–87; Crone and Zimmermann,
The Epistle of Sālim ibn ḏakwān (Oxford, 2001), chap. 7.
[101] The Šīʿa/Sabaʾiyya
are followers of kuhhān
(soothsayers); they claim to have secret knowledge or knowledge of the ġayb; they hope for and believe in
a dawla (revolution) and the raising
of the dead before the Day of Resurrection (van Ess, “Das Kitāb al-irǧāʾ”; Cook, Dogma, chap. 2).
[102] On these three poets and the
evidence concerning their Kaysānī inclinations, see al-Qāḍī,
al-Kaysāniyya fī ʾl-tārīḫ
waʾl-adab (
[103] J.
Horovitz, Die Hāšimijjāt
des Kumait (Leiden, 1904); Ch. Pellat, “Kumayt”, EI2; Madelung, “The Hāshimiyyāt of
al-Kumayt and Hāshimī Shīʿism”, Studia Islamica 70 (1989).
[104] For example, the ġayba of Muḥammad b. al-Ḥanafiyya
in the mountains of Raḍwā, his taḥdīṯ by angels and assemblies of noble
spirits, the events that will accompany his raǧʿa,
etc.
[105] The only possible exception is in
the lines ascribed to al-Sayyid in pseudo-Nāšiʾ, UṢūl al-niḥal, 37–38,
which satirize Šīʿites who deified ʿAlī. But these may
be spurious, their ascription to a prominent Šīʿite designed to
undermine nascent Šīʿite gnosticism in the third century.
Pseudo-Nāšiʾ cites them as evidence that al-Sayyid was critical
of this kind of (gnostic) ġuluww
“despite his own ġuluww and
excessive tašayyuʿ”. The
only other source I know of that cites these same lines is Ibn ʿAbd
Rabbih, al-ʿIqd al-farīd, ed.
A. Amin et al. (Cairo, 1940–65), 2:405. The lines do not appear in Šīʿite
sources that cite al-Sayyid, often extensively.
[106] Ch.
Pellat, “Essai de reconstitution d’un poème de
Maʿdān aš-Šumayṭī”, Oriens 16 (1963): 99–109.
[107] These include Abū Manṣūr,
Kumayl, the Sabaʾiyya, the Ḥarbiyya, and al-Muġīra. The
epithet al-kisf al-sāqiṭ
(the fallen patch of sky), given to Abū Manṣūr in this and
other sources (Pellat, “Maʿdān”, 100, 102), does not necessarily have
esoteric connotations. It is associated with his “ascension and descent” and
his claim to be the “anointed one”, viz., with his messianic claims. See also
below and notes 118, 119, on the Manṣūriyya as messianists.
[108] See lines 12–21 in Pellat, “Maʿdān”,
101.
[109] Ǧāḥiẓ, al-Bayān waʾl-tabyīn, ed.
M. ʿA.
In one of
his poems al-Kumayt uses the term tanāsuḫ
when referring to the transmission of the “noble substance” to Muḥammad
through his ancestors (Goldziher, “Neuplatonische und gnostische Elemente im Ḥadīṯ”,
Zeitschrift für Assyriologie 22
(1909): 107–34, at 125–26). This idea is not the same as the doctrine of
metempsychosis (also known as tanāsuḫ)
that our sources associate with Šīʿite ġulāt, who believed it to be characteristic of mankind in
general and some of whom used the term to describe the transmission of the
divine spirit or light from one imam (or prophet) to another (see, for example,
Nawbaḫtī, Firaq, 35–36,
41). Hence, contrary to Goldziher’s suggestion, this reference by al-Kumayt
cannot be taken as evidence of the existence of gnosticizing tendencies in
early Šīʿism. Cf. U. Rubin, “Pre-Existence and Light: Aspects of
the Concept of Nūr Muḥammad”, Israel
Oriental Studies 5 (1975): 62–117, at 71–73, and n. 27, where he
distinguishes between two ideas of Muḥammadan prophetology and points out
that Goldziher has wrongly interpreted a tradition dealing with the wandering
of Muḥammad’s primordial substance through his pure ancestors (a
tradition that basically serves to establish his superiority over other
prophets) as dealing with the gnostic idea of the transmission of the divine
spirit through a series of universal prophets.
[110] Abū ʾl-Faraǧ al-Iṣfāhānī,
Kitāb al-aġānī
(Cairo, 1345/1927–1394/1974), 9:4.
[111] Saʿd, Maqālāt, 28–29.
[112] Above and n. 89.
[113] Ibn
Qutayba, ʿUyūn al-aḫbār (
[114] As we have seen, the idea that Ǧaʿfar
was widely regarded in Kūfa as the ʿAlid Mahdī during his
lifetime is attested in the work of Hišām (in his description of the Ḫāṭṭābiyya).
As for the ǧafr,
there are various views about its contents and some overlap with muṣḥaf Fāṭima and
ṣaḥīfat ʿAlī
(Abū Ǧaʿfar Muḥammad b. al-Ḥasan al-Ṣaffār
al-Qummī, Kitāb Baṣāʾir
al-daraǧāt al-kubrā fī faḍāʾil Āl Muḥammad,
ed. M. M. Kūtchebāġī [Tabriz, 1380/1960], 150–61;
Kulīnī, al-Kāfī, 1:238–42).
Yet there is reason to believe that originally its significance was mainly
apocalyptic (cf. T. Fahd, “Djafr”, EI2). Some traditions seem to preserve
its association with apocalypticism in the time of Ǧaʿfar and al-Nafs
al-Zakiyya. Thus, according to one tradition, Ǧaʿfar said that he had
in his possession the “red ǧafr”,
which contained the Prophet’s armour and which would be opened by the Master of
the Sword (i.e., the Qāʾim/Mahdī). He also said that the
descendants of al-Ḥasan knew about this but chose to ignore it. This is
an allusion to the rebellion of Muḥammad al-Nafs al-Zakiyya and his
brother Ibrāhīm and the belief in Muḥammad as the Mahdī.
The brothers are criticized for having staged their rebellion even though they
knew that it was the descendants of al-Ḥusayn who had the ǧafr and, hence, that the Mahdī will
be from them (al-Kāfī, 1:240 below). According to other traditions, Ǧaʿfar commented on those events by
saying that he had “two books” (or kitāb
Fāṭima) which proved that none of the descendants of al-Ḥasan
would ever “rule the earth”, viz., be the Mahdī (ibid., 242, nos. 7, 8).
On the uprising of Ibrāhīm and Muḥammad, see F. Buhl, “Muḥammad
b. ʿAbd Allāh”, EI2.
[115] Ibn al-Nadīm, Fihrist, 215.
[116] The only example I know of is in
one of Kaššī’s reports on al-Faḍl b. Šāḏān.
The text, which may well be based on a work by al-Faḍl, credits ġulāt disciples of the 11th imam
with a belief in perpetual prophecy (Bayhom-Daou, “The Imam’s Knowledge and the
Quran according to al-Faḍl b. Shādhān
al-Nīsābūrī”, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and
African Studies 64 [2001]: 198–205, and n. 80). The expression used there
to descibe that belief is al-waḥy
lā yanqatiʿ.
[117] A similar objection would apply to
the title of another work by Ḍirār, “al-Radd ʿalā muʿammar fī qawlihi anna muḥammad
rabb” (Ibn al-Nadīm, Fihrist, 215). The title does not tell us
that Muʿammar was a Šīʿite or that his belief in the
divinity of Muḥammad entailed viewing him as the saviour figure at the
centre of a gnostic doctrine.
[118] Abū Manṣūr is
associated with the belief that “God’s messengers never come to an end”, or
with the doctrine of “five ʿAlid and seven ʿIǧlid prophets, the
last of whom will be the Qāʾim”. One group of the Manṣūriyya
is said to have claimed that the imāmate passed from al-Bāqir to
Abū Manṣūr and then to his son al-Ḥusayn, and another
group that after Abū Manṣūr the imamate reverted to the ʿAlids
and that the Qāʾim is Muḥammad b. ʿAbdallāh (al-Nafs
al-Zakiyya) (Ašʿarī, Maqālāt,
9, 24–25; Nawbaḫtī, Firaq,
34; Saʿd, Maqālāt, 46–48).
Muġīra is said to have claimed that he was a prophet, and the Muġīriyya
refused to recognize any imām after him and al-Nafs al-Zakiyya and awaited
the return of the latter as the Mahdī;
or, according to another report, they recognized Ǧābir al-Ǧuʿfī
and Bakr al-Qattāt as imams after al-Muġīra (Nawbaḫtī,
52, 54–55; Ašʿarī, 6–7, 8, 23–24; Saʿd, 43–44, 55, 74, 76–77).
[119] That these two sects were
originally portrayed as messianists is still visible behind the later “gnostic”
accretions. For the argument concerning the Muġīriyya, see above. As
for the Manṣūriyya, its characterization as a messianic sect is
reflected in the concepts of the “anointed one” and the Qāʾim (Nawbaḫtī,
Firaq, 34; Ašʿarī, Maqālāt, 9, 25).
[120] The use of the term ḥuǧǧa to describe the
imams and the belief that the earth will never be devoid of a ḥuǧǧa are well attested
in classical Imāmism. In the early heresiographical tradition, however,
the term and the belief are associated with Abū ʾl-Ḫaṭṭāb
and the Ḫaṭṭābiyya, which is indicative of the origins
of the doctrine in gnostic ġuluww
(Ašʿarī, Maqālāt,
10; Saʿd, Maqālāt, 51;
Nawbaḫtī, Firaq, 38).
[121] Cf. I. Friedlander, “The
Heterodoxies of the Shiites in the Presentation of Ibn Ḥazm”, Journal of the American Oriental Society
29 (1908): 85–86, 92.
[122] In the bibliographical literature
it is not uncommon to find that the same work is listed under different titles
in different sources. This may be due to the fact that an author did not give a
title to his work, perhaps because he did not finish
it, and different titles were given by different copyists and redactors.
Balāḏurī’s Ansāb
is a good example (Ansāb
al-ašrāf, ed. S. D. F. Goitein [Jerusalem, 1936], introduction, 9–11).
In the case of Ḍirār’s title, it is possible that it was given by a
copyist working in the third century or later, who was familiar with this
slogan (“the earth will never be without a prophet”) and assumed it to be an
appropriate description of the messianic beliefs attacked by Ḍirār.
[123] Halm has argued that these
traditions, or rather layers of them, go back to the Kūfan ġulāt in the circle of
al-Bāqir and al-Ṣādiq, on the basis of similarities with
descriptions of second-century ġulāt
by the heresiographers. However, the problem with this argument is that it is
based on acceptance of the testimonies of the Šīʿī gnostic
tradition and the heresiographical tradition, both of which have a tendency to
backdate.
[124] G.
Lecomte, “Aspects de la littʾrature du ḥadīṯ chez les imṣmites”, Le Shīʿisme imṣmite, Colloque de Strasbourg, ed. T. Fahd (
[125] S. A. Arjomand, “The Crisis of the
Imāmate and the Institution of Occultation
in Twelver Shiʿism”, International
Journal of Middle East Studies 28 (1996).
[126] The heresiographical tradition
tends to portray the heretics among the followers of an Imāmī
imām as Wāqifites (i.e., those who “stop” at an imām and refuse
to recognize a successor) or as claimers that the imamate has been transferred
to their non-ʿAlid leaders. This is unlikely to be true of all the gnostic
ġulāt in the third century, but there is no reliable way
of ascertaining to what extent those gnostics espoused the principle of a
continuous imāmate or the same line of imāms as the moderates.
[127] See above n. 44.
[128] The fact that Abū ʾl-Ḫaṭṭāb
is revered as an authority in the Nuṣayrī tradition (Halm, Kosmologie, 154–55, 162–63) might seem
to contradict the suggestion that it was the moderates who would have had
reason to associate discredited figures like him with gnostic teachings. In
fact there is not necessarily any contradiction here and there is a good
explanation as to why some gnostics would have espoused Abū ʾl-Ḫaṭṭāb
as one of their authorities: once the association between Abū ʾl-Ḫaṭṭāb
and gnostic ġuluww had been
established in Šīʿite circles, some gnostics would have found it
impossible to disown him and tried instead to rehabilitate him. That something
like this happened is indicated in the additional report in Saʿd
al-Qummī, mentioned above, where Ǧaʿfar’s public censure of
Abū ʾl-Ḫaṭṭāb and his companions is said to
have been interpreted by the Ḫaṭṭābiyya as a ploy
designed to protect his followers and to confuse opponents (Saʿd, Maqālāt, 54–55, and above, n.
86).
[129] See above, the section entitled “Nawbaḫtī’s
Sources Reconsidered” and the relevant notes.
[130] A reluctance to name the
individual who was recognized as the current Imāmī imām has been
noted for pseudo-Nāšiʾ by van Ess (Häresiographie, 29ff.).
[131] Madelung, “Bemerkungen”, 38.
[132] Nawbaḫtī,
Firaq, 78. The Nuṣayrīs themselves trace
their doctrines to the eleventh imām al-Ḥasan al-ʿAskarī
and his follower Ibn Nuṣayr (Halm, Shiism,
159).
[133] Ṭūsī, Riǧāl, ed. M. Ṣ.
Āl Baḥr al-ʿUlūm (Naǧaf, 1961), 400, 410, 411, 413,
414, 418, 420, 421, 423, 426, 436; also, Halm, Gnosis, 275–83.
[134] The second-century religious
movements in
[135] On this group, see Madelung, “Khurramiyya”,
EI2.
[136] Pseudo-Nāšiʾ, Uṣūl al-niḥal, 32–35;
the story is at p. 34. Cf. also Ṭabarī, Taʾrīḫ, 2:1503, 1588–89.
[137] In Ṭabarī (Taʾrīḫ, 2:1588–89) Ḫidāš
is said to have “changed” from calling people to the imāmate of Muḥammad
b. ʿAlī to calling them to the religion of the Ḫurramiyya
(defined as libertinism and the like). In the parallel account in Balāḏurī
(Ansāb, vol. 3, ed. Durī,
116–18), however, there are no references to the preaching of gnostic or Ḫurramī
doctrines by Ḫidāš. He is simply said to have “changed” the sunan of the imām and the sīra of his predecessor and issued
reprehensible rulings (aḥkām),
which made him unpopular and led to him being murdered by the followers of Muḥammad
b. ʿAlī (or by the governor Asad b.
ʿAbdallāh al-Qasrī, according to another report). It is not made
clear what those sunan and aḥkām were. Sharon seems to
think that Ḫidāš was
associated with the idea of the reversion of the imamate to the ʿAlids (“Khidāsh”, EI2; but see the review of his Black Banners from the East [Jerusalem and Leiden, 1983] by
Patricia Crone in Bulletin of the School
of Oriental and African Studies 50 [1987]: 134–36). In any case, the main
point here is that one layer of the tradition about Ḫidāš is
not aware of his association with Ḫurramism/gnostic ġuluww.
[138] The founder of the Rizāmiyya
is said to have been Rizām (b. Sābiq) who appears only once in the
accounts of the Rāwandiyya in the reign of al-Manṣūr. It is not
exactly clear what role he played in the events or what his position was
(Tabarī, Taʾrīḫ,
3:132). The firaq works do not shed
any light on his identity either
(pseudo-Nāšiʾ, Uṣūl
al-niḥal, 35–36;
Nawbaḫtī, Firaq, 42; Saʿd, Maqālāt, 64–65; Ašʿarī,
Maqālāt, 21–22).
[139] Nawbaḫtī, Firaq, 29–30, 41–42. Note, however, that
in the passages based on Hišām the Rāwandiyya are identified as
one of two ġulāt sects of
the ʿAbbāsid Šīʿa, the other being the
Hāšimiyya who are said to have believed that the imāmate was
transferred to the ʿAbbāsids from Abū Hāšim b. Muḥammad
b. al-Ḥanafiyya; ibid., 46–47. Athough in the passage as it stands the
Rāwandiyya are not identified as advocates of a pure ʿAbbāsid
line, there is reason to believe that this is due to suppression of the idea by
Nawbaḫtī. The latter, unlike Hišām but like most of the
later scholars, used the name Rāwandiyya to designate the ʿAbbasid
Šīʿa at the point of its inception and identified the Hurayriyya
(followers of Abū Hurayra al-Rawandī/al-Dimašqī) as the
advocates of a pure ʿAbbāsid line;
Nawbaḫtī could not
therefore retain Hišām’s identification of the Rāwandiyya
(and their leader Abū ʿAbdallāh al-Rāwandī) in the
time of al-Manṣūr as the source of the idea of a pure ʿAbbāsid
line. See Bayhom Daou, “The
Imāmī Shīʿī Conception,” 99–101, and the
references therein.
[140] Uṣūl al-niḥal, 31–32, 35–36.
[141] Ibid., 31, line 16, where he
refers to the Hurayriyya as a group that exists “now” and its doctrine as
having been formulated during the time of al-Mahdī (r. 158/774–169/785).
[142] Madelung, “Häresiographie”,
229, 232–34.
[143] Abū ʾl-Ḥasan al-Masʿūdī, Murūǧ al-ḏahab, vol. 4,
ed. Ch. Pellat
(Beirut 1966–79), 316, par. 2728, where Yaḥya b. Aktham says of al-Maʾmūn
that he has been inspired by God with knowledge of the right things to say and
do. I owe the reference to Patricia Crone.
[144] ilhām as a prerogative of the imām, and for the specific
purpose of imposing doctrinal/legal uniformity, is only rarely attested in
connection with the ʿAbbāsid caliphs. It is referred to by Ibn
al-Muqaffaʿ in his epistle to al-Manṣūr; Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ, “Conseilleur” du Calife, ed. Ch. Pellat (Paris,
1976), par. 36. It is not attested again until the account of
pseudo-Nāšiʾ, who ascribes its formulation to the shadowy
Rizām: the latter is assumed to have founded the sect named after him and
to have formulated the ʿAbbāsid Šīʿī doctrine of ilhām during the reign of
al-Mahdī (Uṣūl al-niḥal,
31, par. 47, and 36, par. 54). In the earlier work of Hišām b. al-Ḥakam,
written during the reign of al-Rašīd (170/786–193/808), ilhām is associated with the Ǧārūdiyya
and its function is exegetical/juridical, whereas two sects of the ʿAbbāsid
Šīʿa (the Hāšimiyya and the Rāwandiyya) are said
to have claimed for their imām knowledge of a prophetic and divine nature
(Bayhom-Daou, “Hishām b. al-Ḥakam”, 95–108; eadem, “The Imāmī Shīʿī
Conception,” 103–8).
[145] M. Hinds, “Miḥna”, EI2; M. Q. Zaman, Religion and Politics under the Early ʿAbbāsids
(
[146] In a report in Ṭabarī (Taʾrīḫ, 3:1117) al-Maʿmūn
comes close to claiming for himself a sort of knowledge that is not accessible
to other men and that serves to resolve legal uncertainty (šakk).
[147] In the account of Abū Ḥātim
al-Rāzī, the Rāwandiyya and the Hurayriyya are identified as two
distinct sects of the ʿAbbāsid Šīʿa, the first as
followers of ʿAbdallāh al-Rāwandī and the second as
followers of Abū Hurayra al-Dimašqī, and it is Abū Hurayra
who is credited with introducing the idea of a pure ʿAbbāsid line (Zīna, 298–300). This would tend to
confirm my suggestion that the idea of a distinction was familiar to scholars
in the third century and that pseudo-Nāšiʾ’s
account, even though it makes no mention of al-Manṣur’s Rāwandiyya, was aimed at showing that the
Hurayriyya (or the moderate ʿAbbāsid “imāmīs”) had
nothing to do with the former.
[148] The possibility that
pseudo-Nāšiʾ himself was an advocate of the idea of the caliph
as arbiter in religious matters, and hence sympathetic to ʿAbbāsid “imāmism”,
cannot be ruled out. According to a report in a Muʿtazilī source, he
used to attend debating sessions at the court of the caliph al-Wāthiq, and
on one occasion, when it was prayer time and the caliph went forward to lead
the prayer, Ǧaʿfar stepped aside and prayed alone (ʿAbd al-Ǧabbār,
Ṭabaqāt al-muʿtazila
in Faḍl al-iʿtizāl wa-ṭabaqāt
al-muʿtazila, ed., F. Sayyid [Tunis, 1974], 282). If the aim of the
report was to show that he refused to recognize the caliphs as Šīʿite
imāms, this could be an attempt by the later Muʿtazilī tradition
to exonerate him and to present him as a true Muʿtazilite. Classical Muʿtazilism did not recognize the caliphs as
divinely inspired imāms and rejected the Imāmī view
regarding the necessity of having an imām who is distinguished from his
fellows by knowledge. On the views of the Muʿtazilī ʿAbd al-Ǧabbār,
see M. J. McDermott, The Theology of al-Shaikh al-Mufīd (
[149] On the opposition to al-Maʾmūn’s
religious policy, see W. M. Patton, Aḥmed
Ibn Ḥanbal and the Miḥna (Leiden, 1897); I. M. Lapidus, “The
Separation of State and Religion in the Development of Early Islamic Society”, International Journal of Middle East Studies
6 (1975); Nawas, Al-Maʾmūn,
65–72.
[150] Ṭabarī, Taʾrīḫ, 3:129–33; Balaḏurī,
Ansāb, 3:235–37. The gnostic
material, which consists of brief references to the tanāsuḫ doctrine, occurs only at the beginning of both
accounts. The parallels between the two accounts suggest that they are based on
common sources. Balāḏurī’s is attributed to al-Haytham b. ʿAdī
(d. 207/822) “and others”, and Ṭabarī’s to al-Madāʾinī
(d. 228/843). Although both Haytham and Madāʾinī are known to
have composed books, it is sometimes clear that our historians had access to
this material through later narrators and compilers (e.g., Balāḏurī
states that his account is taken from Abū Masʿūd al-Qattāt,
who had it from Haytham and others). Hence, there is always the possibility of “contamination”
by later material. And although Balāḏurī does not mention
Madāʾinī as one of his sources for this particular report, he
may well have been. Madāʾinī was a main authority for him on the
ʿAbbāsids and he cites him extensively in the reports on al-Manṣur
(183–275). It is thus quite possible that the gnostic material came from
Madāʾinī and not from Haytham. In any case, the death date of
Haytham is within the proposed period for the rise of Islamic gnosticism and
the emergence of the idea that gnostic ġuluww
was preached by heretical Šīʿites in the second century.
It is
important to recall here the evidence, adduced earlier in this paper, that
Hišam’s account of the Rāwandiyya shows no awareness of the existence
of gnostic ideas among them; above and notes 65–69. The same may be said of the
references of Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ to the fanatical Ḫurāsāniyya,
where he speaks of their excessive reverence for al-Manṣūr as
verging on deification (“Conseilleur” du
Calife, ed. Pellat, 23, 25, pars. 10, 11, 12).
[151] See, for example, the report in Ṭabarī,
Taʾrīḫ, 3:418–19. The
report is from ʿAlī b. Muḥammad, most probably Madāʾinī,
who relates it on the authority of his father. It consists of two parts. The
first part deals with a “daʿwa
to the Rāwandiyya” and gnostic beliefs preached by a certain al-Ablaq. The
latter and his followers are said to have been killed by Asad b. ʿAbdallāh
when he was governor of Ḫurāsān (116/734–119/737), and their
beliefs are said to “continue among them (the Rāwandiyya) to the
present day”. The second part is about the Rāwandiyya in the time of
al-Manṣūr and their jumping off to their death from the roof of his
palace.
[152] For some of the more usual
interpretations of the material on ʿAbbāsid Šīʿism in
the second century, which tend to accept the historicity of the reports that
associate it with gnostic ġuluww,
see B. Lewis, “ʿAbbāsids”, EI2;
Daniel, Political and Social History, chap. 1; M. Sharon, Black Banners, chap. 6, esp. 165ff.; Madelung, “Kaysāniyya”, EI2, 837b f; Kohlberg, “Rāwandiyya”, EI2; van Ess, Theologie und Gesellschaft, 3:10–19.