In the original program of this meeting, I was to talk on the Qarmatians while the Isma'ilis had been allotted to another speaker; but as that speaker was prevented from coming, Isma'ilism was dropped from the program, leaving me to deal with the Qarmatians in isolation. If the original distribution had put me in a quandary, I am even more confused now, since it is my view that the names "Isma'ili" and "Qarmatian" are, properly speaking, synonymous and do not refer to different entities.[1]

Four decades have passed, and so rapid has been the pace of scholarship in Isma'ili studies that Heinz Halm now can offer an integrated, comprehensive, and persuasive narrative of early Isma'ili activities, up until the Fatimid conquest of Egypt in 969. Where there once was extensive confusion as to interrelationships within this complex and territorially dispersed version of Shi'ism, a clear and coherent story is now at hand against which all subsequent accounts of Isma'ili history will be judged.

The source of the earlier confusion is clear. Sometime in the mid-700s a question arose over which son of Imam Ja'far al-Sadiq should inherit his religious authority within the Shi'ite community. A century and a half later, in 909, a warlike principality took form in the mountains of northwestern Tunisia ostensibly based on belief in the Imamate of a descendant of Ja'far through his son, Isma'il, though alleging that the questionable intervening generations had lived in secrecy and under assumed names to prevent suppression by the dominant Sunni Abbasid caliphate in Baghdad. In 969, with the rest of North Africa already under his sway, the Fatimid caliph--so-called for his claimed descent from the Prophet Muhammad's daughter, the progenitrix of Ja'far al-Sadiq's line of Imams--conquered Egypt and built Cairo as his capital. For the next 212 years his dynasty cast an imperial shadow over the southern and eastern shores of the Mediterranean.

But what of the time between Ja'far's death and the conquest of Egypt? This was a murky period of secret propagandists carrying the doctrines of the concealed Imams throughout the Islamic world, of abortive revolts in far-flung areas, of Berber tribal armies extending the Imam's domain from their Tunisian stronghold, and of militant movements called Qarmati in the Abbasid heartland of Iraq, Syria and eastern Arabia. Each of these stories once seemed so disconnected from the others in time, place, and social as well as political dynamic as to make it almost impossible to grasp the early Isma'ili movement as a whole.

Against this background, Halm's achievement looms large. Specialists will disagree with him on details, but they will applaud the flow and liveliness of his narrative. Less demanding readers will simply enjoy the story and delight in discovering which North African potentate had a penchant for whoopee cushions and which conceived the idea of a fountain pen.

Footnotes:
(1) L'Elaboration de l'Islam: Colloque de Strasbourg, 12-13-14 juin 1959, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1961, 99. [Back]

Richard W. Bulliet.

Columbia University
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