Isma'ili Modern

Globalization and Identity in a Muslim Community

Jonah Steinberg

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780807871652, 9780807834077
• eBook ISBN: 9780807899458
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History

The Isma'ili Muslims, a major sect of Shi'i Islam, form a community that is intriguing in its deterritorialized social organization. Informed by the richness of Isma'ili history, theories of transnationalism and globalization, and firsthand ethnographic fieldwork in the Himalayan regions of Tajikistan and Pakistan as well as in Europe, Jonah Steinberg investigates Isma'ili Muslims and the development of their remarkable and expansive twenty-first-century global structures.

Led by a charismatic European-based hereditary Imam, Prince Karim Aga Khan IV, global Isma'ili organizations make available an astonishing array of services — social, economic, political, and religious — to some three to five million subjects stretching from Afghanistan to England, from Pakistan to Tanzania. Steinberg argues that this intricate and highly integrated network enables a new kind of shared identity and citizenship, one that goes well beyond the sense of community maintained by other diasporic populations. Of note in this process is the rapid assimilation in the postcolonial period of once-isolated societies into the intensively centralized Isma'ili structure. Also remarkable is the Isma'ilis' self-presentation, contrary to common characterizations of Islam in the mass media, as a Muslim society that is broadly sympathetic to capitalist systems, opposed to fundamentalism, and distinctly modern in orientation. Steinberg’s unique journey into remote mountain regions highlights today’s rapidly shifting meanings of citizenship, faith, and identity and reveals their global scale.

CHAPTER ONE Antecedents and Precursors

The Historical Contexts of Isma

ili Globalization

Who Are the Isma

ilis? A Simplified Sketch

The role of leadership, succession, and schism in the history of Islam warrants careful (albeit brief) consideration here.¹ It is only through an understanding of these processes that the story of Isma

ilism can be fully explained. At almost every historical moment, how the Isma

ili community defined and redefined itself revolved around questions of succession and rightful authority. This was always an issue in Shi

ism in general, since legitimate authority was the domain of the Ahl al-Bayt, the “people of the house” of the Prophet Muhammad, especially through the line of his nephew and son-in-law

Ali. The Shi

a opposed the Sunni notion of rule by consensus (ijma

) of the community, because they believed that leadership should only be in the hands of the qualified, especially since leadership involved elucidation of the underlying truth of the religion. The criteria among the Shi

a for the selection of qualified leaders were lineal; only the descendants of

Ali were seen to be qualified to lead Islamic society. The question, then, revolved around who was in fact the rightful heir in the line of

Ali.

Since the inception of the religion, and especially after the death of the Prophet, Islamic societies and polities have devoted a great deal of attention to these questions. After all, the Islamic leader, or caliph, was charged with prescribing both religious and worldly conduct. Leadership has remained more of a concern for Isma

ilism than for most other branches of Islam; Sunni populations no longer have a centralized caliph, nor do the Ithna

ashari Shi

a, who believe in the messianic return of the twelfth imam as Mahdi. Isma

ilis, however, retain a leader whom they believe to be a direct descendant of

Ali and thus uniquely qualified to explain and interpret the meaning of their religion.

In sum: after Muhammad's death, questions of succession caused a rift between those who favored

Ali as the leader of the Muslim community, and those who favored Abu Bakr, Muhammad's successor. Those loyal to

Ali and his cause would become known as the Shi

a, the “party” of

Ali; those who favored the caliphs beginning with Abu Bakr would later be referred to as Sunni. The Shi

a felt that

Ali had been wronged and cheated of his rights. Each group slowly developed its own distinctive religious orientation. The Shi

a too split into many sects, often over questions of succession. The Shi

i Isma

ilis were born in one such dispute: The major branch of Shi

a and the proto-Isma

ilis shared all the same imams through Ja

far al-Sadiq, the sixth imam by current Nizari Isma

ili reckoning (and the fifth in other reckonings). When Ja

far's son and heir-apparent, Isma

il, died before his father, a dispute arose over who was the rightful successor. Those who believed that it was Isma

il would become the Isma

iliyya (Daftary 1990: 1).

The various formations referred to as the “Isma

iliyya” have been commonly perceived as taking a somewhat radical and oppositional stance in the Islamic world; this reputation has been at the center of the attributes bestowed upon them by other groups. They have gone through cycles of great prominence and complete obscurity over the course of their history and have been divided by schism a number of times. Beginning in the tenth century, significantly, the Isma

ilis established a territorial state, the Fatimid Empire, which included much of North Africa and western Asia. The Fatimids built the city of Cairo (including the famous Al-Azhar mosque and university), which quickly became a cosmopolitan center; their territory incorporated Morocco and Mecca, Jerusalem and Sicily, and their religiopolitical network stretched from Africa to India (Daftary 1990: 2; Robinson 1996). These facts would become ethnographically important later for the influence they had on Isma

ilis’ views of themselves, but their actual relationship to contemporary Isma

ilism is difficult to discern. In fact, despite Isma

ili institutions’ insistence on their historical salience for modern Isma

ilism, their real shared continuity is rooted more in interpretation than historical fact.

As the Fatimid Empire began to fall apart, another major schism over succession to the Isma

ili imamate divided the sect into branches that became the Musta

lawiyya (or Musta

lian Isma

ilism, out of which emerged the Tayyibis and the Bohras of Yemen and India), and the Nizariyya, the branch that is our primary concern here, whose early post-Fatimid history was primarily in Iran, and out of which eventually came the line of the Aga Khans. The Nizariyya too had a “territorially scattered state” (Daftary 1990: 2) in Iran, with a center in the Elbrus Mountains above the Caspian Sea, and a vassal state in Syria with its own complex and significant history. It consisted of widely distributed fortresses that maintained intensive communication between them. While the Nizari state was not on the same scale as the Fatimid state, in the eyes of the key powers of the Islamic world, particularly the Seljuqs, it was a real threat and figures prominently in Islamic histories of the period; almost all the dynasties feared the rebellious Isma

ilis of the time. The Mongol invasions, however, especially the campaigns led specifically against the Nizaris by Hülegü, proved to be disastrous for the sect, and as the invaders swept across Iran on horseback, the Isma

ili community seemed to fade into obscurity; it became, for a time, little more than a conglomeration of scattered populations, with the central leadership presenting itself as a Sufi order. Only in the past century, with the explosion of global processes, has the Isma

ili community come back into the consciousness of the non-Isma

ili world. It should be noted that, while over the cours...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Ismaʿili Modern
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• INTRODUCTION Beyond Territoriality
• CHAPTER ONE Antecedents and Precursors
• CHAPTER TWO Fluid Cartographies
• CHAPTER THREE Universalizing Ismaʿilism
• CHAPTER FOUR Into the Fold
• CHAPTER FIVE Living Globality
• CONCLUSION Decoding Globality
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index