As I try to complete an old commission editing a volume of papers on Ismaili thought and thinkers (which hopefully should appear with Tauris/Bloomsbury and the IIS in the new year), I seem to move again back to an examination of different periods in the development of Ismaili doctrine and confessions. I have also recently supervised an excellent dissertation on Qāḍī Nuʿmān's hadith methodology that throws up much interesting methodological insights on understanding the development of Fāṭimid doctrines and genres of writing.
As most people in the study of Islam know, the Ismailis represent an esoteric approach to scripture and symbols of the faith and are particularly associated with a hermeneutics of taʾwīl par excellence as a means for establishing a dynamic and unfolding understanding of the faith. Despite this reputation, already articulated in studies by Corbin, Ivanow, and De Smet, the nature and purpose of taʾwīl as an allegoresis of scriptural exegesis is little understood and studied. Taʾwīl was essential to the early Ismaili kerygma/mission (daʿwa) and the means for the dissemination of the notion of salvation history and of salvific knowledge itself. The unconventional modes of this interpretation often led to the characterization of the Ismailis as socially radical and transgressive in their esotericism by particularly Sunni authorities such as, in perhaps the most famous case, al-Ghazālī (d. 1111) in his Calumnies of the Esotericists (Faḍāʾiḥ al-bāṭinīya). David Hollenberg's monograph Beyond the Qurʾān focuses on the early Ismaili period in which the mission was active, dynamic, militant and sectarian in a conflictual manner and perhaps by implication an interesting question is when that the mission’s approach come to an end or radically transfigure after the Fāṭimid perod into the current notions of pluralism that dominate especially the modern Nizārī tradition. He presents a tightly argued five chapters and an epilogue (in a relatively short book) that attempts to reconsider how we make sense of taʾwīlby refocusing on three themes: the sectarianism of the dynamics of the mission, the apocaplyticism of it (especially in the pre-official Fāṭimid period), and the sources of allegoresis and the objectives of the mission. The main thrust is to argue that taʾwīl constitutes a ‘cognitive re-training’ and habituation into a sectarian identity. Recent research and publication of texts has tended to focus on the Fāṭimid and post-Fāṭimid period (especially in terms of the publications of the Institute of Ismaili Studies in London) and hence the early period has been somewhat neglected. Hollenberg attempts to rectify that and locates his study within the study of esotericisms and knowledge systems of hermeneutics in the study of religion in his preface; elsewhere he also draws on sociological theories. A more thorough introduction would have been useful to locate his contribution within Ismaili and Shiʿi studies more properly especially since he provides a number of correctives and objections to existing norms in Ismaili studies.
[For other reviews of the same work, see
Chapter one on competing islands of salvation distinguishes the Fāṭimid polity’s campaign and mission from the early Ismaili mission and locates the latter in a pan-ʿAlid rhetorical strategy aimed at converts (especially from Twelver Shiʿa and from Zaydīs as we know from some early works by Ibn al-Ḥaytham, Ibn al-Ḥawshab, and Jaʿfar b. Manṣūr al-Yaman). In a sense this is a literature review chapter that covers the development of Ismailism and criticizes the positions of a number of experts such as Daftary and Hodgson on sectarianism, Sanders and Bierman on Fāṭimid material culture and its integration into the mission, and Brett on the role of the Imam in the mission. He begins with a consideration of what is meant by the term daʿwa and how it ought to be associated with sectarian identity and often beliefs in esotericism, imminent messianism, gnosticism, and eschatology. Hollenberg presents the mission as a new religious movement. The focus on taʾwīl and the nature of the daʿwa helps to explain the different stages of splits within the ranks and attempts to change the direction of the daʿwa first under the Fāṭimids and then later with the two new branches of the Ṭayyibī and Nizārī missions. The early daʿwa’s broader appeal and its somewhat distant relationship to the Imam gave way to a narrower sectarianism. This, however, still begs the question – which we may not be able to answer in the absence of sources – of how that mission functioned and the absence of the active role of the Imam in articulating the learned culture of the Fāṭimids does not tell us what may have been happening before then. Furthermore it would be useful to show how the sectarianism and inculcation of the mission was similar to other sectarian movements including proto-Sunnism. It would be unfortunate if some readers took away from the study the idea of a new re-entrenched idea of the Ismailis as sectarians going against some developing Sunni normativity. In that sense, the formative world of Islam was the venue for competing islands of salvation, orthodoxy and apostasy.
Chapter two moves onto the daʿwa literature and its focus on taʾwīl. This literature is not really an esoteric hermeneutics of the Qurʾan but rather uses the scripture as a set of prompts to establish a more radical, gnostic doctrine that claims revealed status. As such taʾwīl should not – and this is contrary to the earlier work of Strothmann, Steigerwald and Bar-Asher – be assimilated into the general study of Qurʾanic exegesis or tafsīr but rather associated with the privileged knowledge of the Imams as bearers of truth, as the holders and professors of taʾwīl as opposed to the Prophet’s role as bearer of the revelation (tanzīl). It is that esoteric truth revealed by the Imams that is deployed in taʾwīl. Thus taʾwīl is not the esoteric other of tafsīr but of tanzīl and brings to mind the narration famous in Shiʿi circles in which the Prophet addressed ʿAlī stating that just as he fought for the revelation so will ʿAlī fight for the taʾwīl. It is then the role of the missionaries to use rhetoric including devices of taʾwīl to disseminate that esoteric truth. Hollenberg then considers the sources that he is using and acknowledges the problem of ascertaining authorship partly because so little is known about the authors of what the later Ṭayyibī tradition calls ḥaqāʾiq literature. His periodization into pre- and Fāṭimid works makes sense; however, it is not clear how he establishes and authenticates the attribution of a text, not least because of uncertain manuscript provenances and the relatively modern copying and survival of codices. For example, the Kitāb al-kashf and other works that are highly lettrist and occult in content are allocated to the pre-Fāṭimid period and unlike the previous specialists are anonymized and not attributed to Jaʿfar al-Manṣūr al-Yaman (although no strong reason is given for rejecting the previous attribution). What is interesting about the early taʾwīl texts is that there is a strong overlap with Nuṣayrī and similar material which begs the question of how we understand the milieu whence the Ismailis emerged. Hollenberg notes this connection but does not take it further. In that sense, it would be useful to compare his findings with recent work in that tradition by Yaron Friedman, Bella Tendler and Mushegh Asatryan.
Chapter three examines the ways in which taʾwīl constitutes a cognitive re-training through symbols, patterns, and logics of that material. The ‘rearing’ of acolytes is through the appeal to these elements in the work of al-Qāḍī al-Nuʿmān and Jaʿfar b. Manṣūr al-Yaman. This process undergoes stages: the first is the recognition of the Imam in a series of anagnorisis events (briefly studied before by Philip Kennedy with respect to the work of Ibn Ḥawshab); the second is the pledging of allegiance as the rebirth of the acolyte; the third is the imparting of the knowledge of the daʿwa; the fourth is the repetition and inculcation of that knowledge through training in the symbols; the final one is the rearing in the logic of the daʿwa. This is then followed by some examples of the prophets. One thinks of cognate examples in the exegesis of al-Shahrastānī (d. 1153) which deals with binary pairs: the one that ends this chapter is the coupling of the familiar with the obscure, that partly accounts for the early Ismaili embrace of Neoplatonism as a rhetorical strategy.
Chapter four moves on to the practice of Jaʿfar b. Manṣūr al-Yaman in his taʾwīl of prophecy in the Qurʾan and beyond it. This chapters engages the enunciator prophets and the establishment of laws and religious dispensations. The difference to some other forms of esotericism in Islam is that the composition of those religious dispensations and laws is tied to the agency of the Prophet and not just something given in revelation. Hollenberg also makes an interesting observation about the incorporation of philosophical elements into the work of Jaʿfar b. Manṣūr as part of a strategy of debating in the East and critiquing some of the missionaries there who remained with the old mission (contra the Fāṭimids); the example given is the creation of Adam and its assimilation to the theory of emanation. The examples of Noah, Moses, Jesus and Muḥammad are also considered. The key point is that this articulation of the law and those who oppose it is a critique of those who failed to recognise the Fāṭimid Imam and hence rejected the previous prophets. Previous religious dispensations are abrogated and the corrupted scriptures recovered through the skill of the Imam to ascertain the esoteric truths. The final chapter continues the examination of the hermeneutics of Jaʿfar b. Manṣūr al-Yaman and this time considers the Biblical and Israelite material to establish types and anti-types. What Hollenberg shows – and I would contend that this was true generally of Shiʿi strategies of the text – was that the usage of the Torah was not merely the extrapolation of Israelite materials in order to gloss and fill in the narratives of the Biblical prophets (as was often the case in Sunni exegetical contexts), but constituted an act of taʾwīl in which the Torah was used just like the Qurʾan. The notion of cyclical time and the repetition of types and anti-types suggested that in the Torah were plenty of examples that spoke to the nature of a daʿwa, the role of an enunciating Prophet and Imam and the ways in which their mission was obstructed and thwarted and even their scriptures tampered. It was the role of taʾwīl to bring out the significance of those account and ascertain the truth. As Hollenberg correctly notes, this could be possible because that strategy was already used by Imāmī authors in Kufa and elsewhere before the Fāṭimid daʿwa.
The short final epilogue raises an interesting connection between the daʿwa, apocalypticism and imperialism. He connects his findings on the Ismaili mission and its transformation from an ‘imminent’ apocalypticism to an ‘immanent’ and otherworldly (one might say routinized and institutionalized) apocolypticism to recent scholarship on the ʿAbbasids and indeed on the early modern messianic empires of the Timurids, Ottomans and Safavids. In doing so, he suggests that we need to go beyond our archetypes of scholars of the past with whom we are primarily concerned, with the jurists, the belles-lettrists, the philosophers and the Sufis and consider a critical fifth category of politically and socially active thinker and esotericist the dāʿī.
Hollenberg presents us, in this rather brief argument, with a radically distinct approach to the Ismaili kerygma that forces us not to fall back onto platitudes such as defining it as esotericist, counter-cultural or occult but actually demands of us the need to ask: esoteric in what sense, or glossing the text in what way? That is indeed the very question - and defining the esoteric almost by definition is wrought with problems and hermeneutical problems.The absence of the texts and a clear notion of their provenance for the early period makes this difficult to understand. What is clear is that he presents us with certain starting points, and from there we need to locate this early kerygma within other esoteric and Shiʿi strategies in the early period that will help us to distinguish between Imāmīs, Ismailis and Nuṣayrīs. In that sense, Beyond the Qurʾan is really one of the best recent contributions, from the perspective of the study of religion with its strengths and weaknesses, of early Shiʿi intellectual history.
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