Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

144 t CHAPTER SIX
atism in the fifth century and Kharijism in the seventh. The Ismaili
call was not dissimilar to those earlier appeals and to the later ones
that carried Berber fundamentalists into Muslim Spain: a heightened
sense of community, a puritanical ethic, and a call to holy
war against the “false” Muslims outside the movement. Within the
new community of Ismailis a warrior class was recruited from
among the Berber tribes, and the Berbers provided the bulk of the
fighting force that carried the Fatimids across North Africa to conquer
Egypt and nearly the caliphate itself.
The Fatimid claims to the Imamate varied over the period covered
by the initiation of the call in Ifriqiyya, through the critical
reign of the Imam Muizz (r. 953–975), down to the last fatal
schism in the movement at the time of Imam Mustansir (r. 1036–
1094), but varied, in any event, from the more straightforward call
to apocalyptic revolution being broadcast by the Qarmatians.
Muizz’s reforms neither intended to nor succeeded in secularizing
the office of the Fatimid Imam whose titles and ceremonial remained
filled with echoes of Mahdism and quasi-divine powers.
The “materialization” of these tendencies culminated in the divine
claims of the Imam al-Hakim (d. 1021) and the creation of the
Druze sect, named after one of its prominent missionaries, al-
Darazi. Al-Hakim’s view of himself as a divinized or divine Imam
found little support among his subjects and his successors returned
to a modest posture on the Imamate as simply a more authentic
alternative for the Sunni caliphate. With the return to modesty
came a turning as well to another Abbasid pattern, the delegation
or loss of powers to more secular and military forces, the viziers
and generals of the realm.
With the decline of the Fatimid power center in Egypt, the
widely scattered Ismaili diaspora—the creation of those energetic
dais—was increasingly left to its own resources. There was a considerable
Ismaili apparatus in Iran, which, with schism and political
impotence in Cairo, was taken over by the dai Hasan ibn
al-Sabbah, who sometime before 1090 installed himself in the impregnable
fortress of Alamut in Daylam, south of the Caspian Sea.
Hasan never claimed the Imamate for himself; he was merely the
hujja or Proof, here understood as the custodian of Ismaili doc-