Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

THE UMMA t 143
ries. Then, in the second half of the ninth century, two diverse
movements sprung from the same Shiite soil, the Qarmatians
and the Ismailis properly so-called. Their “call” (dawa), as these
early Ismailis referred to their movement, was heard in southern
Iraq and Bahrain—this latter the proper locus of the Qarmatian
“branch” of the larger movement—as well as in northwestern Iran
and North Africa. The original substance of the call was the announcement
of Ismail’s son Muhammad’s concealment and the
promise of his eventual return as the Mahdi. It was precisely there,
however, that the two groups parted company. Whereas the main
body of the Ismailis believed that the return of the Imam had taken
place in a person named Ubaydallah in Ifriqiyya (modern Tunisia),
the Qarmatians continued to await the perhaps distant End Time
return of their leader.
The Fatimids—as the dynasty was known, to stress its descent
from both Ali and Fatima in contrast to the Abbasids, who
claimed descent from Ali alone—soon vacated their eschatological
claims. The End—the qiyama, or “resurrection,” in Ismaili parlance—was
not yet, and in the meantime there would be an indefinite
line of caliph-Imams to rule the Abode of Islam. This meant
that the traditional Islam of the “Pillars” and its traditional law
(sharia) were still firmly in place. The Sunnis who were now under
Ismaili political control were not constrained to embrace Shiism—
such a course may have been far too dangerous, politically speaking—but
the Fatimids did make strenuous efforts to convert them.
Missionary dais were trained in the new dawa center in Cairo, al-
Azhar, which eventually turned into Islam’s largest, most prestigious,
and influential (Sunni) school of religious studies and still
dispatches Muslim missionaries all over the globe. From al-Azhar
they were sent into the Fatimid provinces to instruct and persuade
the Sunni majority and sent under cover into the caliph’s domains
to subvert the Sunni regime, which they attempted—unsuccessfully,
as it turned out—with a combination of propaganda and
terrorism.
The foundations of Ismaili Fatimid political power had originally
been laid down among the perennially dissident Berber
tribes, who had already bucked the tide in their adherence to Don-