Ismaili and Fatimid Studies in Honor of Paul E. Walker.

• Author: Brett, Michael
• Position: Book review

Ismaili and Fatimid Studies in Honor of Paul E. Walker. Edited by BRUCE D. CRAIG. Chicago Studies on the Middle East, vol. 7. Chicago: MIDDLE EAST DOCUMENTATION CENTER, UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO, 2010. Pp. xxi + 214. $59.95.

Over the past twenty years Paul Walker has succeeded to Wladimir Ivanow and Wilferd Madelung as a major figure in the study and exposition of the philosophical tradition that developed in the Ismaili branch of Shitism in the Fatimid period from the tenth to the twelfth century C.E., In common with Ismaili studies in general, it is a subject that emerged from nowhere in the 1930s to establish itself over the past fifty years as a major aspect of the intellectual history of medieval Islam. It has done so not simply because of its intrinsic interest as yet another attempt to combine Neoplatonism with divine revelation, but because of its central notion of an Imam as the pivot of the natural and human world, pointed by its function as the ideology of the Fatimid dynasty in its endeavor to take over the government of the Islamic world. While that endeavor succeeded in making more enemies than friends, the controversy it engendered played a formative role in the development of Islam, one that is only now being recognized. In this volume in honor of Walker's achievement, the cosmology is addressed by the doyen of Ism-dcili studies, Wilferd Madelung, and by Daniel De Smet; the history of the dynasty by Farhad Daftary; and the outcome of the controversy for the Islamic world by Maribel Fierro. Her contribution on the Almohads and the Fatimids is particularly apt, since it illustrates the geographical range of the subject, from the philosophers of Iran in the east to the statesmen of Morocco and al-Andalus in the west, over the three hundred years. from the tenth to the twelfth century, during which the FAtitnids moved from Tunisia to Egypt to occupy a central position between the two extremes. As they did so they moved into the embrace of the Iranian philosophers, who enfolded a doctrine of the Imam-Caliph as the lineal successor to the Prophet, with supreme authority for the law and supreme command of the community, in a philosophical version of a previous creation myth, one that led into a sequence of seven ages of prophecy culminating in that of Muhammad and his successors.

Their grand scheme of a cosmos that descends from and ascends to its Creator is introduced by Madelung's examination of a newly available treatise on the...