Proofs of Prophecy and the Refutation of the Isma'iliyya: The Kitab Ithbat nubuwwat al-nabi by the Zaydi al-Mu'ayyad bi-llah al-Haruni (d. 411/1020).

• Author: Walker, Paul E.
• Position: Book review

Proofs of Prophecy and the Refutation of the Isma'iliyya: The Kitab Ithbat nubuwwat al-nabi by the Zaydi al-Mu'ayyad bi-llah al-Haruni (d. 411/1020). By EVA-MARIA LIKA. Worlds of Islam, vol. 9. Berlin: DE GRUYTER, 2018. Pp. vii + 177 (Eng.), 152 (Ar.). $149.99, [euro]129.95, [pounds sterling]106.99.

Ismaili relations with the Zaydis during the Fatimid period were both good and bad--less hostile in the beginning but quite polemical by the era of al-Hakim when the two main antagonists, the Zaydi imam al-Mu'ayyad bi-llah al-Harunl and the Ismaili da'i Hamld al-Din al-Kirmanl exchanged bitter partisan denunciations of each other. One small element of that exchange involved the very treatise presented in the volume under review and the general topic is a major concern of the work as a whole.

But from long before there is evidence of a fairly close affinity between the Zaydis and the Ismailis. Wilferd Madelung's groundbreaking study of Qadi al-Nu'man's sources for legal materials from which he constructed Fatimid law revealed serious dependency on much earlier 'Alid writings, many of which were Zaydi. Ismaili refusal to allow mut'a marriage against the doctrine of the Imami Shi'a, which permits it, accords with Zaydi doctrine and likely derives from the same sources. We now know also that a number of key recruits to the Ismaili da'wa among the Maghribi elite in the beginning were secretly Zaydi Shi'is, a prime example being Ibn al-Haytham, whose firsthand account of the advent of the Fatimids constitutes an invaluable historical eyewitness. From about the mid-tenth century we also have a section on the Zaydis in Abu Tammam's Ismaili heresiography featuring five subsects, all destined for hellfire in the view of the author because of their erroneous doctrines.

The present work is Eva-Maria Lika's revision of her 2014 Free University of Berlin dissertation and it looks and acts more like a dissertation than it should. It actually consists of two not well or obviously connected projects. One is a critical edition of the Zaydi imam's Arabic text on the proofs of prophecy, a broad category of writing in Islamic literature, not only among Zaydis but most other sects as well, including the Ismailis. A critically important example of the latter is Abu Ya'qub al-Sijistani's Ithbat al-nubuwwat (Prophecy's proofs), a critical edition of which was published in 2016 in Tehran (edited by Madelung and myself). It appeared, it would seem, too late to be...