Abu Tammam and his 'Kitab al-Shajara': a new Ismaili treatise from tenth-century Khurasan.

• Author: Walker, Paul E.

In 1965 Arif Tamir, a Syrian Ismaili scholar of no small accomplishment in terms of works written and edited, published in Beirut a text called Kitab al-idah, which he claimed was the work of Abu Firas Shihab al-Din al-Maynaqi - a prominent authority in the Syrian Ismaili community during the first half of the sixteenth century. This new addition to the body of available Ismaili materials proved to contain important examples of sophisticated, quasi-scientific intellectual doctrines and, beyond that, citations of other authors and texts not available elsewhere. The trouble was that this work, however valuable, gave almost no evidence of having been written in Syria, and especially not in the era of Abu Firas.

Although Abu Firas' father came originally from Daylam, the son was born in Syria in 859/1455 and grew up in the mountain fortresses that belonged to the Ismailis of that region, such as Masyaf and Qadmus and most particularly Maynaqa, where he spent the greater part of his life until he died, having become the chief dai, in either 937/1530 or 947/1540-41.(1) Thus, there could be little question but that a treatise by him - especially one as extensive and learned as the/idah - indicated not only Abu Firas' acquisition of scientific and philosophical knowledge that put him in the same league as the major figures from much earlier (such as the 4th/10th century giants Abu Hatim al-Razi, Muhammad al-Nasafi, and Abu Yaqub al-Sijistani) but, as well, a brilliant continuity in the scholarly traditions of this community. In his enthusiasm for Abu Firas' treatise, Tamir added to this comparison later writers of even greater stature, such as al-Kirmani, an Ismaili writer, and Ibn Sina and Suhrawardi, both of whom were almost certainly not Ismaili. The Idah was proof that the Ismailis had retained in Syria a strong attachment to their intellectual heritage long after - in fact centuries after - its classical inception and greatest flourishing.(2)

The Syrian group to which Abu Firas belonged did not follow the same line of imams that eventually produced the Aga Khans. Locally they are known as Jafari Ismailis. Among them, apparently, a tradition of preserving and copying older texts continues to exist. Rumors of this had led W. Ivanow, perhaps the foremost of the modern scholarly pioneers in the effort to recover and catalog the literature of the Ismailis, to attempt to obtain detailed information about this community's literary holdings. Most intriguing was the possibility that the Syrians, as users of Arabic from the beginning, might have examples of the earliest works, some of which seem to have been lost to the Tayyibi Ismailis of Yemen and India, the other and generally most productive source of original texts from the earliest centuries. Non-Tayyibi, non-Syrian Ismailis, such as the Nizaris of Iran and India have no comparable tradition of Arabic scholarship and, accordingly, did not retain examples of the oldest literature. Ivanow in his 1963 Ismaili Literature: A Bibliographical Survey, however, noted the difficulty of gaining access to Jafari-held materials and credits there an unnamed "journalist of Beirut" for providing him a list of what might exist.(3)

Among the titles he gives, three that have particular importance in regard to the present investigation were grouped under the name "Nakhshabi," which Ivanow insisted has "obviously nothing to do with the ancient Nakhshabi." Nakhshabi and Nasafi are the same - Nasafi is the Arabized form of the Persian Nakhshabi.(4) The person Ivanow refers to is the famous philosophical author and dai, who was martyred in 332/934 at the Samanid court.(5) The three works in question are (no. 795) Kitab al-mahsul, (no. 796) Kitab al-burhan, and (no. 797) Kitab al-idah. The title al-Mahsul is the same as that of Mu.hammad al-Nasafi's highly influential, seminal treatise, considered by many authorities to be the first work to attempt the philosophical interpretation of Ismaili doctrines.

The presence also of the title al-idah in Ivanow's list without an attribution to Abu Firas, who is nevertheless represented by other titles, should have caused concern in the case of Tamir's assertion that he was its author. This is especially so in view of the material in the Idah which hardly fits the sixteenth century. Most important in this regard is its doctrine about the imamate - a doctrine that expresses a concept of the Qaim and his khulafa that is characteristic of the Iranian writers during the 4th/10th century but does not exist during later times.(6) Taken at face value, the Idah could only have been composed in the 4th/10th century, almost certainly in Khurasan, where its author says he is or has been. There are, in addition, a number of other points of reservation, chief being the numerous citations in it of the Mahsul, a work by someone the text itself calls only al-Hakim al-Sadiq.(7) These citations, however, cannot refer to anyone but the famous al-Nasafi and to his work the Mahsul - not as Tamir wanted to insist, to the imam Ahmad b. Abdallah.(8) Other material in the text names the famous physician Abu Bakr al-Razi (d. 313),(9) and there are pieces of it that parallel closely the so-called Pseudo-Ammonius, an important, pseudo-epigraphical doxography of ancient Greek philosophical opinions which itself has a connection to the work of both Abu Hatim al-Razi (d. 322) and al-Nasafi.(10)

Tamir himself was likely uneasy with his attribution of the Idah to Abu Firas because, in 1982, he reissued virtually the same material under the title Shajarat al-yaqin, this time stating that its author was the well-known Iraqi Qarmatian dai Abdan (3rd/9th century). Most disturbing about its reappearance in this form is not the highly improbable attribution to Abdan and the early Qarmatians - after all, there are indications that a number of Abdan's followers wrote books in a period subsequent to his murder in 286 and ascribed them to his authorship.(11) The Shajara/Idah could have been such a work and thus the anachronism of its citations of Abu Bakr al-Razi and Muhammad al-Nasafi could be explained in this way. But what is truly more serious and perplexing is why Tamir himself failed in the second publication to admit the coincidence between one text and the other. The differences between them are for the most part transparent: the Shajarat al-yaqin leaves out phrases, a few references to names that cannot have been known in the 4th/10th century are dropped, and the second version provides, on occasion, an alternative reading. Thus, while it is quite possible that Tamir's sources supplied him with two works already differing in attribution and in phrasing, comparing the two carefully makes the publication of the Shajarat al-yaqin look more like a shoddy effort to account for numerous doubts arising from the mistaken claim for Abu Firas' authorship. It might, for example, still have been argued that Abu Firas had reused an older work and that the discovery of the Shajara had finally made that clear. Tamir, however, did not do this but rather, through his silence, left the matter hanging. As will be seen, the truth is that both claims about authorship are almost certainly entirely false; neither Abdan nor Abu Firas had a hand in writing the Shajara/Idah. The question of variation, however, needs to be reconsidered in the light of evidence about the text - its date and its real author - now to be offered.

My own interest in this work grew out of research on the early Ismaili Neoplatonist philosophers. It has long been thought that al-Nasafi and his Mahsul hold the keys to understanding how and why Neoplatonism entered the Ismaili intellectual tradition. Written at the beginning of the 4th/10th century, the Mahsul seems to have circulated widely both in Ismaili circles and elsewhere. Al-Nasafi earned repute as a philosopher even from those who would have rigorously rejected his Ismaili religious views.(12) During the period of his greatest achievements, just prior to his martyrdom, the Ismailis of Khurasan enjoyed an uncharacteristic era of acceptance at the Samanid court. A prominent Amir, Husayn al-Marwazi, actively promoted their cause, providing support and protection, and possibly a forum for their scholarly teaching, exchanges and research.(13) Ostensibly, all this came to an end - perhaps merely a hiatus - with the death, first of the Amir, and then with a violent reversal in the sentiment of the ruling house, leading directly to the execution of al-Nasafi and many of his followers in 332/934. For the next thirty years or so, the outstanding Neoplatonizing figure was Abu Yaqub al-Sijistani, who seems to have been active then mainly in Sijistan and not in Khurasan.(14)

Unlike al-Sijistani, whose books and treatises, by and large, found an honored niche in later Ismaili libraries, those of al-Nasafi, though well regarded by some in their day, apparently were not preserved.(15) That places great value on all those citations from them that do remain in other works, notably in Abu Hatim's al-Islah, which is a point by point refutation of the Mahsul,(16) in Hamid al-Din al-Kirmani's al-Riyad, which is a critical review of the dispute about the Mahsul,(17) and in Abu al-Qasim al-Busti's Kashf asrar al-Batiniya, which, as a fairly early Zaydi denunciation of Ismaili thought, is one of the most knowledgeable witnesses to 4th/10th century Ismaili writings.(18) As an addition to these, the Idah, which cites and/or quotes the Mahsul in a number of instances, offers a further critical source of information - a fact duly noted by Ismail Poonawala in his monumental 1977 Biobibliography of Ismaili Literature.

In my study of the references to the Mahsul in the Idah, I was aware continually both of their importance and of the difficulty of separating what belonged to al-Nasafi from what might be the work of the author of the Idah itself. The exact quotations in question are not clearly...