The Ismāʿīlīs and Their Traditions

A major Shīʿī Muslim community, the Ismāʿīlīs have had a complex history dating back to the formative period of Islam. In the course of their history, the Ismāʿīlīs became subdivided into a number of major branches and minor groups. However, since the end of the fifth/eleventh century, they have existed in terms of two main branches, the Nizārīs and the Mustaʿlians, respectively designated as Khojas and Bohras in South Asia. Currently, the Ismāʿīlīs are scattered as religious minorities in more than thirty countries in Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Europe, and North America. Numbering several millions, they also represent a diversity of ethnic groups and literary traditions and speak a variety of languages. Both Ismāʿīlī historiography and the perceptions of outsiders of the Ismāʿīlīs in pre-modern times, in both Muslim and Christian milieus, have had a fascinating trajectory. In the course of their long history, the Ismāʿīlīs were persistently misrepresented with a variety of myths and legends circulating about their teachings and practices. This state of affairs reflected mainly the fact that until the twentieth century the Ismāʿīlīs were almost exclusively studied and evaluated on the basis of evidence collected, or often fabricated, by their detractors. As the most politically active wing of Shīʿī Islam, with a religiopolitical agenda that aimed to uproot the ʿAbbāsids and restore the caliphate to a line of ʿAlid imāms, from early on the Ismāʿīlīs aroused the hostility of the Sunnī establishment that led the Muslim majority. With the foundation of the Fāṭimid caliphate in 297/909, ruled by the Ismāʿīlī imām-caliph, the potential challenge of the Ismāʿīlīs to the established Sunnī order was actualised, and thereupon the ʿAbbāsids and the Sunnī ʿ ulamāʾ or religious scholars launched what amounted to an official anti-Ismāʿīlī propaganda campaign. The overall aim of this prolonged literary campaign was to discredit the Ismāʿīlī movement from its origins, so that the Ismāʿīlīs could be readily condemned as mulḥids, heretics or deviators from the true religious path. In particular, Sunnī polemicists fabricated the necessary evidence that would lend support to the refutation of the Ismāʿīlīs on specific doctrinal grounds. Muslim heresiographers, theologians, jurists, and historians also