Daniel Beben

This book offers a new Persian edition and the first English translation of the Ibrat-afza, the memoirs of Hasan Ali Shah, the 46th Imam of the Nizari Ismailis and the first Ismaili Imam to bear the title of Aga Khan. The Ibrat-afza was composed in the year 1851, following the Imam’s departure from Persia and his permanent settlement in India.

The text recounts the Aga Khan’s early life and political career as the governor of the province of Kirman in Iran, and narrates the dramatic events of his conflict with the Qajar establishment in Iran and his subsequent travels and exploits in Afghanistan and British India. The Ibrat-afza provides a rare example of an autobiographical account from an Ismaili Imam and a first-hand account giving a window into the history of the Ismailis of Iran, India and Central Asia at the dawn of the modern era of their history. Consequently, the book will be of great interest to both researchers and general readers interested in Ismaili history and in the history of the Islamic world in the nineteenth century.

This dissertation examines the legendary biographical traditions concerning the eleventh-century Ismāʿīlī philosopher and missionary Nāṣir-i Khusraw and their significance for the history of the Badakhshān region of Central Asia.  While scholars have long been aware of the immense body of narratives surrounding this figure, previous studies have examined these texts only as sources for the historical biography of Nāṣir-i Khusraw.  In contrast, this study instead seeks to place these narratives within their own historical context and to examine the particular agendas behind their creation.  This body of literature offers a unique window into the social and religious history of Badakhshān for periods that are otherwise poorly served by documentary evidence.  While there is little doubt that Nāṣir-i Khusraw came to Badakhshān as an Ismāʿīlī missionary, I find that it was first among Sunni constituencies connected with Nāṣir’s shrine that a discernible effort was made to perpetuate his legacy, an effort that entailed an effacing of his Ismāʿīlī past.  It was only in the eighteenth century that a written hagiographical tradition connected with Nāṣir-i Khusraw took shape among Ismāʿīlī communities in Badakhshān.  I argue that this Ismāʿīlī hagiographical tradition drew substantially upon the older stratum of Sunni biographical narratives concerning Nāṣir-i Khusraw, and sought to capitalize upon his charisma as a popular saint in an effort to extend the Ismāʿīlī daʿwah in the Badakhshān region.  This study explores the textualization of this hagiographical tradition within the context of the broader social and political transformations in the Islamic world in the eighteenth century, an era that witnessed a vigorous expansion of Ismāʿīlī activity in Central Asia and elsewhere.  I find that hagiographical production served as a medium through which these communities narrated themselves within both the framework of Islamic civilization and of a transnational Ismāʿīlī identity, and advanced claims to political and social legitimacy within those frameworks.  The ever-evolving biographical image of Nāṣir-i Khusraw presents us with a window onto the changing relationship between Badakhshān and the broader Muslim world.  This dissertation presents a case study in the process of religious conversion, communal identity formation, and the development and transmission of cultural memory in the Islamic world.

Badakhshan is a historical region spanning the present-day territories of northeastern Afghanistan and eastern Tajikistan, as well as bordering districts of northern Pakistan and northwestern China. This mountainous region was historically significant on account of its position as a key transit point for trade between China and western Eurasia, as well as for its gem mines. The region held a largely peripheral position within the Muslim world down to the 12th century. Its status changed significantly in the wake of the Mongol conquests, from which Badakhshan emerged as a notably enlarged and autonomous kingdom, one which thereafter played an important role in the political history of Central Asia and Afghanistan. However, neighboring empires continued to encroach on the region throughout the 18th and 19th century, and by the end of the 19th century, the region had permanently lost its autonomy and was partitioned between Afghanistan and the Russian Empire.

The history of Ismailism in the Persianate world in the centuries following the Mongol conquests remains among the least explored areas in the field of Ismaili studies today. This is particularly the case for the Central Asian Ismaili tradition, as research in this area until recently has been severely hampered by a lack of access to source materials, the vast bulk of which remain held in private collections in the highland Badakhshān region.  However, in recent years a significant quantity of Ismaili manuscript materials from Badakhshān have come to light, many of which have now been collected and made available by the Institute of Ismaili Studies (IIS). Among the more prominent texts of the Central Asian Ismaili tradition is one titled Ṣaḥīfat al-nāẓirīn (Pages for the Readers), also known under the titles Sī ū shish ṣaḥīfa (Thirty-Six Chapters) and Tuḥfat al-nāẓirīn (Gift for the Readers), which is the subject of reassessment in this chapter. The Ṣaḥīfat al-nāẓirīn is an important yet understudied work covering a series of topics related to Ismaili theology and doctrine, and is noteworthy for being the first Ismaili text known to have been composed within Badakhshān after Nāṣir-i Khusraw (d. after 462/1070). While the text undoubtedly deserves further study on several counts, in this chapter I will pursue the more limited objective of re-examining the matter of the authorship of the text and, by extension, the implications of it for the history of Ismailism in Central Asia.

The Ismailis are a minority community of Shiʿi Muslims that first emerged in the 8th century. Iran has hosted one of the largest Ismaili communities since the earliest years of the movement and from 1095 to 1841 it served as the home of the Nizārī Ismaili imams. In 1256 the Ismaili headquarters at the fortress of Alamūt in northern Iran was captured by the Mongols and the Imam Rukn al-Dīn Khūrshāh was arrested and executed, opening a perilous new chapter in the history of the Ismailis in Iran. Generations of observers believed that the Ismailis had perished entirely in the course of the Mongol conquests. Beginning in the 19th century, research on the Ismailis began to slowly reveal the myriad ways in which they survived and even flourished in Iran and elsewhere into the post- Mongol era. However, scholarship on the Iranian Ismailis down to the early 20th century remained almost entirely dependent on non-Ismaili sources that were generally quite hostile toward their subject. The discovery of many previously unknown Ismaili texts beginning in the early 20th century offered prospects for a richer and more complete understanding of the tradition’s historical development. Yet despite this, the Ismaili tradition in the post-Mongol era continues to receive only a fraction of the scholarly attention given to earlier periods, and a number of sources produced by Ismaili communities in this period remain unexplored, offering valuable opportunities for future research.

This article examines how a text attributed to the renowned Central Asian Sufi figure Aḥmad Yasavī came to be found within a manuscript produced within the Ismāʿīlī Shīʿī community of the Shughnān district of the Badakhshān region of Central Asia. The adoption of this text into an Ismāʿīlī codex suggests an exchange between two disparate Islamic religious traditions in Central Asia between which there has hitherto been little evidence of contact. Previous scholarship on Ismāʿīlī-Sufi relations has focused predominately on the literary and intellectual engagement between these traditions, while the history of persecution experienced by the Ismāʿīlīs at the hands of Sunnī Muslims has largely overshadowed discussions of the social relationship between the Ismāʿīlīs and other Muslim communities in Central Asia. I demonstrate that this textual exchange provides evidence for a previously unstudied social engagement between Ismāʿīlī and Sunnī communities in Central Asia that was facilitated by the rise of the Khanate of Khoqand in the 18th century. The mountainous territory of Shughnān, where the manuscript under consideration originated, has been typically represented in scholarship as isolated prior to the onset of colonial interest in the region in the late 19th century. Building upon recent research on the impact of early modern globalization on Central Asia, I demonstrate that even this remote region was significantly affected by the intensification of globalizing processes in the century preceding the Russian conquest. Accordingly, I take this textual exchange as a starting point for a broader re-evaluation of the Ismāʿīlī-Sufi relationship in Central Asia and of the social 'connectivity' of the Ismāʿīlīs and the Badakhshān region within early modern Eurasia.

This article explores the practices of religious secrecy and dissimulation (taqiyya) within the minority Ismāʿīlī Shīʿī Muslim community of Central Asia. While the doctrinal aspects of the practice of taqiyya within the Shīʿī Muslim tradition have been the subject of a wide range of research, the social dimensions of its praxis have remained largely unexamined. This study addresses one of the key contradictions inherent in the practice of taqiyya, namely that while such practices may contribute to the cohesion and resilience of a religious community in the short term, the prolonged observance of religious dissimulation over time may result in assimilation to the majority community and the loss of communal integrity and identity. This article offers a case study of the strategies adopted by one minority religious community, the Ismāʿīlīs of Central Asia, to resolve this tension and to maintain communal integrity in the face of a prolonged experience of religious dissimulation. In particular, I reassess the place of taqiyya within the relationship between Ismāʿīlism and Sufism, which has frequently been cited as constituting a form of disguise for Ismāʿīlīs engaged in the practice of dissimulation. I demonstrate how an examination of Sufi themes within the literary and oral traditions of the Central Asian Ismāʿīlīs may shed new light on the particular strategies of secrecy adopted within the community in the past and will explore how these strategies may have functioned to resolve the tensions inherent in the prolonged observance of taqiyya.

This paper is a study of the Kalām-i pīr, a text on religious doctrine preserved among the Ismaʿili Shiʿi community of the Badakhshan region of Central Asia, attributed to the fifth/eleventh-century Ismaʿili author Nāṣir-i Khusraw. An edition and translation of this work was first published by Wladimir Ivanow, who judged it to be a 'forgery' by the tenth/sixteenth-century Ismaʿili missionary Khayrkhwāh Harātī. Ivanow concluded that while the text overall holds value as a specimen of Ismaʿili doctrinal writing, its first chapter, which purports to be an autobiographical account of its reputed author, Nāṣir-i Khusraw, is an irrelevant appendage to the work. Since then, Ivanow's interpretation has remained broadly authoritative within the field. In recent years, however, multiple new manuscripts of the work and a range of related materials have come to light, indicating the need for a thorough re-evaluation of the text and its history. In this article I demonstrate that Harātī had no role in the development of the Kalām-i pīr and that its production should be dated to the eighteenth century, rather than the sixteenth. Furthermore, I argue that the attribution to Nāṣir-i Khusraw, elaborated in the first chapter, is not incidental to the text, but central to understanding its significance within the Ismaʿili tradition of Central Asia. The text must be considered within the context of the history of Badakhshan in the eighteenth century, which saw an energetic expansion of the Ismaʿili mission (daʿwa) in the region and the development of a competitive hagiographical tradition connected with Nāṣir-i Khusraw among various constituencies. This re-evaluation of the Kalām-i pīr demonstrates the need for a revision of the broader framework by which we understand both the legacy of Nāṣir-i Khusraw and the historical development of the Ismaʿili daʿwa in Central Asia.

The Ismailis are one of the largest Muslim minority populations of Central Asia, and they make up the second largest Shiʿi Muslim community globally. First emerging in the second half of the 8th century, the Ismaili missionary movement spread into many areas of the Islamic world in the 10th century, under the leadership of the Ismaili Fatimid caliphs in Egypt. The movement achieved astounding success in Central Asia in the 10th century, when many of the political and cultural elites of the region were converted. However, a series of repressions over the following century led to its almost complete disappearance from the metropolitan centers of Central Asia. The movement later re-emerged in the mountainous Badakhshan region of Central Asia (which encompasses the territories of present-day eastern Tajikistan and northeastern Afghanistan), where it was introduced by the renowned 11th-century Persian poet, philosopher, and Ismaili missionary Nasir-i Khusraw. Over the following centuries the Ismaili movement expanded among the populations of Badakhshan, reaching a population of over 200,000 in the 21st century. In the 19th and 20th centuries, the Ismailis suffered a series of severe repressions, first under local Sunni Muslim rulers and later under the antireligious policies of the Soviet Union. However, in the decades since the end of the Soviet period, the Ismailis of the region have become increasingly connected with the global Ismaili community and its leadership. While many aspects of the history of Ismailism in the Badakhshan region remain obscure and unexplored, the discoveries of significant corpuses of manuscripts in private collections since the 1990s in the Badakhshan region have opened up wide possibilities for future research.

The Fatimid era is ubiquitous today in the discourse of the Nizari Ismaili imamate. Yet this was not always the case. As with other societies and religious communities the world over, the arrangement and presentation of history in the Ismaili tradition has
evolved in the course of time, with new historiographical agendas and subjects of emphasis emerging or receding in response to changes in the political and social contexts. In this chapter the place of the Fatimids in the cultural memory of the Nizari Ismailis in the post-Mongol era will be explored. It will be argued that the emphasis placed on the Fatimid era in present-day Nizari discourse is a relatively recent development, rooted in the dynamic changes that occurred in the social and political context of the community in the 18th and 19th centuries. Rather than the Fatimids,
the primary locus of Nizari communal memory in the earlier period from the 7th/13th to the 12th/18th centuries was the Alamut era, and particularly the declaration of the qiyama (spiritual resurrection) under Imam Hasan 'ala dhikrihi'l-salam at Alamut in 559/1164. It was only in the 18th century, when the Nizari imamate emerged from a long period of concealment and entered into a new-found position of political and social prominence, that we see the first signs of a de-emphasis of the qiyama and a renewed focus on the Fatimid era and its legacy.

In this study I examine the presentation of Saladin and the Crusades within the genre of Persian universal histories produced from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century. While a number of recent studies have begun to explore the place of the Crusades in the historical memory of the Islamic world, to date little attention has been given to the question of the manner in which the ensuing Mongol conquests affected subsequent Muslim memory of the Crusades. In this article I argue that historiographers of the Mongol and post-Mongol eras largely sought to legitimate the conquests through evocation of heresy and by celebrating the Mongols' role in combating alleged heretical elements within Muslim society, most notably the Ism¯ aʿ¯ ıl¯ ıs. While Saladin is universally remembered today first and foremost for his re-conquest of Jerusalem from the Crusaders, within the context of the agenda of Persian historiography of the post-Mongol era the locus of his significance was shifted to his overthrow of the Ism¯ aʿ¯ ıl¯ ı Fatimid dynasty in Egypt, to the almost complete exclusion of his role in the Crusades. This article challenges long-standing assumptions that the figure of Saladin was largely forgotten within the Muslim world until the colonial era, and instead presents an alternative explanation for the supposed amnesia in the Muslim world regarding the Crusades in the pre-modern era.

In this essay I propose to tackle a number of methodological concerns regarding the study of Islamic sectarian movements as agents of religious conversion as well as the evaluation of their long-term relevance and consequences for the broader process of Islamization.    I examine this question through a case study of the Shīʿī Ismāʿīlī community of the highland Badakhshan region of Central Asia, a historical province encompassing the mountainous districts of present-day northeastern Afghanistan and eastern Tajikistan, along with bordering areas of northern Pakistan and northwestern China.  I focus particularly on the role of the eleventh-century Persian poet, philosopher, and Ismāʿīlī missionary Nāṣir-i Khusraw, who is widely credited today with the introduction of Ismāʿīlī Shīʿism to this region.  Through an examination of a range of sources examining the legacy of Nāṣir-i Khusraw, as well as the broader array of literature on conversion within the Ismāʿīlī tradition, I argue that the idealized conception of religious conversion derived from this literature is untenable as a historical explanation.  In its place I propose a new framework for understanding the long-term significance of Ismāʿīlī and other “sectarian” missionary activity, which measures their impact not merely through the “success” of their particular communal interpretation of Islam, but rather through their contribution to the broader process of Islamization.  In pursuing this argument I stress a fundamental distinction between “conversion” as a more immediate and individual shift in religious adherence and “Islamization” as a broader and more gradual process of social change.  While the main significance of Nāṣir-i Khusraw’s career has been most commonly assigned to the former category, in contrast I find that it is the latter category, namely his contribution to the process of Islamization, which should rightly be considered his most notable legacy in Central Asia.