In the central lands of Islam (Anatolia, Iraq, Iran, and Central Asia), the politically volatile period between the end of Mongol rule and the rise of the early modern empires (ca. 1300-1500) is known for an upsurge in new religious movements that modern scholarship has labeled variously as “activist” and “messianic.” And though all these movements’ leaders certainly claimed messianic authority, sometimes verging ona divine nature, little is known about most of their beliefs. With this relative lack of textual evidence, modern scholarship has tended to simply portray these new religious movements of late medieval Islam as the descendants of early “extremist” (ghulāt) Shiʿi sects of 8th-9th c. Iraq.[1] Even less, however, is known about the latter’s beliefs, but crucial for modern scholars’ comparisons, these early Shiʿi sects, in addition to staging insurrections against the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphs, were accused of “exaggerating” (ghuluww) the Imams’ nature, to the point of viewing them as divine.[2] And yet, despite these undeniable resemblances, the half-millennium gap separating the early Shiʿi from late medieval messianic movements with no evidence of connection is enough to give any historian pause in placing the same label on communities and movements from such radically different contexts. This is all the more true when such classifications reproduce an essentialized portrayal of Shiʿism as a force for social division, prevented by constraints of a militant sectarianism from the free exchange of ideas with other elements in Islamic society.
This paper presents a new investigation of late medieval textual sources for the belief that has supposedly defined “extremist” Shiʿism throughout Islam’s history: the divinity of the Imam. Reading texts of two of the era’s “messianic” movements, the Hurufis and the Safavids, in comparison with the works of mainstream Sufi tradition, I show that medieval expressions of the Imam’s divine nature could not have been formulated without a key contribution of Sunni dogma, namely the Qurʾan’s status as God’s uncreated speech. I further present intertextual evidence that such a recognizably Sunni–Sufi component actually helped make such “extremist” Shiʿi views of the Imam both intelligible and appealing to a broad audience, not necessarily “popular,” “sectarian,” or both.
I ground this exposition in the writings of the Hurufi poet Imâdeddîn Nesimi (d. 1417), who introduced both the Turkophone public and learned elites to such elegies for the Prophet as “Lo! Your hair is by the night when it covers (Q 92:3), your face by the dawn (Q 92:2).”[3] The intensity of these praises of the Prophet’s beauty identifying his very body with the Qurʾān[4] was only reinforced by such refrains as “your attributes are the same as the Essence.”[5] Such statements were in turn reference to Ibn ʿArabī’s theology of divine attributes, which combined both Ashʿarī and Muʿtazilī-Imāmī views but with the net effect of upholding the Sunni dogma of God’s uncreated speech, precisely by upholding its identity with His Essence. Remarkably, Nesîmî not only alluded to this doctrine in verse, but even expounded it in a little-known prose treatise devoted to elucidating the apocryphal saying of Imam ʿAlī being “the dot beneath the bāʾ” that mysteriously contains the entire Qurʿan.[6] Nesimi’s treatise goes on to systematically defend not only ʿAlī’s identity with God, but that of the Prophet Muhammad and all others who achieve sainthood in the conventional Ibn ʿArabīan sense, all argued on the basis of the Qurʿan’s uncreated nature.
Now, Nesimi was not Shiʿi, but because his praises for the Imams were unusual for the Hurufi movement, we can safely infer that they were aimed at a Turkophone Shiʿi audience he wanted to win over, in heavily Shiʿi Aleppo where he preached.[7] And while we do know that isolated Shiʿi figures throughout the 14th-15th c. experimented with Ibn ʿArabī’s metaphysics, none of them had an appeal nearly as wide ranging as Nesimi. Both his gazels to a divine beloved whose very body is made up of Qurʾanic verses, and his elegies for the Twelve Imams, became key features of the genre of Turkic divan literature that he himself inaugurated, and earned copious imitation throughout the 15th c. among Sunni authors. The recognizability and pathos of these devices across boundaries of both confession and social class was such that when the first Safavid emperor Shah Ismaʿil I (r. 1501-24) began to rally his Kizilbash followers in the name of the Twelve Imams, one such call could read:
The courageous gazis have donned the crown of fortune
This is the Mahdi’s cycle of time, the world has turned to the light of eternity
His essence is Yāʾ Sīn, his heart is Ṭāʾ Hāʾ, his cheeks are Qāf – by the Qurʿān
With his lashes Nūn, his hair By the night, his face [By] the Sun [and its] dawning he has come.[8]
With this context, we cannot fail to appreciate how an intellectual background that upheld the Sunni dogma of God’s uncreated speech would have helped lead the young Shiʿi zealot Ismaʿil from witnessing the Qurʿān in the Imam’s face to declaring of ʿAlī, “know him as God – don’t call him a man!”[9] And yet, modern scholarship on medieval Islam has rarely taken such expressions seriously as products of a living literary and intellectual milieu, preferring to treat them as sharing some static essence of Shiʿi “extremism” passed down over centuries, both unaffected by history and leaving hardly a trace. By grounding my analysis of medieval Shiʿi “extremism” in textual evidence rather than inflexible categories, a far more differentiated and connected view of this obscure period of Islam’s religious history becomes possible.
[1] As in the studies of Roger Savory, Michel Mazzaoui, Bianca Maria Scarcia-Amoretti, Said Amir Arjomand, Kathryn Babayan, and others.
[2] As explored both by Mohammed Ali Amir-Moezzi and Hossein Modarressi.
[3] Nesîmî, Divan, ed. Huseyn Ayan.
[4] An observation on these verses belonging to Michael Hess, Subversive Eulogies.
[5] Nesîmî, Divan.
[6] Nesîmî, Mükaddimetü’l-Hakâyık, ed. Fatih Usluer.
[7] For the religious demography of Aleppo, see Stephennie Mulder, Shrines of the Alids.
[8] Hatayi Divanı, ed. Muhsin Macit, 254.
[9] Ibid., 573. Cf. Minorsky, The Poetry of Shah Ismaʿil Safavi.
This paper presents is one of the first comparative textual studies of the “messianic” religious movements of late medieval Islam (ca. 1300-500), who are often assumed to have been isolated from intellectual traditions. Scholars have thus compared these movements to the early (8th-9th c.) “extremist” Shiʿi sects, particularly because both viewed the Shiʿi Imams as divine figures. However, taking the examples of the Hurufis and the Safavids, I show the belief in the Imam’s divinity among these later groups to have arisen from a particular indebtedness’ to a major point of Sunni dogma, the uncreated nature of the Qurʿan, which Shiʿi groups in turn commonly equate with the Imam. Ironically, while their “extremist” belief in Imams’ divinity has invited these movements’ characterization as manifesting a “popular” Shiʿism unchanging throughout history, I show how it emerged from the highly connected, interconfessional intellectual milieu historically specific to late medieval Islam.