"The Birth of New Messianic and Prophetic Movements under the Fatimids"

Abstract

From time to time, Islamic chronicles note the appearance in one place or another of someone who claims to be either a messiah or a new prophet. There are many variations of either situation and most movements of the kind were of little or no serious consequence, tending, despite attracting some following among the general populace, to fade quickly on their own or be suppressed by the state. Modern scholarship for the most part ignores them. Likewise, once Islamic heresiography had formed its standard sect list by the early 10th century, few if any of the new eruptions of this kind were added to the basic catalogue of ‘heresies’ in Islam. Yet they continued to arise with surprising frequency and the period of Fatimid rule 909-1171 was no exception. It experienced as many as a dozen such cases. The same is true, though to a lesser degree, for new declarations of prophecy. The primary purpose of this paper is to provide a catalogue of all such movements within the Fatimid realm and to analyse what types occurred and under what circumstances. What happened as a result and how did the authorities react? Major cases include: the advent of a mahdi-messiah among the Kutama Berbers; the revolt of Abu Rakwa with its overtone of Umayyad messianism; yet another religious rebellion among the Kutama at the end of the 10th century; a semi-populist movement in Cairo under the vazirs al-Afdal and al-Ma’mun that went through several stages ending ultimately in a claim of prophecy; the appearance in Libya of a man who produced a new revelation and a new ‘Qur’an’; and finally the Druze, the only one of these movements to outlast the Fatimids themselves. The Druze began in a strictly Ismaili environment in Fatimid Egypt and thereafter progressed through various stages that, in their insistence that al-Hakim was/is God, ultimately transcend the theme of this paper. But in origin they belong to this group nonetheless. Of all these individual cases and others, only the Druze have received scholarly attention. To be sure the data about the rest is meagre and perhaps, since it comes to us at any rate from hostile sources, is not quite as reliable as one could want. Rarely is it complete enough in any given case for that movement or incident to be the subject of an investigation on its own. Still, the aggregation of all such cases rises to an appropriate level and makes such a study both interesting and worthwhile.