Keywords: Ismaili, Shi‘a, taqiyyaPrecautionary dissimulation of one’s religious beliefs, especially in time of persecution or danger, a practice especially adopted by the Shi’i Muslims., Imamah, Imam ‘Ali, Caliphate, Fatimid, Abbasid, Ahl alBayt, da‘wa, shari‘a, dawr al-satrLit. ‘period of concealment’. Al-Qāḍī al-Nuʿmān (d. 974) uses the term dawr al-satr to refer to the period of around 150 years in which the Isma‘ili imams were hidden from…, AlamutFortress of the Nizari Ismailis in northern Iran, which fell to the Mongols in 654 AH/1256 CE., Nizari, Musta‘li, Zaydi, tawhid, ta’wil, hadith, batin, zahir, haqa’iq, ‘ilm, al-AzharA major mosque and institution of learning founded in Cairo by the Fatimid Imam-caliph al-Muʿizz (d. 975)., wazier, alQahira, mahdi, IfriqiyaMediaeval Muslim name for modern-day Tunisia; also the area where the Fatimids founded their state in the early tenth century., da‘i, Imam Ja‘far al-Sadiq, Pir, Nasir-i Khusraw, ginan, Safavid, Aga KhanA title granted by the Shah of Persia to the then Ismaili Imam in 1818 and inherited by each of his successors to the Imamate., nur, qiyamah, ta‘lim, ‘ulama.
The history of Ismailism is best understood as the embodiment of one response, among others, to the message contained in the Islamic revelation.
Author
Professor Azim Nanji
Azim Nanji is currently Special Advisor to the Provost of the Aga Khan University, and a member of the Board of Directors of the Global Centre for Pluralism in Ottawa, a joint partnership between His Highness the Aga Khan and the Government of Canada. He has held many prestigious academic and administrative appointments, most recently as Senior Associate Director of the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies at Stanford University, where he was also lecturer in the Department of Religious Studies. From 1998 to 2008, Professor Nanji served as Director of the Institute of Ismaili Studies in London.
Professor Nanji has published numerous books and articles on religion, Islam and Ismailism, including: The Nizari Ismaili Tradition (1976), The Muslim Almanac (1996), Mapping Islamic Studies (1997) and The Historical Atlas of Islam (with M. Ruthven) (2004) and The Dictionary of Islam (with Razia Nanji), Penguin 2008. In addition, he has contributed numerous shorter studies and articles in journals and collective volumes including The Encyclopaedia of Islam, Encyclopaedia Iranica, Oxford Encyclopaedia of the Modern Islamic World, and A Companion to Ethics. He was the Associate Editor for the revised Second Edition of The Encyclopaedia of Religion.
Within the Aga Khan Development Network, he has served as a member of the task force for the Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations (AKU-ISMC) and Vice Chair of the Madrasa-based Early Childhood Education Programme in East Africa. He served as a member of the Steering Committee of the Aga Khan Award for Architecture in 1998, 2001 and 2016.