Knowledge Like Life-Giving Rain
Edited by Aaron Michael Ullrey
The following Research Reflection is part of an ongoing series spotlighting the academic study of religions.
Imagine living in a world where you are told that most of what is around you is only an opaque refraction of true reality. This was the world of those initiated into Fatimid Ismailism, an interpretation of Islam emphasizing that behind the literal text of scriptures and behind what we perceive through our senses is the batin, the hidden. Among the Fatimids, this batin is elucidated through a process called ta’wil, a return to the one.
The Fatimid Ismailis developed ta’wil into a sophisticated hermeneutical process tethered to an organizational hierarchy called the da’wa, the call. The da’wa was at once a summons to true Islam and a formal structure. At the top of this da’wa was the Shia Imam, the descendant of the Prophet Muhammad via his wife Fatima. The Imam is the locus of the divine on earth. He and his authorized agents of various ranks unveil hidden truths to true believers, who, in turn, gain spiritual upliftment through increasing apprehension of the true nature of reality. Ta’wil texts provide a record of some of these disclosures.
Ta’wil helped to transform the religio-political terrains of tenth-century North Africa by arguing that a revolution would arrive and return Islamic leadership to its righteous custodians, the Shia Imams. This revolution led to the establishment of the Fatimid dynasty (909-1171) and, in the process, the founding of the city of Cairo. The Fatimids continued to deploy ta’wil for more than a century, indicating how central ta’wil was in conveying spiritual truths to true believers. For historians of religion, studying ta’wil can tell us much about the process of world-making, particularly when the world that is apparent is not the world as it should be.
Among Fatimid insiders, transcripts of ta’wil served as substrates for salvation, for they divulged the batin of reality. Ta’wil could be made from virtually anything; in early Fatimid texts, ta’wil is tied to vast cosmological and terrestrial expanses. A ta’wil account of creation found in a text titled The Master and the Disciple, translated by James Morris, reads: “Hence their imam is like the immensity of the sun in comparison with the (other heavenly) lights: it is impossible for it to be veiled from (people’s) vision—indeed the sun is his symbol and outer aspect. And their hujja, the gateway (bab) to their imam, is like an illuminating moon, for the moon is his outer aspect and his symbol. And their dais are like shining stars, for the stars are their symbols and outer aspects.”
Similarly, another Fatimid text, The Book of True Guidance, likens life-giving rain to knowledge of religion mediated through the da’wa, and “the growth of plants is similar to the growth of the believer through knowledge of religion.” In a ta’wil text of a Fatimid legal compendium, death itself points to the structure and function of the da’wa. Burial in a praiseworthy condition symbolizes believers’ spiritual ascent through different ranks until becoming connected to the hujja, a rank of the da’wa, and then, finally, to the naqīb, the highest rank of the da’wa. In this same text, the author states that the earth, as the locus of burial, is analogous to the hujja.
Building upon the oft-repeated Qur’anic refrain that “most people do not know” the extent of the divine, its creation, and God’s intervention in bringing religion to humanity, ta’wil conceives of a world in which most people only see the visibly apparent. Reared by the teachings of the Imam, the Shia elect are the only ones who can perceive the salvific truths hidden behind everyday existence.
Echoing Jonathan Z. Smith’s observation that all ritual possesses a gnostic dimension, ta’wil gains its traction from the fact that the world we experience is different from the way it ought to be. The Fatimids rose to power intending to return the custodianship of Islam to the Shia Imams. Yet these hopes never materialized, and the Fatimids ended up ruling over a population that mostly subscribed to other interpretations of Islam. The continued production of ta’wil allowed the Fatimids to issue hidden transcripts from external phenomena that maintained an alternate vision of reality; ta’wil made the batin immanent, coherent, and salvific for true believers.
David Hollenberg argues that we might even consider ta’wil to be a kind of continuing apocalypse. It is a dynamic unveiling between the other world and this world, an unveiling that is mediated through the exclusive ontology of the Shia Imam who serves as the bridge between both worlds. In a sense then, whatever happens in the apparent realm does not really matter.
Ta’wil transcripts cross boundaries, bridge times, and fuse the here with the hereafter to make the world over and into the way it ought to be.