Walayah in the Fatimid Isma?ili Tradition

Explores the relationship between revelation and reason in medieval Islamic intellectual history.

In this original study, Elizabeth R. Alexandrin examines the complex relationships that can be inscribed between medieval Isma''ili thought as an intellectual tradition with a devotional practice of reliance on the imam, and as a politico-esoteric system that redefined governance during the Faimid caliphate in the eleventh century. Alexandrin''s work is a departure from recent Western scholarship that focuses on similarities among early Islamic traditions. She argues instead that, under the guidance of the Faimid Isma''ili chief missionary al-Mu''ayyad fi al-Din al-Shirazi (d. 1078 CE), the concept of walayah (divine guidance) became closely associated with religio-political authority, on the one hand, and the perfection of the individual human being, on the other. By signaling and affirming how the Faimid caliph-imams were the heirs of walayah and by proposing new definitions of the "seal of God''s friends" (khatim al-awliya'' Allah), al- Mu''ayyad broadened the contexts of making esoteric knowledge public and shifted the apocalyptic frameworks of Islamic messianism.