Imagining the End: Visions of

khazina

) of  the Mahdi’ and

one-fifth of  the revenues were kept for the Lord of  the Time (

sahib al-

zaman

).

116

 In the year of  the seventh conjunction of  the Fiery Triplicity, 



,

a young man from Isfahan who claimed to be the descendant of  the Persian

kings had joined the Qarmatians in Bahrain. A few years earlier, in January

,

 presumably in anticipation of  the astrally determined turn in domination,

a man claiming to be Muhammad b. Isma'il appeared and gathered a large

band of  Bedouin around him.

117

 Later that year, the caliphal police discovered

a group of  Qarmatians, called the Baqliyya, whose members carried clay seals

stamped with the inscription, ‘Muhammad b. Isma'il, the Mahdi-Imam, the

friend of  God’. What appears like spontaneous Mahdistic agitation among the

Baqliyya was suppressed, and some of  the survivors drifted to Bahrain and

became known as the Ajamiyyun (the thicket dwellers).

118

 In 



, the Qar-

matians attacked Mecca, massacred the pilgrims and carried away the black

stone to mark the end of  the era of  Islam. Meanwhile, the young man from

Isfahan soon found his way to the inner circle of  the Qarmatian elite and was

told by one insider to approach the 

de facto

 ruler of  Bahrain and the son of

its founder: ‘Go to Abu Tahir and tell him that you are the man to whose

allegiance his father and he himself  had summoned the people. If  he then asks

you for signs and proofs, reveal these secrets to him.’

119

 Abu Tahir, whose

poetry declaims that he would live until the coming of  Jesus, son of  Mary,

recognized the signs and publicly surrendered the sovereignty to the Qa'im

from Isfahan in 



. According to the eye-witness account of  the physician

Ibn Hamdan, Abu Tahir declared:

Know then, community of  men, that the [true] religion has henceforth ap-

peared. It is the religion of  our father Adam, and all the belief  we had was

false. All the things missionaries made you hear, their talk about Moses, Jesus

and Muhammad, was falsehood and deceit. The [true] religion is in fact the

religion of  Adam, and those are all wily Dajjals; so curse them.

120

The Mahdi of  Isfahan ruled for eighty days that ended in disaster. The

apocalyptic Isma'ilis of  Iran had sought to put Islam in the perspective of  the

history of  religions, identified Zoroaster with Abraham, and at least one of

their theorists, Nasafi, had presented the religion of  Adam as the natural

religion, religion without the Law. The Isfahani Mahdi, who evidently took

the astral sign to indicate the end of  the era of  world domination by the

Arabs and beginning of  the domination of  the Persians, ordered the worship

---

124

Judaism, Christianity and Islam

of  fire, established links with the Zoroastrian clergy in Iran and had the

biblical prophets as well as the Imams, including 'Ali, cursed in public. All

this was too much for Abu Tahir who had him seized and killed.

121

 This

instance of  ‘realized millennialism’ thus turned out to be a complete disaster

and was recognized as such by its main instigator.

A century and a half  later, or in 



 to be more precise, the Nizari

Isma'ilis also broke off  from the Fatimids. Some Nizaris believed their Imam

was in occultation and would return as the Qa'im-Mahdi. Their redoubtable

leader, Hasan Sabbah (d. 



), however, soon propounded ‘the new preach-

ing’ (