119
Messianism, Millennialism and Revolution
of the Imam. The hidden Imam would perpetually rule the world through
the visible hierocracy of 'ulama.
93
Medieval Trends
While the Imami hierocracy was beginning to contain political messianism
through a quietistic transformation of the idea of occultation, Shi'ite political
messianism erupted in the shape of the Isma'ili revolutionary movement, and
with it came a pronounced millennialism in the form of political astrology.
From the typological point of view, it is particularly felicitous to end this
essay on medieval Islamic history with a brief examination of the Isma'ili
movement as Isma'ilism combined political Messianism, or Mahdism, and
millennialism within a firmly apocalyptic worldview.
Apocalyptic revelation of a new creation here and now transforms the
present into a moment of revolutionary liminality, of the great opening and
freedom from tradition.
94
Liminal anxiety generated by apocalypticism is a
source of constant
pressure for certainty, and results in the reification of the
apocalyptic future. The oldest techniques for the fabrication of predetermined
futures are numerology and astrology. Numerology is the oldest technique for
the calculation of the predetermined future. Its reception in Islam as the
science of
jafr
is quite early, that science being attributed to Daniel but also
to the Sixth Shi'ite Imam, Ja'far b. Muhammad, presumably on account of
the red leather bag known as the
jafr
. The Shi'ites believed that it contained
secret scrolls as well as the weapons of the Prophet and was in the possession
of Ja'far al-Sadiq, who had inherited it from his father and grandfather.
95
The distinctive Muslim science for the prediction of the predetermined
future, however, is what I would call political astrology. This
science for the
astral determination of political upheavals was developed with the hindsight
of the Abbasid revolution. It adopted the Sasanian astrological techniques for
predictions of dynastic change on the basis of Ptolemaic astronomy, super-
imposed on Zoroastrian millennialism.
96
It was developed by Masha'Allah, the
Jewish astrologer who, together with the Zoroastrian astrologer Nawbakht,
advised the second Abbasid Caliph, Mansur, on the time and location of the
new City of Peace (
madinat al-salam
, Baghdad) in
, and by his disciple
Abu Ma'shar al-Balkhi (d. 886).
97
A practitioner of this science who was a
contemporary of Abu Ma'shar, Ibn Abu Tahir Tayfur (d.
), saw the
heavenly revolution of stars replicated in a great revolution in
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