Imagining the End: Visions of
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world domination. Masha' Allah’s calculations had shown the rise of Islam; the Arabs’ turn in power/domination ( dawla ) had been determined by the Shift of Triplicity on March . 98 Tayfur used this and other horoscopes and demonstrated that the next major event on earth occurred at the 120 Judaism, Christianity and Islam conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter. That Conjunction at the vernal equinox in March had determined ‘the shift ( tahwil Arabian world domination to the Hashimite Imams’ – that is, the Abbasid revolution, which Ibn Abu Tahir Tayfur described as ‘the general revolution in religion and the state’ (
). 99 Apocalyptic numerological speculations continued through the centuries, producing endless calculations of the Hour and of lesser events. 100
However, it was political astrology that became the most respected science of prediction of the predetermined future revolutions in world domination, and thus stimulated numerous apocalyptic uprisings throughout Islamic history. Political astrology played an important role in the history of the Isma'ili revolutionary movement. The conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter in the year (
– ) must have stimulated the Isma'ili missionary, 'Abd Allah al-Shi'i, who set up the Fatimid state for the Mahdi in North Africa in
. 101
Our documentation for the consequences of the next conjunction twenty years later is much better. Biruni mentions a prediction, based on erroneous astronomical calculations, of the appearance of the Qa'im at the eighteenth conjunction after the birth of Muhammad, which is made to coincide with ‘the tenth millennium, which is presided over by Saturn and Sagittarius’. At that time, the era of Islam and the rule of the Arabs will come to an end. The Qa'im will rise and ‘will restore the rule of Magism’. 102 In Rayy, a city in central Iran to the north of Isfahan, Abu Hatim al-Razi had been spreading the same astrological prediction of the coming of the Qa'im. 103 We can further read in Biruni that the Isma'ilis who had established the Qarmatian state in Bahrain ‘promised each other the arrival of the Expected One ( al-muntazar ) in the seventh conjunction of the Fiery Triplicity’. 104 When that conjunction occurred in
, as we shall see below, a young man from Isfahan was ready to set out off for Bahrain to claim to be the expected Qa'im. The great tenth-century Isma'ili encyclopaedia, the
(
), developed political astrology into an astrally determined cyclical theory of history. The revolution of the stars determined major changes in world history. Changes in the sovereignty of the dynastic houses (
ahl bayt ) and civil wars occur at the conjunctions of Saturn and Jupiter every twenty years, changes in world domination from one nation to another at the shifts from one Triplicity to another every years, and the greatest revolutions of all, changes in religion by the great prophet-lawgivers, occur every (solar) years or every (lunar) millennium at the Great Con- junction of Saturn and Jupiter at the shift back to the initial Triplicity of the signs of fire. 105 The Brethren of Purity reconciled this duodecimal system of the Zodiac with the heptads of the Judaeo-Christian sacred history. The Prophet is made to say: ‘The life of this world is seven thousand years; I have 121 Messianism, Millennialism and Revolution been sent in the last of these millennia.’ 106
Each millennium [=
solar years] is divided into two complete cycles, each consisting of four -year
quarters of ascension, apogee, decline and clandestinity. The term Qa'im is given a new meaning in this astrological theory of history. Each -year
quarter cycle is inaugurated by a Qa'im, who is followed by six imams. The Seventh Imam who completes the heptad is the Qa'im of the next quarter- cycle. The Qa'im of the Resurrection would be expected at the end of the millennium of Muhammad, which is the final millennium. 107 The political messianism of the Isma'ili movement was even more striking at the beginning. In fact, Isma'ilism was the most important of the medieval Mahdist movements, and it rested on the archetypal belief that a grandson of Ja'far al-Sadiq, Muhammad b. Isma'il, had not died and was the Qa'im- Mahdi.
108 The Isma'ili missionaries first appear in Iraq and the Yemen during the last quarter of the ninth century, engaged in propaganda on behalf of the expected Mahdi-Qa'im whom they considered the Seventh and last Imam of the Islamic era. God was ‘preparing the paradise of Adam for Muhammad b. Isma'il’. 109 He would soon remove the veil of external reality by abolishing the Law, and reveal the True Religion. Each missionary ( Yüklə 4,01 Mb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
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