KAYSĀNIYA

 

KAYSĀNIYA (occasionally referred to also as Moḵtāriya), the Shiʿite sectarian movement(s) emerging from the Kufan revolt of Moḵtār b. Abi ʿObayd Ṯaqafi in 66-67/685-87, which revered Moḥammad b. Ḥanafiya (d. 81/700) as their imam and the Mahdi. Moḥammad was the third son of Imam ʿAli b. Abi Ṭāleb and Ḵawla, a woman from the tribe of Banu Ḥanifa, who had been brought to Medina as a slave after the defeat of her tribe at the battle of ʿAqrabāʾ in 12/633.

The sect’s sobriquet Kaysāniya appears nowhere as a term of self-designation, and its precise origins seem to have mystified the heresiographers, who must have adopted it from much earlier usage.  A cryptic imami tradition, for example, censures the sons (wold) of a certain Kaysān for spreading the secrets of the imams “on the roads and in the valleys of the Sawād” (Kolayni, II, p. 223).  The heresiographers generally provide two explanations for the sect’s name, asserting that either (1) it derived from the leader of Moḵtār’s personal guard (ḥaraṣ) of mawāli, Abu ʿAmra Kaysān, or (2) Kaysān was the nickname of Moḵtār himself.  In turn, the second explanation appears in several iterations.  Some claim that Moḵtār adopted the name of ʿAli’s mawlā, Kaysān, after the latter’s death at Ṣeffin, because it was he who first convinced Moḵtār to join the ʿAlid cause.  Others claim that either ʿAli or Ebn al-Ḥanafiya named Mokṯār ‘Kaysān,’ because of his cleverness/shrewdness (Ar. kays; see Ebn Qotayba, p. 622; Nawbaḵti, pp. 20-21; Ps.-Nāšeʾ, pp. 22-23; Kašši, p. 117; cf. Qāżi, 1974, pp. 55-56).

Contemporary observers, whose testimonies are preserved almost entirely in the form of poetry, epistles (if authentic) or history (aḵbār), refer to the sect, or at least factions thereof, under several different names: Ḵašabiya (i.e., those who fight wielding wooden clubs, ḵašab), Sabaʾiya (see below), extremists (ḡolāt), etc.  In the course of Moḵtār’s revolt, one finds numerous self-designations utilized by his acolytes and supporters, such as “partisan’s of Moḥammad’s household” (šiʿa āl Moḥammad), “vanguards of the weak” (anṣār al-żaʿif), and the like, but most salient and unique to Moḵtār’s movement seems to be the moniker šorṭat Allāh (God’s elite troop), an appellation attested as late as the 70s/690s (Balāḏori, IV/2, pp. 196, 202, 211; Bar Penkāyē, p. 158; Ṭabari, II, pp. 618, 672, 716; cf. Anthony, 277-85).  In any case, Kaysāniya came to encompass all sects arising out of this revolt that traced the imamate through Moḥammad b. Ḥanafiya.

The Kaysāniya were the product, rather than the impetus, of Moḵtār’s revolt, yet the revolt’s political and religious currents made a defining mark on the sect’s history by combining a reverence for Ebn al-Ḥanafiya as imam and theMahdi with a staunchly activist political program that was strongly colored by apocalyptic beliefs.  Although the term mahdi had been utilized by previous movements (cf. the Tawwābun’s designation of Imam Ḥosayn b. ʿAli [d. 61/680, q.v.] as al-mahdi b. al-mahdi in Ṭabari, II, p. 546; tr., XX, p. 132; cf. Halm, 1991, pp. 28-29; tr., pp. 20-21; Crone and Hinds, pp. 36-37, 102), Moḵtār’s revolt marks the first time that the title unambiguously conveyed the sense of an apocalyptic redeemer (Qāżi, 1974, pp. 122-28).  Ebn al-Ḥanafiya neither denied nor endorsed the appellation of mahdi outright; however, Ebn Saʿd preserves a fascinating anecdote, wherein, in response to being addressed as mahdi, Ebn Ḥanafiya retorts, playing off the ambiguity of the title, saying: “Indeed, I am a mahdi, for I guide to righteousness and what is good (ahdi ela’l- rošd wa’l-ḵayr)” (Ebn Saʿd, pp. 68-69). Titling himself wazir al-Mahdi (among other things; e.g., see Balāḏori, IV, p.176), Moḵtār established an oft-repeated precedent by acting as the imam’s proxy in the political arena and accommodating, if not encouraging, an entirely passive role for Ebn al-Ḥanafiya.  Throughout the revolt, Ebn al-Ḥanafiya’s passivity contrasted to the political activism of his deceased half-brother, Ḥosayn b. ʿAli (d. 61/680, q.v.). 

Moḵtār also articulated the ideologyof his revolt as in an idiom of social justice and as being based upon “the Book of God, the tradition (sonna) of the Prophet, the pursuit of vengeance for the blood of the Prophet’s family (ahl al-bayt, q.v.), the waging of jehād upon the violators of God’s law, and the protection of the weak” (Ṭabari, II, p. 633; tr., XX, pp. 217-18; Balāḏori, IV/2, p. 165). His ultimate aim was perhaps to hand over rule of the Muslim community to a member of the Prophet’s family chosen by a consultative assembly of his descendants (šurā fi āl al-rasul; Ṭabari, II, p. 633; tr., XXI, p. 89). Most of these aims were fully realized.  The legacy of Moḵtār’s successful (albeit ephemeral) rebuff of Zobayrid irredentism and his establishment in Kufa of an autonomous state governing the northern part of Iraq and the Jazira on the basis of ʿAli’s policies (sira) in the name of his mahdi ensured that Moḵtār’s legacy would go far beyond the Omayyad period.  His revolt marked the first appearance of an ʿAlid/Hashemid theocracy since ʿAli’s assassination in 40/661, and it was distinguished by his political and martial enfranchisement of non-Arab mawāli (i.e., the aforementioned żoʿafāʾ) and his ferocious pursuit and execution of the old enemies of the ʿAlids and their partisan.  This final achievement reached its zenith at the defeat and death of ʿObayd-Allāh b. Ziād, the man considered most responsible for the murder of Ḥosayn b. ʿAli, and his Syrian army on the banks of the Ḵāzer River near Mosul in Moḥarram 66/August 686.

Moḵtār’s revolt was to a great extent animated by an apocalyptic eschatology that served as the basis of a revolutionary Kaysāni religious activism well after Moḵtār’s death. During the height of his revolt, Moḵtār claimed possession of an Ark of Covenant (tābut al-Sakina; cf. Qurʾān 2.248) in the shape of ʿAli’s former chair (korsi).  Moḵtār surrounded this ark with audacious displays of pageantry and wielded it as a talisman of political authority and military victory.  Much of this pageantry echoed an array of late antique apocalyptic expectations, both Muslim and non-Muslim, concerning the reappearance of the Ark of the Covenant (Anthony, 2011, pp. 265-77).  It was this ark that he carried into battle to vanquish Ebn Ziād.  One account even suggests that he intended to use the ark to capture Damascus (Ebn Sallām, I, p. 439).  Such an eclectic and ostentatious anti-Omayyad apocalypticism appealed strongly not only to the oppressed, disenfranchised, and quasi-islamicized mawāli who radically identified with the plight of the Banu Hāšem thereafter, but also to the southern Arabian tribesmen who rallied to his cause (cf. Djaït, pp. 168 ff.).

The Omayyad and Zobayrid opponents of Moḵtār reviled him as a false-prophet (kaḏḏāb) due to his movement’s notorious sponsorship of the Kufan ḡolāt and Sabaʾiya, who awaited Imam ʿAli’s imminent parousia (rajʿa).  Syriac historians, perhaps as early as Theophilus of Eddessa (695-785), replicate these charges, calling Moḵtār a deceiver (dagālā) and self-proclaimed prophet (nabīyā;  Hoyland, pp. 178, 184; cf. Ṭabari, II, p. 686; tr. XXI, p. 52; and Ebn Aʿṯam, VI, p. 292, where Moḵtār’s enemies call him an antichrist (dajjāl). Such accusations against Moḵtār were rootedin his alleged practice of divination (kahhāna) and his hailing of his ark as a vessel of revelation (waḥy), whereby he and his acolytes foretold future events.  Some of his propheciesproved to be mistaken(e.g., the prophesied defeat of Ebn Ziād and Moṣʿab b. Zobayr, respectively; see Balāḏori, IV/2, pp. 197-198, 212), leading to his doctrine that his erroneous predictions resulted from the changing of God’s mind (badāʾ, q.v.; Ṭabari, II, p. 732; tr. XXI, p. 99). Among the Shiʿites and their sympathizers, however, the evaluation of Moḵtār remained somewhat ambivalent, given that he had successfully exacted revenge on their enemies and aided Ebn al-Ḥanafiya to escape his imprisonment at the hands of Ebn al-Zobayr.  Ebn ʿAbbās apparently refused to denounce Moḵtār as a kaḏḏāb for this very reason (Balāḏori, II, p. 661).  Some historians, such as Ebn Aʿṯam Kufi (VI, pp. 225-47, 254-94), would write accounts of Moḵtār’s revolt purged of any hint of these controversies.  By the Safavid period, Shiʿite memory of Moḵtār’s revolt had considerably evolved in a direction favorable to his revolution, and his deeds were ensconced in the popular sagas and epics relating the martyrdom of Imam Ḥosayn b. ʿAli and extolling Moḵtār’s quest for vengeance in various Moḵtār-nāmas (Calmard, 2003, pp. 321 ff.).

The Zobayrids were ruthless in their suppression of the vestiges of Moḵtār’s supporters once Moṣʿab b. Zobayr retook Kufa on 14 Ramażān 67/3 April 687, but a significant faction survived their leader’s death by absconding to the northern Jazira and consolidating a small, independent city-state in Nisibis (Naṣibin).  The sources invariably refer to this remnant as Ḵašabiya, likely indicating that the majority were poorly armed mawāli (Crone, 2000, pp. 174 ff.).  At this point, the Kaysāni movement nearly falls off the historiographical map for most annalistic sources.  Nisibis in the Sufyanid period abided on the margins of Muslim empire and, thus, remained of minimal concern until its full integration into the empire by the Marwanids (Robinson, pp. 42 ff.).  Where one does encounter the rare historical notice on the region, the details are often sketchy, or contradictory, until the Marwanids’ decisive incorporation of the city under Moḥammad b. Marwān b. Ḥakam’s administration of the Jazira in the mid-70s/690s.

Acting as Moḵtār’s general and governor of Mosul, Ebrāhim b. Aštar appointed his brother ʿAbd-al-Raḥmān as governor of Nisibis; however, the remnant of the Kaysāniya that survived Moḵtār’s downfall rebelled against him and appointed their own leader from Moḵtār’s partisans, “preferring to be led by one of their own number,” according to John bar Penkāyē (p. 158).  Of this leader we know very little besides his name, Abu Qāreb Yazid b. Abi Ṣaḵr Kalbi.  Unlike most of the Ḵašabiya, who were undoubtedly mawāli, Yazid himself appears to have been an Arab numbered among the Arab tribal notables (ašrāf) of Jazira (cf. his genealogy in Ebn al-Kalbi, II, p. 352).  He was likely to have been among the 2,000 cavalrymen said to have resettled in Nisibis (Masʿudi, III, p. 307).  Abu Qāreb’s Ḵašabiya, therefore, seems to have followed the precedent first established during Moḵtār’s revolt, in which a large contingent of club-wielding mawāli was led by a smaller unit of Arabian tribesmen (Anthony, 211, p. 284).  The length of Abu Qāreb’s tenure in Nisibis is uncertain; however, it is clear that he maintained Kaysāni control of Nisibis while weathering the storm of Zobayrid attempts from the east and of Marwanids from the west.  Abu Qāreb’s repulse of repeated Zobayrid attempts to take the city led by Mohallab b. Abi Ṣofra finds a firm attestation in a poem, in which Aʿšā Hamdān chides Mohallab for having underestimated and failed to defeat his enemy at Bājarmā, whom Mohallab derided for merely bearing staffs (Aḡāni³ VI, pp. 50-51; Bakri, I, p. 220).  According Syriac historians, the hold of the Ḵašabiya over Nisibis outlasted the defeat of Moṣʿab b. Zobayr and ʿAbd-al-Malek b. Marwān’s entrance into Kufa in 72/691.  Theophanus of Edessa (d. 785 CE) perhaps serves as the source for the Syriac report that in the lead-up to ʿAbd-al-Malek’s offensive against Moṣʿab, the Omayyad caliph’s brother Moḥammad b. Marwān easily took the cities of northern Jazira except Nisibis, which remained in the hands of a certain BWDYR (Anonymi auctoris I, p. 293; cf. Michael the Syrian, IV, pp. xi-xv, with variant BWRYDĀ), likely a corrupted form of the name Yazid.  The holdout against the Marwanid advance in the Jazira, however, seems to have been short-lived, likely due to the intrigues of certain physician named Mardānšāh, who “aided Moḥammad, the brother of ʿAbd-al-Malek, in taking Nisibis and expelling those rebels who were there (fa-ṭarada man kāna behā men al-moḵālefin; Ps.-Māri b. Solaymān, I, p. 64).  Although initially abandoning the administration to Christian proxies (Syr. mdabberānē), Moḥammad b. Marwān eventually deposed and crucified Mardānšāh and his associates, bringing the city definitively into the orbit of Omayyad preeminence (Morony, 1984, p. 352 f.; Robinson, pp. 50 ff.).

The beliefs of the Nisibine Kaysāniya are not well documented.  There exists good evidence that they maintained the apocalyptic eschatology discernible in Moḵtār’s revolt, which is an outlook they seem to have shared with their contemporaries (Bar Penkāyē, p. 167; cf. Reinink, pp. 81 ff.).  One testimony mentions that they expected Moḵtār’s resurrection (rajʿa) alongside ʿAli and his two deceased sons, Ḥasan and Ḥosayn (Ḏahabi, III, p. 436).  According to the Ḥasan b. Moḥammad b. Ḥanafiya (d. ca. 90s/710s), holdouts of Moḵtār’s revolt in Kufa, whom Ḥasan calls Sabaʾiya, also expected an imminent reversal (dawla), which they believed would be achieved through a resurrection (fi baʿṯ) before the Hour or before the coming (qiām) of the Hour (see Van Ess, 1974, p. 27).  One finds scant trace of this in the heresiographical accounts, but these earlier testimonies are likely to be more reliable.

Heresiographers usually begin their account of the Kaysāniya with the post-Nisibine phase.  They focus on the two deepest, early crises met by the sect: (1) Ebn al-Ḥanafiya’s oath of allegiance (bayʿa) to the Omayyad caliph ʿAbd-al-Malek b. Marwān after Ebn al-Zobayr’s defeat in 73/692, and (2) Ebn al-Ḥanafiya’s death in 81/700, leaving the Kaysāniya’s messianic expectations unfulfilled. These crises divided the Kaysāniya into a myriad of sub-sects, concerning whose number and precise beliefs the heresiographers disagree (Qāżi, 1974, pp. 14 ff. provides clearest summary of the various heresiological taxonomies of the Kaysāni sects). The general trends can be summarized as follows.

Contrary to the expectations of his Kaysāni devotees, Ebn al-Ḥanafiya maintained cordial relations with ʿAbd-al-Malek and even went as far as to visit him in Damascus in 78/697-98.  In the final years of his life he was even content to live comfortably off the caliph’s largesse.  This was an odd posture for a mahdi whose existential enemies were allegedly the Omayyads (see Ps.-Nāšeʿ, p. 27).  After Ebn al-Ḥanafiya’s death, one finds several attempts among the Kaysāniya to accommodate these realities.  Imamiheresiographers claim that the followers of Abu ʿAmra Kaysān declared themselves to be in a state of spiritual wandering without an Imam (fi’l-tih lā emāma lahom) following Ebn al-Ḥanafiya’s apparent death, while also declaring Ebn al-Ḥanafiya’s passing not to have been a true death.  Rather, God caused Ebn al-Ḥanafiya to be concealed (ḡāʾeb) from the world of men, a divine punishment inflicted upon him for his sin of submitting to ʿAbd-al-Malek. Citing parallels with Adam’s fall and Jonah’s sojourn in the belly of the whale, they declared that God had removed their mahdi from his home along with a set number of his companions to dwell in a mountain until the time came to fulfill his redemptive mission.  In the interim, the imamate had been deposited (wadiʿa) with his son Abu Hāšem, who acted as the silent (ṣāmeṭ) Imam vis-à-vis his father, the speaking (nāṭeq) Imam (see Nawbaḵti, pp. 23-24;  tr., pp. 50-51; Ebn Ṣaʿd, pp. 22-23; cf. Abu’l-Qāsem Balḵi, in ʿAbd-al-Jabbār, p. 178).  Other Kaysānis, such as Abu Kareb and the Karebiya, rejected the notion of Ebn al-Ḥanafiya’s concealment as a punishment and regarded it as an act of divine protection.  According to this view, Ebn al-Ḥanafiya resided in the crags of Mt. Rażwā west of Medina, where he was guarded by a lion to his right and a leopard to his left and sustained by water and honey.  He would remain in this state until the appointed hour of his reappearance (Ašʿari, p. 19; cf. Nawbaḵti, tr., pp. 50-51). 

The notion of the Mahdi’s concealment (ḡayba, q.v.) appears here for the first time as a tenet of Islamic belief. It is undoubtedly not coincidental that most non-Kaysāni accounts subsequently also maintain that, like Ebn al-Ḥanafiya, the qāʾem (a descendant of the Prophet, who is expected to rise and restore justice in the world) will bear both the Prophet’s forename (Moḥammad) and konya (Abu’l-Qāsem).  This notion of a concealed and/or imprisoned messianic redeemer resonates rather strikingly with Jewish beliefs concerning the Davidic Messiah (e.g., see the state of Messiah, son of David Menahem bar ʿAmiel before his advent in Sefer Zerubbabel in Reeves, p. 5; cf. Berger, pp. 1-17; cf. Anthony, 2012 on a Jewish messianist who enters occultation in Damascus in ca. 715-717 CE).  Other scholars have attempted to draw attention to precursors to the ḡayba doctrine in Zoroastrian beliefs (see Kippenberg, pp. 49-80).  What is more, the belief resonates with and culminates the apocalyptic eschatology that placed Ebn al-Ḥanafiya as its central hero and had characterized the sect since its origins among the acolytes of Moḵtār.  It is these salient beliefs (i.e., rajʿa, ḡayba, and badāʾ) that most profoundly influenced later Imami doctrine, albeit in modified forms.

The most rudimentary and abiding Kaysāni beliefs evolved out of a reverence for Ebn al-Ḥanafiya as the head of the Banu Hāšem; by the end of 1st/7th century, this reverence for Ebn al-Ḥanafiya had produced three beliefs: Ebn al-Ḥanafiya’s imamate as Imam ʿAli’s successor (waṣi), recognition of him as the Mahdi, and the belief in his ḡayba.  This triad of tenets features prominently in the poetry and anecdotal reports of the sect’s adherents well into 2nd/8th century and, therefore, seem to represent the most authentic doctrine of the Kaysāniya.  They appear in the verses of the most prominent Kaysāni poets, namely, the saḥābi (Companion) Abu Ṭofayl ʿAmr b. Wāṯela (d. ca. 102/720, who reputedly met the Prophet as a boy), Koṯayyer ʿAzza (d. 105/723), and especially Sayyed Ḥemyari (d. ca. 173-79/789-95; cf. Qāżi, pp. 305 ff.), and in anecdotes about adherents of Kaysāni doctrine from the 2nd/8th century, such as Moraqqaʿ b. Qomāma Asadi, ʿAli b. Ḥazawwar/Ḥazawur (d. ca. 130-40/747-57), and Ḥayyān Sarrāj (d. after 183/799; Kašši, pp. 96-97, pp. 314 ff.; Ebn Bābuya, p. 45).  Most notably, however, the belief in Ebn al-Ḥanafiya’s ḡayba appears to have tamed the activist core of the so-called pure Kaysānis and resulted in a swift dwindling of their numbers.  By the 3rd/9th century, their mention becomes exceedingly scarce, only to disappear altogether by the following century (Qāżi, pp. 264 ff.; van Ess 1992, I, pp. 305-7).  Shaikh Mofid (d. 413/1032) claims that in his time the Kaysāniya “had no remnant(lā baqiata lahom; Šarif Morṭażā, p. 305); however, writing further east, his younger contemporary Abū Rayḥān Biruni (d. 440/1048, q.v.), claimed that even in his time there existed people who believed that Ebn al-Ḥanafiya was alive in Mt. Rażwā, waiting to return as the Mahdi (Āṯār, p. 212).

Other Kaysāni sects veered into the realm of the ḡolāt (extremists), often by denying or significantly modifying either one of the three aforementioned tenets and by augmenting their doctrine with extremist beliefs (ḡoluw), such as the divinity of the imams and metapsychosis (tanāsoḵ).  One of the first Kaysānis to do so was Ḥamza b. ʿAmāra Barbari, who after 90/709 proclaimed Ebn Ḥanafiya to be god and himself his prophet (Qāżi, pp. 205 ff.).  However, the majority of the Kaysāni ḡolāt branched off from those Kaysānis who recognized Ebn Ḥanafiya’s son, Abu Hāšem ʿAbd-Allāh, as his father’s successor, either by affirming the reality of Ebn Ḥanafiya’s death or by accommodating Abu Hāšem’s Imāmate as an interim dispensation preceding his father’s ultimate return.  Although some sources give the impression that, like his father, Abu Hāšem remained largely aloof from his devotees, others attribute to him a much more active role and claim, for example, that he “collected the Hadith of the Sabaʾiya” (Fasāwi, II, pp. 737, 742) and that he maintained radical partisans of Moḵtār in his personal employ (Aḵbār al-ʿAbbās, pp. 174, 180-81).  Easier to discern than Abū Hāšem’s own predispositions, however, is the considerable influx of non-Shiʿite, Iranian religious influences, such as the Mazdakites and Ḵorramdiniya, in the doctrines of his acolytes (Madelung, 1998, pp. 9-10; Crone, 2012, chap. 4; cf. Balḵi’s statement to similar effect in ʿAbd-al-Jabbār, p. 178). This trend is exemplified most clearly by the sect known as the Ḥarbiya/Ḥāreṯiya (Nawbaḵti, pp. 32 ff.; Saʿd Qomi, pp. 44 ff.; Ps.-Nāšeʾ, p. 37; Abu Ḥātem Rāzi, p. 298).

Abu Hāšem having died without offspring in 98/717-18, his devotees splintered into numerous sectarian movements collectively known as Hāšemiya.  A number of Abu Hāšem’s devotees, such as Esḥāq b. ʿAmr and the Esḥāqiya, asserted that following their imam’s death the imamate transferred to Abu Hāšem’s younger brother, ʿAli b. Moḥammad b. Ḥanafiya, and then to his son Ḥasan b. ʿAli b. Moḥammad b. Ḥanafiya, after whose death the imamate ceased until Ebn al-Ḥanafiya’s return (Nawbaḵti refers to this group as the pure ḵollaṣ: p. 28; tr., p. 55). Others recapitulated the claim made for Abu Hāšem’s father and declared him to be concealed in Mt. Rażwā until the advent of the eschalon.  The numbers of Kaysāni devotees to embrace these positions appear to be few, and by 2nd/8th century, their numbers were swiftly absorbed by the ḡolāt offshoots of the Kaysāniya or the increasingly prominent Imamiya who recognized Moḥammad al-Bāqer and his son, Jaʿfar al-Ṣādeq (qq.v.), as imam.  Thus, early on in the 2nd/8th century, most of the Hāšemiya appear to have chosen new leaders, all of whom laid some claim to Abu Hāšem’s legacy (waṣiya) and engaged in some level of radical political activism.  Such currents produced the most spectacular of Moḵtār’s epigones, such as the Kufan rebel and would-be prophet Bayān b. Samʿān (crucified in 119/737 by Ḵāled b. ʿAbd-Allāh Qasri) and the Talebid rebel ʿAbd-Allāh b. Moʿāwia Ḏu’l-Janāḥayn (executed in prison by Abu Moslem Ḵorasāni, q.v., in 131/748-49; see Ps.-Nāšeʾ, pp. 36-37, 40-41; Saʿd Qomi, pp. 37-39).  It is from the latter movement of Ebn Moʿāwia that perhaps the most influential of extremistsects emerged (if the heresiographers are to be believed) under the leadership of ʿAbd-Allāh b. ʿAmr b. Ḥarb/Ḥāreṯ Madāʾeni.  Though at one time a follower of Ebn Moʿāwia, Ebn Ḥarb in time founded his own sect, the Ḥarbiya, proclaiming himself imam.  His ideas include notions such as the pre-existence of souls as shadows (aẓella) and the divinity of the prophet Moḥammad and the Imams, whom he declared were successively indwelt with the Holy Spirit and who represent the earliest iteration of what would later evolve into the quintessential beliefs of the Noṣayriya and the ʿAbbasid ḡolāt (Ps.-Nāšeʾ, pp. 30-40; Ašʿari, pp. 5-13; Nawbaḵti, pp. 31-47; Saʿd Qomi, pp. 39-46).  Of all the successor movements that branched from the Hāšemiya, however, the most preeminent would be the ʿAbbāsiya, whose daʿwa traced its origins from the Abu Hāšem’s alleged bequeathal of the imamate to Moḥammad b. ʿAli b. ʿAbd-Allāh b. ʿAbbās b. ʿAbd-al-Moṭalleb and led to the founding of the ʿAbbasid dynasty.

See also: ABU HĀŠEM ʿABD-ALLĀH, ʿABD-ALLĀH B. MOʿĀVIA, BADĀʾ, EBN AL-AŠTAR, ḠAYBA, ḠOLĀT, ISLAM IN IRAN v.-vii.

 

Bibliography:

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(Sean W. Anthony)

Originally Published: May 31, 2013

Last Updated: September 25, 2012

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Vol. XVI, Fasc. 2, pp. 183-188