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Qarmatians
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The Qarmatians ( Qaramita "Those Who Wrote in Small Letters"; also transliterated "Carmathians", "Qarmathians", "Karmathians" etc.) were a millenarian Ismaili group centered in eastern Arabia, where they established a utopian republic in 899 CE. They are most famed for their revolt against the Abbasid Caliphate and particularly with their seizure of the Black Stone from Mecca and desecration of the Well of Zamzam with Muslim corpses during the Hajj season of 930 CE.
The Qarama?ah were also known as "the Greengrocers" (al-Baqliyyah) because of their strict vegetarian habits.
r the ‘Abbasids, various Shi‘i groups organised in secret opposition to their rule.
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The Qarmatians ( Qaramita "Those Who Wrote in Small Letters"; also transliterated "Carmathians", "Qarmathians", "Karmathians" etc.) were a millenarian Ismaili group centered in eastern Arabia, where they established a utopian republic in 899 CE. They are most famed for their revolt against the Abbasid Caliphate and particularly with their seizure of the Black Stone from Mecca and desecration of the Well of Zamzam with Muslim corpses during the Hajj season of 930 CE.
The Qarama?ah were also known as "the Greengrocers" (al-Baqliyyah) because of their strict vegetarian habits.
History
Under the ‘Abbasids, various Shi‘i groups organised in secret opposition to their rule. Among them were the supporters of the proto-Isma‘ili community, of whom the most prominent group were called the Mubarakiyyah.
Imam Ja?far al-?adiq designated his second son, Isma‘il ibn Ja‘far "al-Mubarak", as heir to the Imamate. However, Isma‘il predeceased his father. Some claimed he had gone into hiding, but the proto-Isma‘ili group accepted his death and therefore that his eldest son, Mu?ammad ibn Isma‘il, now was Imam, who remained in contact with the Mubarakiyyah group, most of whom resided in Kufah.
The split among the Mubarakiyyah came with Mu?ammad's death. The majority of the group denied his death; they recognised him as the Mahdi. The minority believed in his death and would eventually emerge in later times as the Fa?imid Isma‘ili, ancestors to all modern groups.
The majority Isma‘ili missionary movement settled in Salamiyyah in what is modern Syria and had great success in Khuzestan, where the Isma‘ili leader al-Husayn al-Ahwazi converted the Kufan man ?amdan in 874 CE, who took the name Qarma? after his new faith. Qarma? and his theologian brother-in-law ‘Abdan prepared southern Iraq for the coming of the Mahdi by creating a military and religious stronghold. Other such locations grew up in Yemen, in Bahrain in 899 CE and North Africa. These attracted many new Shi‘i followers due to their activist and messianic teachings. This new proto-Qarma?i movement continued to spread into Persia and then Transoxiana.
The Qarmatian Revolution
A change in leadership in Salamiyyah in 899 lead to a split in the movement. The minority Isma‘ilis, whose leader had taken control of the Salamiyyah centre, began to proclaim their teachings - that Imam Mu?ammad had died, and that the new leader in Salamiyyah was in fact his descendant come out of hiding. Qarma? and his brother-in-law opposed this and openly broke with the Salamiyyids; when ‘Abdan was assassinated, he went into hiding and subsequently repented. Qarma? became a missionary of the new Imam, Ubayd Allah al-Mahdi Billah, founder of the Fatimid Caliphate.
Nonetheless, the dissident group retained the name Qarma?i. Their greatest stronghold remained in Bahrain, which at this period included much of eastern Arabia as well as the islands that comprise the present state, was under Abbasid control at the end of the ninth century, but a slave rebellion in Basra disrupted the power of Baghdad. The Qarma?ians seized their opportunity under their leader Abu Sa‘id al-Hasan al-Jannabi who captured Bahrain’s capital Hajr and al-Hasa in 899, which he made the capital of his republic and once in control of the state he sought to create a utopian society.
The Qarma?ians instigated what one western scholar termed a "century of terrorism" in Kufa. They considered the pilgrimage to Mecca a superstition and once in control of the Bahraini state they launched raids along the pilgrim routes crossing Arabia: in 906 they ambushed the pilgrim caravan returning from Mecca and massacred 20,000 pilgrims. Under Abu Tahir Al-Jannabi they came close to raiding Baghdad in 927 and sacked Mecca and Medina in 930. The assault on Islam's holiest sites saw the Qarmatians desecrate the Well of Zamzam with corpses of Hajj pilgrims and take the Black Stone from Mecca to Al-Hasa. Holding the Black Stone to ransom they forced the Abbasids to pay a huge sum for its return in 952.
The revolution and desecration shocked the Muslim world and humiliated the Abbasids. But there was little that could be done; for much of the tenth century the Qarmatians were the most powerful force in the Persian Gulf and Middle East, controlling the coast of Oman and collected tribute from the caliph in Baghdad as well as from a rival Ismaili imam in Cairo, whom they did not recognize.
After their expulsion from Iraq by the Buyids in 985, a group of Qarmatians also settled in Multan.
Qarmatian Society
The Qarmatians' goal was to build a society based on reason and equality. The state was governed by a council of six with a chief who was a first among equals. All property within the community was distributed evenly among all initiates. The Qarmatians were organized as an esoteric society but not as a secret one; their activities were public and openly propagated, but new members had to undergo an initiation ceremony involving seven stages. In an echo of cyclical Mazdean thought, the Qarmatian world view was one where every phenomenon repeated itself in cycles, where every incident was replayed over and over again.
The land they ruled over was extremely wealthy with a huge slave based economy according to academic Yitzhak Nakash:
It has been argued that the desecration of Mecca and the stealing of the Black Stone was to symbolise the ‘end of Islam’. And one western scholar argues that “they may not have been Ismailis at all at the outset, and their conduct and customs gave plausibility to the belief that they were not merely heretics but bitter enemies of Islam.”.
The sack of Mecca followed millenarianism fervour among the Qarmatians (as well as in Persia) over the conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter in 928 – an event which happens every 960 years. The date of the conjunction, 27 October 928 CE, was interpreted in light of Islamic revelation, which they saw as heralding a new period as a return of Persian dominance.
The Mahdi-Caliph
In 931 Abu Tahrir believed he had found the new Mahdi in a young Persian from Isfahan, and handed over the power of the state to him. The new Mahdi-Caliph immediately set about abolishing Sharia law and changed the qibla of prayer from Mecca to that of fire, a specifically Zoroastrian practice. According to historian Farhad Daftary who specializes in Isma’ilism:
Indeed, under Abu Tahir "Islam was to be abrogated, for a complete revelation of past hidden esoteric truths was to take place.... The Isfahani Messiah abolished the Shari'a and sanctioned the worship of fire and the cursing of Muhammad and his family... the truth meant a return to a Persian past."
After this episode the Qarmatians reverted to their former beliefs and Abu Tahrir was soon back to raiding southern Persia and Iraq.
Collapse
After defeat by the Abbasids in 976 the Qarmatians began to look inwards and their status was reduced to that of a local power. This had important repercussions for the Qarmatians' ability to extract tribute from the region; according to Arabist historian Curtis Larsen:
In Bahrain and eastern Arabia the Qarmatian state was replaced by the Uyunid dynasty, whilst it is believed that by the middle of the eleventh century Qarmatian communities in Iraq, Iran and Transoxiana had either been won over by Fatamid proselytising or had disintegrated. The last contemporary mention of the Qarmatians is that of Nasir ibn Khosrau, who visited them in 1050, although Ibn Battuta, visiting Qatif in 1331, found it inhabited by Arab tribes whom he described as "extremist Shi`is" (rafidiyya ghulat), which historian Juan Cole has suggested is how a 14th Century Sunni would describe Ismailis.
Religious beliefs
There is a general tendency in the Sunnite and Shiite sources, when referring to the Ismailis, often erroneously call them Qarmatians without perception of the distinction between them. The Qarmatians have been discredited invariably as the extremist and opportunistically nihilist, and their extreme activities have been wrongly conflated with the Ismailis. Syed Abid Ali writes in "Political Theory of the Shiites" (cf. "A History of Muslim Philosophy", ed. by M.M. Sharif, Germany, 1963, 1st. vol., p. 738)
See also
External links
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