Fazlallah Astarabadi and The Hurufis
SHAHZAD
BASHIR
Fazlallah Astarabadi (d. 1394) was an
Islamic religious leader who believed that the world was about to come to an
end and that he had been appointed the final divine messenger for humanity. He
claimed that he had received direct revelations from God, which made him equal
to prophets like Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad. These revelations came to him in
the form of momentous dreams that also gave him the unsurpassed ability to
interpret others’ dreams and to understand all human and animal languages. His
followers thought that he was the ultimate master of all techniques of
interpretation and, based on this distinction, they saw him as a manifestation
of God in a human body.
Divine incarnation is a radical idea in the Islamic context
and readers of this book already familiar with Islam might be inclined to think
that Fazlallah and his followers do not qualify as Muslims. Such a judgment should
be resisted. All evidence from Fazlallah’s works indicates that he considered
himself a Muslim, but he also felt that he had been given the great charge of
fulfilling Muhammad’s mission by providing the final and unambiguous
interpretation of the Qur’an and previous scriptures. It is understandable
that Muslims who did not accept Fazlallah’s claims saw him as a transgressor
but, from a historical viewpoint, we must regard Fazlallah’s story as an
indicator of Islam’s internal diversity. The radical ideas held by Fazlallah
had,by the time of his activity, a long history as a part of the fabric of
Islam. He provided a new complicated rationale for the proposition that God can
manifest himself in the material world and was able to persuade a sizeable group
that his views represented true Islam. His perspective should be seen as a version
of Islam that was a viable alternative for Muslims living in the late medieval
period.
The first three chapters of this book treat Fazlallah’s life
and the next two go into aspects of his thought. Chapter 4, on cosmology and
humanity, explains Fazlallah’s ideas about the creation of the world, its
mythological history, and the place of the human being within it.The human body
in particular was a central topic for him since he believed that the human form
was an actual image of God imprinted on a mixture of earthly elements. He was
also especially concerned with the human capacity for language, spoken as well
as written. This emphasis is reflected in the fact that his followers came to
be known as “Hurufis,” a term that translates as “letterists” and implies
people obsessed with the alphabet. As discussed in Chapter 5, Fazlallah’s
perspective compelled him and his followers to work for the salvation of the
world in the face of the impending apocalypse. This effort generated a
substantial literary corpus as well as communities of followers in various
parts of the Iranian world. Chapter 6 takes the narrative beyond Fazlallah’s
death by treating the activities of his immediate followers who constructed a
shrine for him after his execution and attempted to rationalize his death.The
last chapter of the book describes the fate of Fazlallah’s ideas after the
period of his direct disciples.
Although written for a non-specialist audience, this book is
the most comprehensive academic treatment of Fazlallah Astarabadi and his
movement to date. A National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship from the
American Research Institute in Turkey was instrumental in providing the
resources for manuscript research for this project. I am grateful to Patricia
Crone, for her keen editorial eye, and to Hamid Algar, Abbas Amanat, Kathryn
Babayan, Gerhard Bowering, Kay Ebel Cornell Fleischer, Adnan Husain, Ahmet
Karamustafa, and Emin Lelic for their aid and encouragement over the years I
have been pursuing this topic. Special thanks to members of the Sufis and
Society Project — Devin DeWeese, Jamal Elias, Farooq Hamid, Kishwar Rizvi, and
Sara Wolper — for providing a congenial venue for discussing many different
interests. And my greatest gratitude is due to Nancy and Zakriya for all their
patience and love.
Very little is known for certain
about Fazlallah Astarabadi’s life. He is mentioned in only two historical
works, which state that his birth name was ‘Abd al-Rahman, but he was better
known as Abu l-Fazl Astarabadi, or as Sayyid Fazlallah. At some point in his
life, he acquired a considerable reputation for a religious lifestyle
emphasizing poverty and detachment from the world and for the depth and
literary quality of his writings. Muslim scholars in Samarqand (Central Asia)
and Gilan (northern Iran) eventually condemned his views as religious innovation,
a hallmark of heresy in medieval Islamic thought. The historians state that he
was executed on the order of the Turko-Mongol conqueror Timur in the Islamic
year 804 (1401—2 ce). The
involvement of Timur in the matter is certain, though it can be asserted, on
the basis of better evidence, that the execution actually took place in 1394.
The lack of hard historical information does not mean that
nothing else can be said about Fazlallah’s life. His followers’ works provide
many details, some even with dates, although these sources have to be treated with
caution since they presume that Fazlallah was a great saint and a martyr.
Whatever is said in these works comes to us after being refracted through the
lens of the myth Fazlallah’s followers built around his personality during his
life and after his death. This issue is further complicated by the fact that
Fazlallah and his followers placed great importance on dreams. Much of what we
know about his life consists of either his own dreams and their supposed meanings,
or the interpretation he provided for dreams seen by others. Such information
is often difficult to interpret conclusively, leading to a story full of
conjectures.
My sketch of Fazlallah’s life is based largely on the movement’s
internal tradition. Its neat progression, where everything works out like a
plan, makes it difficult to accept the whole narrative as history on face
value. Since we have virtually no evidence from outside the movement, we cannot
make the story more complex by juxtaposing alternative information and
interpretations, as would be done with an historical topic based on a wider
base of sources.We have to take the story as it is, keeping in mind that it is
both a history and the unfolding of a myth or an archetype. Fazlallah’s devoted
followers must have witnessed their guide’s life as a complex reality as
well.The fact that what they recorded from it seems formulaic and oversimplified
reflects their notions of the light in which Fazlallah’s life should be
understood. In what follows, I reconstruct Fazlallah’s life using the
fragmentary evidence found in his own works and the eulogistic accounts written
by his followers.
Works by Fazlallah’s followers tell
us that he was born in Astarabad in 1340.The city, the capital of an Iranian
province on the southeastern shore of the Caspian Sea (see map), was at the
time under the control of a petty ruler from the Ilkhan dynasty. Fazlallah’s
father was the head judge of the city, which placed his family among the local
elite.The fact that the term “sayyid” is sometimes attached to Fazlallah’s name
means that he considered himself a descendant of Muhammad, a mark of
distinction among Muslims.The city of Astarabad was, at least in later
centuries, famous for having a large number of sayyids as its residents, which made
some people regard it as a religious center.We do not know to which sect of
Islam Fazlallah’s family belonged. His works reflect familiarity with the
positions of various sects but also show a particular devotion to early leaders
of Twelver Shi‘ism known as the imams. However, a report from one of his sons
that originated after Fazlallah’s death states that the family was Sunni of the
Shafi‘i legal per- suasion.The confusion regarding this matter in part reflects
the fact that formal sectarian affiliation was not a crucial marker of
religious identity in the context.
Fazlallah’s father died while he was still a child and we are
told that he inherited the judge’s office. Judgeships were not usually
transferable between generations and if Fazlallah did actually succeed his
father in this way, this would have been based on a limited local tradition. In
his youth, while he was incapable of actually doing the judge’s job, he was put
on a horse every day and taken to the courthouse to act as the figurehead
while his father’s former assistants took care of the work. The judge’s seat he
occupied may have made him unusually serious even as a child, but we are also
told that he was naturally inclined toward religious diligence. He performed
the necessary Islamic rituals without fail from an early age and often went
beyond these to do extra prayers by staying awake at night. He must have
received a solid traditional religious education in his youth as well since
his works, written much later in his life, show extensive familiarity with
major Islamic sources, such as the Qur’an and the sayings of Muhammad and other
early Muslims. The interpretive method he eventually developed also contains
ways of arguing that he could have learned only through training in a
traditional institution.
Fazlallah’s first extraordinary religious experience occurred
around the year 1358 at the age of eighteen. One day he heard a wandering
dervish recite the following verse by the great Sufi Persian poet Jalal al-Din
Rumi (d. 1273):
Why are you afraid of death when you
have the essence of eternity?
How
can a grave contain you when you have the light of God?
This verse moved Fazlallah greatly,
so much so that he became rooted to the spot and went into a kind of trance. He
then asked his religious teacher about the verse’s meaning and was told that it
was beyond description. He said that understanding the message underlying the
verse required devoting oneself completely to religious pursuits, following
which one would experience the meaning rather than knowing it intellectually.
Hoping to unite with God and transcend death as mentioned in the verse,
Fazlallah decided to attempt the experiential path suggested by his teacher.
For one whole year after hearing the
verse, Fazlallah tried to live a normal life while at the same time detaching
himself from worldly concerns. During the day he would go to the religious
school to study and also work as a judge as required by the office he had
inherited. At night he would often remove himself to a graveyard outside the
city and pray alone until dawn. He soon discovered that his day and night-time
activities were fundamentally antithetical to each other and that he must make
a choice. When he was about nineteen, he decided to abandon his family,
possessions, and secure life to become a homeless religious seeker. He gave
away all his belongings and left Astarabad in the dark of the night. On the way
out of the city, he met a shepherd and gave him the clothes he was wearing in
exchange for a felt shirt. From now on he began wearing this shirt at all times
as a symbol of having abandoned worldly connections and comforts.
Fazlallah’s religious search first took him to the city of
Isfahan in central Iran. He was unused to hard conditions and the long journey
on foot from Astarabad caused him to develop a seizure in one of his limbs upon
arrival. After recovering, he became a part of the culture of wandering
religious seekers who were becoming common in the Islamic world at this time.
The period 1300—1500 is known for the rise of groups such as the Haydaris,
Qalandars, and Abdals of Rum, whose members demonstrated their religious
devotion by shunning contact with the larger society and by deliberately
violating codes of conduct relating to clothing, diet, and normative religious
practices such as daily prayers. Fazlallah never joined a group especially
committed to breaking social norms but had contacts with people who had
adopted such an attitude.
In Isfahan, Fazlallah also began to experience significant
dreams, which he was able to interpret in correlation with his waking
experience. For instance, he saw a disturbing dream in which an uncouth man
took him by the hand near a water bank and spun him around three times.A few
days later, he ran into a group of men who invited him to come with them to the
river. He went with them but then found them not to his liking because of their
questionable religious behavior. He had a meal with them, after which they
started to dance while he sat by the side hoping not to be asked to join in.
However, one of the men came over and made him stand up and spin around three
times just as in the dream. Fazlallah’s initial unease about the dream was now
relieved since he realized that it had been a premonition regarding the
future.
After some time in Isfahan, Fazlallah decided to undertake
the hajj, the obligatory Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca. His works contain extended
commentaries on the significance of the Ka‘ba, the cube-like shrine in Mecca
that is at the center of the hajj, and we can presume that the pilgrimage was a
moment of great significance in his life.After the pilgrimage,he traveled to
the city of Khwarazm, south of the Aral Sea in Central Asia, and from there
decided to embark once again on a pilgrimage to Mecca. On the way, however, he
got caught up in heavy snows in the mountains of Luristan. While waiting for
the roads to clear, he saw a dream in which a man told him to change his course
and go instead to the city of Mashhad. He soon realized that this man was the
ninth Shi‘i imam Musa al-Riza (d. 818) who is buried in Mashhad.This city, now
in northeastern Iran, has been a major pilgrimage center for Shi‘i Muslims in
particular since the ninth century. Interpreting the dream as an invitation,
Fazlallah went to Mashhad and felt that the religious exercises he performed at
the imam’s shrine were particularly beneficial for his spiritual progress. He
then restarted his journey to Mecca and, after the hajj, decided to travel once
again to Khwarazm.
Fazlallah was in his early twenties
when he arrived in Khwarazm for the second time. The two dreams mentioned above
reflect his developing sense that he had a special aptitude for communication
with the unseen sacred world through the medium of sleep. The first dream gave
him knowledge of the future, and in the second, a long dead divine made an
appearance to guide him in his religious search.The dreams he saw in Khwarazm
continued this pattern; he now came into contact with even greater guides and
was told things known only to the very elect.
One day in Khwarazm, Fazlallah fell asleep while doing
repetitive Sufi prayers, called zikr, with the formula “there is no god
but God.” He then saw that he was in a bathhouse when Jesus came in and asked
him if he knew the names of the most sincere religious seekers over the course
of Islamic history. He said that he did not know and was then told that these
were the four famous Sufis Ibrahim Adham, Bayazid Bistami, Sahl b. ‘Abdallah
Tustari, and Bahlul. These names remained with him when he awoke and he said
that this knowledge allowed him to understand many things. The point of the
dream presumably was to indicate that the opinions attributed to these four
were to be preferred over other interpretations of early Sufi thought and
practice.
A few days later, Fazlallah had a dream in which he was
standing next to Solomon. The prophet asked him if such and such a person had
been oppressing him. He said yes and then Solomon asked the hoopoe bird, his
trusted lieutenant mentioned in the Qur’an (27: 20), to fetch this man.The
hoopoe left and came back with a black crow that turned out to be the offending
man in a transformed condition. Solomon then scolded the crow severely and
eventually asked the hoopoe to kill him.
In a different version of this dream, Fazlallah saw himself
in the garden of his former home in Astarabad when a man came in and expelled
him from it using harsh language. He then found himself standing as a
supplicant in front of Solomon who was seated on a heavenly throne. Solomon
called the hoopoe and asked him to bring the other party involved in the
dispute so that he could pass a judgment.The hoopoe went and brought back a
black crow, and Solomon ordered all the feathers of the crow to be plucked out.
The crow was then thrown out of the garden and Fazlallah was made the garden’s
owner. He later said that he understood the dream as follows: Solomon was God,
the garden was Fazlallah’s body, the hoopoe his spirit, and the crow the part
of the human soul that incites to evil. The dream’s message was that
Fazlallah’s evil self had caused him to become angry when the man had expelled
him from the garden in the beginning of the dream. God had then intervened and
made Fazlallah’s spirit incapacitate the evil self and expel it from his body.
The two versions of this dream contain rather different mes-
sages.The first represents the idea of supernatural protection for Fazlallah
from his enemies, while the second indicates that the real conflict lay not in
his relationships with others but in the battle that was taking place between
different aspects of his own psyche. The most plausible explanation for the
difference between the two versions is that Fazlallah gave different accounts
of the dream to his followers, modifying both the details and the supposed
message according to the situation. Whatever accounts for the difference, it is
clear that he saw dreams as a major tool for both self-analysis and
understanding his relationships with others.
Another dream seen in Khwarazm anticipates the idea that
Fazlallah would become the best dream interpreter of all times.This time he saw
himself near a tree in Astarabad, under which sat an old soothsayer preparing
to furnish interpretations for people’s dreams and other concerns. Muhammad
appeared and told the old man that what he was about to attempt was a very
difficult business since knowing true interpretations required being able to
establish the correct connections between one’s own self, the dreamer, and any
other person dead or alive. The persons actually seen in the dreams were not to
be taken for their surface identities but were to be understood as stand-ins
for others. Knowing who each character really was required a comprehensive
understanding that went far beyond the dream that was the immediate concern.
After saying this, Muhammad turned to Fazlallah and said that
the gift of true dream interpretation is like a rare star that becomes visible
every thirty thousand years and encompasses seventy thousand worlds. He then
told Fazlallah that this star had now appeared and he could see it if he
wished. He was told to go and stand under an orange tree where he would see
seven stars, one of them being bigger and more luminous than the others. He did
so and the luminous star emitted a ray of light that entered his right eye,
conveying a special intuitive knowledge to him. He said that the ray of light
felt like a pearly substance, which disclosed to him secret meanings of
Muhammad’s sayings (hadith). In one report about the dream, he said that the
light kept flowing until the whole star had poured into his eye.When he woke up
from this dream he felt that he could intuitively interpret all dreams and
could also understand the language of birds.
The powers revealed in the dream of the star seen in Khwarazm
remained Fazlallah’s greatest religious claim through the rest of his life. His
followers called him the master of esoteric interpretation (sahib-i ta’vil)
because they thought that he could penetrate the surfaces of all events and
narratives to figure out their true meanings. Dreams and the language of birds
do not hold obvious meanings for human beings but Fazlallah felt that God had
made him capable of translating such things into intelligible matters. He had
received his knowledge in stages, through the intermediacy of guides such as
the imam Musa al-Riza and the prophets Jesus, Solomon, and Muhammad who had
appeared to him in his dreams.
The story of Fazlallah’s alleged interpretive powers spread
rapidly throughout Khwarazm and he began to be surrounded by people seeking
explanations for their own stories. However, he preferred to keep the company
of individuals who exercised control over themselves through perpetual silence
and fasting and were dedicated to religious pursuits alone. The crowd around
him kept growing so that he eventually decided to leave Khwarazm altogether.
We can place Fazlallah in the region
of Sabzavar, in northeastern Iran, within the earliest period of his activity
after the dreams seen in Khwarazm.This is significant because a substantial
proportion of the local population in Sabzavar was involved in apocalyptic
religious activity at this time. During the period 1336—1381, this region was
under the rule of a group of nobility called the Sarbadars.The Sabzavar state
was quite unique in that, unlike the governments of all other surrounding
regions, the Sarbadars did not follow a dynastic principle. They themselves
were a diverse collection of noble families with competing interests and
claims. The families sometimes supported each other against other groups, but
at other times, the group disintegrated owing to bitter infighting. The
region’s tradesmen’s guilds (particularly the butchers and the undertakers)
wielded considerable power in the state and a butcher in fact became the ruler
for a brief period around 1356.
Adding to the complexity of the social environment, a substantial
proportion of the population of Sabzavar was affiliated with a religious group
called the Shaykhiyya that was led by a series of charismatic religious guides
between 1330 and 1380. These religious leaders — Shaykh Khalifa (d. 1335),
Shaykh Hasan Juri (d. 1342),Darvish ‘Aziz Muhammadi (d. 1362—63), and Darvish
Rukn al-Din (d. 1380—81) — had political ambitions and each of them was killed
in the course of factional fighting between the interest groups within the
state. The details of the religious views held by the Shaykhiyya are not fully
known but it is clear that, at least at times, the leaders advised their
followers to prepare arms in advance of a great cosmic war that would be
followed by the appearance of the messiah. The immediacy of the expectation can
be seen in the report that for a number of years, a horse was placed at the
gates of the city of Sabzavar every day to become the messiah’s steed when he
made his appearance.
Fazlallah’s presence in an area with a high messianic expectation
may have been tied to his growing sense of his own significance. He could have
gone to Sabzavar in the light of his expanding repertoire of extraordinary
experiences and may have absorbed the apocalyptic currents that were in the air
in Sabzavar at the time into his own ideas. We cannot be sure of this, but it
would make sense that living in a population expecting a messiah eventually
compelled Fazlallah to think of himself in such terms.
Stories about Fazlallah’s activity in Sabzavar do not state
that he portrayed himself as the messiah. Instead, he seems to have acted as a
mediator in the state’s power politics through his dream interpretation. For
instance, we are told that a Sarbadar nobleman named Khwaja Jamal al-Din saw in
a dream that he and his uncle ‘Ali Mu’ayyad, the Sarbadar incumbent who ruled
the state for nearly twenty years between 1361—62 and 1381, caught some pigeons
and were cooking them when they grew wings and took off. In the continuation of
the dream, he saw that he put a candle in the window of a palace and from that
numerous other candles became lit. Jamal al-Din asked Fazlallah for an
interpretation but he said that it would have to wait. The Shaykhiyya was at
this time in competition with the Sarbadars for control over the state and on a
later day, an influential member of this religious fraternity was present in
Fazlallah’s gathering. At this point, Fazlallah related Jamal al-Din’s dream to
him and told him that it meant that ‘ Ali Mu’ayyad would at some point expel
members of the Shaykhiyya from Sabzavar but that they would stage a return
within a year.This spiritual reconnaissance was clearly meant to aid the
Shaykhiyya against the Sarbadars. Fazlallah’s follower who tells this story
states that this is exactly how things came to pass nearly fifteen years after
Fazlallah’s prediction. Correlating this account with the history of the
Sarbadar state, it would seem that Fazlallah was present in Sabzavar around
1360. Fifteen years later, in 1375, the Shaykhi leader Darvish Rukn al-Din was
expelled from Sabzavar, to return in triumph within a year. This calculation
for Fazlallah’s presence in Sabzavar conflicts with the report that he saw the
dream of the star, discussed above, in 765/1363—64 when he was still in Khwarazm.
Our sources provide too little information to resolve this discrepancy.
The Sarbadars and their rivals figure in other narratives of
Fazlallah’s dream interpretation as well, indicating that he spent substantial
time and energy in this region. However, he eventually left it and traveled
first toYazd and then on to, once again, Isfahan.
Fazlallah’s hagiographers indicate
that his decision to leave first Khwarazm and later Sabzavar and Yazd stemmed
from his desire to minimize social contact.This idea cannot be accepted at face
value. He arrived in Isfahan around 1365 when the city was a bigger and more
cosmopolitan urban center than all the cities he had inhabited previously. For
someone seeking anonymity, going to a major administrative and commercial
center like Isfahan does not make sense. Also, his subsequent behavior in the
city gives no indication that he meant to disappear in the crowds of a big
city. The move was very likely spurred by the social significance he had acquired
in Khwarazm and Sabzavar and represented his desire for increased social
exposure rather than an impulse toward isolation.
In Isfahan, Fazlallah made his home in a mosque in the suburb
of Tuqchi. Either his fame preceded him or he caught the people’s imagination
very quickly so that his residence soon became a thoroughfare. Two types of
people in particular sought him out: first, dedicated religious seekers
searching for a worthy guide, and second,those who wanted him to interpret
their dreams.These two groups had interests at cross-purposes with each other
and Fazlallah seems to have tried to strike a balance. He was willing to
interpret the dreams of anyone who came to see him but made sure that, to
preserve his reputation and strict lifestyle, he and his close followers would
not receive anything in return. He also continued with austerities such as
depriving himself of sleep at night to pray and weep continually in an effort
fully to control his carnal desires.
The first person to become attached to him in Isfahan was a
Sufi named Mu‘in al-Din Shahrastani who questioned him about his understanding
of a true “man of God.” He replied that he believed in the description given by
the famous early Sufi Junayd Baghdadi, who said that it is someone who is
silent on the outside so that his inner reality can speak through him.
Shahrastani was impressed enough by this answer to become a devotee and after
him a number of others also decided to dedicate themselves to Fazlallah. His
earliest devotees included Nasrallah Nafaji, whose work The Book of Dreams
(Khwabnama) is one of our main sources for Fazlallah’s biography.
Imitating the pattern of Fazlallah’s own life, his wealthy followers gave away
all their belongings to come and live with him in the simple mosque in Tuqchi.
Fazlallah’s sincere companions were rewarded for their
devotion in the form of spiritual gifts of minor miracles known as karamat
among Sufis. These included the ability to understand hidden matters, special
knowledge pertaining to sacred texts like the Qur ’an and the Bible, and clear
interpretations of sayings by Muhammad, ‘Ali, and other early Islamic heroes.
The followers’ hermitlike lifestyle and the similarity of their spiritual
achievements engendered a deep brotherly feeling among them so that they
sometimes thought of themselves as a single soul distributed in many bodies.
Their association with Fazlallah also made them subjects of good dreams,
whether seen by themselves or those that others saw in which they made
appearances.
In contrast with Fazlallah’s dedicated devotees, those who
came to him seeking interpretations of their dreams included members of the
elite such as scholars, sayyids, ministers, military and administrative
officers, and wealthy people of all types.They related all manner of dreams in
Fazlallah’s company and in his response, Fazlallah usually first identified how
the dream connected to the dreamers’ lives and then gave them information about
what was to come. Fazlallah’s ability to know the past and predict the future
through dreams made him a powerful person.With this information, he was in a
position to withhold or disclose secrets and to enable a person to prepare for
the future.
Some examples of Fazlallah’s dream interpretations are
helpful in portraying his life in Isfahan at this point.We are told that a
prominent scholar named Sadr al-Din Turka saw a dream in which he was pouring
water over Muhammad’s hands to help him with the ablutions necessary before
ritual prayer. As he bent forward, a drop of his saliva fell from his mouth
onto Muhammad’s hands, and this made the prophet look up at him and smile.
Fazlallah told Sadr al-Din that the dream indicated that he had been planning
to travel to Mecca and stay at the holy sanctuary to write a book harmonizing the
principles of divine law and philosophy. His pouring the water represented the
idea of writing a book but the intrusion of an impurity in the form of saliva
meant that the topic was problematic. Muhammad’s looking up and smiling
conveyed that, in his view, the divine law revealed to him was too superior a
system from philosophy to be compared with it. Sadr al-Din said that he had
indeed resolved to write such a book but had not told anyone.The revelation of
Muhammad’s opinion about the endeavor dissuaded him from beginning the project,
and he was saved from doing something objectionable thanks to Fazlallah’s
interpretation.
Mawlana Zayn al-Din Rajayi was a devoted lay follower of
Fazlallah and came one day to tell him a dream in secret.All that was known to
others was that the dream had something to do with a slave girl who worked
inside his house. Fazlallah told him that the dream revealed that the slave
girl was pregnant by him, which the dreamer confirmed. He then predicted that
the newborn would be a girl and that, a few days after the birth, he would
become very sick and would be delirious for a while. In the end he would be
cured and then come and report his experiences to Fazlallah’s company. As
predicted, a girl was born after two months, and one month later Zayn al-Din
became sick and for seven days lost all movement in his body save his breath.
He then recovered and the first thing his sight encountered upon gaining
consciousness was his new daughter. The story of this dream and Fazlallah’s interpretation
became very famous and Zayn al-Din would himself tell people about it at length
until his death.
Fazlallah’s interpretations also include stories in which the
occurrences of dreams seem to have no easy symbolic relationship with his
interpretation. For example, a military commander named Amir Farrukh Gunbadi
saw himself confronted with four dragons.This was interpreted as a reference
to a ring of gold and precious stones that the Amir had lost four years ago but
would recover in fourteen days. The Amir reported that, exactly according to
prediction, he was going through the bazaar two weeks later and paused at the
jeweler’s shop for a brief moment. Just then another man stopped by and pulled
out the ring in an effort to sell it to the jeweler. He recognized the ring
and was able to recover it from the man.
The dreams described here show Fazlallah dealing with
powerful men such as a famous scholar and a military commander. The fact that
people of this stature came to him and told him matters that could reveal the
details of their personal lives indicates that they saw him as a trustworthy
person. The dreams Fazlallah is reported to have interpreted in Isfahan do not
fit any pattern.There are no subjects that receive excessive emphasis, implying
that he was acting as a general provider of interpretations to whom anyone
could go for a service. His personal ambitions and spiritual life seem to have
been on a track that ran parallel to the public persona, the two being relatively
independent from each other.We are told that his activities in Isfahan made
him famous throughout the provinces of Khurasan, Persian Iraq, Azerbaijan, and
Shirvan. The fact that he now decided to leave Isfahan for Tabriz points to his
ambition to capitalize on his fame and make a bid for wider influence.
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alculating from the few dates at our
disposal, Fazlallah arrived in Tabriz some time between 1370 and 1374.The last
date for his presence in Isfahan is indicated by the report that he interpreted
a dream seen by one of his followers in 772/1370—71, while it is claimed that
the Jalayirid ruler Shaykh Uvays,who died in 1374, visited him in Tabriz.This
also means that he spent between five and ten years in total in Sabzavar and Isfahan,
since the dream of the star, which he saw in Khwarazm, occurred in 765/1363—64.
The city of Tabriz, today the capital of Iran’s Azerbaijan
province, played a central role in the administration of Iranian lands between
the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries. The Mongol conqueror Hulegu (d. 1265),
who initiated the Ilkhan dynasty, set up his capital in Maragha, also in
Azerbaijan, after his destruction of Baghdad in 1258.The capital was moved to
Tabriz in 1265, during the reign of the Ilkhan Abaqa (d. 1282), Hulegu’s
successor. It was shifted once again in 1313 to the newly constructed
Sultaniyya, though Tabriz remained a major commercial and cultural center for
the rest of the Ilkhanid period.The Chupanids and the Jalayirids, who
supplanted the Ilkhanids in Azerbaijan in rapid succession after the death of
the Ilkhan Abu Sa‘id in 1335, ruled from Tabriz and regarded control over it
as a major source for their political legitimacy.
Although these dynasties ruled only a
part of Iran, and that too under highly contentious political circumstances,
Tabriz in their times still had the prestige of having been the capital of a
grand empire in recent memory. In the fourteenth century, the city’s status
also rested on the extensive patronage of religion, literature, and art by all
the dynasties.
Fazlallah arrived in Tabriz during the twilight years of the
reign of Shaykh Uvays, the most significant monarch of the Jalayir dynasty. He
made his home in a Sufi hospice and soon became an object of curiosity and
devotion among the city’s high society. If Shaykh Uvays did himself visit
Fazlallah’s sessions as reported, he must have acquired a very high status
quite quickly indeed. The legendary works on Fazlallah’s life also contain
references to many other princes, administrators, and military commanders in
Tabriz whose dreams Fazlallah is shown to have interpreted effectively.
Standard histories of the reign of the Jalayirids in Tabriz make no mention of
Fazlallah, casting some doubt on his direct access to the royal court. Although
we cannot be sure of the extent of Fazlallah’s influence, it is reasonable to
assume that he did have some success as an adviser to the elite in Tabriz in
the 1370s.
Along with associating with rulers
and ministers, Fazlallah continued his life of strict asceticism and
self-denial in Tabriz. These divergent aspects of his behavior are reflected in
the account of his marriage to a woman from the city’s nobility.The story
indicates that his piety had begun to garner him access to circles of power but
that he was keen to maintain his austere lifestyle despite the new connection
to the world of privileged classes. Fazlallah’s followers included a Jalayir
vizier named Khwaja Bayazid Damghani whose wife, also a devotee, was originally
from Astarabad and was related to Fazlallah. This couple wished to arrange the
marriage of their fourteen-year- old daughter to Fazlallah but were unsure
whether it would be possible. The girl’s mother approached Fazlallah through
the intermediacy of one of his disciples and was told that the matter was
difficult since the circumstances in which Fazlallah lived, which were
incumbent on anyone attached to him, would be particularly arduous for a woman.
She persisted by asking to hear the exact conditions and was told that the girl
would be required to: forsake all personal belongings upon leaving her parents’
house; renounce any food or dress that could not be paid for by the small means
of a dervish; determine never to take a single step out of the Sufi hospice where
Fazlallah lived after entering it; adopt a bed made of sackcloth, a felt
pillow, and a cotton dress; respect the religious community’s practice of
seclusion at night; and adopt the stringent collective prayers practiced daily
by the community.
The prospective wife’s mother was allegedly glad to hear
these conditions and asked the girl what she thought of them. Needless to say,
she wholeheartedly agreed due to the spiritual reward she and her parents would
attain in return for the harsh life she would lead. She first spent four months
in the house of another dervish in a kind of trial to make sure that she could
withstand the difficulties and then married Fazlallah. Her entry to the dervish
community was marked by the symbolic step of putting on the distinctive green
dress worn by all of Fazlallah’s dedicated followers. Besides the generally
hard living conditions, she also worked alongside other dervishes to sew caps
that were sold to provide for the community’s food and other bare necessities.
In connection with this marriage, Fazlallah was asked about the permissibility
of sexual relations and said that they were not spiritually harmful as long as
the intention was procreation and not pleasure.
Fazlallah’s agreeing to the marriage proposal in Tabriz indicates
openness toward establishing ties with elite circles, reflecting his growing
connections to matters of politics. Indeed, the discomforts of the ascetic
lifestyle would by themselves have been a source of prestige in this society
since people considered religious dedication a worthy vocation. His concern
with questions of social and political power can be observed in his
interpretations of dreams in Tabriz as well. In comparison with the Isfahan
period, these stories show that, with time, he had become more aware of the
impact of his knowledge on his own and others’ interests.
DREAM
INTERPRETATION IN TABRIZ
Fazlallah’s chief forte in the new
city remained dream interpretation, though his behavior seems to have become
more of a public performance.We are told that, in his gatherings, he listened
to people’s accounts and then put his sleeve over his forehead and eyes, in a
way removing himself from the company. In the moment of communion with the
unseen world, when he discovered the interpretation, the color of his face
changed. Then his body returned to normal, and he opened his eyes and stated
the interpretation. Occasionally, a dreamer denied what Fazlallah had been able
to gather about the dreamer’s past, but Fazlallah always stuck to his story as
the truth. At other times, Fazlallah actually offered corrections, telling the
dreamer that he or she had stated such and such detail incorrectly or had
forgotten an important segment. Through such incidents, we get the picture that
he had become the dream interpreter par excellence. He seems to have claimed to
have completely unfettered access to the whole sphere of consciousness from
which dreams emerge.
Fazlallah’s increased concern with power is reflected in his
interpretations of states and dreams that relate to questions of social status.
This included the religious status of those who came to see him and issues
having to do with relations between people involving politics. For instance, we
are told that he could determine a person’s state of ritual purity through
dream interpretation or visual observation. Khwaja Hasan Bashtini, a powerful
man from the region of Sabzavar, saw that his clothes had caught fire and he
had gotten burned. Fazlallah told him that he had had a wet dream the night
before but had not noticed it in the morning. He then examined his underwear,
saw that this was true, and went to take the bath required after a discharge of
semen. Similarly, one of his devoted followers once had a wet dream and decided
to just change his clothes and skip the bath. Fazlallah intuited the laxity on
the part of the follower as soon as he laid his eyes on him and made a comment
that those who wished to have pure hearts should also have clean bodies. The
man understood the hint and immediately went to take the bath. Both these
incidents mark Fazlallah’s own high religious status so that keeping company
with him required maintaining particular vigilance with respect to rules of
ritual purity.
Stories from Fazlallah’s stay in Tabriz have a particular emphasis
on questions of sexual impropriety. Fazlallah ‘Abidi, an influential citizen in
Tabriz, saw a dream in which he was holding a bowl of poison while standing
naked. He asked for an interpretation in front of a large group of people and
Fazlallah first refused by saying that the matter was not appropriate for
discus- sion.The man insisted so that Fazlallah eventually asked everyone
present to leave except for three men who were not from the city. He then told
the dreamer that the dream revealed that he had taken a prostitute to his house
for two or three nights to satiate his lust and the two lovers had kissed each
other’s faces. The man refuted this interpretation, upon which Fazlallah
related the details of the woman’s features and attire. He still refused to
acknowledge the incident but then Fazlallah asked one of the others present to
validate the interpretation by visiting the prostitute who lived at such and
such exact address. When the man stood up to go, Fazlallah ‘Abidi asked him to
sit back down and acknowledged that the interpretation had been correct.
Fazlallah’s alleged ability to know matters relating to
sexual impropriety gave him direct power over others since disseminating such
information to the public could lead to humiliation, and worse, for the
culprits. The most extreme such case is the story of a cloth-seller who opposed
Fazlallah and, at one point, went out of his way to call Fazlallah’s followers
religious deviants. He saw a dream in which he defiled the prayer niche of a
mosque and was disturbed enough by it to try Fazlallah for an interpretation.
Fazlallah told him that the dream indicated that he had committed incest with
his daughter one day when the two were alone in his house. The man became
utterly ashamed when told this and asked Fazlallah if there was any way in
which he could atone for the sin. Fazlallah replied that the only thing to do
was to take a vow never to tell a lie. He replied that it was impossible to be
a trader in the bazaar without lying and was then told that none of his words
of repentance carried any weight since he was unwilling to stop lying. He
became so overwrought with shame when the incident became widely known that he
left his established life and moved away from the city. Besides showing Fazlallah’s
interpretive powers, this story marks Fazlallah’s victory over a critic. Its
end is predictable given that the source is one of Fazlallah’s followers, but
we can deduce from it that not everyone was enamored with him during his stay
in Tabriz.
A story that shows Fazlallah as a mediator in politics
relates to the year 1375 when Shah Shuja‘ (d. 1384), the Muzaffarid ruler of
Shiraz, had ousted the Jalayirids from Tabriz for a very brief period.A scholar
named ‘Izz al-Din saw a dream in which he traveled somewhere and came across
Muhammad sitting down on the ground. He greeted the prophet and the latter
raised his hand in front of his face to the level of his eyes with all five
fingers spread out. Fazlallah said that the dream revealed that ‘Izz al-Din had
recently written a treatise dealing with five questions of Islamic
jurisprudence and had first dedicated it to Shah Shuja‘. But then he had
considered the fact that Shah Shuja‘ was likely to be ousted from Tabriz by the
Jalayirids soon and his having dedicated the book to the invader was a risky
thing. Consequently, he had removed the dedication from the work’s preface.The
dreamer confirmed the story and said that Fazlallah’s interpretation was
miraculous since no one but he himself had known about the book or the
inclusion and removal of the dedication.
Fazlallah’s personal spiritual
development in Tabriz continued, as before, on a path parallel with his public
activities. Each dream he was able to interpret both reflected his gift and
added to his reserves of knowledge. This process culminated in a special
revelation he received in Ramazan 775 (February- March 1374). Nasrallah Nafaji,
one of Fazlallah’s closest followers, gives the following account of this
event:
During a forty-day retreat
in Tabriz, his eminence [i.e. Fazlallah] was favored with a (special)
revelation. At this time, spiritual secrets and truths and the stations of
Muhammad came within the field of vision of his pure-seeing heart. He now went
beyond the standing and rank (of others).After the event, he was completely
beside himself for three nights and days and wept and lamented uncontrollably.
On the third day of this condition, a voice suddenly recited the following
verses in his ear: In the moment he was rent asunder from earthly concerns,
The
world was freed from all calamities.
(If)
someone asks: who is this young man?
Who
is this moon, earth, and heaven?
It is said: he is the master of the age,
And the Sultan of all prophets.
The verses enabled Fazlallah to
recover from the torment brought on by the revelation. The verses are quite
cryptic in the original and the translation above is one among a number of different
possible interpretations. What is clear, however, is that they exalted
Fazlallah to the level of prophets and beyond, and gave him a pivotal position
in the structure of the cosmos.They also emphasized a particular moment in time
that correlated his acquiring special knowledge and status with the redemption
of the world at large.The idea that he was ranked above all prophets is
problematic from a mainstream Islamic viewpoint. The vast majority of Muslims
regard prophets as God’s most chosen people and see Muhammad as the last
prophet and the best of all humans. The status ascribed to Fazlallah in these
verses was, therefore, a substantial deviation from what most Muslims alive in
Fazlallah’s time would have seen as unassailable truths.
The enlightenment experience precipitated a fundamental shift
in Fazlallah’s view of himself and his purpose in life.A key for appreciating
this transformation is the fact that the authors who describe the experience
call it a manifestation (zuhur) and exteriorization (buruz) of
God’s knowledge and majesty. Since Fazlallah’s consciousness and body were the
recipients of this manifestation, the event turned him into a sanctified being.
Until this point, his prominence had been based on the following sequence: he
heard the concerns of human beings living in the visible world, traveled to the
hidden realm to understand them, and came back to tell people what their
experiences indicated. After the enlightenment, he no longer needed to travel
to the hidden world. Instead, the hidden truths were within him already and his
being and activity represented a materialization of the sacred. Those who
accepted his claims and tried to reorder their lives according to his commands
were thus coming in direct contact with the divine reality.
The reorganization of the flow of knowledge reflected in the
enlightenment had significant implications for Fazlallah’s actions in the
world. The idea that he was equal to prophets meant that his appearance was a
direct divine intervention in worldly affairs. His arrival was in some sense
preordained and had to fit into the mythological history of the cosmos. This notion
tallied neatly with the Islamic expectation of the messiah, the last guide that
God is supposed to send to the world before its destruction and the ensuing
resurrection. The Islamic messiah is fundamentally an activist figure, charged
with dictating the course of history according to the pattern set by
God.Therefore, following his identification as the messiah, it no longer
sufficed Fazlallah to sit by himself and be a counselor for whoever sought him
out. He had to go out into the world and propagate the truths entrusted to him.
Our knowledge of the particulars of
Fazlallah’s activities after the enlightenment remains as murky as that of
previous periods. A number of manuscripts containing works by his followers
repeat a short list of dates that identifies the year 788/1386—87 as the time
of an experience designated the “Manifestation of Divine Glory” (zuhur-i
kibriya). However, the major enlightenment experience described above,
which is also referred to as a form of manifestation (zuhur), occurred
in 775/1374. The best way to make sense of the two different years marked as
moments of grand revelation is to differentiate between the experience itself
and its open proclamation. In other words, Fazlallah had the experience of
enlightenment in 1374 but he did not proclaim his messianic mission publicly
until 1386—87. The period of approximately twelve years between 1374 and 1386
was thus an incubatory phase during which Fazlallah first came to terms with
his experience and then gradually conveyed it to his close confidants. The end
of the process was an announcement and invitation to the public at large. The
fixing of the number of years at twelve may also have been motivated by the
desire to emulate the life of the Prophet Muhammad, who preached for twelve
years in Mecca, between 610 and 622, before migrating toYathrib/Medina to set
up a separate Muslim community.
Although the precise details of Fazlallah’s activity in this
period are not known, circumstantial evidence indicates that he spent much time
traveling to various areas in the Persianspeaking Islamic world (present-day
Iran and Central Asia). The versified Book of the Divine Footstool
(Kursinama) of Fazlallah’s major successor ‘Ali al-A‘la hints that
Fazlallah may have tried to abandon all social interaction after the enlightenment.
The story is given in cryptic verses and is difficult to make out fully. It
suggests that Fazlallah broke off all relationships after the experience of
enlightenment and his devotees felt great distress when they were unable to
locate him. Finally, ‘Ali al-A‘la had a dream that led him to a cave where he
found Fazlallah living as a hermit. He was unwilling to leave the cave at first
but then was told that a dervish nicknamed “traveler” (musafir), whom he
had known from before, was ill and about to die. As he came to visit this
dervish, the latter recognized the station Fazlallah had reached immediately
upon seeing his face and greeted him with great enthusiasm. He then correctly
told Fazlallah about some of the things he had seen in dreams in Tabriz,
proving that the visions were not false but a part of an expectation. He
convinced Fazlallah that the knowledge he had been given needed to be conveyed
to the whole world. Fazlallah eventually accepted this idea and, reluctantly
(we are assured), began his life as a missionary.
Fazlallah’s decision to propagate the mission in 1386—87
marked the “Manifestation of Divine Glory” mentioned in numerous works by his
followers.While in the initial enlightenment in Tabriz God had manifested
himself only to Fazlallah, this was a more momentous occasion since now God was
being made available to the larger world through open proclamation of
Fazlallah, whom God had chosen as a vessel for himself. Seven close confidants
of Fazlallah pledged their allegiance to him at this point, inaugurating a
specific group, later called the Hurufis, dedicated to his religious vision.
Some of these individuals played a significant part in the later propagation
of Fazlallah’s message.
Fazlallah’s surviving works include a
short tract entitled The Book of Sleep (Nawmnama), which provides
descriptions of dreams seen between 1383 and 1394. Some of the dreams come with
dates and the places where they were seen. From this collection and from works
by Fazlallah’s followers, we can tell that Fazlallah traveled to various places
in Iran, Central Asia, and the Caucasus in the last phase of his life. We now
find him in already familiar places such as Isfahan, Tabriz, and Khwarazm, and
new localities like Abarquh, Burujird, Damghan, Gilan, Baku, and Shamakhi.
These dreams underscore political involvement at three different levels.
First, they provide direct evidence for the fact that he saw himself as the
messiah, whose mission was ratified by past religious heroes like ‘Ali. Second,
the dreams indicate that he expected to become a ruler through a political
alliance such as marriage to a princess from one of the existing ruling houses.
And third, the dreams have a militaristic side, indicating that he thought that
he would be installed as a ruler after a bloody struggle.
The narratives given in Fazlallah’s Book of Sleep are
written in a kind of shorthand in the Astarabadi dialect of Persian and it is
not always possible to decipher them in full. The idea that he saw himself as
the messiah has already been mentioned, and here Fazlallah tells us that, in a
dream that occurred in the year 1384, he saw the messiah dressed in white
clothes and knew intuitively that these were his clothes. When he awoke he
understood that the dream had confirmed that he was the messiah.
In a dream that corroborated the idea that he was heir to the
tradition of prophecy, he met ‘Ali, who took his hand and said that he swore
allegiance to Fazlallah as the leader. This was a reversal of the norm since a
figure of ‘Ali’s status deserves the allegiance of others instead of offering
it to someone else. His show of respect to Fazlallah indicated that the latter,
as the messiah, now deserved to be respected and followed by all people.
The ambition to be admitted to royal circles is reflected in
a dream in which Fazlallah saw Toqtamish Khan (d. 1395), the ruler of the
Golden Horde who reigned from the city of Saray in the lower Volga valley (now
Russia), and wished that he would get one of his daughters in marriage. He
hoped also that the marriage would lead to the birth of a son who would act as
a mediator between spiritual and political power represented, respectively, by
Fazlallah himself and the royal mother. One of his associates saw a dream seven
times, in which a person was identified as “Master of the Auspicious
Conjunction” (sahib-i qiran), a title referring to an astrological event
that marked the astrological charts of rulers. The Master is not identified
directly in the dream narrative but it is very likely that it was meant to
refer to Fazlallah. He also saw once that drums of happiness were being beaten
in Tabriz, as was usually done upon the arrival of a ruler, and realized that
he was the object of the celebration.
A number of dreams in the Book of Sleep contain
imagery of swords that suggests that Fazlallah was contemplating a military
role for himself and his followers. One of his followers saw that he had one
hundred and forty sons, each equipped with two double-edged swords. Fazlallah
also saw that the whole sky was illuminated with a huge sword whose handle he
held in his own hand. And in another dream,he saw a sword that had beautiful
golden handwriting and stars placed on it in the form of an astronomical chart.
He realized that, once again, the handle of the sword was in his hand, and that
the text said that the world would experience terrible events after the
appearance of Fazlallah Astarabadi.
The dreams from the Book of Sleep cited above convey
the sense that Fazlallah felt that he was destined to become a ruler as
predicted for the Islamic messiah.The allegiance of a grand figure like ‘Ali,
the possibility of inclusion in an existing royal lineage, and the prospect of
a miraculous victory through heavenly weapons as exemplified in the dreams of
swords all point in this direction. However, these dreams occur in the work
alongside others that have a distinct sense of foreboding. It is almost as if
Fazlallah felt that he was definitely destined for something great, but that
this would either be a grand victory leading to universal rule, or a horrifying
death marking a great cosmic tragedy. For the latter possibility, some of his
dreams identify him with Jesus and Husayn, religious figures famous for being
subjected to torturous deaths for the sake of their causes. In one dream he
even saw that a crippled man had ordered that he was to be captured and
imprisoned.This dream is presented as a premonition of the fact that Fazlallah
was eventually imprisoned on the order of Timur, famous for being lame.The
possibility of martyrdom suggested by these dreams eventually proved truer than
Fazlallah’s expectation of universal kingship.
DEATH
All sources for Fazlallah
Astarabadi’s life agree that he was executed after a brief imprisonment.
However, there is no unanimity over matters such as: what led to this event,
when it took place, and what it symbolized. External sources from the fifteenth
century and later accounts written by mainstream Muslims portray Fazlallah as
a religious extremist who invited the wrath of the rulers owing to his
exaggerated claims and political ambition. Among such commentators, some
consider the execution justifiable while others offer no moral judgment but
present it as a foreseeable consequence of Fazlallah’s actions and ideas.
Conversely, writings stemming from Fazlallah’s movement condemn the execution
in the strongest terms. For Fazlallah’s followers, the event was a personal
shock and a tragedy of cosmic proportions. However, they also felt that
Fazlallah’s dying in this way was a part of God’s cosmic plan and that the
tragedy must have an ulterior positive meaning for the future. The fact that
the death had to “make sense” in some way meant that Fazlallah’s followers had
to rethink their religious ideas to a substantial degree after the event.
From a broad historical perspective, Fazlallah’s arrest and
execution were a side effect of the establishment of the authority of the
Turko-Mongol conqueror Timur in Iran and Central Asia. This region was the
scene of massive upheavals during the last quarter of the fourteenth century,
when Fazlallah was traveling around in search of converts. His personal claims
following the enlightenment probably did invite the condemnation of some
mainstream scholars, though this by itself cannot have led to suppression by
the government. The true cause of the arrest and eventual execution was the
political potential of Fazlallah’s ideology and the growth of his
following.The formation of a sizeable group around his charismatic personality
was seen as a possible source of rebellion by the new government.
Born into a lineage of chiefs of the
Turkish Barlas tribe some time in the 1320s or 1330s,Timur distinguished
himself as a charismatic and capable military man in his twenties. His father
was a part of the ruling elite of the Chaghatay khanate in Central Asia. This
political entity ruled over a mixed sedentary and nomadic population and had
evolved out of the great Mongol empire that had, at one point in the thirteenth
century, united China, Central Asia, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe under
a single ruling house. Between the 1350s and 1380, Timur went from being a
minor overlord of the region around the city of Kish (also known as Shahr-i
Sabz) to becoming the biggest power in Central Asia. He received a severe leg
wound during a battle in the early days of his ascendancy, which led to a limp
and the enduring epithet Timur the Lame (Timur-i Lang), transformed into
Tamerlane in European languages.
Although Timur spent his whole career as a systematic and
ruthless conqueror, he never proclaimed himself a sovereign.
He maintained a puppet ruler from the
lineage of the Mongol conqueror Chingiz Khan (d. 1227) at his capital and portrayed
himself as the greatest among Turkish tribal chiefs. In 1368, he married the
Mongol princess Saray Malik Khanim and came to be known as the son-in-law (guregen).
Although this gave him some derivative legitimacy, Mongol traditions did not
consider relatives by marriage a part of the dynasty and Timur respected this
restriction throughout his life.
Despite his great ambition, Timur was a practical military
man who worked according to precise plans when conquering regions, subjugating
populations, and ensuring steady extraction of wealth from his vassals and
subjects. He first became involved in the politics of Iran through alliances
with dynasties that ruled the border regions with Central Asia.This eventually
led to a ten-year period of planning a massive invasion of the Middle East that
emulated the invasion of Chingiz Khan’s grandson Hulegu in the middle of the
thirteenth century. Over the period 1380 to 1400, he gradually brought most of
the Middle East under his control through either direct attack and subjugation
or by granting vassal status to local rulers in exchange for heavy ransoms and
contributions to his forces.
The expansion of Timur’s empire can be situated relative to
Fazlallah Astarabadi’s life by noting the years in which the major cities of
Iran fell to his forces. The Sarbadar rulers of Sabzavar, with whom Fazlallah
had contacts around 1360,allied themselves with Timur in 1381 and their domains
were spared large-scale devastations. Despite a general immunity, some Sarbadar
areas did see destruction, such as the city of Isfizar that was ransacked after
a local rebellion in 1383.In 1384 during his first direct foray into central
Iranian lands Timur conquered Astarabad, the city where Fazlallah was born in
c. 1340.Tabriz, the scene of Fazlallah’s enlightenment in 1374, fell to Timur’s
forces in 1386 and was made the capital of the whole of western Iran. Isfahan,
a focus for Fazlallah’s activity through the early 1370s, surrendered in 1388
and the city’s population received particularly harsh treatment after some of
Timur’s tax collectors were killed upon entering the city. A historian recounts
seeing at least twenty-eight towers of 1500 severed heads each outside the
city’s gates as an indication of the reprisal. In Timur’s tactics, the
overthrowing of the cities were often preceded by debilitating sieges and
followed by devastating famines brought on by the conquerors’ policies. It is
understandable that populations faced with this sociopolitical situation would
have been attracted to a charismatic religious leader like Fazlallah who
claimed that the end of time was near and that the elect group who would accept
him as the messiah would be delivered from the terrible situation in front of
them in the near future.
Although he was nominally Muslim, Timur was not known for
religious piety and we are not even sure where to place him in the framework of
Islamic social entities such as sectarian groups, juridical schools, or Sufi
orders. However, he almost always exempted religious professionals such as
jurists, scholars, and dervishes from looting and torture at the hands of his
forces when he captured a city. This attitude stemmed in part from prudence
since such individuals were necessary for reestablishing the social order after
the conquest. But Timur seems to have believed in the charismatic powers of
particular religious men, some of whom he kept with him to provide advice or
oracles. It was rare for Timur to intentionally cause the death of a
charismatic religious man. If the person was seen as threatening rather than
beneficial, he was simply banished from the realm without harm so that he could
not gather a large following that would cause trouble. In this context, the
arrest and execution of Fazlallah, a descendant of
Muhammad and a renowned charismatic
dream interpreter, stands out as an anomaly rather than part and parcel of
Timur’s policies.
Historians of the Timurid period who
briefly mention Fazlallah state that he was arrested and executed in
804/1401—2.Works by Fazlallah’s followers, on the other hand, unanimously place
the event in 796/1394.This discrepancy can be solved in favor of 1394 since
Fazlallah’s followers were intimately concerned with the consequences of the
death and no ideological reason can be identified that would have required
changing the year. Furthermore, there is circumstantial evidence for preferring
1394. All sources agree that Timur’s son Miranshah (d. 1408) carried out the
sentence during his term as the governor of Azerbaijan. Miranshah was appointed
to this post in 1393, at a time when Timur was campaigning in western Iran, and
he was deposed in 1399 on suspicions of having become unduly independent.
Fazlallah’s arrest in 1394 was thus a part of the establishment of firm
Timurid control over the region at the beginning of the rule of a new governor.
The historians state that Fazlallah was arrested after
scholars of Samarqand and Gilan issued legal opinions that condemned him for
religious innovation. Given the content of Fazlallah’s thought, it is easy to
see that mainstream scholars familiar with Fazlallah’s claims would have passed
such a judgment. However, opinions of this type are usually given at the behest
of a governing authority and carry no weight without an agency willing to carry
them out. In the context of Timur’s empire in particular, scholars had very
little influence over the conduct of state policy.The likeliest scenario is
that Timur’s government had found Fazlallah problematic and had imprisoned him.
Scholars were then asked for an opinion that could be used to justify
eliminating him completely.The case as a whole constituted a situation where
the opinions of the scholars coincided very well with the interests of the
Timurid state.
The arrest occurred at a time when Fazlallah was in the city
of Shamakhi in Shirvan, a region today in the former Soviet republic of
Azerbaijan. He had gone there to visit an associate named Qazi Bayazid who had
been ill.This man told Fazlallah that he had seen a dream in which a person was
being sacrificed and was fearful that this implied his impending death from the
illness. Fazlallah reportedly consoled Qazi Bayazid by saying that the dream
did not pertain to the illness but was actually a premonition of his own
imminent death. True to form, Fazlallah was then arrested by the orders of
Shaykh Ibrahim, the local authority in Shamakhi, just as he stepped out of Qazi
Bayazid’s house and was imprisoned along with one or more associates.
Fazlallah may well have foreseen that he would die a martyr
because of his sense of his place in history as indicated in his interpretation
of dreams in Shamakhi and other places. However, the way Shaykh Ibrahim is
portrayed in the works of Fazlallah’s followers indicates that Fazlallah was
taken by surprise at the actual moment of arrest in Shirvan.The captor is
constantly referred to as a traitor who betrayed the trust put in him by
undertaking the arrest. There is some confusion about the precise chain of
command that led to the arrest. Some works blame only Shaykh Ibrahim and
Timur’s son Miranshah and state that these two worked either without Timur’s
own knowledge of the matter or explicitly against him since he held Fazlallah
in high regard. Others include Timur in their condemnations, referring to him
as the “accursed lame demon” who had caused countless calamities for the whole
population along with ordering Fazlallah’s death.The arrest was very likely a
minor matter in the overall scheme of Timur’s activities and was carried out at
the behest of the local authority, Miranshah, in a general sweep aimed at
eliminating subversive elements from Timur’s new Iranian domains.
Two versions of
Fazlallah’s last will and testament are extant.
The first is quite short
and can be cited here in full:
I have a heart filled with
desire for speech but no messenger can be found to convey it to you. God is
witness to the situation of this poor unfortunate man, and no anxiety remains
save regarding the scattering of his children and separation from his friends. Some
matters that were pending are left to that dear friend and other dear ones. If
God almighty wishes well for all, things will happen, either now or some time
in the future.
O
Lord, O Lord of my nights:
All
my life I never found a single friend in Shirvan
What to say of a friend, even a (sincere) acquaintance remained a mere
wish
I am the Husayn of the age, and the unworthy enemies my Shimr andYazid
My life is altogether
‘Ashura and Shirvan my Karbala
It is not hidden from
those dear friends that this wretch harbors no anxieties in matters concerning
religion.They are to convey my greetings and prayers at this last moment to my
companions and friends and are to act such that these rules, verses, and
truths, reach them.They are to settle down in some unknown corner for a
while.This is the new command. Let them inquire from me about that child and
others who remain and are free.
Farewell.
This document contains mythological
as well as real-life features conveying Fazlallah’s feelings in the period
after the arrest.The fact that he compares himself to Husayn indicates that he
saw the calamity to have befallen him as a part of the larger battle between
good and evil. Husayn was Muhammad’s grandson who, in 680, was killed along
with a number of his followers in Karbala, southern Iraq, because of his
opposition to the rule of Yazid, the caliph belonging to the early Islamic
Umayyad dynasty. In the centuries following Husayn’s death, Muslims,
particularly those belonging to the Shi‘i sect, came to see Husayn as the ultimate
martyr who gave his own life for the redemption of his followers. Conversely,
the caliph Yazid, and Shimr, the Umayyad commander who fought against Husayn,
became the ultimate human faces of wrongdoing.
The remainder of the document is concerned with more mundane
matters, namely, the settlement of his affairs and the injunction to his family
and followers to go into hiding. The larger version of the testament provides
more details regarding these aspects, although the only existing copy of this
version is garbled and not fully comprehensible. Nonetheless, we can tell that
the testament was addressed to Fazlallah’s eldest son Salamallah, whom he also
designated the executor of all his affairs and the guardian of the family. He
was to accomplish his charge in consultation and collaboration with a number of
Fazlallah’s close associates.This testament also mentions two or three women
who appear to be Fazlallah’s wives, other sons besides Salamallah, and
daughters named ‘A’isha and Fatima. Fazlallah in fact had more children than
these who are referred to in the testament in general as sons and daughters
without specifying names.
In the longer testament, Fazlallah enjoins members of his
family to follow the advice of Salamallah and Fazlallah’s senior followers. He
tells his children as well as his followers to make themselves inconspicuous by
avoiding any public display of their religious practice or their affiliation
with Fazlallah. They are told to remove themselves to remote places so that
people sent out to capture Fazlallah’s associates would not be able to trace
them. The children in particular were to disperse to different locations in the
company of designated trustworthy followers so that even if one were caught,
the authorities would not be able to eliminate the whole family en masse. Two
of the daughters were also to be married to specific followers if the latter
were still living.
The commands given in the larger testament are remarkable for
their details. Although downcast because of the arrest, Fazlallah appears here
as a realist concerned primarily with assuring the safety of his family and
friends in a straightforward and practical way. The document refers to
financial matters as well, though the details of these cannot be deciphered
fully. Irrespective of his sense that his life was a part of cosmic mythology,
it appears that, at least at this point in his life, Fazlallah was a man of the
world fully concerned with managing his earthly affairs. His worldly attitude
in evidence here is also a far cry from the austere life seen in stories from
the time before his enlightenment.
Fazlallah was shifted to the fortress
of Alinjaq in the Nakhchivan region close to Shirvan soon after the arrest and
was executed on the sixth day of the month of Zu l-Qa‘da, 796 (September 2,
1394). Some sources state that Miranshah carried out the beheading personally
due to the severity of Fazlallah’s crimes. Given the scant attention afforded
him in official histories, he was probably not a huge threat and the idea that
Miranshah acted as the executioner seems to be a legend. However, the
governor’s implication in the order that led to the death made him the ultimate
villain in the eyes of Fazlallah’s followers.Their works usually refer to him
as Maranshah, or king of snakes, rather than by his actual name.
Fazlallah’s followers had been shocked by the news of his
arrest and an elegy by ‘Ali al-A‘la paints the picture of a community stricken
with unbearable grief when it heard of the exe- cution.The process of trying to
make sense of the death began immediately since ‘Ali al-A‘la notes that
observers had commented on the inauspicious astrological omens that were proliferating
immediately before the event.The body was handed over to his followers and they
were able to conduct a proper funeral and burial. The elegy says that for the
followers, the sight of the coffin leaving their midst to be taken to the grave
felt like the separation of their souls from their bodies. As discussed in a
later chapter, Fazlallah’s grave eventually became the movement’s major shrine.
It was seen as a piece of heaven on earth since devotees visiting it heard the
dirt surrounding it echoing with the sounds of the winds of paradise.
Fazlallah’s arrest and death were accompanied by a rounding
up of at least some of his followers as well. His disciple Sayyid Kamal al-Din
Husayn is identified specifically as a martyr who perished along with Fazlallah
in the debacle. Some of his children did follow the advice of Fazlallah’s
testament and escaped to other regions such as Syria. The death may have
shocked and saddened Fazlallah’s followers but it did not lessen their faith in
his status and teachings. However, they were forced to reinterpret the
significance of his life in light of the new situation.Their efforts in this
regard eventually led to a number of different options espoused by the various
factions in the community. Fazlallah’s religious system as represented in his
written works and propagated by his disciples ensured that his legacy would
live on long past his death.We now turn to Fazlallah’s religious ideas before
picking up the historical thread of the development of his movement after his
death in Chapter 6.
Fazlallah Astarabadi’s religious
worldview put particular emphasis on the genealogy and history of the cosmos
and the human species. Following previous Islamic as well as pre- Islamic
religious systems, Fazlallah saw the cosmos and the human being as parallel
entities, one being the macrocosm and the other the microcosm.The two systems
were fundamentally interdependent so that to understand the microcosm one had
to investigate the macrocosm, and vice versa. Fazlallah maintained that the
interconnection between the two was grounded in the fact that both were aspects
of God’s self-manifestation in the material world.
The macrocosm was a display of God’s
attributes, traces, and acts, and constituted an array of signs that pointed to
God. The human being, the microcosm, was the only created being capable of
fully comprehending these signs. Human beings’ highest calling in their earthly
lives was to recognize the potential implanted in them in this regard and work
toward its actualization. Taking their cues from heavenly scriptures and the
spiritual experiences of prophets and saints among them, they were expected to
decipher the cosmic mystery by understanding the unifying symbolic structure
underlying its apparent multiplicity and disorganization. The ultimate purpose
of human existence was thus to decode observable reality, through which humans
came to understand God, the world, and themselves. Human beings who understood
the cosmos and human existence possessed a portion of God’s knowledge and, like
God himself, came to see the manifest world as an aspect of their own beings.
According to Fazlallah and his followers, he was the only human being to have
achieved this in its totality so that he bridged the gap between humanity and
divinity. He could, therefore,be addressed with titles such as “lord of all the
worlds” that were usually reserved for God alone.
In Fazlallah’s view, the intertwined destinies of the cosmos
and the human species were one part predetermined and another part open to
change based on deliberate action. The predetermined side of things resulted
from the fact that God had created the world at a particular moment and with a
determined purpose that would be fulfilled after it had exhausted its term.The
lifespan of the world — the time between its creation and the final apocalypse
— was also expected to unfold in cycles of time with known outlines. On the
other hand, the willful, and hence changeable, dimension of the world depended
on the way human beings responded to messages revealed to them through special
messengers. To act appropriately, humans needed to know not only the static
structure of time but also what particular time period they themselves were
living in.The second imperative required intensive use of their intellectual
and spiritual faculties for deciphering the signs of the times and recognizing
the spiritual elect who were alive at that time and who deserved their
allegiance. Fazlallah believed that what he had experienced in his life pointed
to the fact that he himself was the final divinely appointed messenger for
humanity. The whole metaphysical and historical system thus converged on his
person since all people alive in his times were supposed to recognize him as
the bearer of truth just before a final apocalyptic destruction of the cosmos.
These basic orientations regarding time, material reality,
and God recur consistently throughout Fazlallah’s works and the derivative
interpretations found in the works of his followers. However, the details of
the stories used to substantiate this mode of understanding existence vary
considerably in the sources. The intellectual viewpoint of Fazlallah and his
disciples is consistent with respect to the methodology used to
understand the world, but their works do not contain a single mythology
across the board. For example, the works contain a number of divergent
narratives explaining the creation of the world that, despite their
differences, indicate a consistent overall intellectual agenda. As a result of
this factor, it is possible to encapsulate the general perspective with the
help of a few examples.
The overall framework of Fazlallah Astarabadi’s religious
worldview can be summarized by concentrating on three themes: (1) the details
of his views regarding the creation and evolution of the world as a whole (the
macrocosm); (2) the particular position of the human species, the microcosm,
within the created world; and (3) the structure of cosmic time, defined by
various cycles, that was reaching its final conclusion during Fazlallah’s
lifetime. Fazlallah’s religious vision is considerably richer than these three
elements, but virtually everything he elaborates on rests on the foundation of
these three concerns. The ideas discussed below had descriptive as well as
prescriptive import for Fazlallah and his followers. The worldview described
here enabled them to make sense of the world and, in conjunction with their
historical circumstances and their personal religious inspirations, it provided
them the basis for making decisions about how to act.
Fazlallah’s discussion of the cosmos
as a whole contains a particular emphasis on cosmogony, or the story of the
creation of the world. As mentioned several times already, he felt that he was
living at the end of time and, as in other religious ideologies centered on
apocalyptic ideas, to understand the dissolution of the world one had to know
about its creation. His interpretation of the creation was a particular
version of the genesis story as it is found in the Qur’an and its Jewish and
Christian antecedents. Following a view popular among Sufis, he stated that the
ultimate reason for the existence of the cosmos was God’s desire to be known.
Before the beginning of time, God, the uncreated being who has always existed,
felt lonely and decided to create entities other than himself so that he would
become an object of knowledge. He then set the process of creation into motion
through the command “be,” which produced the fundaments of the cosmos out of
nothing (Q. 2: 117, 3:47, 6:73,19:35,40:68).
In Fazlallah’s view, the scriptural report that God said
“be” was to be taken quite literally. God was to be seen as actually
articulating a word in a form of language to produce the world. Because of this
primordial event, language and materiality were fundamentally interconnected
throughout all later phases of the world’s continuing existence.The actual
sound of God’s word and the material produced from the command were facets of
the same event, and the moment of creation was in fact a bifurcation of divine
attributes leading to a constant relationship between sounds and bodies in the
cosmos.The cosmos as a whole — seen as a conglomeration of materials and sounds
— was thus an echo of the word “be,” with all entities and movements
representing continuing reverberations of the divine command issued at the
beginning of time.
God’s creative activity continued after the first command and
he gradually brought all aspects of the material cosmos into existence.The
creation of the cosmos reached its apex and conclusion when God kneaded clay
from a mixture of the elements earth and water with his hands and imprinted the
lump in front of him with an image of himself. In Qur’anic terminology, this
event was represented in the idea that, after he had created the heavens and
the earth in six days, God “seated himself upon the throne” (10: 3, 13: 2, 20:
5, 25: 59, 32: 4, 57: 4). The clay model that resulted from the act of
imprinting was the human body, that of Adam, which God then proceeded to
enhance by giving it life and knowledge. He animated it by blowing into it some
of his own spirit (Q. 32: 10) and endowed it with a share of his knowledge
before presenting it to angels as an object of veneration (Q. 2: 31—4, 7: 11,
17: 61, 18: 50, 20: 116). God commanded the angels to bow down in front ofAdam
by telling them that he was more exalted than them because he knew the “names
of things” that had not been divulged to the angels. Once fully assembled,Adam
was the being most similar to God in all of creation since his bodily form was
an imprint of God, he was infused with God’s spirit, and God had made him privy
to knowledge withheld from other beings.
At this juncture in the narrative of creation, Adam became
subject to the hostility of Iblis or Satan, the angel or jinn who refused to
bow before him because of a feeling of superiority. For Fazlallah and his followers,
it was particularly noteworthy that Iblis’s objection to Adam was based on his
contention that the element fire, which formed his own body, was superior to
the clay that constituted Adam’s body (Q. 7: 12).The material content of the
bodies of a species was therefore always a noteworthy matter for understanding
its place from the very beginning of the drama of the cosmos. Iblis’s mistake
was that he had considered fire superior to earth and water and God’s reprisal against
him pointed out that the truth was the exact opposite of his contention.
For Fazlallah, the “names” taught to Adam that compelled all
angels except Iblis to bow down in front of him were the letters of an alphabet
that allowed him to comprehend the world.The letters in question were, however,
not the entities familiar to us from knowing any of the readily available
writing systems.They were the fundamental constituents of the very language
that God had used when he had said “be” to create the world.What
had been imparted to Adam was not a
particular language but the more general capacity for language, represented by
a kind of metalanguage, which was necessary for first creating the world and
then comprehending it. God had no use for language before creating the cosmos
since he was alone and did not need to communicate with any other being. The
utterance “be” was the first instance of language, from which all other aspects
of language such as sounds and letters came into being. Fazlallah claimed that
the “names” taught to Adam were the thirty-two sound-letter pairs that formed
the alphabet of this divine meta- language.Through these God had imparted the
greatest cosmic secrets to the human species.
ities were not merely spiritual but
had a direct connection to the constitution of his body. The high station
accorded to Adam in this interpretation of the creation of the world formed the
basis for much of the rest of Fazlallah’s religious pronouncements.
Following the initial period of
cosmic generation, Adam and his spouse Eve were made the progenitors of a whole
species. Fazlallah’s works do not dwell on the human fall from grace through
the instigation of Iblis. Instead, he presumes that God had created humans as
beings who had the potential to recognize and know him.Their placement on
earth as a trial was thus not an accident but part of the plan from the very
beginning.
Fazlallah saw the story of Adam’s creation as the production
of the prototype for the human species as a whole. The imprinted clay that
formed Adam’s body acted as the mold for the creation of later humans, and the
production of each member of the species replicated God’s intentions toward
the species. Since the human being was the microcosm, the conception,
maturation, and eventual demise of every individual human reiterated the story
of the cosmos from genesis to final dissolution.The story began in the womb of
the mother where the embryo was generated through the intermixing of male and
female fluids. The moment of fertilization was equivalent to God’s command “be”
in the macrocosmic perspective. During the period of gestation, the embryo
successively acquired parts such as blood, nerves, arteries, and bones, leading
up to the fully constituted human body. The process of the formation of these
parts was equal to the first six days of initial creation when God had
constructed the heavens and the earth. Once the body was complete, a spirit was
blown into it, reenacting God’s action with respect to Adam on the seventh day
of creation. Once fully developed, the normal brain function of the human being
equaled the capacity for language that derived from the knowledge imparted to
Adam in the form of the names and would prove crucial in later stages of
development. The embryo then turned into a human infant when born into the
world.
For Fazlallah, the body of every human infant bore the signs
of God’s speech in the form of seven lines of hair that marked its face. These
were: the hairline, two eyebrows, and the two sets of eyelashes (four lines).
These lines paralleled the seven verses of the first chapter of the Qur’an, The
Opening. The idea here was again that God’s creative commands existed in
bifurcated forms in bodies and sounds in the physical world and that we could
see the correspondences between the two facets by correlating major aspects of
a body (the human being) with a form of speech (the Qur’an).The fact that these
two entities in particular were comparable was no surprise since they were,
respectively, the best body and the most perfect form of materialized language,
God’s ultimate scripture.
The maturation of the human body in the years after the birth
also contained clues to the connection between body and speech/text. This could
be seen in the arrival of more lines of hair on the human face, though the way
this occurred was different for males and females. On the male face, the
appearance of facial hair increased the number to fourteen: two lines each on
cheeks, above the moustache, and below the lips, and one at the end of the
beard.The female face itself did not acquire seven additional lines, but it had
an equivalent in the female’s capacity to give birth. Through this, another
human face and its lines appeared in the world. Like the seven lines, the
fourteen lines also paralleled an aspect of the text of the Qur’an. Some
chapters of the Qur’an begin with groups of letters that do not constitute
actual words. These random letters have been a source of much speculation by
Muslims over the centuries, with little consensus regarding their true meaning
or significance. Fazlallah observed that, eliminating repetition, this group as
a whole consists of fourteen separate letters.This feature of the Qur’an is
not obvious and has to be deduced, just as the human being does not have the
additional seven lines at birth and develops them in the process of maturation.
In the case of both males and females, Fazlallah saw the fourteen
lines as seals that sat on top of the places on the face where they occurred.
Consequently, the significant entities that “inhabited” the face were in fact
twenty-eight: fourteen lines and the fourteen places on the face on which the
lines sat as seals. In parallel, the text of the Qur’an was revealed in Arabic,
whose alphabet contained twenty-eight letters. In a given human life cycle, the
number twenty-eight was reached as a result of the process of becoming an
adult. Similarly, the Qur ’an, with its twenty-eight letters, was the last
scripture and had appeared in the world at a late stage in cosmic history.
The human being’s status as a reflection of God’s speech was
affirmed when the male acquired facial hair and the female gave birth during
teenage years. Up to this point, the person him- or herself could not interfere
with the lines and the processes involved were natural. Women’s bearing
children was socially normative and would have been perceived as a natural
course of things in their life cycles. Going beyond these steps, Fazlallah
contended that it was a universal human trait to part the hair of the head and,
in the case of the male, of the beard into two sides.This revealed one or two
more lines and the places underneath them. Parting the hair was an act of
volition, here representing a deliberate attempt to adorn oneself, thereby
becoming better and civilized. It was in fact seen as the point of becoming
fully human since it was only now that the face became a dwelling place of
thirty-two entities — sixteen lines and sixteen places under them — in parallel
with the thirty-two letters that God had taught Adam as the names at the
beginning of creation.With this, each human face came to reflect God’s speech
in its entirety following maturation as well as deliberate cultivation. This
fundamental fact underlying the correlation between divine speech and the human
body was affirmed also by the fact that the mature human mouth, the organ that
actually produced speech, contained a total of thirty-two teeth.
The single line that parted the hair to create the fully
human person was seen as a mark of God’s creativity that was evident throughout
nature. It could be observed in the following single lines: the slit that
reveals the eye, the nose that divides the face, the line between the lips that
reveals the mouth cavity, the line in the middle of every seed of grain, the
line that naturally divides the mane of the horse, the line that splits the
lower lip of the camel, etc. In all these cases, the single line was seen as
God’s imprint on the bodies in question, recalling, among other things, the
singleness of God’s essence and the production of the pair of materiality and
sound through God’s command “be” in the first moment of genesis. The
fundamental unity of the cosmos and the parity between the macrocosm and the
microcosm were reflected also in the fact that the eight final lines on all
human faces (hairline, two eyebrows, four eyelashes, parting in head hair)
multiplied by the four elements (earth, wind, water, fire) reflected the
thirty-two names/ letters God had taught Adam in the beginning.
Human beings were bearers of language both in the forms of
their bodies and in their intellectual ability to acquire spoken and written
speech. The general capability was turned into a specific form by learning
particular human languages and alphabets.These languages gave humans the
ability to comprehend the world and communicate with each other through
symbolic means, something not available to other created beings. However, these
languages were limited in scope compared to the metalanguage taught to Adam at
the moment of creation.
The metalanguage, with its thirty-two letters, did not represent
or symbolize reality but named it from its very essence.
Fazlallah’s view of this language was
articulated in the oft- repeated statement “the [metalinguistic] name of a thing
is its very essence”.This maxim followed from the fact that, on one side of the
equation, the names of all physical, imaginary, and conceptual entities rested
ultimately on the primordial metalanguage. All things named were, therefore,
predicated fundamentally on its set of thirty-two letters as a whole. On the
other side, the essence of a thing was that element whose absence necessitated
a complete lack of the thing itself. The essence was the metalinguistic name of
the entity since it was the only element unequivocally necessary for the entity
to exist at all. If this were not so, the thing would fall outside the purview
of the metalanguage, which was impossible. Once again, the crucial inference to
be drawn from this argument was that the universe was fundamentally a
linguistic event. As the creator, God had complete mastery over the
metalanguage while he had endowed human beings with the possibility of
acquiring it. The base potential for this to happen was discernible in humans’
everyday ability to comprehend and vocalize ordinary languages and decipher
various alphabets. However, the true appreciation of the cosmic mystery
required transcending these languages and becoming aware of the metalanguage
and “recalling” its thirty-two letters/names revealed to Adam in primordial
time and lying dormant within every human being. Fazlallah believed that the
spiritual matters revealed to him formed a pathway toward recalling this metalanguage.
He was the only person with the full ability to translate between ordinary
languages and the metalanguage, and the task of his audience was to master his
works and to emulate him in order to decipher their own existence and the
surrounding world.
The description of Fazlallah’s ideas
so far has highlighted the salience of the physical human body and its deep
connections to God’s intentions in creating the world.Along with rationalizing
the individual human life cycle, Fazlallah also believed that the cosmos was
destined to go through three cycles of time between its creation and final
destruction.This represented the lifespan of the macrocosm and paralleled the
development of the human microcosm from birth to death. The beginnings, ends,
and intervening points of the three cycles were tied to the appearance into the
world of particularly significant prophets and saints. The cosmic term as a
whole was geared toward a gradual unfolding of God’s plan for the created
world.
Fazlallah divided cosmic time into a tripartite scheme consisting
of cycles of prophecy, sainthood, and divinity. The prophetic cycle began with
Adam and ended with Muhammad; the cycle of sainthood began with ‘Ali and ended
with Fazlallah; and the divine cycle began with Fazlallah’s proclamations following
his enlightenment and was expected to end with an imminent final apocalypse.
Events within each cycle could be placed relative to the markers of the
boundaries between them and the stories of prophets told in the scriptures all
pointed to this scheme. Fazlallah’s works contain extensive discussions of all
Qur’anic narratives about prophetic figures and his general attitude to them
can be illustrated by concentrating on his views on Adam, Eve, Mary, Jesus, and
Muhammad.
Adam’s significance has already been discussed in the section
on cosmogony and it suffices here that he figures prominently as the founder of
the cycle of prophecy and the father of the species. Eve’s significance lay in
the fact that she was the actual bearer of the species, the primordial mother.
She was, in one sense, inferior to Adam since he was created first and acted as
the mold for her creation. However, she was equal to Adam and necessary for his
fulfillment in that the cosmos could not progress along its predestined course
without her. After the generation of the first two human beings with their
differentiated reproductive capabilities, the coupling of human males and
females represented a constant transfer of lines from one side to the other.The
seven lines on all human faces were called the “motherly” lines, and those that
appeared later on male faces were known as the “fatherly” lines. The two sets
were interdependent on each other in a kind of cycle: the male began with the
seven motherly lines and developed to fourteen at puberty when the seven
fatherly lines appeared on his face; the fatherly lines were then transferred
to a woman through sexual intercourse; and she then gave birth to a child who
had the motherly lines on his or her face.The cycle established by the coupling
of Adam and Eve thus continued from generation to generation.
All humans descended from Adam and Eve replicated the
numerical patterns leading to thirty-two discussed above until Jesus, who was
anomalous because he was born without a father and through a divine command
“be” addressed directly to Mary’s womb. His thirty-two lines were not derived
from two parents, but this was amply compensated for by the fact that he was,
literally, the word of God become flesh.This was significant because in the
previous cases, all humans reflected the thirty-two letters of the metalanguage
in the parallel but disconnected systems of the body and the language.
However, as a direct materialization of God’s word,Jesus’ body was the
exteriorization of the all-pervasive metalanguage, a situation that differed
from all other human beings.
In addition, Jesus’ birth commenced an internal cycle of time
within the prophetic cycle that contained a special exteriorization of the
divine metalanguage in the human sphere.
Jesus’ teachings were the first step
in this direction, although Fazlallah’s perspective underscored that these were
not fully understood in his own time. Their full significance could be seen
only through the further unfolding of the cycle of prophecy.The text of the New
Testament was thus laden with meanings that had been overlooked by Christians.
Muhammad and his Muslim followers understood this scripture better since they
had arrived later in history, and Fazlallah could now provide the final and
deepest understanding.
After Jesus, the next important human person to arrive in the
world was, of course, the Prophet Muhammad, whose body was nothing out of the
ordinary.What he brought, however, was the Qur’an, God’s speech in the form of
the twentyeight letters of the Arabic script.What Jesus’ body represented in
its flesh was found in the letters and sounds of the Qur’an.
The textual form was superior to the
corporeal since it was
more easily
comprehensible by the human mind. Although the
highly allusive text
that required interpretation. The Qur’an text, of which only the simplest and
least significant was accessible in the literal meanings attached to the
Arabic words that could be understood by someone who knew the language.
In Fazlallah’s understanding, deeper investigation and interpretation
of the Qur ’an were the chief religious activities of the cycle of sainthood,
which began with ‘Ali and ended with Fazlallah’s enlightenment. Twelver Shi‘i
Imams and great Sufi masters from the dawn of Islam to the time of Fazlallah’s
own proclamations were the chief luminaries of this cosmic cycle.
Fazlallah marked the transition from the cycle of sainthood
to the third and final cycle of divinity. He was the consummation of all
processes of cosmic history. He was given the gift of the complete
understanding of all the scriptures, particularly the Qur’an, and felt that,
following his enlightenment experience , his body had become the repository of
the thirty-two letters of the metalanguage. These had descended into him in a
revelation and had made his bodily presence comparable to that of Jesus who was
a direct representation of God’s speech. It is possible that Fazlallah saw this
parallel between himself and Jesus as the metaphorical realization of the idea
of Jesus’ Second Coming accepted by most Muslims.
One of Fazlallah’s ultimate proofs for asserting his status
as the culmination of history was the fact that he proclaimed himself in
Persian, a language that had an alphabet with thirty-two letters. Because of
this numerical parallel with the primordial alphabet, Persian was seen as the
closest correlate to the original metalanguage taught to Adam. Fazlallah’s
works are most thoroughly imbued with Qur’anic quotations, and taken together,
they can be considered an extended Persian commentary on the Arabic scripture.
Comparing Fazlallah to the evolution of the macrocosmic sphere, one sees that
his writings were like the parting of the hair of the head and the beard that
takes the human face from its natural state to becoming a full reflection of
the thirty-two letters of the metalanguage.What shone forth from his writings
was the ultimate truth of the cosmos, revealed at a time when the macrocosm
had reached its maturation. He himself as the writer, and those among his followers
who had absorbed his works, were the consummate human beings, images of God’s
command “be” in both body and knowledge. At the moment of the creation of the cosmos,
the creative utterance had bifurcated into materiality and sound. With
Fazlallah’s understandings, the perfection of the body was rejoined with the
metalanguage, thus realizing God’s ultimate purpose in creating the cosmos. By
acquiring and embodying the metalanguage, Fazlallah and his followers satisfied
God’s desire for beings who would know him.
Fazlallah’s supporters were exceptional human beings since
the maturation of their bodies and minds coincided with the maturation of the
cosmos as a whole. Because of the times in which they lived, the microcosm and
the macrocosm were becoming combined in their beings.This was, on the one hand,
a matter of fate since God had fixed the course of cosmic history from the
very beginning. On the other hand, an understanding of their status
necessitated that they act in the world in keeping with their cosmic role. This
imperative compelled them to reflect on religious matters, write explanatory
narratives, and travel widely to proclaim themselves. Fazlallah’s idea that he
was the messenger of universal salvation before an imminent apocalypse left him
no choice but to seek the maximum number of believers in the shortest possible
time. The fact that a substantial number of his contemporaries were willing to
accept his claims eventually led to his death at the hands of his Timurid
captors in 1394.
APOCALYPSE, LANGUAGE,
AND SALVATION
|
B |
y the time of Fazlallah Astarabadi’s
activity, apocalyptic religious ideas had had a long history as a part of the
Islamic tradition. Derived originally from Jewish, Christian, and Zoroastrian
antecedents, these ideas projected that time was linear and that its end would
see the final great struggle between good and evil. It was expected that a
messiah would lead the forces of truth, and that he would be opposed by
antichrist-like figures known under names such as Dajjal or Dabba (the beast).
Muslims in the first two centuries of the Islamic era (c. 600—800) were divided
into hostile groups that both fought against each other in battlefields and
tried to justify their positions through intellectual effort. In the course of
the latter endeavor, they assimilated the messianic ideas already current in
the region, thereby turning them into a distinctive Islamic system.
The rich and highly imaginative eschatological ideas in the
traditions of the first two centuries formed the basis for the dogmas of the
Islamic sects that solidified in the classical period (c. 800—1200), in so far
as they were not rejected. Messianic and apocalyptic doctrines varied
considerably between different sects and subsects, and they were also regarded
with skepticism by a number of people throughout Islamic history. The contested
nature of messianic ideas meant that anyone who wished to discuss the topic
could count on criticism from many directions.
Muslims like Fazlallah, who lived after the classical period,
had both the corpus of early apocalyptic traditions and the standardized
messianic dogmas of the different sects at their disposal. Out of these ideas,
Fazlallah devised new configurations so that his interpretation of the
apocalypse as a whole was unique in its specific details. His beliefs are most
closely related to those of Shi‘i Muslims belonging to the Twelver (also known
as Imami), the Isma‘ili, and the Ghulat (“exaggerator”) subsects. These Shi‘is
had a heavy investment in apocalyptic and messianic ideas because they considered
early Islamic history a tragedy and expected that the world would finally be
set right when the messiah made his appearance at the end of time. By the
fourteenth century, when Fazlallah proclaimed himself as the messiah, the
Twelver and Ghulat subsects had turned their messiahs into mythological figures
whose appearance in the flesh was not usually considered imminent. Some types
of Isma‘ili Shi‘is (Musta‘lis) believed in a similarly abstracted messiah while
others (Nizaris) followed a living Imam who was not regarded as the Mahdi and
who was politically quiescent.
Fazlallah attempted to blow new life into the messianic
paradigm by showing how the stories and scenarios contained in existing
traditions applied to the circumstances of his own life. During the fourteenth
and fifteenth centuries, the eastern Islamic world saw the rise of a number of
other messianic movements as well. Fazlallah’s innovative interpretation of the
various existing messianic paradigms paralleled the thought of other messiahs
such as Muhammad Nurbakhsh (d. 1464), Muhammad b. Falah Musha‘sha‘ (d. 1462),
and leaders of the Safavid Sufi order active in the last three decades of the
fifteenth century. A generally heightened concern with messianism could be seen
also in the history of the Sarbadar state (discussed in Chapter 2) and in
numerous other historical incidents reported in the period’s chronicles.
Fazlallah’s messianic claim was thus part of a larger pattern in the religious
history of the Islamic east during the late medieval period.
Fazlallah’s specific view of the apocalypse divided the event
into two phases. The first phase corresponded with the literal meaning of
apocalypse (a cosmic unveiling or revelation), which he thought referred to his
own enlightenment, while the second phase signified the cataclysmic destruction
popularly associated with the end of time.The physical dissolution of the
universe indicated by the second phase of the apocalypse was expected to occur
after Fazlallah had fulfilled his earthly role as the messiah.
Fazlallah’s works were concerned primarily with the first
phase of the apocalypse since he was keen to prove that he had become privy to
special revealed knowledge. The apocalypse was, in this sense, a mental change
of perspective, and to participate in it meant seeing everything from a new
angle. The physical world had not changed as yet but people exposed to
Fazlallah’s interpretation were expected to see it with new eyes.Thereafter
they were expected to experience the physical destruction at the end of time as
a confirmation of the destruction of ordinary perception that had taken place
in their minds. Adopting the mental apocalypse offered by Fazlallah was crucial
for one’s salvation since that way one became a conscious participant in the
historical process instead of being its unwitting victim.
Appreciating Fazlallah’s understanding of the apocalypse
requires familiarizing oneself with the system of interpretation found in his
own works and the derivative literature produced by his followers. Ideas about
the cosmos, the human species, and time discussed in Chapter 4 constitute the
bases for this system.The actual implementation of the system is visible most
clearly in the way Fazlallah and his followers understood the components and functions
of language. In the following discussion, I treat their overall view of
language and their explanations for why it was necessary to investigate
linguistic phenomena such as sounds, letters, words, and narratives in many
different ways to understand the nature of the apocalypse. The end of the
chapter explains how Fazlallah’s interpretation of language connected
concretely to human salvation.
In Fazlallah’s perception, all
tangible reality was a materialization of the divine metalanguage .The sounds
of the cosmos were the spoken aspect of this metalanguage and the physical
world its written aspect. The metalanguage had been revealed to Fazlallah and
he could understand all of existence by hearing and reading the cosmos. His teachings
for other human beings amounted to instruction in the metalanguage; the more it
became a part of one’s consciousness, the better one understood the cosmos and
one’s own place within it.
The metalanguage could not be taught like ordinary human
languages since the latter are symbolic systems that work by assigning
signifying sounds to material or conceptual entities. For example, someone who
understands English knows that the utterance produced by combining the sounds
d-o-g signifies a particular animal. There is no inherent connection between
the signifying sounds and the signified animal, and the association between the
two has to be learned by someone who wishes to understand English. In the
metalanguage, the signi- fier and the signified had an inherent relationship
since Fazlallah claimed that the metalinguistic name of a thing was its very
essence.
One significant proof for this assertion was the fact that
the ordinary letters of the alphabet are the only material entities whose names
have to contain a reference to the named entities. For example, writing the
name of the first letter of the alphabet, alif, requires using the
letter alif itself. Similarly, the name alif cannot be pronounced
without using the sound associated with the letter alif.The letters of
the alphabet are the only existent entities for which the signifiers and the
signified are inextricably connected. For entities other than letters, there
is no essential connection between names in ordinary languages and the things
named (e.g. “dog” in spoken or written form has no necessary connection to a
particular animal). Ordinary letters were thus the closest correlates to the
metalinguistic letters that were the essence of all existence.
One interesting aspect of this scheme was that individual
letters/sounds of ordinary languages provided the strongest connection to the
metalanguage although they did not carry linguistic meaning in ordinary
languages themselves. Conversely, once these letters and sounds were combined
to form words, they acquired ordinary linguistic meaning but lost their close
association with the metalinguistic letters. This revealed a fundamental
disjuncture between the metalanguage and ordinary languages, indicating that
one could not “translate” from one side to the other as could be done between
two ordinary languages. The only way to get to the metalanguage from ordinary
languages was to break words down to letters and sounds and analyze them to see
their metalinguistic refer- ents.This was precisely the job of Fazlallah’s
“science of letters” (‘ilm-i huruf), abundantly in evidence in all the
literature stemming from his movement. The science relied on a number of
different techniques for breaking and reconstituting language that were learned
through careful study of Fazlallah’s works. The cumulative knowledge gained
from understanding all the interpretations offered by Fazlallah was thought to
train one into becoming a consummate listener and reader of the metalanguage.
The fundamental difference between the metalanguage and
ordinary languages meant also that the two were apprehended through different
human senses. While ordinary language was understood through ears and eyes, the
requisite organ for the metalanguage was the heart, understood as the seat of
intelligence. Metalinguistic letters related to the ordinary letters in the
same way as a specimen of a species to its archetype (i.e. an actual dog to the
concept dog that connotes the species as a whole). Based on this analogy, the
metalinguistic letters were devoid of shapes and bodies and were to be thought
of as abstract principles, while the ordinary letters of the various alphabets
were derived from them through a concretizing process. An individual writer or
speaker producing ordinary letters/sounds was thought to be involved in a
partial apprehension of the metalinguistic letters. Instead of “generating” the
letters, the use of a hand or a tongue to materialize language amounted to
“uncovering” the metalinguistic letters present in the cosmos as its primary
constituents. The production and apprehension of ordinary language occurred
through physical senses while the metalanguage became understood through the
inner human organ of the heart.Translating from one type of language to the
other was, therefore, a journey to the core of the human being.
Fazlallah’s science of letters was
particularly concerned with two phenomena: human languages in their spoken and
written forms, and the sounds and shapes of the cosmos that contained hidden
references to sounds and letters. People outside Fazlallah’s movement referred
to him and his followers as Hurufis or “letterists” because of their obsession
with investigating language in all its forms and seeing it reflected in all
material reality.
Letter mysticism had long been a part of Islamic esoteric
traditions such as Sufism and Shi‘ism and a general concern with deciphering
language at this level was not extraordinary in Fazlallah’s times. Preserved
discourses of the Shi‘i Imams contain extensive discussions of letters, and
the same is true of works by famous Sufi authors such as Ibn al-‘Arabi (d.
1240) and Sa‘d al-Din Humuvayi (d. 1252), among numerous others. There is in
fact much similarity between Fazlallah’s system and mainstream Sufism at the level
of appreciating the centrality of language (particularly the text of the
Qur’an) for discovering esoteric religious secrets. However, Sufis usually
thought that the world contained an infinite number of divine signs and their
explorations were, by necessity, only partial expositions of cosmic truths.
In addition to the esoteric traditions, the abjad
system that gave a numerical value to each letter of the alphabet and then
tried to extract meanings from words by performing mathematical calculations was
common currency among all educated Muslims in the medieval period. Works by
Fazlallah and his followers make use of this system only occasionally.
In historical terms, the speculation on letters,numbers, and
geometric shapes was connected also to Pythagorean ideas of pre-Islamic
provenance. Such notions had been particularly popular with philosophically
inclined groups like the anonymous Brethren of Purity (Ikhwan al-Safa) who
composed their encyclopedic Epistles (Rasa’il) sometime between the
ninth and eleventh centuries. Such theorists thought that the cosmos was
inherently symmetrical in mathematical and geometric terms and that this
symmetry was observable in physical phenomena. Ideas proposed in the works of
the Brethren of Purity and other like-minded groups found extensive use in
Isma‘ili Shi‘i discussions between the tenth and thirteenth centuries.
Fazlallah’s view of the letters and sounds of language differed
from those of his predecessors in that he claimed to understand the whole
system once and for all through the concept of the metalanguage. Earlier
speculation had seen letters as signifiers pointing to God’s knowledge, but
Fazlallah connected them to the metalinguistic letters that were the basis for
all material existence.The totalizing scope of Fazlallah’s assertions
regarding his letter interpretation reflected the idea that he was the messiah
who had received the ultimate revelation before the end of time. He believed
that although all that could be heard and seen in sentient experience stemmed
from the metalanguage, the sounds and written words of ordinary human languages
were the clearest correlates to the metalanguage. Therefore, the spoken word
and the written text were the most efficient gateways to the metalanguage and
needed the greatest attention.
Of all materials available in ordinary languages, the Bible
and the Qur’an were the most valuable since they were God’s word. Their obvious
linguistic meanings represented the least valuable forms of God’s knowledge,but
one could get to higher meanings by discovering the hidden levels — usually as
many as seven — that lay underneath the obvious text. In addition to the sounds
and letters ordinarily regarded as language, sounds and letters were to be seen
to be present in the rest of the material cosmos as well. It was possible,
therefore, to see any sound as a garbled form of human language and discover
shapes of letters in the shapes of material objects. A consummate interpreter
such as Fazlallah could understand all ordinary languages in spoken and written
forms and could decipher matters such as the language of birds.When he looked
at the physical world, he saw it permeated with the shapes of letters that
could be read. The cosmos was thus an open book to him because of his mastery
of the metalanguage.
Although all languages were related
to the metalanguage, Fazlallah believed that Arabic and Persian were closest to
the ultimate truth.This was reflected in the fact that their alphabet had,
respectively, twenty-eight and thirty-two letters, which were related to the
lines that appear on the human face. The status of these languages was ratified
also through Muhammad’s supposed statement that Arabic and Persian were the
languages of paradise.
The interrelationship between Arabic and Persian was of
particular interest to Fazlallah since it ran parallel to the transition
between the cycles of prophecy and divinity. Muhammad had been the last prophet
and had received his revelation in Arabic, and Fazlallah was the ultimate
interpreter and expressed himself in Persian. To substantiate this transition,
Fazlallah and his followers relied on a hadith in which Muhammad was asked,
“How is a prophet what he is?” He replied,“Through a book that descends to
him.” The inquisitor then asked what was the descended book, and he said the
twenty-nine letters of the alphabet, meaning the twenty-eight Arabic letters
and lam-alif. Lam and alif are two separate letters of the
alphabet that were, in this hadith, joined together as a single entity and
added to the alphabet.
In Fazlallah’s system, the lam-alif as a single
“letter” in the Arabic alphabet was the crucial marker predicting the change of
language between the Qur’an and Fazlallah’s works. The name of this letter
contained four distinct letters/sounds: l-m-a-f. These four were seen as
stand-ins for the four letters p-ch-zh-g that had to be added to the Arabic
script to write Persian. During the prophetic cycle, a new prophet surpassed
his predecessors by becoming the recipient of a new scripture. For example,
Muhammad with his Qur’an had superseded the biblical prophets who had received
the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. But Fazlallah was not a mere prophet;
rather, he marked the beginning of a whole new dispensation, the cycle of
divinity. Consequently, he did not receive a new scripture but rather the key
to the full understanding of the existing scriptures through the transition
from Arabic to Persian. The possibility of this transition had always been
hidden within Arabic through the idea of the lam-alif as a separate
letter. With Fazlallah’s knowledge, it became clear that now Persian had to be
used to make sense of all linguistic data.
The idea that Persian transcended
Arabic had direct consequences for interpreting the Qur’anic text. Besides
writing commentaries on the Arabic text in Persian, Fazlallah and his followers
maintained that the Arabic text itself could actually be read as if it were
Persian.This possibility was visible in an interpretation given in an epistle
by one of Fazlallah’s followers named Mir Fazili.This author (about whom we
know nothing besides this work) was concerned with interpreting Qur’an 30: 2—4,
which reads: “The Byzantines have been vanquished in the nearer part of the
land; and, after their vanquishing, they shall be the victors in a few years”
(ghulibat ar-rum;fi adna l-ard wa-hum min ba‘di ghalabihim sayaghlabun; fi
bid‘i sinin). Fazili explained that the word “rum,” which in Arabic
means Byzantium, should actually be read as “writing on the face”because its
true referent is the Persian phrase “my face (ruy-i man')." His
authority for this unconventional way of treating language was the Qur’anic
verse that states, “(there is) nothing fresh or withered, but it is in a clear
book" (6: 59), implying that all human languages could be related to the
Qur’an in some shape or form.
Moving further in the interpretation of the verses, Fazili
stated that, in its normal Arabic meaning, when one adds the definite article “al-"
to the word “rum," the compound word (al-rum, pronounced ar-rum)
meant the Byzantines,“inhabitants of Byzantium." Transferring now to
Persian, he claimed that the true referents of the compound word al-rum
were the “inhabitants of the human face," namely the seven lines. The
Qur’anic text that follows was, then, a reference to the creation of Eve after
Adam,because the Byzantines’“defeat in the nearer part of the land" meant
the creation of a being lesser than Adam at a time after Adam’s creation
(defeat = lesser, nearer = later). Although Eve may be lesser than Adam, her
existence was necessary for the start of the human species, and this species
was the most crucial part of the cosmic plan since humans fulfilled the purpose
of the cosmos by recognizing God. Eve’s “deficiency" with respect to Adam,
therefore, was in fact a marker of creation’s perfection, and this was the
meaning of the Qur’anic verse when it stated that the Byzantines would be
victorious even after being defeated.
The last part of the Qur’anic text under discussion (“in a
few years" [fi bid‘i sinin]) was said to refer to the additional
seven facial lines peculiar to males. The “few" in this case meant
“seven," and the reference to years corresponded to the fact that males
were born with only seven “motherly" lines common to all humans, but
acquired the additional “fatherly" lines after a few years.The
“victory" of the Byzantines also had an application here since the
masculine lines came on top of the universal feminine ones.
Fazili’s interpretation of these Qur’anic verses accorded
well with the general principles of Fazlallah’s science of letters. Fazlallah
maintained that the letters and sounds of language were greater bearers of
truth than the words formed from combining them. Fazili separated the
letters/sounds of the Qur’an from their Arabic meanings and read/heard them in
Persian, the new sacred language. The overall operation was thus consistent
with the science of letters propounded in Fazlallah’s thought.
In addition to emphasizing Persian, Fazlallah may have
believed that all linguistic phenomena in one language can be treated as if
they were in a different language to get to higher meanings.This can be deduced
from a vision recounted in his Book of Dreams in which he saw someone
reading the Qur’an in Turkish.The person was doing this not by translating the
Arabic words into their Turkish equivalents but by mouthing the sounds of the
Arabic text and then trying to see what these sounds might mean if the text
were in Turkish. The possibility of such “readings” of the Qur’an could be
justified by the contention that the sounds of the Qur’an were not confined to
Arabic but conveyed meaning in all human languages.
The innovative nature of Fazlallah’s general approach to language
should be evident from these examples. He used the purported connection
between the metalanguage and ordinary languages to disassociate existing
texts/speech from their conventional meanings.This method freed Fazlallah and
his followers from the literal meanings of the scriptures. Moreover, it was
precisely this aspect of his thought that was most threatening for scholars
invested in conventional interpretations of religion. Mainstream Muslim
scholars saw the text of the Qur’an as the most secure source of guidance for
their intellectual and practical concerns. Through his radical ideas, Fazlallah
wholly undermined the stability of the text and the entire religious system
founded on it.
Along with re-reading the Qur’an in
various ways, Fazlallah and his followers also scrutinized the letters of the
Perso- Arabic alphabet on an individual basis.They believed that each
letter/sound was a substantive doorway to the metalanguage. One author explained
this with reference to the Persian statements “there is a God” (khuda hast)
and “there is no God” (khuda nist). According to God’s law, pronouncing
the first statement made one deserving of paradise, while the second one led to
execution and a life in hell. The crucial distinction between the meanings of
the statements was embodied in the difference between the letters “h” and “n”,
indicating the general significance of single letters as the adjudicators
between truth and falsehood. Following this explanation, each part of the
alphabet could be subjected to a whole host of operations.
Fazlallah and his followers made use of the abjad
system in which letters correspond to numbers and can be manipulated through
calculations to derive the connection between a text and its interpretation.The
efficacy of the abjad system was held to have been endorsed by Muhammad
himself in a hadith report that advocated learning the abjad and its
interpretation. An example of its use is the assertion that the Quranic text can
be divided into nine topics: (1) command (amr),(2) prohibition (nahy),
(3) glorification and invocation (tasbih, du‘a), (4) promise (wa‘ad),
(5) threat (wa‘id), (6) stories (qisas, akhbar), (7) allowability
and unlawfulness (hall, hurmat), (8) casting examples (darb
al-mithl), and (9) abrogation (nasikh, mansukh).
According to one tabulation, the
number of verses devoted to each of these topics equaled the numerical value of
the letters in the title of the topic (e.g. amr = a-m-r = 1000
verses), and the total numerical value of the words used to describe these
topics was 6666, the number of verses in the Qur’an.The text therefore had a
complete numerical understructure, pointing both to its own perfection and the
fact that numerical operations on it led to its deeper meanings.
Fazlallah and other authors also employed other schemes to
distinguish between the letters and their attributes. In one categorization,
the twenty-eight letters of Arabic were divided into halves of fourteen each
based upon Qur’an 3:7: “It is he who has revealed to you the book, wherein are
verses clear (muhkamat) that are the Essence of the Book (umm
al-kitab), and others ambiguous (mutashabihat).” The fourteen
“clear” letters were the ones that occur in the groups of separate letters to
be found in the beginnings of certain Qur’anic chapters. These were seen as the
Essence of the Book, while it was shown through various processes that the
remaining fourteen could be derived from them.
The clear letters could be deciphered directly as well. For
example, the three letters alif-lam-mim found at the beginning of the
second chapter (sura) of the Qur’an were said to refer to Allah (God),Jibra’il
(Gabriel), and Muhammad. The occurrence of these letters at the beginning of
the chapter was a reference to the process of revelation in which God’s word
had been conveyed to Muhammad through Gabriel’s intermediacy. This
interpretation connected the alif-lam-mim to the first verse of the
chapter: “This is the book about which there is no doubt, a guidance for those
who are pious” (Q. 2:1).
The positions of the letters in the
alphabet and their physical shapes also received considerable attention in
Fazlallah’s movement. For example, the letter alif was thought to point
to God because it was the first letter of both the alphabet and the name Allah,
and also because the uniqueness and uprightness of its shape pointed to the
singularity of God’s essence.The rest of the alphabet was rationalized along
similar lines so that connections were established between the letters and
certain crucial terms and expressions in which they occur (e.g. mim for
Muhammad, lam for Gabriel/Jibra’il, vavfor Eve/Havva, etc.).
Through a similar operation, the whole alphabet could be read as a litany
containing the ninety-nine names customarily attributed to God in Islamic
thought.
It was argued that all letters originated from three basic shapes:
straight (mustaqim), rounded (mustadir), and bent (mu‘wajj).These
shapes were exemplified by the letters alif,lam, and ha, which
was no accident since these three letters form the word Allah.The alphabet as a
whole could thus be seen as pointing to God. The shapes of the letters
corresponded directly to the parts of the human body as well, recalling the
connection between speech and material reality going back to the command “be”
uttered by God in the beginning of creation. Concrete examples for the parity
between letters and the human body included: the rounded ha that looks
like the human head; the fa that resembles the ear; and the sad
that looks like the eye.
The human body was also seen as articulating letters through
its movements. Fazlallah claimed that his knowledge included the precise
rationale behind the gestures, genuflections, and compound actions that formed
standard Islamic rituals. His works contain extensive discussions of every
step involved in duties such as the ritual prayer (salat), fasting (sawm),
obligatory almsgiving (zakat), and the hajj pilgrimage. The discourses
on this issue get fairly convoluted but the general approach can be understood
through an examination of his interpretations of the ritual prayer and fasting.
He pointed out that the three characteristic postures assumed by the human body
during the prayer were: standing up straight (qiyam), bending with hands
on the knees (ruku‘), and prostrating fully on the ground (sujud
).These three shapes lead once again to the letters alif, lam, and ha,
the straight, bent, and rounded letters that form the word Allah. The purpose
of the postures of the prayer was therefore to articulate God’s name not just
through the tongue, but also physically through the body.
In a different vein, ritual fasting during Ramadan was
thought to be necessary because the Qur’an had started to be revealed during
this month. Fazlallah saw the Qur’an as a descent of the metalanguage in the
material sphere and maintained that the process was not limited to Muhammad’s
lifetime but repeated every year during this particular month.The body had to
be emptied of food during that month in order to make room for the letters as
they descended to enter the body through the head.This same process also explained
why fasting was not necessary during traveling.A body in motion could not
become host to the letters anyway so that emptying it was beside the point.
Fazlallah and his followers believed that all material
entities could be divided into the three shapes found in the letters. Any
entity could thus be broken down into a combination of straight, bent, and
rounded forms of the alif, lam, and ha that formed the word
Allah.This proved that even though the letters of the ordinary alphabets were
pale reflections of the metalinguistic alphabet, they still constituted the
strongest link between apparent reality and the prototypes of materiality
generated at the beginning of creation.
ABBREVIATIONS
AND NEW CHARACTERS
In describing the interpretive
techniques employed by Fazlallah and his followers I have so far concentrated
on how they tried to connect ordinary linguistic materials to the metalanguage.
There is some evidence that the “translation” from one type of language to the
other worked in the opposite direction as well. The metalanguage was
ordinarily beyond the purview of the outward human senses but one aspect of the
textual evidence suggests that it could be made available to adepts, at least
in part.
Manuscripts of works by Fazlallah Astarabadi and his followers
are instantly recognizable because all the copyists used a unique alphabetic
symbolism to denote certain words (see Plate 1).This occurred in two ways:
first, they employed a system of abbreviation replacing frequently used terms
and names with a few letters; and second, they invented new characters to refer
to Fazlallah’s name and the Persian words for twentyeight and thirty-two. Most
modern scholars who have examined these manuscripts have thought that this
symbolism was a protective device to make the works meaningless to the uninitiated.
The difficulty of deciphering this symbolism, it is argued, was meant to impede
the progress of those inclined to charge Fazlallah’s followers with heresy. It
is difficult to assess this possibility in full because we know exceedingly
little about the social life of the early communities of followers. However,
the special symbolism seems to indicate something more than just the desire to
confound the movement’s critics.
Fazlallah’s major aim in propagating his views was to inform
the world about the dawn of a new dispensation, and an open proclamation of the
message was clearly part of his agenda.The distinctive textual symbolism is
utilized in all surviving manuscripts, of which the earliest is dated 845/1441—42.
It is Plate 1. A page from ‘Ali al-A‘la’s Book of the Divine Footstool
(Kursinama), MS. Persan 255, Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris, fol. 136b.The
new characters used in Hurufi manuscripts can be seen as follows: (i) Character
for twenty-eight (bist-o-hasht) — lines 5,6, 7, 8, 11, 12, 13, 17; (ii)
Character for thirty-two (si-o-du) — lines 15, 16, 18, 19, 20; (iii)
Character for Fazlallah Astarabadi (modified form of the regular letter fay)
— line 9.
impossible to pinpoint the exact
moment the system was generated since most manuscripts are undated. The
symbolism makes the manuscripts stand out rather than making them inconspicuous
and some manuscripts even contain glossaries explaining the abbreviations and
symbols for the reader’s benefit. The argument that the symbolism was a device
aimed at self-preservation is plausible for the case of ordinary people looking
to condemn the movement. Such readers would have found the manuscripts largely
unintelligible and would have had little to go on to make a case for heresy.
However, the difficulty of understanding introduced through the use of the symbolism
could not have afforded much protection from learned critics since even modern
readers of the texts such as myself have little difficulty deciphering the
symbols from their contexts. A scholar trained in the medieval Islamic
academic style would, therefore, have been able to see through the abbreviations
quite easily.
I would like to suggest that the special symbolism intended
more than just protection from stray criticism. This opinion is based on the
fact that the names and concepts given in special code were hardly the ones
most problematic from the point of view of Islamic orthodoxy.They were also not
aimed at hiding the movement’s critical opinions about other Muslim groups that
may have been seen as enemies. In fact, the codes referred only to terms most
significant for Fazlallah’s own theoretical system, and within the codes, the
new characters were reserved for the most elevated and central concepts of
Fazlallah’s religion. Thus, the texts contained abbreviations for Adam, Eve,
Gabriel, Jesus, Muhammad, etc., and entirely new characters represented
Fazlallah himself and the numbers at the roots of his speculations on the
letters (twenty-eight and thirty-two). The character for Fazlallah’s name was
particularly significant in this regard since it provided a single letter for
the multiple meanings associated with both his name and his person. It signified,
in one instantaneous visual moment: the literal meaning of the name (God’s
grace), Fazlallah as a historical person, and his status as God’s most explicit
manifestation in terrestrial form. Works by Fazlallah’s disciples were
deliberately written so that the term would connote all three of these
significations. The availability of a single character likely made the
necessarily intertwined meanings of the term even more explicit to the
initiated reader.
My view is that, rather than being a mere disguise for their
religious ideas, the movement’s new textual symbolism was an effort to
translate the metalanguage directly into the material sphere. The new symbolism
was in part a new alphabet that had a closer connection to the abstract
metalanguage. On this issue, it is also significant to note that Fazlallah
wrote his longest work, The Great Book of Eternal Life (Javidannama-yi
kabir), in the obscure Astarabadi dialect of Persian. He was highly
proficient in standard Persian and wrote in that language as well, including a
smaller redaction of the Book of Eternal Life. The choice of Astarabadi
dialect over standard Persian resonates with his general theory about
languages superseding each other through newer scriptures. The Astarabadi
dialect was Fazlallah’s native tongue, and his writing in it reflected the fact
that it was to be seen as the materialized language closest to the
metalanguage.
By accepting Fazlallah’s science of letters, humans were
expected to guarantee their salvation on the eve of the apocalypse and final
destruction of the world. The new symbolism was the most obvious form of the
science, and it transcended earlier alphabets in the same way that Fazlallah
and his discourse superseded earlier prophets and their scriptures. To
inscribe the new characters on paper was to show one’s acceptance of
Fazlallah’s overall system. It was,furthermore, to mark oneself as a member of
an elect group that possessed direct access to divine knowledge as embodied in
the letters of the metalanguage.
Behind all the speculation on sounds,
letters, and words discussed in this chapter lies eventually the fact that
Fazlallah saw his own physical body as a receptacle for the thirty-two metalinguistic
letters. These had descended on him during his enlightenment and enabled him to
both see himself in all of creation and project his power through all time and
space. Infused with the metalanguage, he was the real Adam, formed in God’s
image and endowed with all his essential attributes. He was thus the progenitor
of all prophets, saints, and other humans, and they were obligated to prostrate
in front of him in recognition of his unmatched status. The incorporation of
all forms and knowledges in his person meant that his coming denoted the
Gathering (mahshar) of all beings that precedes the Day of Judgment in
Islamic eschatology. Those who refused to accept Fazlallah as the repository of
the cosmos and a direct reflection of God’s essence prior to the physical
apocalypse were condemned to a death of ignorance followed by eternal damnation.
The centrality of the apocalyptic message in Fazlallah’s
movement is explained evocatively in an anonymous text named The Book of the
Messiah (Masihnama).The author of this work assigns a particular
significance to the Black Stone that is affixed to the Ka‘ba in Mecca and has
been central to Muslims’ pilgrimage experience from Muhammad’s time to the
present day. He states that, according to a hadith report, at the time of
apocalypse the Black Stone will break open to reveal two eyes and a tongue,
mimicking the form of the human face. It will then vocalize the word “yes” (bala)
that the Qur’an reports was uttered by all human souls in the beginning of time
when God had asked them the question, “Am I not your Lord?” (7: 172). This
“yes” articulated by a stone turned into a human face was to be seen as the
cosmic equivalent of the eighth line of the human face discussed in Chapter 4.
While material reality in the form of the Black Stone was going to speak, quite
literally, at the time of the physical apocalypse, those who knew Fazlallah’s
science of letters could already see the cosmos as a speaking/writing entity
using the techniques employed in his works. The cosmos had in fact always been
speaking and writing but this activity was visible only to those who
understood the metalanguage. Once the apocalypse came, material existence
would appear as text and sound to everyone in the most literal sense.
Human beings alive in Fazlallah’s times were witnessing the
beginning of the process of the apocalypse and resurrection. The choices they
faced at that moment are summarized in the following lengthy excerpt from an
anonymous text named The Book of Advice (Hidayatnama) written by one of
Fazlallah’s followers:
God has said in the Qur’an that one indication of the day of
resurrection is that smoke will descend from the sky: “a day when the sky will
produce a manifest smoke” (44: 10).This ‘manifest smoke’ is the unveiling of
the [metalinguistic] letters and the science of letters. Letters can be likened
to smoke because they themselves and the science of letters exhibit their forms
in black lines.This is so both in the divine realm — in the case of the
creative pen and the way God wrote on the faces of Adam and his descendants —
and in the created realm, where people write on paper and in notebooks.That God
meant letters when he said smoke is proven from ‘Ali’s saying that smoke will
descend from heaven before the day of resurrection and will enter the
unbelievers’ ears to turn their heads into heads of hayna’idhin, which
means the roasted head of a calf. For the believers (in comparison), the smoke
will induce a condition resembling the common cold ... Smoke usually affects
eyes and not ears, but these are letters that enter the ears of the unjust and
the tradition-bound (muqalladan ).They hear them but their great envy
compels them not to embrace them.They remain unbelievers as a result of this
and their heads become ... like roasted heads of animals incapable of utilizing
the letters ...The believers attract a cold (from the letters) since a cold
cleanses the brain from constricting and impure substances ...When the smoke of
letters enters the ears of the believers, their brains are cleansed of impure
and confusing traditional notions and non-existent imaginations regarding the
Return (ma‘ad) and the End (akhirat).Then, once physical death
destroys their bodies, they find themselves in the highest paradise as a reward
for having stopped following (the religion of) their parents blindly and
acquiring true apprehensions from a perfected guide.They dwell in it for
eternity, never again tasting death, sitting on grand thrones in
well-constructed forms, possessing the ability to see God, served by female and
male pages
(huris and ghulams),
completely free of dissension and veils, pains and jealousies, having achieved
all that a soul desires and presented with all that is savory to the eye.
While this statement connects to
Fazlallah’s theories in a number of different ways, its most remarkable aspect
is the description of a physical reaction between the letters descending from
the sky and damned and saved human beings. For the author, the letters were
descending at that moment since the end time had arrived, and what mattered
most was to prepare one’s body so that it became a welcoming receptacle for
them.Those who rejected Fazlallah’s message were forsaking the path of salvation
and their bodies were turning into those of dead animals.
Such beings were damned and were, like
animals, incapable of receiving the reward God has promised for the next
life.The bodies of Fazlallah’s followers, on the other hand, were becoming
sanctified in anticipation of the time when their redeemed souls would depart
from them and reside in bliss for eternity.
The only way to bring oneself in line with the times was to
accept Fazlallah’s vision and become his follower. By mentally recognizing the
truth, an individual could transform his or her own body into one like that of
Fazlallah, representing perfect harmony between materiality and language. At
least for those who were alive at the time, the physical bodies they possessed
were their passports on the imminent Day of Judgment. A proper understanding of
the metalanguage and the science of letters led one to ultimate knowledge and
its corollaries, eternal salvation and bliss. Descendants of Adam who were able
to accomplish this eliminated the estrangement between materiality and sound
instituted at the dawn of creation. As a result, such beings fulfilled the
purpose of the creation of the cosmos by knowing God and coming to sit in front
of him in the divine court. Given the comprehensiveness and promise of
Fazlallah’s system, it is no surprise that the community of his followers were
faced with a tremendous crisis when he was arrested and executed before they
had witnessed the realization of his vision.
Fazlallah Astarabadi’s death in Zu
l-Qa‘da 796 (September 1394) came as a huge shock to his followers. An elegy by
‘Ali al-A‘la, a prominent disciple, states that people’s faces turned white
when they heard the news and some were completely besides themselves with
grief. It is understandable that a community centered round a charismatic
leader would have been stricken by his unexpected demise. Moreover, as the previous
two chapters have shown, Fazlallah was much more than a human leader for his
followers. They saw him as the apex of their cosmological hierarchy and the
consummation of all historical processes, a fulfillment of the very desire
that had compelled God to create the cosmos. Fazlallah’s intellectual system
had put a tremendous emphasis on the human body and the material cosmos as the
ultimate loci for God’s manifestation. His lifeless and mutilated body lying in
front of his followers represented not just the demise of their hopes but also
a fundamental challenge to their whole worldview.
Historical and social scientific studies have shown that
prophetic and apocalyptic religious movements almost never crumble when their
expectations are abruptly shown to be untenable. They usually see the new
circumstances as having been preordained and get to the task of developing a
new program of action. Following this pattern, Fazlallah’s followers did not
see his death as the end of their religious system either. Instead, they
immediately began the task of reinterpreting the system to make sense of the
unforeseen event.They felt that, like Fazlallah’s life, his death must have
cosmological meaning and that this could be derived from examining what he had
done and written before his death.The process of reinterpretation split the
group into factions with differing views. Some felt that what Fazlallah had
provided was enough to prepare them for the impending apocalypse while others
thought that he would have a second coming. Fazlallah’s major disciples and
some of his children led these factions during the fifteenth century. Later
generations of the movement’s leaders became increasingly distant from
Fazlallah’s apocalyptic ideas and, by the end of the fifteenth century, all
that was left of Fazlallah’s vision was the movement’s literature.
During the period when Fazlallah’s movement retained its
social vitality, the shrine constructed over his place of burial in Alinjaq
became its symbolic center. The movement attracted substantial numbers of
followers in Iran, Central Asia, and Anatolia, who made pilgrimages to the
shrine and expected that it would become the starting point of the apocalypse
about to unfold in their view. Seen as a substitute for Fazlallah’s physical
presence, the shrine was also invested with much of the cosmological
significance that they had attached to Fazlallah’s body during his life.
Like other aspects of Fazlallah’s
history, we know of his shrine only through oblique references in the
movement’s literature. Some reports concerning his execution state that the
dead body was dragged through the streets or even burned. In spite of possible
mutilation, it was eventually delivered to his followers who conducted a
funeral and buried it. Our only information about the day to day functioning
of the shrine constructed over the grave comes from certain verses in ‘Ali
al-A‘la’s Book of the Divine Footstool (Kursinama), completed in
810/1407, where a man named Musa is named as its caretaker. From the same
source, we can tell that the shrine became dilapidated and was reconstructed by
some of Fazlallah’s devout followers either six or fourteen years after the
initial burial.
While we have no physical description of the shrine, we can
surmise its shape and the underlying architectural principle from its uses and
the place it occupied in the movement’s cosmology. Most significantly,
Fazlallah’s followers believed that the shrine replaced the Ka‘ba in Mecca as
the center of Islam since it was the final abode of the incarnated divine
being. In accordance with the general principle of Fazlallah’s religious
system, the shrine was declared the “true Ka‘ba” and the older house of God as
a mere symbol of it. Just as Fazlallah had exteriorized the hidden truth of
Islam through his knowledge of the divine metalanguage, so the new Ka‘ba
superseded the older one as the truer center of the universe that could have
been made visible only at the end of time. All heavenly bodies and angels were
seen to prostrate in its direction and, in the human sphere, the symbolism and
rituals attached to the old Ka‘ba were shifted to the shrine. Fazlallah’s
followers now performed the smaller pilgrimage (‘umra) as well as the
hajj around it in a pattern taken over in a slightly altered form from
normative Islamic practice.
The mainstream hajj is performed during the first half of Zu
l-Hijja, the twelfth month of the Islamic calendar.The new hajj took place in
the month of Zu l-Qa‘da, the eleventh month, and culminated on the fifteenth
day. The participants were required to put on the pilgrims’ clothes required
for the normative hajj: two large pieces of unstitched cloth for men and plain
versions of normal dress for women.The major ritual was circumambulations of
the shrine in multiples of seven. Emulating the stoning of Satan in the Meccan
ritual, the last rite of the new hajj included three successive occasions where
pilgrims cast twenty-one stones at the nearby castle of Sanjariyya, identified
as the home of Miranshah, Fazlallah’s exe- cutioner.Works written by
Fazlallah’s followers after his death contain numerous exhortations to the
community to visit the shrine,indicating that the ritual was central to the
community’s identity.
In his works, Fazlallah provided extensive rationalizations
for the physical actions undertaken during Islamic ritual prayer (salat),
fasting, the hajj, and other normative rituals. Along the same lines,his
followers now gave the rites of the new hajj elaborate justifications that
made the ritual acts understandable in ordinary terms.They claimed that the
four walls of the Ka‘ba’s square shape represented the elements earth, wind,
fire, and water that formed the physical universe.The set of seven cir-
cumambulations were performed four times (once for each wall/element) and the
total came to twenty-eight, the number of letters in the Arabic alphabet.The
seven circumambulations themselves referred to the seven levels of meaning that
were thought to lie underneath all symbols. Similarly, Miranshah’s castle was
stoned only three times with seven stones — once each for the three elements
earth, water, and wind — since he himself represented fire in the form of
Satan. The interpretation of these rituals exemplified the perfect internal
symmetry of the cosmos first revealed to Fazlallah during his lifetime.
Knowledge of this symmetry was within human understanding as long as one knew
the connections between the metalanguage on the one hand and ordinary languages
and physical reality on the other.
Along with its ritual usage, Fazlallah’s followers incorporated
the shrine in their cosmology based on Fazlallah’s idea that God had formed
Adam’s face from the clay of Mecca (i.e. Alinjaq, the true Ka‘ba). Since Adam
had been formed in God’s image and had been given God’s knowledge in the form
of the alphabet of the metalanguage, the clay of Mecca was seen as the greatest
material recipient of God’s selfdisclosure. The interment of Fazlallah’s body
into the earth of Alinjaq was a reversal of the process that had initiated the
human species. At the culmination of the process of creation, Adam’s body had
been formed from a lump of clay separated from the earth of Alinjaq. At the
time of the apocalypse, when creation was about to be folded, the lump of
material substances represented by Fazlallah’s body was returned to the same
spot. Adam and Fazlallah were thus seen, respectively, as the beginning and the
end of the lifespan of the human species.
As discussed in previous chapters, Fazlallah believed that
the perfection of the human face was carried forth through history in the form
of human discourse. This applied to both speech, vocalized through the human
mouth, and the written word formed by combining letters, creation’s primordial
symbols. As the end of the cosmos approached, Fazlallah’s followers felt that
eschatological realities were also reflected in the human face.The seven
openings of the face (two ears, eyes, and nostrils each, and the mouth) were
thus equated with the conventionally accepted seven doors of paradise. Since
it was the apogee of the process of creation, the face was seen also as the
“farthest lote-tree” (sidrat-i muntaha) near which Muhammad saw God (or
an angel) according to a Qur’anic account (53:14). Accession to heaven at the
end of time was therefore a kind of return to the perfection of Adam’s face
whose potential was inherent in every human being.The burial of Fazlallah’s
body at Alinjaq was the beginning of the whole process of “return” to the
origins at the end of time.The shrine at Alinjaq was thus a metonymic marker
for the impending apocalypse.
In summary, Fazlallah’s shrine at Alinjaq was crucial to his
followers’ rituals and ideology. As the site of the yearly hajj, it functioned
(or at least was meant to function) as the most significant attempt to draw the
community together after his demise. In addition, it was seen as the source of
the human being; travel to it was the equivalent of a return to the place of
one’s origin. While God’s creation of Adam in his own image had begun the
connection between divinity and humanity, Fazlallah’s body, interred in the
shrine at Alinjaq, most fully and explicitly realized the potential divinity within
all humans. The shrine was, therefore, the earthly home of God, the source of
Adam, and the point of eventual return
for the righteous
all rolled up into one. In Fazlallah’s system interpret one “system,” such as
the alphabet or the human face, enabled one to understand other “systems,” such
as hidden matters like life after death. The shrine was the most concrete
representation of this complex ontological unity since it literally and
metaphorically contained Fazlallah’s being.
As discussed in previous chapters,
Fazlallah’s followers regarded him as both an embodiment of divinity and the
deliverer who was to save humanity at the end of time as predicted in
messianic traditions. His followers maintained their apocalyptic beliefs in
the first few decades after his execution, though how the apocalypse was to be
seen was a matter of contention between two factions. Fazlallah had himself
divided the apocalypse into two phases: the first was his own enlightenment,
when the veil had been lifted from the physical world, and the second was to be
the cataclysmic destruction of the material sphere. After his death, one group
of his followers believed that the first phase had in fact been the full
apocalypse. A second group thought that he had only begun his work in the first
life and would come back in the near future to lead them to a universal victory
before the dissolution of the cosmos.
The eschatological apocalypse was, for all of Fazlallah’s followers,
a revelation of the mystery underlying the cosmos. They believed that God had
pledged exactly such a momentous revelation for the end times, and that the
science of letters that could be learnt from Fazlallah’s works fulfilled this
promise. Fazlallah’s knowledge and the circumstances of his life were the signs
heralding the messiah’s appearance and the end of time. The events of his life
were also the fulfillment of well-known sayings by Muhammad, including the one
that states that paradise lies under mothers’ feet. By “mothers” Muhammad had
meant the fourteen unexplained letters found in the beginning of some chapters
in the Qur’an that Fazlallah equated with the “clear” revelations. The true
meaning of these letters lay under them, so that those who acquired the science
of letters by heeding Fazlallah’s revelation drew close to the ultimate bliss
of paradise.
The difference of opinion between Fazlallah’s followers was
really about the promised accession to paradise. Those who equated the first
phase with the full apocalypse thought that knowing Fazlallah’s science had
already put them in paradise, while those who expected him to return also
expected more cosmic events to occur prior to the realization of paradisiacal
joys. The former viewpoint, reportedly popular among some believers in Rum,
Iraq, Kurdistan, Shirvan, Gilan and Azerbaijan, stated that:
Paradise and hell are, in
essence, representations of knowledge and ignorance, respectively. Since we are
cognizant of the thirty-two letters, of our own being, and of all things, all
things are paradise to us. Actions such as ritual prayer, fasting, and
cleanliness, and the differentiation between that which is religiously lawful
and unlawful, are no longer incumbent upon us.These matters are all obligations
that have no place in paradise. Paradise is the world that surrounds us, except
with knowledge of the science of letters and the explanations of the Master of
Esoteric Interpretation (i.e. Fazlallah).
Our knowledge of the full beliefs of
this group is limited to what is reported in works written by the opposition.
The fact that none of the written sources contains a defense of this position
suggests that this view was popular among followers whose religious worldview
was tied to the new mode of action prescribed for human beings rather than
theoretical rational- ization.Those who feel that they are already in paradise
after a final judgment have, in any case, little reason to explain their
condition for the benefit of others.
In contrast with the metaphorical entry into paradise offered
by the ideas of this group, others believed that paradise and hell were real
places, populated by inhabitants appropriate for each. The author who documents
the controversy states that one night he saw in a dream four of Fazlallah’s
children who had perished in a plague in 1417—18.They told him that they were
in heaven and it was exactly the way it had been described in the Qur’an.To
prove their point, they took him on a tour so that he could see for himself
things such as rivers, shady fruit-laden trees, colorful flowers, and houses
filled with silken fabrics. In keeping with Fazlallah’s teachings and
experiences, his followers regarded the events of this dream as true occurrences
since what one saw in dreams was the measure of one’s fate in the
afterlife.The opposing group accepted this viewpoint based upon Fazlallah’s
teachings, but argued that dreams had ceased to function in this way since
Fazlallah’s death. In other words, heaven and hell had already been “filled”
with those who had, respectively, accepted or rejected Fazlallah’s revelation:
afterlife had already begun, and one’s dreams no longer served as an indication
of what was to come in this respect.
Those who did not think themselves to be in paradise supported
the continued observance of rituals. They contended that acts of devotion were
praiseworthy in all circumstances since they were expressions of love toward
the divine being. ‘Ali al-A‘la countered the idea that ritual requirements had
lapsed by recalling a hadith that states that prayers are the talk of the
heavens and are performed even in paradise. Furthermore, echoing Fazlallah’s
own perspective, he stated that the movement of the head and body during prayers
was the equivalent of vocalizing words written through the combination of
letters.The human body and the letters of the alphabet were derived from God’s
essence and these came “alive” through the act of prayer or vocalization
respectively. Another author stated that rituals were an aspect of the love
that connected humanity and divinity. He explained that human beings’ belief
that they loved God when they embarked upon a religious path was a mere
illusion.The truth was that it was God who was the active lover since the human
being was God’s beloved.An individual seeker came to recognize this truth only
when s/he understood the esoteric doctrines explained in Fazlallah’s works.
The difference of opinion between the
Hurufis went beyond matters of doctrine since the two perspectives had varying
implications for human action at the societal level. Some who believed that
they were in paradise took the idea further by stating that they had the right
to the lives and property of those outside the group.They declared: “Whatever
is in creation is the right of the knowledgeable person. He should procure and
utilize everything obtainable to him, and, for things beyond his reach, regard
them as his right and strive to get them out of others’ hands.” The suffering
caused to the unconverted from any such activity was, presumably, justifiable
since they were in hell and deserved punishment.The faith of the
paradise-dwellers provided them a license to satisfy their desires, though we
have no evidence that they acted upon this conviction to create social unrest.
Against this view, those who did not believe themselves to be
in paradise began to wait for Fazlallah’s return after his death. They expected
him to avenge his death in the first life and create a just society prior to
the total destruction of the physical world. Taking their cues from Fazlallah’s
own pronouncements, they now began to scrutinize events surrounding them in
order to find hints about the messiah’s resurrection.
The cryptic evidence for the exact beliefs of this group
comes from ‘Ali al-A‘la’s versified Book of the Divine Footstool and we
can be sure that, as the new house of God, the shrine at Alinjaq and its
geographical context were at the very center of the expectation. This group
concentrated on three common prophetic traditions about the messiah, which
stated that he would (1) raise the flag of rebellion in Khurasan, (2) acquire
the allegiance of a party of the righteous in Mecca, and (3) conquer the city
of Constantinople. They thus expected Fazlallah to begin his movement in
Khurasan and then travel westward to Shirvan and Azerbaijan. Fazlallah’s first
birth in Astarabad (an area included in Khurasan) and his enlightenment in
Azerbaijan were taken as preambles to his activity in the second coming. The
oath of allegiance to the messiah was to occur at Alinjaq, the new Ka‘ba, where
Fazlallah was to be united with his erstwhile followers. He was then expected
to progress westward, eventually conquering Constantinople, still the capital
of the Byzantine empire.This city did fall to the Muslim Ottomans in 1453,
though we have no information about what members of Fazlallah’s movement made
of this event. Paralleling the shifts that underlay Fazlallah’s ideology and
the construction of the Alinjaq shrine, they moved the Islamic messianic
expectation from an Arabia-centered normative Islam to the Azerbaijancentered
new version.
‘Ali al-A‘la’s Book of the Divine Footstool also
provides the only direct indication of an effort to fix a time for Fazlallah’s
second coming, in the form of an interpretation of certain Qur’anic verses that
had other uses in the intellectual system as well.Thetext in question was
Qur’an 30: 2—4:“The Byzantines have been vanquished in the nearer part of the land;
and, after their vanquishing, they shall be the victors in a few (bid‘)
years. To God belongs the command before and after, and on that day the
believers shall rejoice in God’s help.” As discussed in Chapter 5, one author
interpreted this text to signify the creation of Adam and Eve. It was given an
entirely different meaning in the context of the speculation about Fazlallah’s
second coming. This was not a problem since all Qur’anic texts were thought to
have seven different levels of meaning.
‘Ali al-A‘la’s understanding of this Qur’anic text is
reflected in the following verses:
The source of all will
indeed become apparent at the time of the ‘few’ (bid‘)
Understand the appearance
of God’s grace (fazl-i haqq) to be the seeds the farmer spread on the earth
On that day, the believers
will rejoice in God’s aid and the infidels will be in distress
These verses likened Fazlallah’s
first coming to the work of a farmer who prepares the ground for an eventual
harvest.The prediction of the believers’ “rejoicing”in the Qur’anic text was
transposed to the fortunes of Fazlallah’s community, and the “nearer part of
the land” was taken to be Azerbaijan. The word “few” (bid‘) was crucial
in this interpretation since its numerical value in the abjadsystem,
830,was seen as the year in which Fazlallah would come back to the earth to
complete his messianic mission.The Muslim year 830 corresponds to the end of
the Christian year 1426 and the beginning of 1427. It is impossible to judge
whether this year had received general acceptance by the movement’s adherents
or if it was only one possibility being discussed among many others.
Regardless of exact predictions, many of Fazlallah’s followers
alive in the beginning of the fifteenth century clearly did consider his return
to be imminent within their lifetimes. To this end, they readied themselves for
a struggle, waiting for the time when Fazlallah would reach Baku, in
Azerbaijan, and issue a call for his supporters to join him. The community thus
retained the aspirations to political success that Fazlallah himself had
harbored.The Timurids were the community’s natural enemies since Timur had
ordered Fazlallah’s execution and his son Miranshah had carried it out.Works by
Fazlallah’s followers written in this period consistently demonized Miranshah
as the Dajjal, the Islamic antichrist figure. Focusing once again on bodily
indicators, they pointed particularly to the fact that Miranshah had an
extremely hairy face that, unlike other human faces, did not have seven clear
hairlines. The Timurids were equated with the hordes of Gog and Magog as well,
who are supposed to flood the earth before the apocalypse. The community’s
tense relationship with the rulers meant that the propagation of the movement
had to be carried out through clandestine means.
Fazlallah’s execution marked his
followers as a subversive group that could not openly carry out its mandate to
spread Fazlallah’s apocalyptic message. Consequently, sources from the period
provide very few concrete details about their activ- ities.The movement’s
continuing vitality in the decades following Fazlallah’s death can be gauged
only from the very substantial surviving literature produced by his followers.
Although Fazlallah’s children were the bearers of his charisma, relatively
little is known about them; they seem not to have authored any works and none
of the other authors provide details about their lives and views. However,
Fazlallah’s intellectual and social perspective attracted a significant band
of talented and well-trained individuals who clarified or elaborated on his
ideas and carried the message further than the geographical regions where
Fazlallah had himself been active. One can get a sense of the characteristics
of the movement’s nucleus by considering three men with differing personalities
and writing styles.
‘Ali al-A‘la (d. 1419) was, in hindsight, Fazlallah’s most
influential disciple, although he was by no means the sole chosen successor.We
know very little for certain about his life. His reputation as a major
propagator of Fazlallah’s movement rests on two facts: his considerable
literary output and the claim of the Bektashis (whose belief system includes
some of Fazlallah’s ideas) that ‘Ali al-A‘la was the missionary who brought the
material to them.‘Ali al-A‘la’s works are almost all narrative poetry and
illuminate both Fazlallah’s ideology and the circumstances of Fazlallah’s life.
The historical references make it clear that ‘Ali al-A‘la was close to
Fazlallah during his lifetime and was present at the time when Fazlallah’s body
was handed over to the community after the execution. His own works contain
references to the expectation of the second coming and one of his disciples and
nephews writes that he was Fazlallah’s greatest successor and opposed the
faction that believed that paradise was already at hand after Fazlallah’s
death.
Besides participating in internal discussions, ‘Ali al-A‘la
traveled westward from Iran to gain converts to Fazlallah’s ideology. His works
and reports by one of his disciples mention Syria and localities in Anatolia
(e.g. Aladagh, near present-day Adana, Turkey) as places to which he traveled
and where he engaged in religious disputation. The sole indication of
Fazlallah’s ideas receiving attention in Syria and Egypt is the poetry of the
Sultan Qansuh al-Ghuri (d. 1516), which contains references to the alphabet.
Anatolia in the fifteenth century was increasingly becoming dominated by the
Ottoman dynasty. ‘Ali al-A‘la’s status as the person who introduced Fazlallah
to Ottoman domains rests on three points: the mention of Anatolia in his own
works; the fact the Bektashi order saw him as the missionary of Fazlallah’s
movement to them; and the fact that he is condemned as a heretical influence on
the Bektashis by Ottoman authors opposed to the order. This is clearly too
little to give a clear picture of his activity. About the best that can be
inferred is that he was in fact active in Anatolia. Sources internal to the
movement place his death in 1419 and state that he was buried next to Fazlallah
in Alinjaq.While some sources state that ‘Ali al-A‘la was also executed, the
internal tradition does not represent him as a martyr. He very likely returned
to the movement’s central shrine after his missionary travels and died of
natural causes.
Like ‘Ali al-A‘la, Khwaja Sayyid Ishaq was also a faithful
companion to Fazlallah during his life and a propagandist for the cause after
his death. He was the author of numerous works in prose and poetry that inform
about Fazlallah’s life and dream interpretations, and clarify the religious
theses presented in Fazlallah’s works. Some of Khwaja Ishaq’s works are written
in the Astarabadi dialect, indicating that he shared a regional identity with
the movement’s founder. In a work written after Fazlallah’s execution, Khwaja
Ishaq mentions seeing Fazlallah in a dream during a visit to the grave of Abu
Muslim Khurasani (d. 755). Abu Muslim was a military commander with Shi‘i
sympathies who helped bring about the rise of the ‘Abbasid dynasty in early
Islamic history. He was perceived to be a threat soon after the ‘Abbasid
revolution (750) and was executed by the very people he had helped bring to
power. In subsequent centuries, Abu Muslim became a legendary figure for groups
that stressed a combination of Shi‘ism and Persian ethnic and linguistic
identity within the Islamic world. Khwaja Ishaq’s mentioning Abu Muslim
indicates that he may have been particularly attracted to Fazlallah’s system
because of his high regard for Persian ethnicity. His activities after
Fazlallah’s death were concentrated in the Khurasan region and his preeminence
in the movement is reflected in the title Pir-i Khurasan (The Elder of
Khurasan).
Khwaja Ishaq’s works have, on the whole, a more militant
voice than those of ‘Ali al-A‘la. Besides glorifying Fazlallah, he criticizes
the movement’s detractors very severely although, curiously, he mentions Timur
in positive terms.Apparently, not all of Fazlallah’s followers were against the
Timurid state. Some at least saw the tragedies that had befallen their movement
as a result of actions taken at the local level. For such followers,
Fazlallah’s death had been the action of the Timurid governor Miranshah,
undertaken on the behest of the petty overlord of Shirvan, the region where
Fazlallah was arrested. One interesting fact we learn from Khwaja Ishaq’s
works is that he regarded Fazlallah’s daughter Kalimatallah al-‘Ulya as the
founder’s principal heir. The fact that this daughter does not figure
prominently in the works of other disciples suggests that the community did not
rally around a single leader in the decades after Fazlallah’s death. Khwaja
Ishaq’s allegiance to one of Fazlallah’s daughters may indicate a Shi‘i
perspective since this sect of Islam bases itself on the rights of generations
descended from Muhammad’s daughter Fatima. Surviving sources do not provide any
details about the year or circumstances of Khwaja Ishaq’s death.
Of all of Fazlallah’s followers, Sayyid ‘Imad al-Din Nesimi
(d. 1404—5) garnered the greatest fame. His celebrity rested on his Turkic and
Persian poetry which shows deep knowledge of Islamic poetic traditions as well
as a genius for composition in the lyrical and quatrain forms. Nesimi is among
the very few followers mentioned in Fazlallah’s own works, indicating that he
must have impressed Fazlallah through personal contact. His poetry contains
frequent mentions of Fazlallah as the guide and the messiah and also elucidates
many religious themes found in Fazlallah’s works. His tremendous affection and
regard for Fazlallah, to which there are parallels in the works of other
authors, is evident in the following Turkic quatrain:
The Grace of the Lord (fazl-i rabb), possessor of majesty, he was
for us
Goodness and beauty and
comeliness he was for us Our father, endowed with excellence, he was for us Our
mother, his milk sanctified, he was for us
All that can be said for certain about Nesimi’s life is that
he came from a Turkic background and traveled extensively in the period after
Fazlallah’s death. His poetry shows considerable knowledge of Islamic,
particularly Sufi, religious ideas, indicating that he must have had religious
training besides that required for assimilation of Fazlallah’s system. His gift
as a poet was instrumental in conveying Fazlallah’s ideas to the Turkishspeaking
population of Anatolia. He traveled extensively and was executed on a charge of
heresy in Aleppo, Syria, in 1404—5. The circumstances of his death are not
fully clear though it seems to have resulted from a combination of religious
and political factors. His passionate poetry, which extols Fazlallah as well as
earlier Sufi figures like Hallaj, would have raised eyebrows in the religious
establishment.The fact that the Mamluk rulers of Syria gave orders for his
execution (and possible flaying) suggests that his religious views may have
attracted a substantial following, giving rise to fears of sedition. If so,
Nesimi’s fate paralleled Fazlallah’s own. Nesimi’s poetry remained popular
among speakers of Turkish in particular in later centuries but orthodox
compilers of dictionaries of poets usually omitted his allegiance to
Fazlallah’s ideas in their entries on him. Instead, they portrayed him as a
great poet and a Sufi who, like the well-known Abu Mansur al-Hallaj (d. 922)
before him, was executed because of his proclamation that he had reached
ecstatic union with God.
ATTACK
ON MIRZA SHAHRUKH (1427)
Besides the activities of individual
disciples, Fazlallah’s followers as a group were implicated in a number of
political incidents during the fifteenth century. There is no indication that
the movement had any central organization or acted with a coordinated plan.
Small cells operated on their own, though everyone associated with Fazlallah’s
teachings faced imprisonment and repression following any political strike.
In one case of noteworthy political involvement, the Timurid
ruler Shahrukh (d. 1447) was attacked with a knife. This took place on Friday,
23 Rabi‘ II, 830 (21 February 1427) in Herat and the attacker was a man named
Ahmad-i Lur. The king was grievously injured but not killed, and his guards put
the assailant to death straightaway.A search of his clothing produced a key
that led officials to his dwellings in the bazaar. It was then discovered that
he was a member of a seditious group of Fazlallah’s followers made up of the
city’s drapers, tailors, and capmakers who had been busy brewing a revolt in
the city. A famous calligrapher named Mawlana Ma‘ruf was implicated in the
matter who eventually confessed to a conspiracy which led to the arrest of a
whole group.
Deeper investigation into the matter revealed that Ahmad-i
Lur had arrived in Herat recently from Shir van, the region where Fazlallah had
been arrested. It is quite possible that the timing of the attack correlated
with the Hurufis’ expectations of Fazlallah’s second coming. As discussed above,
‘Ali al-A‘la’s Book of the Divine Footstool names the year 830 (1426—27
CE), which corresponds with the numerical value of the word bid‘ (few)
in Qur’an 30: 4, as the year for this event. Ahmad-i Lur and his companions may
have thought that the act of killing the king would begin the series of events
leading to Fazlallah’s reappearance and, eventually, the apocalypse.
The authorities imprisoned Mawlana Ma‘ruf, their key
informant, and then proceeded to execute and burn a number of Hurufis,
including Fazlallah’s maternal grandson ‘Azud al-Din Astarabadi. Following the
incident, a prominent scholar named Sa’in al-Din Turka (d. 1432—33) was
imprisoned and tortured and the famous Sufi poet Shah Qasim-i Anvar (d. 1433)
was forced to abandon Herat for Samarqand on suspicion of sympathizing with
the Hurufis.
In the aftermath of the attempt on Shahrukh’s life, one of
Fazlallah’s sons named Amir Nurallah was arrested and questioned in Timurid
princely courts in an effort to connect him to the intrigue. A letter written
by Ghiyas al-Din Astarabadi, a companion of Nurallah and the author of an
important work named The Book of the Sitting (Istivanama), describes how
they were both arrested in Mazandaran and taken in front of Timurid army
commanders involved in a large-scale military operation being undertaken in the
region against local rulers. The officials first tried to prove that Nurallah
had ordered Ahmad-i Lur to carry out the attack on Shahrukh but failed to
produce any concrete link.They then tried to pin on him a general charge of
sedition, which also could not be confirmed. Scholars in the pay of Shahrukh
then engaged him in a religious debate to prove that he held corrupt religious
beliefs and deserved death. On this score too the Timurids’ retainers were unable
to make a convincing argument, though we have to take the report with caution
given its source. The letter states that the audience found his rational
explanations of Islamic rituals, like the reasoning behind the number of cycles
of prayer, particularly impressive.When questioned directly about his creed,
he responded that he followed the Sunni Shafi‘i legal school.
It is interesting that, during his questioning by Shahrukh’s
courtiers, Nurallah denied the idea that Fazlallah was Jesus and would one day
descend from the sky.The fact that this issue in particular was brought up once
again suggests that the attack on Shahrukh may have been related to the
expectation of Fazlallah’s second coming in 830/1426—27. The authorities may
have had partial information about this and had tried to probe Nurallah on the
matter. His denial may have been pious dissimulation or, unlike Ahmad-i Lur and
his companions, he may not have belonged to the party that was expecting the
return at this time.
After the interrogation in Herat, the prisoners were sent to
Samarqand to the court ofShahrukh’s son Ulugh Beg (d. 1449), well known for his
patronage of scholars and scientists. The author of the letter claims that,
instead of incriminating and executing Nurallah, Ulugh Beg was intrigued by
Fazlallah’s ideas about language and the human body and questioned the
prisoners about them at length.
The description of the intellectual discussion at Ulugh Beg’s
court has some concrete elements and is likely to be true at some level.The two
prisoners were asked if they were materialists (i.e. people who believed the
material world to be the sole existence) and Nurallah emphatically denied the
suggestion. In one discussion, someone challenged the idea of thirty-two letters
by stating that Chinese had six more. Nurallah’s only denial of this was to
cite verses by Jalal al-Din Rumi that mention the thirty-two letter alphabet.
The opponent allegedly withdrew his objection because of his respect for Rumi’s
knowledge.
Ulugh Beg was himself a famous astronomer and asked Nurallah
about his and Fazlallah’s view of the stars. Nurallah began by comparing the
cosmos with the microcosm of the human body and correlated the twelve
constellations with the body’s twelve openings. Ulugh Beg objected that the
body only had nine openings: two ears, eye sockets, and nostrils each, the
mouth, and the two excretory points.When Nurallah added the nipples and the
belly button to these, it was objected that male nipples are never open.
Nurallah stated that males do secrete milk from their nipples during infancy.
There were many women present in the court who confirmed that this was true.
After these purported triumphs in Samarqand, Ulugh Beg wrote
to Shahrukh that he could not punish the prisoners since he could find nothing
wrong with their beliefs.The reply came that this judgment was unacceptable and
Ulugh Beg eventually washed his hands of the whole affair by sending them back
to Herat.They were then shuttled to various places in Iran, Iraq, and
Kurdistan.The letter was written five years after the arrest (c. 836/1432—33),
while they were still in captivity. Amir Nurallah was probably executed in the
end since a later work by Ghiyas al-Din Astarabadi refers to him as a martyr.
We do not know Ghiyas al-Din’s own eventual fate.
UPRISINGS
IN ISFAHAN AND TABRIZ
We have some very brief reports that
a Hurufi named Hajji Surkh led a rebellion in Isfahan in 1431—32. His followers
first killed two sons of an important Timurid military commander stationed in
Isfahan at the time.The local garrison then hunted out the whole group and
Hajji Surkh was flayed.
A slightly more detailed account is available for an incident
in Tabriz in 1441—42 involving Fazlallah’s daughter Kalimatallah al-‘Ulya,
whose son ‘Azud al-Din was put to death in Herat in 1427 following the attack
on Shahrukh. Kalimatallah (the name means “word of God”) must have been a
prominent person in the movement since, as mentioned already, Khwaja Ishaq
actually names her as Fazlallah’s principal heir. The sparse details on her
activity indicate that she and a man named MawlanaYusuf headed a group in
Tabriz that exercised considerable influence on the Qaraqoyunlu ruler Jihan
Shah (d. 1467). Fearful of their heretical beliefs, the city’s scholarly
establishment issued a legal opinion decrying them for heresy worthy of death.
Jihan Shah resisted implementing the judgment because one major scholar, Najm
al-Din Usku’i, refused to ratify it. However, Najm al-Din changed his mind
after another mystic had a dream to the effect that he should go and convince
Najm al-Din about the charge. Jihan Shah then had no choice and ordered the
killing of Kalimatallah, Mawlana Yusuf, and five hundred of their followers in
1441—2. This bloodbath seems to have put a final end to the movement’s
organized activity in Azerbaijan.
ATTEMPT
TO CONVERT THE OTTOMAN MEHMET THE CONQUEROR
After Kalimatallah’s demise, the
history of Fazlallah’s movement shifts from Iran to the Ottoman empire. One
propagandist for Fazlallah’s ideas is reported to have tried to convert the
Ottoman prince Mehmet, who later ascended the throne as Mehmet II (r. 1451—81)
and became known as the Conqueror (Fatih) after wresting the city of
Constantinople from the Byzantines in 1453.
The single report about this incident indicates that, around
1445, some followers of Fazlallah managed to enter Mehmet’s company and made
him take an interest in their doctrines. Officials in the prince’s court were
unhappy with this but unable to intervene directly until they enlisted the
support of a scholar named Fakhr al-Din ‘Ajami.The prince’s vizier then invited
the leader of the group to his house and pretended that he was inclined to
their faith. Encouraged by this good news,he began to list all the group’s
doctrines, but when he reached the topic of hulul (the idea that
divinity can reside in a human body), Fakhr al-Din could not contain himself
any longer and came out to curse the “heretic” with great passion. He then pursued
the offender to the palace where the latter went to seek refuge with Mehmet.
However, the prince was cowed by Fakhr al-Din’s ferocity and did not rise to
his companion’s defense. He was then taken to the new mosque in Edirne where
the muezzin gave out the call for a special prayer. Once people had gathered,
Fakhr al-Din denounced the group’s beliefs and extolled the spiritual reward to
be gained by participating in its elimination.The order was issued to prepare a
fire to burn the leader of the group and extinguish the dangerous fire of this
heresy before it spread. Fakhr al-Din himself became so enthusiastic in
fanning the flames that his large beard caught fire. Others then put the
group’s leader in the fire and executed the remainder of the group by other
means.
This triumphalist account comes from Fazlallah’s opponents in
the religious establishment, but they would hardly have dared to credit Prince
Mehmet with interest in the heresy if there had not been some truth to it.
Unfortunately, the account does not allow us to sense what it was that appealed
to him, nor does it really tell us what was involved in the decision to suppress
it. Presumably, it involved a combination of religious and political factors
similar to those involved in the deaths of Fazlallah himself and Nesimi.
Fazlallah clearly did see the presence of the divine in the human but he never
used the term hulul, which has a long history of being considered
heretical in Islamic thought.The propagandist put to death would not have
claimed belief in hulul but the accusers could easily make the charge
based upon the content of Fazlallah’s teachings. This suppression of the
movement ended any possibility of the Ottoman rulers espousing Fazlallah’s
ideas and, furthermore, led to Fazlallah and his followers becoming known as
the archetypal heretics in later Ottoman history.
After Fazlallah’s death, those who
believed in him were able to adjust their intellectual system to accommodate
the death one way or the other. Besides reflecting on their circumstances, they
remained committed to Fazlallah’s apocalyptic vision and expected the world to
come to an end in the near future. Many of them prepared for this eventuality
by trying to enlist followers ranging from ordinary people to members of
ruling houses. The stories of their endeavors end with failure but it is noteworthy
that members of the movement could attract the attention of figures such as
Ulugh Beg, Jihan Shah Qaraqoyunlu, and Mehmet II. Fazlallah’s ideology clearly
did resonate with some Muslims in this period of Islamic history.
The middle of the fifteenth century represents a significant
break in the history of Fazlallah’s movement. From this time onward, there are
no major reports of groups undertaking political or social action in the name
of his system. Fazlallah’s ideas continued to interest and inspire many people
after this period but they became increasingly disconnected from the story of
his life. His works continued to be copied and studied but fewer and fewer
people believed that he would materialize in a second coming to establish a
reign of peace and justice on earth.
|
F |
azlallah Astarabadi’s long-term
legacy in the Islamic world corresponds with the ways in which the term Hurufi
(Letterist) was understood in the centuries following his death. Some marginal
groups put significant stock in his speculations on letters of the
Perso-Arabic alphabet and associated themes, although they discounted
Fazlallah’s messianic claims in favor of their own sociopolitical programs.
Such groups saw him as the initiator of a new hermeneutical method that could
aid them in exploring esoteric religious mysteries. In total opposition to this
appreciative attitude, the mainstream Islamic establishment for the most part
came to regard Fazlallah as an arch-heretic whose influence was a sure sign of
corruption and sedition.They saw his theories about the alphabet as gibberish
that was, besides being meaningless, a severe violation of the sanctity of the
Qur’an and other matters central to true Islam.
We can appreciate the fate of Fazlallah’s system of thought
over the past six centuries by proceeding regionally. In Iran, the movement
fully dedicated to his views died out gradually over the fifteenth century but
its ideological perspective was assimilated into other movements active on the
margins of religion and politics into the modern period.The considerable human
as well as ideological traffic from Iran and Central Asia to India in the late
medieval period led to some of Fazlallah’s ideas finding their way into Indian
Islamic thought. Fazlallah’s works and the writings of his immediate followers
were copied and studied most assiduously in the Ottoman empire, particularly
through being adopted by segments of the Bektashi Sufi order. The Bektashis were
known for their openness to multiple religious influences and, in the eyes of
the mainstream Ottoman establishment, their acceptance of Fazlallah’s ideas
provided clear proof of their heretical tendencies.
Fazlallah’s life story and ideas have held considerable
fascination for some modern scholars as well. Here too, some authors have seen
his movement as fundamentally subversive, a heresy contrary to central Islamic
tenets. Other scholars have emphasized the similarities between the stories of
Jesus and Fazlallah, seeing him as a hidden Christ within Islam. Still others
have regarded Fazlallah as a proponent of a long-standing tradition of
revolutionary esotericism that goes back to pre-Islamic Iran and has always
been present in the shadows of mainstream Iranian Islam. Authors inclined to
this view highlight Fazlallah’s own emphasis on Persian language and ethnicity.
Scholars influenced by Marxist historiography have seen Fazlallah and his followers
as champions of the downtrodden who were fighting a feudal economic system. For
them, Fazlallah’s ideology was a precursor to the historical materialism
eventually adopted by leftist governments or political parties in the modern
era. Finally, Fazlallah’s ideas about language and script have been explored in
fictional form in the novel The Black Book by the prominent Turkish
author Orhan Pamuk published in 1990.
The second half of the fifteenth
century was a highly unstable period in the political history of Iran.Timur’s
conquests at the end of the fourteenth century had caused severe disruption in
civil society. His sons and grandsons who controlled Iran and Central Asia in
the first half of the fifteenth century were a fractious group who did not
bring the area much stability, although a number of them were great patrons of
art and learning in cities like Herat, Samarqand, and Isfahan.The latter part
of the fifteenth century saw the rise of Turkic federations named the
Qaraqoyunlu (Black Sheep) and the Aqqoyunlu (White Sheep). Some rulers from
these federations such as Jihan Shah (d. 1467) and Uzun Hasan (d. 1478) were
able to establish solid rule but their states were built around their personal
authority, and unraveled rapidly after their deaths.This political instability
formed the backdrop for a diverse and lively religious scene with various sects
and Sufi orders vying for political patronage as well as adherents.
Although no movement devoted to Fazlallah can be substantiated
in Iran after the 1450s, his ideas were not completely forgotten. Manuscripts
of his works continued to be copied and the exploration of language and script
that he had initiated remained attractive for many people.The last two decades
of the fifteenth century saw the rise of the Safavid Sufi order originating
from the family of Shaykh Safi al-Din (d. 1334) of Ardabil in Azerbaijan.
Leaders of the Safavid family became highly politicized in this period and
acquired a large number of Turkic tribal followers who formed a special
brotherhood under the name Qizilbash, or Redhead, derived from a special
scarlet hat they wore to mark themselves as a distinctive socioreligious group.
The Safavid Sufi shaykh and military leader Isma‘il (d. 1524) captured the
throne of Iran in the first decade of the sixteenth century with the aid of his
Qizilbash devotees/soldiers and founded the Safavid dynasty that lasted until
1722.
Shah Isma‘il combined the qualities of a capable military and
religious leader who inspired great loyalty among his followers. He was not a
mere Sufi guide, for the Qizilbash saw him as a materialization of the godhead
and the messiah. The place given to Fazlallah and Shah Isma‘il in the ideas of
their respective followers is quite similar and it is likely that Isma‘il was
familiar with some of Fazlallah’s claims. He wrote poetry in Turkish in the
style of the work of Fazlallah’s dedicated follower ‘Imad al-Din Nesimi and is
certain to have encountered Fazlallah’s ideas in Nesimi’s work. Some verses of
doubtful authenticity attributed to him in fact contain praise for Fazlallah
and direct references to his doctrines. Isma‘il’s poetry was, above all, a
declaration of his own religious and political claims and he cannot be counted
as a follower of Fazlallah. However, he was very likely influenced by some of
Fazlallah’s ideas in the process of evolving his self-image. He may have
encountered them not just in Nesimi, but also in lesser-known individuals
active on the Iranian religious scene during the fifteenth century.
A different line of Fazlallah’s influence in late medieval
Iran can be traced also through Mahmud Pasikhani or Pisikhani (d. 1427), the
founder of a movement known as the Nuqtaviyya. Pasikhani was reportedly a
student of Fazlallah who broke away from the master because of ideological
differences. Instead of letters (huruf) he concentrated on the dots (nuqtas)
that are used to differentiate between consonants in the Perso-Arabic script.
Pasikhani also took Fazlallah’s theories about the significance of Persian many
steps beyond Fazlallah’s ideas and saw himself as the prophet of a new
Persian-based religion that surpassed Islam. Some scholars connect Pasikhani’s
religious ideas to Mazdean theories going back to pre-Islamic Iran and see his
movement as a revival of a latent Persian religious and cultural identity that
had continued to exist in the shadows of the Islamic tradition imposed on Iran
following the Arab conquest of Persia in the seventh and eighth centuries.
There is little doubt that pre-Islamic Iranian ideas remained influential after
the region’s Islamization. However, to see the movements that espoused these
ideas as a continuous self-conscious “tradition” seems a modern nationalistic
view rather than something that can be substantiated from the movements’
internal literature. Echoing many of Fazlallah’s ideas, works attributed to
Pasikhani emphasize the correlation between humanity and divinity and see
material reality as the ultimate locus of divine self-manifestation.
The Nuqtavi movement initiated by Pasikhani remained alive in
Iran for more than two centuries. In the fifteenth century, it was a part of
the spectrum of diverse groups interested in esoteric apocalyptic ideas.This
era saw the rise of numerous innovative religious ideologies that both fed off
each other and competed for adherents. The Nuqtavis found numerous capable
leaders and high profile converts in the Safavid era (1501—1722), though at
times they were also subject to severe repression.The Safavid king ‘Abbas I (r.
1587—1629) was initiated into Nuqtavi secret doctrines and took the group’s
prophecies quite seriously. The Nuqtavis in ‘Abbas’ time predicted that after
the first Islamic millennium a Nuqtavi leader would replace the rulers of the
day and begin a new Persian cycle. To fulfill this prophecy in a “safe” way,
‘Abbas had his Nuqtavi companion Ustad Yusuf Tarkishduz installed as king of
Iran on August 5, 1593 (this date falls in the eleventh month of the year 1001
of the Islamic calendar). He was treated as a monarch for three days with
‘Abbas himself waiting on him as a courtier. On August 8, UstadYusuf was
deposed and shot by a firing squad and his body was put on public
display.‘Abbas then reclaimed the throne and ordered the arrest and execution
of all Nuqtavis in his domain.The movement’s political influence declined
severely after the staging of this drama but Nuqtavi ideas remained a part of
the Iranian intellectual scene.
There is considerable similarity between Fazlallah’s ideas
and the work of Sayyid Muhammad ‘Ali Shirazi (d. 1850), known as the Bab, who
instigated a messianic movement in Shi‘i Islam and was the precursor to the
Bahai religion.While we cannot substantiate a direct link between Fazlallah and
the Bab, circumstantial evidence indicates that the two represented the same
strain of Iranian Islamic religiosity.This is indicated in their deep mutual
interest in cosmogony, cosmology, and esoteric speculation on numbers and the
alphabet. Moreover, both of them proclaimed themselves messiahs using complex
doctrines emphasizing special knowledge linked to Shi‘i and Sufi ideas.
Fazlallah’s ideas had some influence
on Indian Islam through at least two different channels.The Nuqtavi movement
traveled from Iran to India as people seeking better fortunes or refuge from
persecution moved between these two Persian-speaking Islamic societies in the
early modern period. The intellectual circle surrounding the Mughal emperor
Akbar (d. 1605) was influenced by Nuqtavi ideas regarding material reality and
the supremacy of Persian culture.The Nuqtavis may also have had some effect on
Akbar’s promulgation of his short-lived Divine Religion (Din-i Ilahi) that was
supposed to overcome the differences between existing religions of India.
A quite different strand of Fazlallah’s ideology than the
Nuqtavi movement is traceable in the literature of the Shattari Sufi order that
arrived with a migrating Sufi named Shaykh ‘Abdallah Shattar (d. 1485) from
Central Asia and became established in India in the late fifteenth and early
sixteenth centuries. A detailed comparison between Shattari literature and the
literature produced by Fazlallah’s movement remains to be undertaken. On a
surface level, it is interesting that manuals of spiritual practice produced by
Shattari authors contain extensive discussions of the letters of the Arabic
alphabet and its symbolic uses. Sometimes by themselves and sometimes in
combinations, the letters are seen as the ultimate repositories of the divine
names whose characteristics are said to constitute the whole of creation.These
ideas, as well as the Shattari emphasis on the abjad numerological
system, are highly reminiscent of Fazlallah’s thought. Shattari works also
connect the alphabet to parts of the human body, although here they are
substantially influenced by the Indian yoga system that contains an elaborate
imagination of the body as a microcosm. No direct link has so far been traced
between Fazlallah’s works and Shattari literature but the similarity between
the two systems is strong enough to suggest at least indirect influence.
Although Fazlallah’s own activity was
limited to central Iranian lands, in the long run his works found their most
hospitable home in the empire ruled by the Ottoman Turks. The area where
Fazlallah had been active during his lifetime was ruled by Turkic dynasties
such as the Timurids and the fact that he had followers who were Turks is
indicated by the example of the poet Nesimi.The Ottoman dynasty had begun in
the late thirteenth century and had suffered the setback of being defeated by
Timur in 1402 at Ankara. The Ottomans came back into prominence once again when
Timur’s empire broke up following his death. They expanded their domains in
Anatolia and southeastern Europe in the fifteenth century at the expense of
various Turkic Muslim principalities
as well as Christian states of Greek and Slavic origins.
Fazlallah’s major disciples ‘Ali al-A‘la and Nesimi both traveled
in Anatolia in the first few decades after Fazlallah’s death partly because of
their appreciation of the region’s significance in apocalyptic discourses. As
mentioned already, the Muslim messiah, the mahdi, was expected to conquer
Constantinople in the course of establishing a kingdom of justice on earth.The
movement’s effort to recruit the Ottoman prince Mehmet in Edirne circa 1445
before his accession to the throne was symptomatic of a larger propaganda
effort in Ottoman lands during the fifteenth century. In 1453, Mehmet did in
fact conquer Constantinople, putting an end to the Byzantine empire that the
Muslims had seen themselves as called upon to destroy for some eight hundred
years. Although Mehmet was fully conscious of the messianic nature of his
accomplishment, we have no evidence that he saw himself in the light of Hurufi
theories. A century or so later, the Ottoman ruler Suleyman (d. 1566), known as
both the Lawmaker and the Magnificent, was portrayed in a messianic role by
some court historians, though here as well we have no indication of direct
Hurufi influence.
Within Ottoman society, Fazlallah’s works received the most
hospitable reception in the Bektashi Sufi order. Although named after Hajji
Bektash (d. c. 1270) who arrived in Anatolia in the thirteenth century, the
Bektashi order became a significant community only in the fifteenth century
under the leadership of Balim Sultan (d. 1516).The Bektashis had a somewhat
contradictory relationship with the Ottoman state, which was expanding in
Anatolia at the same time as the order’s own growth. On the one hand, the order
became closely associated with the Ottomans’ Janissary troops, formed of young
boys taken from the empire’s Christian subjects and trained for special loyalty
to the Sultan. On the other hand, followers of the order were also involved in
high-profile rebellions against the Ottomans in Anatolia.The Bektashis also
adopted a number of Shi‘i ideas in the fifteenth century, as a result of which
they were suspected of sympathizing with the Iranian Safavid dynasty that rose
to power in the sixteenth century and was one of the Ottomans’ most significant
rivals.The order combined a number of different ideologies and did not always
represent a unified perspective. This internal heterogeneity accounts for the
contrary roles undertaken by its adherents over the course of Ottoman history.
The Bektashis traced their connection to Fazlallah through
‘Ali al-A‘la’s Anatolian activities, though there is little historical
evidence for direct contact between him and major Bektashi figures. Fazlallah’s
ideology was likely passed to them indirectly when his works became known in
Anatolia following the propaganda carried out by ‘Ali al-A‘la and
others.Whatever the root of the contact, works by Fazlallah and his followers
became a special advanced syllabus for Bektashi adepts starting in the
fifteenth century. The movement’s ideas never became the order’s common
intellectual currency; they were always deemed a special hermeneutical method
learned by the order’s sophisticated followers who had already mastered the
basic ideology.
Most manuscripts of works by Fazlallah and his followers that
survive to the present have Bektashi origins. Long after Fazlallah’s original
movement had become defunct, the Bektashis kept making copies of them.
Fazlallah’s narratives read like streams of consciousness with no obvious
framework to anchor the reader’s comprehension. This meant that, to be
understood, they had to be read in conjunction with the works of his followers
who had attempted to systemize his ideas in the early part of the fifteenth
century.This whole tradition was in Persian, both the standard variety and the
Astarabadi dialect, and was added on to by each succeeding generation of
scholars interested in the ideas.
The Bektashis for the most part retained the literature in
Persian, which also shows that it was accessible only to those who could
understand this foreign language in two different dialects. The few notable
efforts to render the literature more readily available by translation into
Turkish include Abdul Majid Firishteoghlu’s (d. 1459—60) precis of Fazlallah’s Book
of Eternal Life (Javidannama), entitled ‘Ishqnama-yi Ilahi, and his
translations of Fazlallah’s Book of Dreams (Khwabnama) and The Book
of Advice (Hidayatnama).The total amount of literature in Turkish
elaborating on Fazlallah’s views nevertheless remained very small compared to
works copied and studied in the original Persian.
The Bektashi order spread to many corners of the Ottoman
empire through its association with the Janissary corps. Adepts of the order
took the literature from Fazlallah’s movement with them to all these
places.This can be seen from numerous surviving manuscripts copied in Egypt,
Iraq, Albania, Bosnia, etc. Many Bektashi authors of prose and poetry were
deeply affected by Fazlallah’s ideas and wrote works in the movement’s style.
For example, a Bektashi dervish named Gul Baba (d. 1541) popularly known as
Misali, who is buried in Budapest, Hungary, authored an extensive compendium of
distinctively “Hurufi” ideas entitled The Key to the Unseen (Miftah
al-ghayb). The work of the Bosnian poets Mulhid Vahdati and Husayn Lamekani
also shows influence of Hurufi ideas.
As the Ottoman empire underwent large-scale military reforms
in the nineteenth century, the Janissary corps lost its privileged status in
the empire’s machinery.The Bektashi order was banned in 1825 in conjunction
with this new policy and its followers took their activities underground. The
order’s center of gravity shifted from Anatolia and Istanbul to Albania
following this repression. Some of the most accomplished modern adepts of
Fazlallah’s intellectual system have therefore been of Albanian background.
John Birge, who studied the Bektashi order in the early twentieth century,
found Albanian masters of the order to be avid readers of Fazlallah’s works.
Some of Fazlallah’s ideas underwent further evolution in the
Bektashi environment. A particularly noticeable feature of the Bektashi
assimilation of Fazlallah’s ideas is a distinctive pictorial art in which
letters of the Perso-Arabic alphabet are used to construct forms of human faces
and bodies (see Plate 2). Fazlallah’s ideas about the lines of hair on the
human face and detailed analyses of the shapes of the alphabet and parts of the
human body have a pronounced “graphic” bent. However, virtually none of the
manuscripts that contain his and his followers’ works have any pictorial
description of the movement’s theories. One can only speculate on this somewhat
counterintuitive fact.The movement’s ideology always assigned multiple
meanings to all texts and other physical realities and it may be that
illustrating the material through pictures would have led to an undesirable
“reification” of the symbols’ meanings. The only special graphic symbols to be
found in the movement’s manuscripts are the special letter-like characters
used to write the name Fazlallah and the numbers twenty-eight and thirty-two
(see Plate 1 in Chapter 5). This indicates that the movement’s ideologues were
quite aware of the power of representing entities in iconic forms. However,
they limited their use of this technique to some prominent parts of their
ideology.
Bektashi adherents of Fazlallah’s system were not bound by
the same parameters that seem to have motivated Fazlallah’s immediate
followers. They took the correspondence between the human body and written text
quite literally and fashioned a whole variety of images that located names such
as Allah, Muhammad,‘Ali, Hasan, Husayn, and Fazlallah on the shapes of the
human face.These types of Bektashi images do not, for the most part, attempt to
illustrate Fazlallah’s ideas in pictures.
Plate 2. Bektashi art in which the
word fazl (grace) forms the features of a human face.The Persian verse
underneath the image reads, “Adam is the tablet on which is inscribed the
existence of the world/The grace of God (fazl-i haqq) is written on
Adam’s face.” From Besim Atalay, Bektashilik veEdebiyati (Istanbul:
Matba‘a-iAmira, 1922).
Instead, they are exemplifications of
the general principle of the interchangeability of bodies and texts.
While some Bektashis scoured Fazlallah’s works in search of
esoteric secrets, his name became indelibly associated with heresy in the
mainstream religious establishment of the Ottoman empire. To the degree that
they were known, Fazlallah’s messianic claim and his ideas about divine incarnation
provided ample evidence for this attitude among the empire’s Sunni scholars.
However, it is noteworthy that the term “Hurufi ” was not associated solely
with Fazlallah’s followers in the Ottoman empire during the fifteenth century.
For example,‘Abd al-Rahman al-Bistami (d. 1454), a Sunni author belonging to
the normative Hanafi legal school, was known as Hurufi owing to his interest in
the esoteric qualities of the alphabet. Bistami was born in Antioch and wrote
all his works in Arabic under the patronage of the Ottoman court during the
first half of the fifteenth century.
The term Hurufi acquired its negative characteristics in the
Ottoman context as Fazlallah became better known particularly through being
assimilated in the Bektashi order. From the sixteenth century onward, calling
people Hurufi was a standard way for the government and mainstream scholars to
brand them as heretics. Historical records provide a number of examples of
cases in which individuals were tried for heresy on the charge of being Hurufis,
followed by execution.There are quite a few cases of Ottoman Sufis who were not
Bektashis but who were still attracted to Fazlallah’s ideas. These include
mystics and authors belonging to the Mevlevi, Melami, and Hamzevi orders active
in Anatolia as well as the Balkan provinces of the Ottoman empire.
Ottoman religious authorities critical of the Bektashi order
in the nineteenth century put particular emphasis on Bektashis’ positive view
of Fazlallah’s ideas. A controversy erupted in
Istanbul when Abdul Majid
Firishteoghlu’s ‘Ishqnama, a fifteenth-century summary of Fazlallah’s
thought in Turkish, was printed in 1871. A certain Ishaq Efendi roundly condemned
the work two years later in a work entitled The Revealer of Secrets and the
Repudiator of the Evildoers (Kashif al-asrar ve dafi‘ al-ashrar).A Bektashi
author named Ahmed Rifat then wrote a refutation of this work three years
later, claiming that Hurufi doctrines were separate from the essence of the
Bektashi order. The acerbic tone of this literature indicates that association
with Fazlallah’s ideas was still a highly contentious matter in the nineteenth
century.This controversy seems to have subsided in the twentieth century with
the general secularization of the public sphere after the creation of the
Turkish republic in 1923. Modern Turkish Bektashis or other Sufis seem to show
little inclination toward taking Fazlallah’s theories seriously.
Cut off from its roots in Sufism and
other forms of Islamic esoteric thought, Fazlallah’s ideology has also been
subject to new interpretation in the modern period.Western scholars such as
Clement Huart and E.G. Browne, both writing during the period 1880—1920,
investigated Fazlallah’s life and works because of their interest in marginal
Islamic groups stemming from the Persian environment. These scholars were near
contemporaries of the founders of Babism and Bahaism and saw Fazlallah and his
followers as an earlier manifestation of the same strand of Persian Islamic
esotericism. Helmut Ritter and Hamid Algar, both distinguished scholars of
Sufism, have treated the movement in journal and encyclopedia articles. An
academic interpretation highlighting the distinctively Persian emphasis of the
movement can now be found also in Kathryn Babayan’s book on the cultural
landscapes of early modern Iran.
Fazlallah and Nesimi have been championed as early proponents
of historical materialism by authors writing in Soviet Azerbaijan. Together
with some Iranian leftists active in the 1960s and 1970s, these authors portray
Fazlallah and his followers as Iranian or Azeri nationalists who tried to
overthrow medieval Islamic civilization in favor of an enlightened “modern”
perspective.They are seen as having failed because their time had not yet come,
but their ideology is deemed to accord very well with programs proposed or
implemented by Marxism-inspired groups active in modern nation-states.
Among modern Muslims, the Turkish scholar Abdulbaki
Golpinarli undertook the most substantial review of Fazlallah’s life and
thought and the movement’s history. Golpinarli was himself a Mevlevi Sufi with
an abiding interest in marginal Sufi groups. He edited some interesting
documents relating to the movement’s history and his catalogue of manuscripts
pertaining to the movement in Turkish libraries published in 1973 is an
invaluable tool for anyone wishing to research the topic. Turkish scholars’
continuing interest in the topic is reflected in the recent work of AhmetYasar
Ocak, which has advanced our understanding of Fazlallah’s legacy in the larger
context of marginal groups active in the Ottoman empire.
The popular and widely acclaimed
Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk makes use of Fazlallah’s life and ideas in his The
Black Book (Kara Kitap) that was first published in 1990 and translated
into English in 1994. Pamuk’s work exemplifies a postmodernist literary
aesthetic and engages numerous topics in the course of weaving a complex and
richly allegorical narrative. The plot of the novel centers on a man named
Galip whose wife, Ruya, has disappeared without a trace. Galip has been in love
with Ruya, who is also his cousin, since childhood and he suspects that she has
left him to be with her half brother Jelal who is a famous newspaper columnist
in Turkey and with whom she has a close relationship. The chapters of the novel
alternate between the perspectives of Galip and Jelal and we are never given a
picture of Ruya’s own desires or the reasons for her having left Galip.
Pamuk’s narrative follows Galip’s search for Ruya and Jelal
that takes him to all manner of famous and infamous quarters of the city of
Istanbul. Galip’s pursuit of Ruya mirrors the unending and eventually
necessarily fruitless search for the beloved celebrated in the Islamic poetic
paradigm. Ruya’s silence in the novel fits well with this paradigm as well
since the beloved is always talked about endlessly but hardly ever expresses
her- or himself in such poetry.The names of the characters in The Black Book
have historical relevance in that Shaykh Galip (d. 1799) is the name of a
famous Ottoman poet and Mevlevi Sufi master who fashioned himself as a
successor to the great mystical poet Jalal al-Din Rumi. Ruya literally means
dream, and Galip’s search for his missing wife in the novel is also clearly a
search for his own dreams and identity.
Fazlallah is introduced to the reader in The Black Book
when Galip stumbles upon the fact that Jelal had been obsessed with his theory
about the inherent characteristics of the alphabet. This idea is particularly
significant in the Turkish context since the script for writing Turkish was
changed from Arabic to Latin letters in the 1920s. Following this transition,
Turks are presented as people who have quite literally lost the capacity to
read their faces. The language of their bodies is connected to their Ottoman
Islamic past inscribed in Arabic letters, while the modern Turkish nation is
highly invested in the Europeanness represented by the new alphabet based on
the Latin script taught in modern schools and universities. The loss of one
script and the assimilation of the other represent a change of identity by
which subjects are alienated from their true selves. Pamuk illuminates this
idea by utilizing Fazlallah’s theory that letters are repositories of the
highest cosmic truths. As one character in the novel states, modern Turkish
identity can become normative only once the faces and bodies of Turks lose
their imprints from the old script and become fitted to the molds of the Latin
letters.
Pamuk’s portrayal of Fazlallah in The Black Book is
based on standard scholarly treatments of the topic available in the 1980s. His
description of Galip’s sense of his appreciation of Fazlallah’s views is
evident in the following passage:
It gave Galip a feeling of inner peace to read that Fazlallah
went from town to town preaching that the world was not a place that yielded up
its secrets right off, that it swarmed with secrets, and that in order to
penetrate these secrets it was necessary to comprehend the mystery of letters.
For Galip, it seemed now to be clearly proved that his world also swarmed with
secrets, as he had always anticipated and desired. He sensed that the inner
peace he felt was related to the simplicity of this demonstration; if it was
true that the world was a place swarming with secrets, then it was also true
that the coffee cup on the table, the ashtray, the letter opener, even his own
hand that rested like a hesitant crab next to the letter opener, all pointed to
and were a part of the existence of a hidden world. Ruya was in this world.
Galip was at its threshold. Soon, the secret of letters would let him in (p.
260).
Beyond the basic description, Pamuk’s
fictional appropriation of Fazlallah’s life and the history of the movement
veer away from known facts. For example, his descriptions of Hurufis as a
vast clandestine network spanning the Ottoman empire have no basis in known
facts. However, his literary license allows us the opportunity to appreciate
the attraction of Fazlallah’s views in a way that cannot be substantiated by
purely historiographic methods.
Pamuk’s discussion of Fazlallah’s ideas also highlights an
aspect of the movement that I think was crucial to its attractiveness and
partial successes. Fazlallah’s worldview was characterized by an intriguing
combination of complete certitude and limitless interpretive flexibility. His
notion of the metalanguage with its sounds and letters provided the
possibility that all of existence could be understood in its essence without
any linguistic mediation. A person who knew the metalanguage could both
comprehend reality as it truly was and manipulate it because of this power.The
human ability to do this was a reflection of the divine creative power;
individual human beings who had realized their potential in this regard were
full reflections of God himself.
While knowing the
metalanguage made a person unambigu- gathered only through an intense hermeneutical
effort
directed at all
matters apprehended through human mental and signs, each one of which had
multiple meanings.This perspective opened the world up to limitless
interpretation that could become the life’s work of anyone committed to the
system. Against the distinctly “totalitarian” scope of the theory of the
metalanguage, on the practical level, this religious worldview provided
unending opportunities for creativity and innovation. Using the myriad of
techniques suggested in works by Fazlallah and his followers, one could
extract/invent virtually any meaning from phenomena such as texts, shapes of
physical objects, geographical data, etc.
Fazlallah Astarabadi was by all accounts a highly charismatic
man, but the attraction of his ideas went much beyond the effect of his
personality and generated a long intellectual tradition that seems to appeal to
people even in the modern secularized world. Perhaps it is his focus on the
conjunction between the human body and language — two elements unique to the
human species — that accounts for the durability of his vision. His biggest
accomplishment lies in that he provided an extensive rationale for the idea
that all aspects of existence are interconnected. Once this was established,
those inclined to follow him were told to explore all things surrounding them
endlessly in intuitive as well as counter-intuitive ways.
HURUFI LITERATURE
Fazlallah Astarabadi penned numerous
works explaining his religious ideas, most of which are extant in multiple manuscripts.
His most extensive work is The Great Book of Eternal Life (Javidannama-yi
kabir), written in the Astarabadi dialect. It runs to more than 800 pages
(400 folios) in most manuscripts. Its significance as the ultimate source for
Fazlallah’s ideology can be gauged from the fact that it survives in multiple
copies in Iran and Turkey and can also be found in virtually every major
collection of Islamic manuscripts in western Europe. A short account of dreams
named The Book of Sleep (Nawmnama), also in the Astarabadi dialect, is
sometimes found in manuscripts of The Great Book as an appendix.
Fazlallah’s lengthy works in standard Persian include The
Small Book of Eternal Life (Javidannama-yi saghir), The Book of Love
(Mahabbatnama), the narrative poem The Book of the Divine Throne
(‘Arshnama), and a collection of verse in the lyric form (Divan).All
of his narrative works read like rambling streams of consciousness and seem to
have no clearly defined internal structure. He moves from topic to topic quite
rapidly and is often repetitious. The works are characterized most strongly by
reflecting on the text of the Qur’an and, occasionally, the Bible. He was
particularly concerned with some Qur’anic passages and ideas, though somewhere
or another in his
works, he probably had something to
say about virtually every verse of the scripture.This is consistent with the
fact that he claimed to possess the definitive esoteric interpretation (ta’vil)
of the text.
The lack of internal organization and consistently idiosyncratic
interpretations make Fazlallah’s works difficult to decipher. They might be
particularly so for a modern reader, though it seems that his original
followers also found them difficult to penetrate. If Fazlallah’s works are an
extended commentary on the Qur’an, the remainder of Hurufi literature is a
commentary on his works. This extensive literature is invaluable for making
sense of Fazlallah’s ideas. Fazlallah’s followers were concerned with
extracting a consistent religious vision from his inspirations. Their works are
much shorter and usually deal with issues in a straightforward way. One
difficulty that remains is that much of this literature is in poetry and it is
not always possible to decipher the historical references in full. Still, it
would be virtually impossible to recover the movement’s story and ideology if
one could not supplement Fazlallah’s works with the movement’s subsequent
literature.
My reconstruction of
Hurufi history and thought has relied which are anonymous. This literature is
quite vast and even listing the names of the sources here would be too much.
Specialist readers interested in the original material are referred to my
articles mentioned in Further Reading and the following catalogs and studies:
Azhand, Ya‘qub. Hurufiyya
dar tarikh. Tehran: Nashr-i Nay, 1990.
Browne, E.G. “Further
Notes on the Literature of the Hurufi Sect,”Journal of the Royal Asiatic
Society (1907), 533—581.
--- . “Some Notes on the
Literature and Doctrine of the Hurufi Sect,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic
Society (1898), 61-94.
--- . A Catalogue of the
Persian Manuscripts in the Library of the University of Cambridge.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Library, 1896.
Browne, E.G. and Reynold
A. Nicholson. A Descriptive Catalogue of the Oriental Mss. Belonging to the
Late E.G. Browne. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1932.
Golpinarli, Abdulbaki. Hurufilik
Metinleri Katalogu. Ankara: Turk Tarih Kurumu Basimevi, 1973.
Huart, Clement. Textes
persans relatifs a la secte des houroufis. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1909.
Kiya, Sadiq. Vazhanama-yi
Gurgani. Tehran: Intisharat-i Danishgah, 1951.
Richard, Francis. Catalogue
des manuscrits persans: Ancien fonds. Paris: Bibliotheque Nationale,
Departement des Manuscrits, 1989.
Ritter, Helmut. “Studien
zur Geschichte der islamischen Frommigkeit: Die Anfange der Hurufisekte,” Oriens
7, no. 1 (June 1954), 1-54.
Rossi, Ettore. Elenco
dei Manoscritti persiani della Biblioteca Viticana.Vatican City:
Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1948.
Algar, Hamid. “The Hurufi Influence
on Bektashism.”In Bektachiyya, Etudes sur 1’ordre mystique des Bektachis et
les groupes relevant de Hadji Bektach, ed.Alexandre Popovic and Gilles
Veinstein. Paris: Librairie Orientaliste Paul Geuthner, 1992.
--- .“al-A‘la, ‘Ali,” “Astarabadi, Fazlollah,”and“Horufism,”in
Encyclopaedia Iranica.
Amanat, Abbas. Resurrection and
Renewal:The Making of the Babi Movement in Iran, 1854—50. Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1989.
Amoretti, B. S.“Religion under the
Timurids and the Safavids.’In Cambridge History of Iran,Vol. 6, ed. P
Jackson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.
Babayan, Kathryn. Mystics,
Monarchs and Messiahs: Cultural Landscapes of Early Modern Iran. Cambridge:
Harvard Center for Middle Eastern Studies, 2002.
Bashir, Shahzad. Messianic Hopes
and Mystical Visions:The Nurbakhshiya Between Medieval and Modern Islam.
Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2003.
--- . “The Alphabetical Body: Hurufi Reflections on Language,
Script, and the Human Form.”In Proceedings of the Symposium Religious Texts
in Iranian Languages, ed. FereydounVahman and Claus Pederson. Copenhagen:
Det Kongelige Danske Videnskabernes Selskab (forthcoming 2004).
--- . “Deciphering the Cosmos from Creation to Apocalypse: The
Hurufiyya Movement and Medieval Islamic Esotericism.” In Imagining the End:
Visions ofApocalypsefrom the Ancient Middle East to Contemporary America,
ed.Abbas Amanat and Magnus Bernhardsson. London: I.B.Tauris, 2002.
--- . “Enshrining Divinity:The Death and Memorialization of
Fazlallah Astarabadi in Hurufi Thought,”MuslimWorld, vol. 90, nos. 3
& 4 (Fall 2000):289-308.
Birge, John Kingsley. The Bektashi
Order of Dervishes. London: Luzac and Co., 1937.
Burrill, Kathleen R.F. The
Quatrains ofNesimi,Fourteenth-Century Turkic Hurufi.The Hague: Mouton,
1972.
DeJong, Frederick.“The Iconography of
Bektashism:A Survey of Themes and Symbolism in Clerical Costume, Liturgical
Objects and Pictorial Art,”Manuscripts of the Middle East 4, 7—29.
Fleischer, Cornell. “The Lawgiver as
Messiah: The Making of the Imperial Image in the Reign of Suleyman.” In Suleyman
the Magnificent and His Time: Acts of the Parisian Conference, Galeries
Nationales du Grand Palais, 7—10 March, 1990, ed. GillesVeinstein. Paris:
Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, 1990.
Karamustafa,Ahmet. God’s Unruly
Friends:Dervish Groups in the Later Middle Period, 1200—1550. Salt Lake
City: University of Utah Press, 1994.
Norris, H.T. “The Hurufi Legacy of
Fadlullah ofAstarabad.”In The Legacy of Mediaeval Persian Sufism, ed.
Leonard Lewisohn. London: Khaniqahi Nimatullahi Publications, 1992.
Pamuk, Orhan. The Black Book.
NewYork: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994.