Читать книгу A Short History of the Fatimid Khalifate онлайн

18 страница из 57

Under the next Khalif al-Mahdi, came the still more serious rebellion of al-Muqannaʿ, the “veiled prophet of Khurasan,” who asserted his own deity. He was killed in A.H. 169, but his followers, as usual, believed that he had not really suffered in person, but had passed into concealment and would in due course return again: they continued to form a distinct sect for some three hundred years.

Another pseudo-prophet of the same type was Babak al-Khurrami, who was executed in A.H. 222 or 223. He also declared himself to be an incarnation of the Divine Spirit, and asserted that the soul within him had already dwelt in his master Jawidan.

We might continue to extend the series very considerably by enumerating the various prophets and sects which reproduce these same general characteristics. The latest example occurs in the Babi movement, which still flourishes and has many converts in this country and in America. The first teacher of the Babists, Mirza ʿAli Muhammad (A.D. 1820-1851) claimed only to be a Mahdi or fore-runner of One who was to come, but his successor, Mirza Husayn ʿAli, declared himself to be the expected One, the incarnation of the Divine Spirit, which is an emanation of the Deity and is fairly equivalent to the Reason, Word, or Spirit of the Plotinian philosophy. In later times this doctrine has rather fallen into the background, perhaps as the result of western influences, but the earlier phase shows a repetition of the traditional Persian position. All these sects show common matter in the doctrines of incarnation, of transmigration, and of an esoteric teaching to be revealed only to the elect. Such were the extremer Shiʿite sects of mediaeval times, and such are their descendants of modern times. Even in Persia to-day, side by side with the more orthodox “Twelvers” of the state church and off-shoots such as the Babists, the latest of a long series of mystical developments from the Shiʿite stock, are the ʿAli Allahis who believe in the deity of the Imam ʿAli, and combine with this belief many elements from the ancient Zoroastrian religion, a survival of the older mediaeval Shiʿism which caused so much trouble to the Khalifate of Baghdad.