Qarmatian State of Bahrayn

The Isma'ilis who said no to the Fatimids

Drafted from Daftary, The Isma'ilis: Their History and Doctrines (2007)formation

The Isma'ili mission was a clandestine network that spent decades preparing, produced a caliphate in Ifriqiya in 909, and directed the rest of itself from Cairo afterwards. That is the branch that won. It is not the whole of what the mission produced.

Abu Sa'id al-Jannabi, a Qarmati missionary, took Hajar and then al-Hasa in eastern Arabia in 899 and founded a state there ten years before Abd Allah declared himself mahdi in the Maghrib. When the declaration came, the eastern communities did not accept it. The doctrine they had been taught was that the seventh imam, Muhammad ibn Isma'il, had gone into concealment and would return as the mahdi; a living man in Ifriqiya claiming to be the mahdi himself was not the fulfilment of that expectation but a substitution for it.

So the Isma'ili movement split at the moment of its first success, and the split is the reason this polity exists as a separate thing. The Qarmatians of Bahrayn kept waiting. They took tribute from the Abbasid caliph in Baghdad and from the Fatimid one in Cairo, recognised neither, and for most of the tenth century were the strongest power on the Gulf.

The internal arrangement is the part travellers found remarkable, and the fullest account comes from Nasir-i Khusraw, who passed through in the middle of the eleventh century. He describes a state governed by a council rather than a ruler; residents of al-Hasa paying no taxes; state-owned estates, mills and granaries worked by slaves; and interest-free loans available to a man whose affairs had gone wrong. Whether that is description or admiration is hard to separate at this distance — he was an Isma'ili himself — but it is a coherent picture of a polity organised on a principle rather than on a dynasty. There was no rule of succession because there was, after Abu Tahir, no throne to succeed to.

Taking tribute from both caliphs

Drafted from Daftary, The Isma'ilis: Their History and Doctrines (2007)expansion

For most of the tenth century the Qarmatian state of Bahrayn was the strongest military power on the Gulf and one of the more alarming facts of Abbasid political life, and the way it operated is worth setting out, because there was nothing else quite like it.

It was small. Eastern Arabia — al-Hasa, Qatif, the Bahrain islands, the coast — supports a limited population, and the Qarmatian army is not described in the sources as large. What it had was mobility, a fortified base four hundred kilometres from anywhere the Abbasids could easily reach, and the willingness to do things nobody else would.

Abu Tahir al-Jannabi raided Basra in 923 and sacked it. He raided the pilgrim caravans repeatedly, and in 924 took the entire Baghdad caravan, including a substantial part of the court. In 927 he beat an Abbasid army in Iraq and moved towards Baghdad itself; the caliph's government evacuated. The pilgrimage was suspended for years at a time because the road could not be protected.

What that bought was tribute. The Abbasids paid to have the pilgrim route left alone. So, at various points, did the Fatimids, whose own caravans and whose Syrian ambitions ran through the same country. Almost the whole revenue of the state was money received from other states in order to be left alone: al-Hasa's own residents are described as untaxed, and what the government had besides the tribute was its estates and its mills.

A state financed by two caliphates it refused to recognise, in order not to attack them, is a specific and unusual thing. It is not banditry, exactly: the Qarmatians were not extracting money for its own sake but running a polity on proceeds their doctrine let them regard as legitimate, from powers their doctrine held to be illegitimate. And it is not a protection racket either, quite, because they went on believing the thing that made them dangerous.

The arrangement had one weakness, which is that it depended on being feared. In 930 Abu Tahir did something that made him feared as much as anyone in Islamic history has been, and it began the destruction of his cause.

Habir

Drafted from al-Rudhrawari, The Eclipse of the 'Abbasid Caliphate: Original Chronicles of the Fourth Islamic Century (1921)expansion

Miskawayh worked inside the Abbasid administration and describes the Qarmatian problem the way a government describes a problem it cannot solve. The clearest instance is what happened to the returning pilgrims of the year 311.

Abu Tahir came up to Habir, on the Kufa road, to meet them. Word of his arrival reached the caravan at Faid, and Abu'l-Hayja ibn Hamdan — whose office was guardian of the Kufa and Mecca roads and protector of the pilgrims, which is to say that this was exactly the situation he existed for — advised them to let him take them by a side road to Wadi al-Qura so that they would not pass Habir at all. The pilgrims made an outcry and refused. They stayed at Faid until they had eaten the town's stores and it could not hold them any longer, and then they marched, and their protector went with them of necessity.

At Habir they were met and beaten. A great number were killed. Abu'l-Hayja was taken prisoner, and so were the queen mother's uncle and a number of men and women of the caliph's household. Abu Tahir took the camels of every caravan and as many men, women and children as he wanted, and carried them off to Hajar. The rest of the pilgrims he left where they stood, without food and without camels, and most of them died of thirst and sore feet and walking.

Then Miskawayh adds six words that change the size of the event: Abu Tahir's age was at the time seventeen.

The rest of the chapter is Baghdad. On Saturday 15 May 924 the city came apart. Women came out barefoot with their hair down, beating their faces black and shrieking in the streets, and were joined by the women of the officials whom the vizier Ibn al-Furat had ruined; Miskawayh, who did not like the vizier and does not pretend to, calls the spectacle one of unexampled hideousness. The chief of police was sent to the great mosques on both banks with cavalry, infantry and naphtha-throwers, and quieted the mob. The first survivors came in and explained what had happened. And the vizier rode to the caliph to tell him, feeling, says Miskawayh, his courage fail him on the way — at which the chamberlain, given the opening, attacked him in the caliph's presence.

That is the mechanism by which a small state on the Gulf coast dominated the politics of an empire for half a century without ever holding an inch of its territory. The Qarmatians did not besiege Baghdad. They stood on the pilgrimage road, which the caliphate could not close, could not defend along its length, and could not stop being responsible for — and every year the caliph had to decide whether the hajj would go, and every failure was legible to everyone in the empire at once.

It was worked as a business as much as a war. Caravans were taken and ransomed; protection was sold; the road was periodically declared safe on terms. The caliphate paid, in the end, for the pilgrimage to be allowed through, which is a tax collected by one state on the central religious obligation of another.

Six years after Habir the same man walked into Mecca during the pilgrimage itself.

Twenty-two years in al-Hasa

Drafted from Daftary, The Isma'ilis: Their History and Doctrines (2007)peak

In 930 Abu Tahir al-Jannabi took an army into Mecca during the pilgrimage. His men killed pilgrims in the sanctuary, threw bodies into the well of Zamzam, and prised the Black Stone out of the corner of the Ka'ba and carried it back to eastern Arabia. It stayed there for twenty-two years. The Abbasids eventually paid an enormous sum to get it back, and it was returned in 951.

It is easy to file this as banditry and the sources hostile to the Qarmatians were happy to. It was an argument. The Isma'ili expectation was that the mahdi would abrogate the outward law when he came, and the attack asserted that the age of the law was ending: that the pilgrimage was now void and the stone an object rather than a sacrament. The same doctrine reached the same conclusion two and a half centuries later in the Persian mountains, when Hasan II declared the Resurrection at Alamut and had the fast broken in the courtyard.

The difference is that Alamut did it to its own community and Mecca was done to everybody. The cost fell hardest on the Isma'ilis who had nothing to do with it: the Fatimids in Cairo, building a caliphate on the same doctrinal family, spent the following century being associated with the sack of the holy city by opponents who did not care to distinguish the branches. Cairo repudiated it and the repudiation was not much believed.

The stone went back in 951, after the Abbasids had paid an enormous sum for it, and the sources report that it was returned wrapped in a sack with a note. What the raid had established was that the Qarmatians could do anything they liked to the pilgrimage and nobody could stop them — which was true, and turned out to be worth less than it sounds.

Eighty days

Drafted from Daftary, The Isma'ilis: Their History and Doctrines (2007)contraction

In 931 Abu Tahir handed the state to somebody else. A young Persian had arrived at al-Hasa, and Abu Tahir was persuaded — the sources differ on by whom and on what evidence — that this was the awaited one: Muhammad ibn Isma'il returned, the mahdi whose expected coming was the entire basis of Qarmatian authority.

The young man behaved as the doctrine said the mahdi would. He abolished the law, since the law was the outward form that the mahdi's coming would supersede. He cursed the prophets, including Muhammad. He ordered the execution of notables, including members of Abu Tahir's own family. After about eighty days Abu Tahir concluded he had been deceived, and had him put to death.

Few political disasters are so completely self-inflicted. A polity whose sole claim was that it knew who the mahdi was and could recognise him had publicly, spectacularly, failed to — in front of its own community and in front of the entire Isma'ili world it had spent thirty years telling that the Fatimid caliph was an impostor. The prestige never came back. Qarmatian doctrine afterwards is described as having quietly returned to expecting the mahdi in the future, which is a difficult position for people who have just executed one.

The decline afterwards is unremarkable and took a hundred and forty years. Abu Tahir died in 944. The council governed. Abbasid and Buyid campaigns from the 970s pushed the state back to eastern Arabia; a Qarmatian attempt on Fatimid Syria failed; Bahrain island broke away in 1058, and by 1077 the Uyunids — local, Sunni, and backed by the Seljuks — had taken al-Hasa.

Nobody has put an area or a population on this state, and nobody has named the power that finally absorbed it, because it was not absorbed by one — it was worn down. What it had was a hundred and seventy years, a coherent and genuinely radical argument about property and law, the only occasion on which the Ka'ba was dismantled in part and carried into the desert, and eighty days in 931 that undid all of it.

The terror was at an end

Drafted from al-Rudhrawari, The Eclipse of the 'Abbasid Caliphate: Original Chronicles of the Fourth Islamic Century (1921)end

For most of the tenth century the Qarmatians were not a foreign enemy of Baghdad. They were a party in its politics.

They kept a permanent representative in the capital — Ibn Shahuya — who lived there, in the words of a Baghdad chronicler with a government career, like a vizier. He obtained audiences of the sovereigns, who fell in with his ideas. The grandees were afraid of him, put up with his arrogance and obeyed his commands, and the chronicler is explicit that there was no reason for any of this except his relations with those people.

Successive Buyid rulers had assigned the Qarmatians fiefs in Iraq itself, at Wasit and on the Euphrates canal. Their requests were regularly granted and their requirements carried out. This was the settled arrangement with a power whose formidable character, as he puts it, had caused many a monarch to make friends of them.

It is a remarkable position for a state of eastern Arabia that had sacked Mecca and denied the caliphate of both claimants. It was also, by then, mostly credit — and credit can be spent.

985

Two Qarmatian leaders, Ishaq and Ja'far, seized Kufa.

The vizier at Baghdad handled it the way such things had always been handled. He wrote them a courteous letter with a mild remonstrance, invited them to peace and friendship, and offered them what they were trying to get; and he released their representative from confinement and made it up to him with gifts and honours so that he could mediate.

The reply was evasive. They complained about the arrest. And then they went on pushing their men into more districts and collecting the revenue on their own account, until, in the chronicler's phrase, patience was exhausted.

What followed was routine. A chamberlain went out from Baghdad with Daylamites, Turks and Arabs. An Uqaylid chief was brought in with his tribe. They bridged the Euphrates under fire, crossed, charged together, and routed the Qarmatians; the Qarmatian commander was captured and immediately beheaded by the Uqaylid over a private feud. The survivors fell back on Kufa, and Baghdad celebrated.

Stung — the chronicler notes that pride runs strong in these people — they equipped a second force under another trusted officer. A second chamberlain went out, crossed the water, and destroyed it: the commander killed, many officers taken, the camp and baggage plundered. The two leaders retreated and were chased as far as Qadisiyya.

Then the sentence that ends them:

The disturbance was now at an end, and therewith the reputation of the Qarmatians, and the terror which they had inspired in men's breasts.

What it took to finish them

Not much, and that is the point.

The Qarmatians had held Mecca's stone for twenty-two years, wrecked pilgrim caravans, taken tribute from two caliphates and made governments in Baghdad and Cairo negotiate with a permanent embassy. What ended their standing was two ordinary field engagements against a force assembled in the normal way from the troops available.

Nothing had changed in their doctrine or their organisation. What had run out was the belief that fighting them was different from fighting anybody else, and once that was gone the thing it had been protecting turned out to be a modest regional power with fiefs in Iraq and a diplomat in the capital.

The chronicler draws the moral himself, and it is his own and not borrowed: every community has a term of prosperity up to which it advances, and then retrogression begins — except, he adds, in the case of religious prosperity, which goes on rising, and when it parts from the perishing world passes into the world that endures.

He was writing about a movement whose entire claim was religious, whose members had been taught that the age of the law was over and the awaited one was returning. The exception he carves out is precisely the one they had believed themselves to be.

Al-Hasa held out for another ninety years under its council, losing the island of Bahrain and then the mainland. Nobody wrote about it much.

A traveller's description

Drafted from Jr., Persian Heritage Series 36 (1986)aside?What aside means

Nasir-i Khusraw was a Persian poet, philosopher and Isma'ili missionary who left Khurasan in 1046 and travelled for seven years — Egypt, Arabia, Palestine, Mecca four times — and wrote it down. His Safarnama is one of the best travel accounts of the medieval Islamic world, and he passed through al-Hasa in the 1050s, near the end of the Qarmatian state's life.

What he describes is worth having in his own words rather than at second hand. The town was walled in four concentric rings. The residents paid no tax of any kind. A man whose affairs had gone wrong could obtain a loan on which no interest was charged, repayable when he could. The state owned grain mills and ground the townspeople's grain without charge. The government was a council of six with six deputies, not a ruler. There was a mosque, and nobody prayed the Friday prayer in it, and no sermon was preached.

He also records, without any apparent discomfort, that the state owned something like thirty thousand slaves, who worked the fields and gardens.

Two cautions belong with it. Nasir-i Khusraw was himself an Isma'ili — a Fatimid missionary, in fact, of the branch the Qarmatians had refused — and he was describing a society he had reason to find interesting. And he arrived a century and a half after the state was founded and a few years before it lost Bahrain, so what he saw was a late arrangement rather than a founding one.

With those caveats it is still the fullest description anyone has of a polity organised on a principle instead of a dynasty, written by somebody who was standing in it. A council of six is not an election, not a nomination and not any kind of inheritance; there was no succession, because after Abu Tahir there was no single office to succeed to.

The last sentence of the account is the one that stays with a reader. There was a mosque, and nobody prayed in it, because the age of the law had ended and had not yet been replaced by anything.

The word

Drafted from trans.), Yaman: Its Early Mediaeval History (1892)afterlife

The state in eastern Arabia was gone by the 1070s. The word it had given the language was not, and the word did more damage than the state ever had.

Qarmati — Carmathian — stopped meaning a member of the polity at al-Hasa and became the standard hostile term for Isma'ilis of every kind, applied by writers who had never been near the Gulf, for centuries afterwards. It carried the Black Stone with it, and the massacre of pilgrims, and the eighty days of the false mahdi, and it attached all of that to anybody the user wanted to discredit.

The clearest demonstration is a book written in Yemen more than three hundred years after the raid on Mecca.

A chapter called "The Carmathians"

Al-Janadi was a fourteenth-century Yemeni scholar whose life's work was a biographical dictionary of the jurists of Yemen, arranged town by town — an entirely conventional Sunni undertaking, in which princes and dynasties appear only briefly because, as he says himself, they matter far less.

Into it he inserted a history of the Carmathians of Yemen.

What that chapter actually describes is the Isma'ili mission: Ibn Hawshab, the missionary sent to the Yemeni highlands in the 880s, and the network he built, and the man he despatched from Yemen to North Africa who converted the Kutama Berbers and summoned Ubayd Allah to come and be caliph. In other words, it is the account of how the Fatimid caliphate was founded — filed by a Yemeni biographer of Sunni lawyers under the name of a state in eastern Arabia that had rejected the Fatimid imam outright and been at odds with Cairo for a century.

The chapter is not stupid; it is detailed and it preserves a first-person narrative of how a mission was actually run. A missionary joins a party of men from a mountainous district, travels with them entertaining them with prophetic traditions, urges them to pray, settles in their town, frequents its mosques, worships until he is loved — and only then tells them what he came for, takes their oaths, begins collecting their alms, and explains that the money will need a fortress to keep it in.

That is careful reporting. The heading on top of it is a slur, and a slur that the Qarmatians of al-Hasa had earned on their own account and that everybody else in the tradition then inherited from them.

Who paid for it

The Fatimids, mostly.

They had refused nothing to the eastern communities and had been refused by them: the whole reason a separate state existed at al-Hasa was that its people would not accept a living mahdi in place of a returning one. Cairo and al-Hasa fought each other in Syria. None of that mattered to the polemic. A caliphate built on the same doctrinal family as the men who carried off the Black Stone spent two hundred years being told it was the same thing, by people for whom Qarmati was simply the word.

This is an unusual kind of legacy and worth naming exactly. The state left no successor, no institution, no building anyone visits and no community that claims it. What it left was a name that its enemies found useful, and the enemies were not its own.