Qāʾim and Qīyāma
As Sachedina* and others subsequently have shown, the concept of the Qāʾim (Ariser) in
Islam has its originating locus in mainly Ghulāt and bāṭinī circles during the
first full and second centuries of the hijra. It appears that the idea enters
into the greater Islamic discourse during (and following) the defeat of the
Ḥasanid ʿAlīd Muḥammad Nafs al-Zakīyya and his revolt (against first the
Ummayads and then the ʿAbbasids) in Medīna during 145 AH/762 CE. The explicit
idea of an ‘end times’ savior obviously has no explicitly (Uthmanic) Quranic
pedigree but thereafter becomes intrinsically wed among such circles to the
‘Day of Judgement/the Day of the Payment of the Existential Debt’ (yawm
ad-dīn), ‘the Hour’ (as-saʿa) and the ‘Resurrection’ (qīyāma).
From such streams it finally becomes the enshrined doctrine of the Imāmīs.
The pre-Fātimid and Fātimid Ismāʿīlīs themselves went through various versions of this doctrine, the most
mature version being the one articulated by Nāsir-i-Khosrow (d. 1088) and a few
of his fellow Ismāʿīlī intellectual contemporaries wherein the Qāʾim
(Ariser) is the Nāṭiq (Speaker) who inaugurates the seventh Aeon (kawr)
of hierohistorical time just as Muḥammad (ص) had been the inaugurator of the sixth. Implied in the bāṭinī
development of this idea is that the dispensation of Islām, together with its
sacred law and sharīʿa, is not the final revelation to humankind by God
but only the final one until the Qīyāma (Resurrection) and the
appearance of the Qāʾim. In the subtleties of this concept, we find that
the historical Muḥammad (ص) can indeed remain
as the ‘final prophet’ (khātim an-nabīyīn) but not the final divine
revelator (munazil) nor the final legislator (shāriʿ) to humankind
for all time. The Nizārī and Ṭayyibī development of this concept -- much of
which was already implied in the mature Fātimid version of it -- then makes the
coming of the Qāʾim (Ariser) and the Qīyāma (Resurrection) to be
explicitly synonymous ‘Events’ wherein the coming of the Qāʾim heralds
the formal hierohistorical initiation of the Qīyāma itself and the rupture into
the Seventh Aeon of humanity. This, by the way, is the Bayān’s own explicit
doctrine of the Qīyāma as well (and there is not a shred of evidence
that Siyyid ʿAlī Muḥammad Shīrāzī, the Bāb, had ever perused a single Ismāʿīlī
work).
Now, it would appear that
both the Sunnīs as well as the Imāmīs developed their own unique concepts of
the Qāʾim and Mahdī, which later influenced each other, largely in
response to the threat they perceived from Ghulāt and bāṭinī eschatological
doctrines. The Sunnīs at some point around the 10th-11th centuries CE (maybe
sometime even earlier) made Jesus (ع) and His second coming the focus of their eschatological
speculations, in the process separating this second coming and the Day of
Resurrection (yawm al-qīyāma)/the Hour (as-saʿa) as
being two completely distinct events. Although the earliest of their ḥadīth
literature shows no evidence for it, later we find the figure of Jesus (ع) being incorporated into the later Imāmī
ḥadīth literature as well in the form of the foremost companion of the Twelfth
Imām Muḥammad ibn al-Ḥasan al-ʿAskarī (ع) upon the latter’s ‘return’ to the world as the Qāʾim
and Mahdī. The earliest Imāmī ḥadīth literature, including Kulaynī,
merely mention the return of the Qāʾim with ‘His fathers’, viz. the 11 Imāms
before Him together with Muḥammad (ص) and Fāṭima (ع) who will come
seeking justice and revenge for the unjust murders of Ḥasan and Ḥusayn (ع), but not Jesus (ع) .
In the Twelver world, it is
only during the early 19th century wherein the Shaykhī school once again begins
to close the gap between “Qāʾim” and “Qīyāma” as distinct events, with this gap
fully closed and made once more into a singular event by the Bāb. The
ideological threat posed by the Shaykhīs and then the Bābīs to the Uṣūlī
ecclesiastical establishment of exoteric Shiʿi mujtahids (juriconsults)
then forced this establishment to erect the institution of the ‘source of
emulation’ (marjāʿ at-taqlīd) which eventually culminated in the
Ayatollah Khomeini’s guardianship of the jurisprudent (wilāyat al-faqīh)
during the 20th as a form of Twelver Shiʿite papacy or caliphate. However, what
is most interesting about Ayatollah Khomeini’s revolution, or rather his
diehard supporters of the time, is that they articulated the Islamic Revolution
of 1979 in explicitly eschatological terms, phrasing the toppling of the Shah’s
regime as being the “Qīyāma” with Khomeini as the “Imām Zamān”
and hence implicitly the Qāʾim in person. Be that as it may, it seems
that as hard as they might, Shiʿite orthodoxy cannot escape the long shadow
cast by the Ghulāt and bāṭinīs because, despite all the polemic they have
targeted against their esoteric opponents over time, they keep returning to the
same eschatological conclusions that they did in the form of the singularity of
Qāʾim and Qīyāma. One can say the same about Sunnī Sufīs as well
as other Sunnī mahdawists also.
--
The Seventh Gate of the Second Unity [of the Persian Bayān]
The Seventh Gate of the Second Unity [of the Persian Bayān]
Concerning the explanation
of the Day of Resurrection (yawm al-qīyāma).
The quitessence of this
chapter is that the meaning of 'the Day of Resurrection' is the day of the
Manifestation of the Tree of Reality. It is clear that none of the adherants of
the Shi'i sect have understood (the meaning of) the Day of Resurrection. On the
contrary, they have all vainly imagined something that possesses no reality in
the eyes of God. The meaning of 'the Day of Resurrection' in the sight of God
and in the terminology of the people of truth is that, from the moment of the
appearance of the Tree of Reality in every age and in every name, until the
time of its disappearance, constitutes the Day of Resurrection.
Thus, for example, from the
day on which Jesus was sent (by God) until the day of his Ascension was the
Resurrection of Moses, for the revelation of God was manifest during that
period through the revelation of that Reality, who rewarded by his words
everyone who was a believer in Moses and punished by his words everyone who did
not believe in him. For whatsoever God had witnessed in that age (of Moses) is
what He witnessed in the Gospel. And from the day on which the Messenger of God
was sent until the day of his ascension was the Resurrection of Jesus, for the
Tree of Reality was manifest in the (human) temple of Muhammad, who rewarded all
who believed in Jesus and punished by his words all who did not believe in him.
Similarly, from the time of the appearance of the Tree of the Bayān until its
disappearance in the Resurrection of the Messenger of God...
