Ismailis

Ismailis are Shia Muslims who trace the line of Imams through Isma’il, son of the sixth Imam Ja’far al-Sadiq, who died in 765. Where Twelvers follow a line of twelve, Ismailis believe the Imamate continues in a living Imam. The largest branch today, the Nizari Ismailis, follow the Aga Khan. Ismaili thought gives great weight to ta’wil, the search for the inner meaning (batin) behind the outward form (zahir) of scripture and law, and to reason as a gift of God.

Nasir Khusraw

In the eleventh century the Fatimid caliphs in Cairo, themselves Ismaili Imams, sent missionaries, da’is, across the Islamic world. The most famous Persian among them was Nasir Khusraw, born in 1004 at Qubadiyan near Balkh. A government official in Merv, he set out in 1046 on a seven-year journey to Mecca and Cairo, recorded in his Safarnama, one of the classics of Persian prose. In Cairo he embraced the Ismaili faith and was made the hujjat, the chief representative, of Khorasan. Back home he was attacked as a heretic and fled to Yumgan in the mountains of Badakhshan, where he wrote his philosophical works and the Divan of his austere, moral poetry, and where his shrine stands today. For the Ismailis of Badakhshan, on both sides of the Panj river in Tajikistan and Afghanistan, he is Pir Shah Nasir, the founder of their faith.

Alamut

In 1090 the Ismaili leader Hasan-i Sabbah took the castle of Alamut, high in the Alborz above Qazvin. From there the Nizaris built a state of castles across northern Iran, Quhistan in the east and Syria, which lasted until the Mongol armies of Hulagu took Alamut in 1256. Their enemies called them hashishiyya, and from crusader tales came the word ‘assassin’ and the legend of a garden paradise and drugged killers. Historians, notably Farhad Daftary, have shown how much of this is hostile myth. The Alamut library was destroyed, though the historian Juvayni, who inspected it for the Mongols, saved some works.

In the nineteenth century Fath-Ali Shah Qajar gave the title Aga Khan to the Nizari Imam Hasan Ali Shah, who lived at Mahallat before moving to India in the 1840s. His successors led a community that spread to South Asia, East Africa and later Europe and North America. Karim Aga Khan IV, Imam from 1957, died in February 2025 and was succeeded by his son Rahim, Aga Khan V.

A living tradition

Ismailis gather in a jamatkhana for prayer. In Badakhshan they sing maddoh, devotional poetry in Persian set to music with the Pamiri lute, and keep the chiragh-rawshan, a lamp-lighting ceremony for the dead with readings attributed to Nasir Khusraw. Their traditional houses, the chid, are built around five pillars that carry religious meaning. In Iran small Ismaili communities live in Khorasan, Kerman and around Mahallat.