The Persian empire, the most ancient and likewise the best regulated monarchy of the east, was the first to experience, and had, for the longest period endured, all the horrors of despotism and anarchy arising from unbounded power and resisting liberty. As long as the faith of Zoroaster preserved its primeval purity, and the sacred fire still burned in the temples, religion could neither afford a shield nor a mask to rebellion; but when, under the Sassanides, the edifice of the ancient system was shaken by new opinions and reforms, the temple and the palace began alike to totter. Innovators and heretics sprung up, and sedition undermined, at the same moment, both the altar and the throne.
The sects of Magianism are very little known to us; hence, the erroneousness of the prevailing opinions concerning the religion of the Persians. Dualism, or Manicheism, has often been cited as the original doctrine of Zoroaster. It has been attempted to combine into one system, opinions in vogue at very different epochs; hence, the vague and contradictory accounts not only of the Greeks, but even of Anquetil, and Kleuker, since the discovery of some books of the Zend; to which Herder was the first to direct our attention. His conjectures confirm what Macrisi, probably taking Sheheristani as his guide, has said respecting the sects of the Magians. He enumerates several; and 1st. The Keyumerssie, followers of the ancient doctrine according to Keyumers, called the first man or king; 2nd. The Servaniye, who consider Servan (i. e. eternity) as the matrix and sole origin of all things; 3rd. The Zerdushtiye, or disciples of Zerdusht or Zoroaster, the reformer of the ancient doctrine of Hom; 4th. Sfeneviye the Dualists, properly so called; 5th. The Maneviye or Manicheans; 6th. The Farkuniye, a species of Gnostics who admit two principles, the father and the son, whose discord was mediated by a third celestial power; 7th. The Masdekiye, the adherents of Masdek, who declared war against all religion and morality, and preached universal liberty and equality, the indifference of human actions, and community of goods and women. As he gave free rein to all the passions, he gained all their slaves; not merely the poor and needy,—that numerous class, having nothing to lose and all to win,—but also those who, on the contrary had all to lose and nothing to win, the grandees, and King Kobad himself, the father of Nushirvan. This latter expiated the weakness of his concession by the loss of his throne, and an incarceration, from which he was released only by the wisdom and virtue of his vizier, Bisiirjimihr. His son Nushirvan, however, purified the faith, and exterminated this scandalous brood with fire and sword, without being able, as appears from later incidents, entirely to annihilate them.[17] For, in the first century of Islamism, the same spirit showed itself in the liberal doctrines of several heads of sects; till at last, in the hands of Babek and Karmath, it raised itself over heaps of carcases and ruins, the terror of the kingdom, and the abhorrence of mankind.
The Persians, says Macrisi, have ever considered themselves the freest and most cultivated of nations, and others as mere ignorant slaves. After the destruction of their empire by the Arabians, they looked down upon their victors with contempt and hatred; and sought the ruin of Islamism, not only by open war, but also by secret doctrines and pernicious dissensions, which, breaking forth in rebellion, must have shaken the kingdom to its base. As these opinions bore the stamp of irreligion and libertinism, those who maintained them were called Sindik[18] (libertines), a word corrupted from Zend, the living word of Zerdusht. Their first appearance in Islamism was in the commencement of the khalifat of the family of Abbas, of whom, the first khalifs in vain endeavoured to eradicate them with the sword. The eastern provinces of the ancient Persian empire, whither the remaining adherents of the ancient dynasty and form of worship had taken refuge, and whither Ismalism had, as yet, scarcely penetrated, were the fertile sources of these heresies so fatal to the imamat and khalifat. Thus, in the reign of the Khalif Manssur,[19] the Rawendi, who maintained the doctrine of the transmigration of souls, revolted; and twenty years afterwards,[20] under the command of Abdol Kahir, the Mohammer (i. e. the red, or the ass-like), so called, either because they wore red clothes, or because they were called the true believers asses (the arabic root Hamara meaning, both, he has been red and he has been an ass); and in the same year, in Transoxana, the Sefidjamegan or white-dressed, founded by Hakem Ben Hashem, called Mokannaa the concealed, from wearing a golden mask; or Sasendeimah (i. e. the moonshine-maker), because he, at night, produced a miraculous illumination from a well at Nakhsheb, which caused the place to appear to be lighted by the moon. By this juggling he wished to attest his divine mission, as by a miracle; as Mani had proved the celestial origin of his, by the divinity of art, namely, with a book adorned with splendid paintings (Ertengi Mani). Mokannaa taught that God had assumed the human form since he had commanded the angels to adore the first man; and that, since that period, the divine nature had passed from prophet to prophet, to Abu Moslem, who had founded the glory of the Abbasides, and descended lastly to himself. He was a disciple of Abu Moslem, who was acknowledged also by the Rawendi as their head, and who seems to have been the first to introduce the doctrine of transmigration into Islamism.
Mokannaa added to the metempsychosis (Tenasukh), the incarnation of the human and divine nature, a dogma originating in India, and afterwards adopted, as we have seen above, by the Ghullat as one of their principal tenets.[21]
In the reign of Maimun, the seventh Abbasside khalif, when translations, and the invitation to Bagdad of the literati of Greece and Persia, had caused the seeds of science, already planted, to bloom in full luxuriance,—the spirit of the Arabian, which was now imbued with the systems of Grecian philosophy, Persian theology, and Indian mysticism, shook off, more and more, the narrow trammels of Islamism. The appellation of Mulhad (atheist), and Sindik (libertine), became constantly more and more common with their cause, and the wisest and best informed of the khalif’s court, were thus stigmatized. In the first year of the third century of the Hegira, arose a revolutionary sectarian, who, like Masdek, two centuries and a half before, in Persia, preached the indifference of actions and community of goods, and menaced the throne of the khalif with ruin, as his prototype had that of Chosru. Babek, surnamed Khurremi, either, according to Lari, from the town Khurrem, his birth-place, or, according to others, from the gay licentiousness of his doctrines (Khurrem, in Persian, signifying gay), for a space of twenty years, filled the whole circuit of the khalif’s dominions with carnage and ruins, until at length, in the reign of Motassem, he was overthrown, taken prisoner, and put to death in the khalif’s presence.[22] Babek, before he delivered his captives to the axe, caused their wives and daughters to be violated before their eyes; and it is said, that, in his turn, he received the same treatment from the commandant of the castle in which he was imprisoned. When his hands and feet were struck off, by order of the khalif, he laughed, and smilingly sealed with his blood the criminal gaiety of his tenets. The number of those who fell by the sword in twenty years, is estimated by historians to amount to a million. Nud, one of his ten executioners, boasted that he alone had butchered twenty thousand men,—so terrible and sanguinary was the contest between the assertors of liberty and equality, and the defenders of the khalif’s throne and the pulpit of Islamism.[23]
At this tempestuous and blood-stained epoch, there lived at Ahwas, in the southern part of Persia, Abdallah, the son of Maimun-Kaddah, a son of Daissan, the Dualist. By his father and grandfather, who had introduced Dualism, from the system of the Magi into that of Islamism, he was educated in the principles of the ancient empire and faith of the Persians; and stimulated to deeds, by which, if he could not accomplish their re-establishment, he might at least achieve the overthrow of those of the Arabians.
Profoundly versed in all the sciences, and taught by the study of history and the dire experience of his own day, Abdallah, the son of Maimun, had sufficient opportunity to perceive the risk of declaring open war against the established religion and reigning dynasty, so long as the conscience of the people, and the military power, stood at their command. He determined, therefore, by a deeply laid plan, to undermine in secret, that which he dared not attack openly. His system was to be enveloped in a veil of mystery, nor was it to appear in the face of day, until it had succeeded in placing the sovereignty in the hands of its partisans. It is always extremely dangerous to endeavour, at once, to eradicate from the minds of men the deeply imprinted reverence which they feel for the throne and altars of their fathers. Men can only by degrees emancipate themselves from their prejudices; many but imperfectly, and it is but few who can throw them off entirely. As, however, it was Abdallah’s design to annihilate not merely the prejudices of positive religion and authority, but to aim at the very foundation of all, he resolved to promulgate his doctrines gradually, and divided them into seven degrees, after the fashion of the Pythagorean and Indian philosophers. The last degree inculcated the vanity of all religion,—the indifference of actions, which, according to him, are neither visited with recompense or chastisement, either now or hereafter. This alone is the path of truth and right, all the rest imposture and error. He appointed emissaries, whom he despatched to enlist disciples, and to initiate them, according to their capacity for libertinism and turbulence, in some or all of the degrees. The pretensions of the descendants of Mohammed, the son of Ismail, served him as a political mask; these his missionaries asserted as partisans, while they were secretly but the apostles of crime and impiety. Under these two relations, they and their followers were sometimes called Ismailites, and sometimes Ibahie, “indifferent.” Abdallah proceeded from Ahwas to Basra, and thence to Syria, where he settled at Salemiye: from this place his son, Ahmed, and Ahmed’s sons, Abulabbas and Mohammed Sholalaa, and his envoys (Dai), at once emissaries and missionaries, spread forth his doctrines. The most celebrated of the latter was Hossein of Ahwas, who, in the country of Kufa, initiated, amongst others, Ahmed, the son of Eshaas (called Karmath), in the mysteries of revolt and infidelity, of which he soon gave an earnest to the world, in torrents of blood and the smoking ruins of cities.[24]
He called himself Karmath, from the broken Arabic letters of this name, and became the leader of the Karmathites, who, issuing from Lahssa and Bakhrein, like the Wahabees, nine hundred years afterwards, menaced Islamism with destruction. His doctrine, in addition to the circumstance of its forbidding nothing, and declaring every thing allowable and indifferent, meriting neither reward nor punishment, undermined more particularly the basis of Mohammedanism, by declaring that all its commands were allegorical, and merely a disguise of political precepts and maxims. Moreover, all was to be referred to the blameless and irreproachable Imam Maassum, as the model of a prince, whom, although he had occupied no existing throne, they pretended to seek, and declared war against bad and good princes, without distinction, in order that, under the pretext of contending for a better, they might be able to unravel at once the thickly interwoven web of religion and government. The injunction of prayer meant nothing but obedience to the Imam Maassum; alms, the tithes to be given to him; fasting, the preservation of the politital secret regarding the imam of the family of Ismail.
Every thing depended on the interpretation (Terwil), without which, the whole word of the Koran (Tensil) had neither meaning nor value. Religion did not consist in external observances (Sahir), but in the internal feeling (Bathin). According to the variations of this doctrine, which, in many points, touches those mentioned above, their assertors received various names in the different provinces of the khalifat. In Taberistan, they were called Seveners, from the seven degrees of the secret doctrines of Abdallah, the son of Maimun Kadah; in Khorassan, Mohammere (i. e. the Red), and in Syria, Mobeiyese, the White, from their dress; in Transoxana, Rawendi and Borkai (i. e. the Veiled), because Mokannaa covered his face with a golden mask; at Ispahan, Batheni (i. e. the Esoterics), and also Mutewilin (i. e. the interpreting Allegorists); at Kufa, Karmathi, or Mobareki; at Lahssa and Bahrein, Jenabi; in Western Africa, Saidi, from Karmath, Mobarek, Jenabi, and Said, four of their chiefs. They named themselves in general Ismaili, from deducing them pretensions to the khalifat from Ismail, the son of Jafer Sadik. From their opponents, they all received in common the well merited appellations of Mulhad (i. e. Atheists), or Sindik (libertines[25]).