SIX

The Arabian Peninsula

40

The Carmathian or Qarmaṭī Rulers of the line of Abū Sa‘īd al-Jannābī

c. 273–470/c. 886–1078

Originally in the Syrian Desert region and Iraq, then in eastern Arabia

The Carmathian or Qarmatī movement was one of the manifestations of messianic, radical Shfī‘sm arousing out of the Ismā‘llism which took shape in the later eighth and ninth centuries, towards the end of which period a dā‘ī or missionary called Harndān Qarmat allegedly worked in Iraq. At the opening of the tenth century, the Syrian Desert fringes were agitated by the revolutionary movement of Zakaruya or Zakrawayh until it was suppressed in 293/906. This Carmathian da‘wa had split from the main Ismā‘īlī group in Syria in 186/899, unwilling to recognise the claims of the Fātimids (see above, no. 27), with the ‘Old Believer’ Carmathians now claiming to represent the claims of Ismā‘īl, son of the Sixth Imām Ja‘far al-Ṣādiq, as conveyed through Ismā‘īl’s son Muḥammad; the split with the Fāṭimids was never to be really healed.

Instead, the Carmathians established themselves in lower Iraq, where the Zanj or black slave rebellion of the later ninth century had left behind much social and religious discontent, and among the Bedouin of north-eastern Arabia, in the region of al-Aḥsā or Bahrayn. Here, Abū Sa‘ld al-Jannābī built up an enduring principality, often described later as that of the Abū Sa‘īdīs. The organisation of the Carmathian community there was sufficiently different from the norm of Islamic states at that time to excite the deep suspicion of orthodox Sunnī observers. It seems that there were tentative experients with the communal ownership of property and goods, soon abandoned; in any case, the economic foundation of the Carmathian principality rested on black slave labour. The rulers of Abū Sa‘īd’s family were backed by a council of elders, the ‘Iqdāniyya ‘those who have power to bind [and loose]’; contemporary travellers and visitors to al-Aḥsā praised the justice and good order prevailing there.

The relations of the Carmathians, in their earlier, activist phase, with the Fāṭimids continued to be tense. They raided into Iraq and as far as the coast of Fars (Fārs) and harried the fringes of Syria and Palestine; they had adherents in Yemen, and at one point conquered Oman (‘Umān). Their greatest coup of all was in 317/930 carrying off the Black Stone from the Ka‘ba in Mecca, considering it to be a mere object of superstitious reverence, it was twenty years later before, at the Fāṭimid caliph al-Manṣūr’s pleading, they agreed to replace it. Towards the end of the tenth century, the Carmathians grew more moderate in tone, and their principality evolved into something like a republic, with a council of elders in which the house of Abū Sa‘íd al-Jannābī was still notable. It seems to have lasted thus until the later eleventh century and the end of the Carmathian state as an independent entity through joint operations by a Seljuq-Abbāsid army from Iraq and a local Bedouin chief, founder of the subsequent line of ‘Uyūnids in eastern Arabia. The surviving Carmathians probably then gave their adherence to the Fāṭimids, but descendants of Abū Sa‘īd, called sayyids, were to be found in al-Aḥsā two or three centuries later.

Ismā‘īlism has long disappeared from eastern Arabia, but it may have left a distant legacy in the present existence there, within modern Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Bahrayn Island, of significant Twelver Shī‘ī communities.

Coins of the Carmathians are extant from the second half of the tenth century, but seem to have been minted by their governors and commanders on the borders of Palestine and Syria rather than in al-Aḥsā.

Zambaur, 116; Album, 20.

EI² ‘Isma‘īliyya’, ‘Ḳarmati’ (W. Madelung).

M. J. de Goeje, ‘La fin de l’empire des Carmathes du Bahraïn’, JA, 9th series, 5 (1895), 1–30.

W. Madelung, ‘Fatimiden und Baḥrainqarmaten’, Der Islam, 34 (1959), 34–88, English tr. The Fatimids and the Qarmaṭīs of Bahrayn’, in F. Daftary (ed.), Medieval Isma‘ili History and Thought, Cambridge 1996, 21–83.

George T. Scanlon, ‘Leadership in the Qarmatian sect’, BIFAO, 59 (1959), 29–48, with a provisional genealogical table at p. 35.

François de Blois, ‘The ‘Abu Sa‘īdīs or so-called “Qarmatians” of Bahrayn’, Proceedings of the Seminar for Arabian Studies, 16 (1986), 13–21.

F. Daftary, The Ismā‘ills, their History and Doctrines, Cambridge 1990, 103–34, 160–5, 17–6, 220–2.

H. Halm, Shiism, Edinburgh 1991, 166–77.