Abū Mansūr al-ʿIdschlī

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Abū Mansūr al-ʿIdschlī ( Arabic أبو منصور العجلي, DMG Abū Manṣūr al-ʿIǧlī d. Between 738 and 744) with the surname al-Kisf ("the fragment"), was the founder of an extreme Shiite sect in Iraq that was called Mansūrīya and was notorious for its murderous practices. Abū Mansūr originally belonged to the followers of the Shiite imam Muhammad al-Bāqir and worshiped him as a prophet . After al-Bāqir's death, he claimed prophethood for himself. Because of the murder practices he advocated, Abū Mansūr was also called "the strangler " ( al-Ḫannāq ). He himself was executed in the late Umayyad period , but the terrorist sect he founded continued into the early Abbasid period.

Life

Abū Mansūr was a man from the area around Kufa and belonged to the ʿIdschl, a branch of the north-east Arab tribe ʿAbd al-Qays. He grew up in the steppe and was illiterate and unable to read. But later he owned a house in Kufa. Abū Mansūr initially supported the Shiite imam Muhammad al-Bāqir and glorified him and the preceding imams as divinely inspired prophet-apostles. But when Muhammad al-Bāqir broke away from him and drove him out, Abū Mansūr claimed the imamate for himself and called the people to him.

After the death of Muhammad al-Bāqir around the year 735, he claimed that he had entrusted his cause to him and made him his agent ( waṣī ) after his death. Abū Mansūr's followers came mainly from the traditional Shiite tribes of the ʿIdschl, Baschīla and Kinda and also included Mawālī . Al-Jahiz describes that the followers of Abu Mansour lived and traveled together in groups and acted together.

Chālid al-Qasrī , who was governor of Iraq under the caliph Hishām ibn ʿAbd al-Malik and cracked down on religious heretics, had a search for Abu Mansūr, but could not find him. Only Chālid's successor Yūsuf ibn ʿUmar ath-Thaqafī, who served as governor of Iraq from 738 to 744, seized him and had him crucified.

to teach

The imams as prophets

One of the most important teachings of Abū Mansūr was his theory of the chain of God's messengers that never breaks. Here he equated God's messengers and Shiite imams. According to an-Naubachtī , Abū Mansūr taught: " ʿAlī ibn Abī Tālib was a prophet and messenger, likewise al-Hasan and al-Husain , ʿAlī ibn al-Husain and Muhammad ibn ʿAlī al-Bāqir; I also am a prophet and messenger." According to Abū Mansūr, the Imamate should then continue to exist among his descendants, since there should be seven prophets from the Quraish and seven from the ʿIdschl. The last of Abū Mansūr's descendants should be the Qā'im (= Mahdi).

The mansūrites explained the prophethood of ʿAlī with the fact that the angel Gabriel was mistaken and wrongly conveyed the divine message intended for Alī to Mohammed . Like the other Ghulāt groups, the Mansūrites gave ʿAlī ibn Abī Tālib a very important role. According to Abū l-Husain al-Malatī, they said that ʿAlī was in the clouds and did not die, but would return with all his companions before the day of resurrection .

Abū Mansūr justified his own claim to prophethood by claiming to have been lifted to heaven. On this occasion God is said to have stroked his head and said to him in Syriac-Aramaic ( bi-s-Suryānī ): "My son, go and tell of me." He was now a prophet and messenger. God took him as a friend ( ḫalīl ). Then he was brought back down to earth. Abū Mansūr also claimed that the angel Gabriel brought him the revelation ( waḥy ) from God.

Spiritualistic Exegesis of the Koran and Antinomism

Abū Mansūr also taught that God entrusted Mohammed with the revelation ( tanzīl ) of the Koran and he himself with its interpretation ( taīwīl ). Like other ghulāt , he interpreted the Koran allegorically . This included that he interpreted Koranic terms such as Janna ("garden") and Nār ("Hellfire") as names of men. The garden is said to be the "Imam of the times" ( imām al-waqt ), whom God has commanded to obey, the hellfire of the "opponents of the Imam" ( ḫiṣm al-imām ), which one must fight. The one who had reached and joined the Imam of Time was supposed to be exempt from all other duties, because with that he had come to perfection in Paradise.

In the same way, Abū Mansūr also interpreted the Koranic prohibitions and commandments as the names of certain people. Zinā , dead animals ( al-maita ), bloody meat ( ad-dam ), pork, alcohol ( ḫamr ) and gambling ( maisir ) are not really forbidden; rather, these terms indicated men to whom loyalty was forbidden. With regard to the abolition of the food commandments, he referred to sura 5 : 93: "For those who believe and do good works, there is no offense in what they eat for food." Conversely, with regard to the duties mentioned in the Qur'an, such as salāt , zakāt , hajj and the hem , he taught that they were in fact men to whom walāya was commanded.

He also based his claim to the representation of the prophetic family on an allegorical interpretation of the Koran. So he meant that in sura 52 : 44: "And when they see a fragment ( kisf ) falling from the sky, they say: 'Piled clouds!'" The sky is the family of Mohammed ( āl Muḥammad ), the piece falling from the sky ( kisf ) himself, and the earth on which this piece falls, the Shia . Those who did not acknowledge this miracle and mistakenly believed the heavenly fragment to be piled clouds, he identified with the followers of the rival prophet al-Mughīra ibn Saʿīd . Abū Mansūr originally identified the fragment that had fallen from heaven with mitAlī ibn Abī Tālib.

The spiritualistic interpretation of the Koranic prohibitions was connected with an antinomistic attitude. Abū Mansūr taught that God had not forbidden them to do anything that would strengthen their bodies and please them. The Mansūrites are also said to have allowed sexual intercourse with close relatives ( maḥārim ), "in accordance with the teaching of the magicians (i.e. Zoroastrians ) on sexual intercourse with mothers and daughters." Ash-Shahrastani held the Mansūriten because of such teachings as a subgroup of the Churramites .

Legitimation of violence and terrorism

Ash-Shahrastani reports that Abū Mansūr allowed his followers to kill their opponents, steal their property and have intercourse with their wives. According to an-Naubachtī , he even ordered his followers to murder their opponents by strangling them and taught: "Whoever opposes you is a kāfir and a mushrik . Kill him, for this is a hidden jihad ( jihād ḫafī )." According to other sources, the Mansurites taught that whoever killed forty opponents of their sect should go to paradise. They terrified the people with their murderous activities.

When the Mansurites killed their opponents, they strangled them or smashed their skulls with stones because they believed that metal weapons should not be used before the Mahdi appeared . After the appearance of the "speaking imam" ( al-imām an-nāṭiq ), however, the wearing of swords should become compulsory.

According to Ibn Hazm , the Mansourites murdered not only their opponents, but indiscriminately everyone they came across, justifying this by saying that they only made sure that these people got faster to paradise or hell. They regarded the belongings of their victims as legitimate prey and gave a fifth ( ḫums ) of it to their guide. To drown out the screams of their victims, they beat drums and made their dogs bark. Abū Mansūr's " foster mother" ( ḥāḍina ), Maylā 'is mentioned in a poem by Hammād ar-Rāwiya (d. 772/73) as a leader of these "stranglers".

With regard to their terrorist activities, the Mansourites are very similar to the Kharijite sect of the Azraqites , who were up to mischief half a century earlier in Iraq and Iran. However, the Mansourites were the first Shiite group to resort to terror to intimidate opponents before the Nizāritic Ismāʿīlites later adopted this method.

Christian and Gnostic traits

Heinz Halm pointed out that Abū Mansūr's teachings also had some Christian features. So he meant that the first creature that God created was Jesus . In this point he differed from al-Mughīra ibn Saʿīd , who considered Muhammad to be the first being created by God. Christian influence could also be traced back to the fact that the Mansourites used the formula: "with the logos " ( bi-l-kalima ) when swearing . Abū Mansūr's assertion that God spoke in Syriac also fits in here, because Syriac was the language of the Church in Iraq. Halm explains these Christian traits with Abū Mansūr's tribal origin: ʿIdschl and ʿAbd al-Qais were in fact partially Christianized in pre-Islamic times.

Abū Mansūr also taught that people are mixed of darkness and light. The East Iranian scholar Abū l-Maʿālī reported in his Kitāb Bayān al-adyān , written in 1092 , that Abū Mansūr imagined himself as a man of light with a crown on his head. The Koran was his garment, the Torah his shirt and the Psalms his trousers. Such anthropomorphic ideas were likely influenced by the late ancient gnosis .

The Mansūrīya after his death

After Abū Mansūr's death, the Manṣūrīya split into two groups. One of them, known as Muhammadīya, recognized the Hasanid Muhammad an-Nafs az-Zakīya (d. 762) as her imam. They believed that Muhammad al-Bāqir had installed Abu Mansūr only as a temporary custodian ( mustavdaʿ ) to prevent disputes between the followers of al-Hasan and al-Husain , just as Moses installed Joshua before the succession began the descendants of his brother Aaron went. After Abū Mansūr's death, the Imamate was supposed to return to the Alides . They narrated that Abū Mansūr said, "I am only a custodian and have no right to give (the Imamate) to anyone else until the expected Mahdi appears. He is Muhammad ibn ʿAbd Allah an-Nafs az-Zakīya."

The other group, the so-called Husainīya, considered Abū Mansūr's son al-Husain ibn Abī Mansūr as imam and prophet and delivered him the fifth of the property stolen from their strangling operations. The Abbasid caliph al-Mahdī (ruled 775-85) had al-Husain taken prisoner. Large sums of money were secured from him. After al-Husain confessed his deeds, al-Mahdi had him killed and hung on the cross. He then arrested a number of Al-Husain's supporters and did the same to them. The sect evidently quickly dissolved afterwards.

literature

Arabic sources
  • Abu-l-Ḥasan ʿAlī Ibn-Ismāʾīl al-Ašʿarī : Kitāb Maqālāt al-islāmīyīn wa-ḫtilāf al-muṣallīn . Ed. Hellmut Ritter. Istānbūl: Maṭbaʿat ad-daula 1929–1933. P. 9, line 7 - p. 10, line 8. Digitized
  • al-Ǧāḥiẓ : Kitāb al-Ḥayawān . Ed. ʿAbd as-Salām Hārūn. Cairo 1965. Vol. II, pp. 264-71. Digitized
  • Abū Saʿīd Našwān al-Ḥimyarī: al-Ḥūr al-ʿīn ʿan kutub al-ʿilm aš-šarāʾif dūna n-nisāʾ al-ʿafāʾif. Dār Āzāl, Beirut, 1985. pp. 222-224.
  • Ibn Abī Yaʿlā: Ṭabaqāt al-Ḥanābila . Ed. Muḥammad Ḥāmid al-Fiqī. Dār al-Maʿrifa, Beirut, 1952. Vol. I, p. 33. Online
  • Al-Hasan ibn Mūsā an-Naubachtī : Kitāb Firaq aš-šīʿa . Ed. H. Knight. Istanbul: Maṭbaʿat ad-daula 1931. pp. 34f. Digitized
  • aš-Šahrastānī : Al-Milal wa-n-niḥal . Pp. 209-210. Dār al-Maʿrifa, Beirut, 1993. Digitized - German transl. Religious parties and schools of philosophers for the first time completely from d. Arab. trans. u. with declared Note vers. by Theodor Haarbrücker. 2 vols. Halle 1850–51. Vol. I, pp. 205-206. Digitized
Secondary literature
  • Ḥasan Anṣārī: Art. "Abū Manṣūr-i ʿIǧlī" in Dāʾirat-i maʿārif-i buzurg-i islāmī . Markaz-i Dāʾirat al-Maʿārif-i Buzurg-i Islāmī, Tehran, 1988ff. Vol. XVII, pp. 287b-290a. Digitized
  • Ali Haydar Bayat: Art. "Ebû Mansûr el-İcli" in Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı İslâm ansiklopedisi Vol. X, pp. 181-182. PDF
  • Israel Friedlaender : “The heterodoxies of the Shiites according to Ibn Hazm. Introd., Transl. and commentary. " in Journal of the American Oriental Society 28 (1907) 62-64, and 29 (1908) 89-93. Digitized
  • Heinz Halm : The Islamic Gnosis. The extreme Schia and the Alawites. Artemis, Zurich / Munich, 1982. pp. 86-89.
  • W. Madelung: Art. "Manṣūriyya" in The Encyclopaedia of Islam. New Edition . Vol. VI, pp. 441b-442a.
  • W. Tucker: Abū Manṣūr al-ʿIjlī and the Manṣūriyya: a study in medieval terrorism in Der Islam 54 (1977) 66-76.
  • William F. Tucker: Mahdis and millenarians. Shi'ite extremists in early Muslim Iraq. Cambridge 2011. pp. 71-87.
  • G. van Vloten: "Worgers in Iraq" in Feestbundel van taal-, letter-, divorced and aardrijkskundige bijdragen the occasion. PJ Veth . Brill, Leiden, 1894. pp. 57-63.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Friedlaender: "The heterodoxies of the Shiites". 1908, p. 64.
  2. ↑ See Halm: The Islamic Gnosis . 1981, p. 86.
  3. ↑ Cf. aš-Šahrastānī: al-Milal wa-n-niḥal . P. 209. - Ger. Übers. 1850, Vol. I, p. 205.
  4. ↑ Cf. Tucker: Abū Manṣūr al-ʿIjlī . 1977, p. 66.
  5. ↑ See Halm: The Islamic Gnosis . 1981, pp. 87f.
  6. ↑ See Našwān al-Ḥimyarī: al-Ḥūr al-ʿīn . 1985, p. 223.
  7. ↑ Quoting from Halm: The Islamic Gnosis . 1981, p. 86.
  8. ↑ Quoting from Halm: The Islamic Gnosis . 1981, p. 86.
  9. ↑ Cf. Ibn Abī Yaʿlā: Ṭabaqāt al-Ḥanābila . 1952, Vol. I, p. 33.
  10. ↑ Cf. Abū l-Ḥusain al-Malaṭī: Kitāb at-Tanbīh wa-r-radd ʿalā ahl al-ahwāʾ wa-l-bidaʿ . Ed. Sven Dedering. Orient-Institut, Beirut, 2009. p. 120.
  11. ↑ See Našwān al-Ḥimyarī: al-Ḥūr al-ʿīn . 1985, p. 223.
  12. ↑ See Halm: The Islamic Gnosis . 1981, p. 86.
  13. ↑ See Halm: The Islamic Gnosis . 1981, pp. 86f.
  14. ↑ Cf. aš-Šahrastānī: al-Milal wa-n-niḥal . P. 210. - Ger. Übers. 1850, Vol. I, pp. 205f.
  15. ↑ Cf. al-Ašʿarī: Kitāb Maqālāt al-islāmīyīn . 1929-1933, p. 10, lines 1-5.
  16. ↑ See Našwān al-Ḥimyarī: al-Ḥūr al-ʿīn . 1985, p. 223.
  17. ↑ See Našwān al-Ḥimyarī: al-Ḥūr al-ʿīn . 1985, p. 223.
  18. ↑ Cf. aš-Šahrastānī: al-Milal wa-n-niḥal . P. 209. - Ger. Übers. 1850, Vol. I, p. 205.
  19. ↑ Cf. al-Ašʿarī: Kitāb Maqālāt al-islāmīyīn . 1929-1933, p. 10, line 3.
  20. ↑ See Halm: The Islamic Gnosis . 1981, p. 87.
  21. ↑ Cf. aš-Šahrastānī: al-Milal wa-n-niḥal . P. 210. - Ger. Übers. 1850, Vol. I, pp. 205f.
  22. ↑ Cf. aš-Šahrastānī: al-Milal wa-n-niḥal . P. 210. - Ger. Übers. 1850, Vol. I, p. 205.
  23. ↑ Cf. an-Naubachtī: Kitāb Firaq aš-šīʿa . 1931. p. 34, lines 15-16.
  24. ↑ Cf. Ibn Abī Yaʿlā: Ṭabaqāt al-Ḥanābila . 1952, Vol. I, p. 33.
  25. ^ Friedlaender: "The heterodoxies of the Shiites". 1907, p. 62.
  26. ^ Friedlaender: "The heterodoxies of the Shiites". 1908, p. 92.
  27. ^ Friedlaender: "The heterodoxies of the Shiites". 1907, p. 63.
  28. ↑ Cf. Tucker: Abū Manṣūr al-ʿIjlī . 1977, p. 69.
  29. ↑ Cf. Tucker: "Abū Manṣūr al-ʿIjlī . 1977, p. 66.
  30. ↑ Cf. Tucker: "Abū Manṣūr al-ʿIjlī . 1977, pp. 73f, 76.
  31. ↑ See Halm: The Islamic Gnosis . 1981, pp. 88f.
  32. ↑ See Halm: The Islamic Gnosis . 1981, p. 87.
  33. ↑ See Našwān al-Ḥimyarī: al-Ḥūr al-ʿīn . 1985, p. 223.
  34. ↑ See Halm: The Islamic Gnosis . 1981, p. 88.
  35. ↑ Cf. Anṣārī: Art. "Abū Manṣūr-i ʿIǧlī" in Dāʾirat-i maʿārif-i buzurg-i islāmī . Vol. XVII, p. 288a.
  36. ↑ See Halm: The Islamic Gnosis . 1981, p. 89.
  37. ↑ See Našwān al-Ḥimyarī: al-Ḥūr al-ʿīn . 1985, pp. 222f.
  38. ↑ See Našwān al-Ḥimyarī: al-Ḥūr al-ʿīn . 1985, p. 223.
  39. ↑ Quoting from Halm: The Islamic Gnosis . 1981, p. 87.
  40. ↑ See Našwān al-Ḥimyarī: al-Ḥūr al-ʿīn . 1985, p. 223.
  41. ↑ Quoting from Halm: The Islamic Gnosis . 1981, p. 87.
personal data
SURNAME Abū Mansūr al-ʿIdschlī
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Founder of an extreme Shiite sect
DATE OF BIRTH 7th century or 8th century
DATE OF DEATH between 738 and 744