Ibn al-Haitham (chronicler)

Abu Abdallah Jafar ibn Ahmad al-Aswad ibn al-Haitham ( Arabic أبو عبدالله دفر بن أحمد الأسود بن الهيثم, DMG Abu 'Abd Allah ibn Ahmad al-Aswad Ǧa'far ibn al-Haytham ) was a missionary of the Ismailis and chronicler of the 10th century .

Ibn al-Haitham came from Kairuan in what was then the province of "Africa" (Ifrīqiya) (now Tunisia ), which had emerged from the former camp (al-qairawān) of the Arab invading army, which conquered this province for Islam in the 7th century . His family originally belonged to the Shia of the Zaidites , but he himself first converted to the " Twelve " before he was finally converted at the end of the 9th century by Abū ʿAbdallāh al-Shīʿī to the teaching of Ismaili, for which he later also considered Missionary ( dāʿī ) was active. From the year 909 he became an eyewitness to the overthrow of the Aghlabid dynasty and the proclamation of the Imam of the Ismailis al-Mahdi as the first Fatimid caliph in Raqqada .

Ibn al-Haitham is one of the earliest chroniclers of the Fatimid dynasty along with Jafar the Chamberlain . His “Book of Disputations” (Kitāb al-Munāẓarāt) , a reconstruction of his personal discussions with the leaders of the Ismailis of Africa Abu Abdallah Hussein asch-Shi'i and his brother Abu'l-Abbas from the months (March 909 to January 910) before the proclamation of the Fatimid Caliphate.

Heinz Halm also credited him with the authorship of the Vita des Mahdi (Sīrat al-Imām al-Mahdī) . This biography ends with the death of Mahdi in 934. This work, too, has only survived as a copy from the 15th century (in ʿUyūn al-Akhbār of Imad ad-Din Idris, † 1468). The fragments were edited by Samuel M. Stern without recognizing their origin.

literature

• Heinz Halm , Two Fatimid Sources from the Time of Caliph al-Mahdī (909–934). In: Die Welt des Orients, Vol. 19 (1988), pp. 102-117.
• Farhad Daftary , Ismaili Literature: A Bibliography of Sources and Studies. London 2004, p. 177.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ See Wilfried Madelung and Paul E. Walker, The Advent of the Fatimids: a Contemporary Schi'ì Witness. London 2000.
2. ↑ See Samuel M. Stern, Al-Mahdī's reign according to the ʿUyūn al-Akhbār. In: Studies in Early Ismaʿīlīsm (1983), pp. 96–145.