A Google English-language search for Ibn Sabaʾ turns up sufficient “hits” to attest to his person as a still controversial figure in Islam. Just one URL of an article on him (e.g., see http://gift2shias.com/2013/04/23/ibn-saba-the-jew-the-spiritual-father-of-the-rafidha-an-unquestionable-truth/ [accessed 10 July 2013]) attests to an effort to tar Shiʿism with the brush of association with the man. Together with Arabic-language sites attacking Ibn Sabaʾ's supposed legacy for Shiʿism, these are but one example of the contemporary, broad, and widespread anti-Shiʿi, and particularly anti-Twelver, discourse “alive” on the web today.
In the past, as Sean Anthony notes, among “many early and medieval Muslim scholars, Ibn Sabaʾ and the sabaʾīya stand at the nexus of the earlier incarnations of Islamic sectarianism” (p. 2). For anti-Shiʿi writers, Ibn Sabaʾ was “the leader of the party responsible for first despoiling the original, pristine unity” of the early Muslim community, a Yemeni Jewish convert to the faith who conceptualized ʿAli's role as the Prophet's successor in light of the succession of Joshua to Moses or even depicted ʿAli as Allah incarnate. For Shiʿi scholars, he was the “quintessential ‘extremist’ heretic (ghālī) . . . a veritable icon of ghulūw (a term in the Shī’ite context that usually denotes [his] excessive veneration for ʿAli as immortal or divine)” (pp. 2–3).
Anthony's goal is to unpack the various portrayals of ʿAbd Allah b. Sabaʾ—to whom Anthony, following perhaps the best-known source on the subject, the Kufan Sayf b. ʿUmar al-Tamimi (d. ca. 796), refers to as Ibn al-Sawdaʾ (son of the “dark-skinned” woman [p. 72])—and the sabaʾīya in these sources.
The volume comprises three sections. In the first, Anthony covers Sayf's account, its place in early Islamic historiography, and Sayf's use of Ibn Sabaʾ and the sabaʾīya in his account of the caliphate of ʿUthman (d. 656) and events up to and including the 656 Battle of the Camel between the forces of ʿAli, who succeeded ʿUthman to become the fourth caliph, and those of Aʿisha, the Prophet's widow. This battle marked the first fitna, or civil war. As Anthony notes, Sayf's was not the only discussion of Ibn Sabaʾ, and the second section of the study addresses medieval heresiographers and theologians’ references to the man and the movement. The third part of the study then attempts a critical reconstruction of the history of the sabaʾīya from the Umayyad period through the second fitna (661–91), the fate of the group, and its legacy for later Umayyad Shiʿism.
As to Sayf's work on the ridda (apostasy) wars and on the Battle of the Camel, respectively, both discovered together only in 1991 in Riyadh (p. 15f), Anthony argues that Sayf's narrative is a distinctly pro-ʿUthman and anti-Shiʿi one that is markedly at variance with most other accounts. Sayf portrays Ibn Sabaʾ's followers as participants in and therefore responsible for the murder of ʿUthman, for example, and depicts Egypt as a hotbed of sabaʾīya activity and sympathies (p. 99). Even if Sayf “harbours no particular grievance against ʿAli” (p. 101), he does not, in Anthony's view, recognize ʿAli as caliph and that Sayf's efforts were key to later Sunni efforts—for example, by al-Tabari and Ibn ʿAsakir—to create a “sacral, iconic vision of ʿUthman as a consummately righteous caliph” (p. 101). This was a direct challenge both to “Shiʿi and Khārijī moralism” (p. 102) and to the view that ʿUthman's policies represented a profound break with those of his two predecessors. In later works, therefore, ʿUthman's opponents emerge as “rabble” (ghawghāʾ) and ʿUthmān himself as a ruler killed unjustly (maẓlūm) rather than as an “oppressor (ẓālim) toppled” (p. 103). Ibn Sabaʾ himself emerges “not as a sectarian but the fount of sectarianism of all stripes” (p. 133) who plots, schemes, and “invents abhorrent and corrosive doctrines” (p. 143).
The heresiographical material, however, had its own, separate, that is, non-Sayfian and even pre-Sayfian, dynamic. This favored attribution to Ibn Sabaʾ of such archetypical doctrines as that of ʿAli's return after his death, rajʿa—for which term he offers the translation of parousia—that of ʿAli's divinity while still alive, and, to a lesser extent, Ibn Sabaʾ's originating the insulting (sabb) of the first two caliphs and the Companions as well as the idea that ʿAli had access to hidden parts of the Qurʾan. Anthony cites works in this tradition by the Shiʿi authors Nawbakhti (d. ca. 912–22) and the latter's contemporary Saʿd al-ʿAshʾari al-Qummi, deriving from an account attributed to Hisham b. al-Hakam, a companion of the sixth Imam, itself deriving from what Anthony suggests are non-Shiʿi accounts (p. 157). Another archetype is Ibn Sabaʾ's execution by ʿAli for proclaiming ʿAli's divinity, missing in the pseudo-Hisham account but, as with the story of ʿAli's execution of some ghulāt who had proclaimed him divine, later “grafted” onto other existing Ibn Sabaʾ narratives, embellished and eventually linked with the rajʿa narrative (pp. 164, 171). Together such accounts bespeak of Shiʿi efforts to distance themselves from “extremist” views that could threaten the welfare/existence of the community (p. 183). Anthony cites evidence that some in fact reappropriated and tweaked aspects of the execution narrative, such that ʿAli either pardoned these elements or executed them for revealing his secret, or that Ibn Sabaʾ himself returned from the dead. The author devotes all of Chapter 6 to the first of the above archetypes, Ibn Sabaʾ's denial of ʿAli's death, and his affirmation that ʿAli would not die “until he leads the people/Arabs with his staff (ʿaṣāʾ)” and that ʿAli “shall fill the Earth with justice as it is now filled with injustice” (p. 196).
Here and elsewhere, Anthony is mindful of contemporary non-Islamic parallel traditions. Thus, he notes the idea that ʿAli, like the Qurʾanic Jesus, did not die. Anthony moreover argues that the allusion to the staff was reflective of “a robust, late antique, particularly Jewish tradition” (p. 219f) and that Ibn Sabaʾ's denial of ʿAli's death more generally was in sync with “late antique Jewish apocalypticism” (p. 222). Anthony had also earlier referred to Sayf's understanding of the apostle Paul's corruption of Christianity as a means of identifying Ibn Sabaʾ not merely as sectarian but as the “fount of sectarianism” (p. 133). Anthony concludes his discussion by noting that of all the “traditions and legends” ascribed to Ibn Sabaʾ, the most “compelling evidence on the side of historicity” (p. 241) is his belief in Ali's rajʿa, which, he notes, also appears in the earliest traditions about the Imam's death.
In the volume's third and final portion, the long Chapter 7, Anthony recounts but also attempts to rescue the sabaʾīya from the numerous and conflicting traditions and legends of the Umayyad period, including those surrounding the 685–87 rising of Mukhtar in Kufa and its aftermath. In fact, Anthony's de/reconstruction thereof recalls Madelung's effort, in his The Succession to Muhammad (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), to untangle the events following the death of the Prophet himself. In the process, Anthony charts the “profound debt of Mukhtār's movement and his Sabaʾīya” (p. 275) to the discourse of Ibn Sabaʾ. Not long after his passing, Mukhtar joined the panoply of those—including ʿAli and his sons al-Hasan and al-Husayn—who were among the “righteous dead destined to return to this world” (p. 292), even as the sabaʾīya themselves appear to have ceased to be an “integral, definable group” (p. 309). In the process, Anthony confronts, in some detail, not only the relevant Arabic sources, but the interpreters thereof to date, including Helga Brentjes, Michael Cook, and Patricia Crone.
Anthony concludes that Ibn Sabaʾ was really an “anecdotally iconic representative of all those who nurtured a hope that ʿAli's victory still loomed over the horizon, despite his death” (p. 313). The alleged “Jewish connection” was in the same “late antique and medieval” (p. 314) tradition of tarring by association with Christians, Magians, Manicheans and even “Persians” (p. 314, n. 2); Christian and Jewish polemicists also employed such “myth-making” (p. 315). Nevertheless, it was the notion of the rajʿa that would outlast the period and inform Shiʿism from this period forward.
To reach, and to have documented so robustly, this point was a Herculean task. Anthony accomplishes it in a fashion reminiscent of Madelung's 1998 contribution. As such, The Caliph and the Heretic is eminently worthy of the attention of serious scholars. The ghawghāʾ on the web will likely accord it short shrift.
