2018 Volume 53 Pages 95-107
This study presents a hitherto unknown attestation from the mid-fifteenth century CE of the followers of the Muḥammad Shāhī branch of Nizārī Ismāʿīlism. The attestation in question is a marginal note found on folio 25b of MS British Library Or. 1406, a notebook of a Twelver Shiʿi genealogist from Najaf. The subject of the marginal note is a “madhhab” (religious group) attributed to a Khūn Muḥammad, a figure identifiable as the Nizārī imam Khudāwand Muḥammad (fl. in the second half of the fourteenth century). The note includes references to Khurāsān, Ray, Sulṭāniyya, and “K-S-K-R Khūn Muḥammad” in Gīlān, which are mentioned as the places where sub-groups of Khūn Muḥammad’s madhhab were found at the time. The Najafī genealogist states that he met members of some of those sub-groups. The marginal note, in addition, shows the genealogist’s understanding that one such subgroup was called al-Khūndiyya. Further, the reference to a Shāh Ṭāhir in relation to the sub-group in Sulṭāniyya allows us to use this note as a source for discussing the background of Shāh Ṭāhir Dakanī, a well-known Muḥammad Shāhī imam from the first half of the sixteenth century. The Shāh Ṭāhir in the note is no doubt Dakanī’s grandfather. This linkage makes it clear that “al-Khūndiyya” as the name of Dakanī’s family derives from the family’s relationship with former Nizārī imams, that is, khudāwands, and possibly also from the family’s contemporary status as the family of the imamate, rather than simply from a (possibly fictitious) toponym Khūnd as has been explained to date. Lastly, this note enables us to establish a link between Muḥammad Shāhī Shāh Ṭāhir and Khudāwand Muḥammad, the nature of which reinforces the general understanding that Khudāwand Muḥammad was a Muḥammad Shāhī imam, in spite of a recent opinion that suggests otherwise.
