Nuṣayrī

NUȘAJRĪ. — The n. are a sect which, numbering more than 300,000 souls, occupies the regions between Tripoli of Syria and Antioch, with its centre at Laodicea. Although their beliefs and practices lead the other Muslim confessions to place them outside Islam, and although European authors have exaggerated the pre-Islamic and extra-Islamic elements that have flowed into their doctrine through syncretism, they are a Muslim sect and, more precisely, a Shīʿite one. They take their name from their first theologian, Ibn Nuṣajr, who lived around 859; they are also called anṣārījah, but prefer the name ʿalawījah (Alawites, that is, followers of ʿAlī), under which they established a state during the French Mandate in Syria.

The legitimism of the Shīʿites, in setting their imāms, descendants of ʿAlī, against the caliphs of the Sunnis, reached, in its final stage—which the orthodox call exaggeration (guluwā)—the point of identifying ʿAlī with God. To arrive at this, it passed through the stages of an increasingly daring theory, influenced by philosophical, Gnostic and mystical currents and, at the same time, by the historical vicissitudes of the movement. From being Muḥammad’s favourite companion and expressly designated successor, ʿAlī soon attained a higher rank, necessary to give legitimism a religious justification. Muḥammad is a prophet, but prophets bring only an external law, intended to maintain order within the community, and truths of faith expressed in the crude manner appropriate to the multitude. Beside the prophet there must be a man capable of drawing the inner meaning from revelation and transmitting it to those fit to receive II. In this respect ʿAlī enjoys a divine illumination superior to that of Muḥammad. Consequently, at the very moment when Sunnism, dissatisfied with a Muḥammad conceived as an ordinary mortal, makes his spirit a being anterior to the creation of the world, which Neoplatonizing emanationism further elevates to the dignity of God’s first emanation, the Shīʿites—and especially the Ismāʿīlites—attribute the same nature to ʿAlī, viewed not in his bodily form but in the pure light of his spirit. Or, if they do not wish to slight the prophet, they discern behind the physical persons of Muḥammad and ʿAlī, in two manifestations, a single essence, from which, by ascending one step on the ladder of emanations, it is easy to reach God.

According to the Qurʾān, Muḥammad was preceded by other divine messengers. On this dogma the Ismāʿīlite propagandist ʿAbdāllah b. Majmūn al-Qaddāḥ (d. ca. 1874) constructed his system of world ages, numbering seven like the Ismāʿīlite imāms, each with its “speaking” prophet (nāṭiq) and its “silent” depositary of esoteric truth (ṣāmit): the latter superior to the former. One step further. Shīʿite propaganda had its leaders, heralds of the authority of the visible or hidden imām. It also sought to assign these a high position. It called them bāb, or the gate of access to the imām and, through him, to the divinity, of which it likewise presented them as manifestations. The person who exercised this function on behalf of ʿAlī was found in Salmān, a Persian whom the biography of Muḥammad presents as the forecaster of his advent and his counsellor in digging a trench that prevented the Meccan army from entering Medina.

Although belonging to the Twelver Shīʿite sect, which recognizes twelve imāms, rather than seven like the Ismāʿīlites, the n. adopted from extremist Ismāʿīlism the doctrine of cycles, the role attributed to Salmān, and the exaltation of ʿAlī carried to the limits of guluwā. Their series of ṣāmit and nāṭiq (the former explicitly placed over the latter) is as follows:

Existing before the world, the superterrestrial ʿAlī lived both in the historical ʿAlī and in all his predecessors. The same

may be said of Muḥammad. The bāb Salmān, too, had a series of premanifestations, the first of which is the archangel Gabriel. In the divinity one worships the mystery of the three letters M.S. = ʿAlī, Muḥammad, Salmān. ʿAlī is God as Logos (maʿnā), Muḥammad is God insofar as he manifests himself (ism = “name”), and Salmān is God as the vestibule to his own knowledge (bāb = “gate”). From ʿAlī proceeds Muḥammad, and from him Salmān, who creates the world and governs it with the help of five other entities. If, up to this point, emanationism still places an exceedingly fine veil over the identification of ʿAlī with God, the formula of faith is more explicit: “There is no god but ʿAlī son of Abū Ṭālib.” Through astral symbolism, they assimilate the divinity to the sun (the northern group) or to the moon (the southern group). The ism, the bāb and the five entities associated with him, together with others, constitute the “great luminous world”; beneath it lies “the small luminous world” of spirits imprisoned in bodies; women, deprived of rational souls, and animals form “the small dark world”; and at the very bottom lies “the great dark world” of demons, dead organisms and inert matter. The ascent of fallen souls takes place through seven cycles. By casting the reprobate into the third and fourth worlds, God punishes them.

Because of their monistic interpretation of Being, the n. consider themselves monotheists (ahl at-tawḥīd) par excellence, and reserve full knowledge of their doctrine solely for the elect class, subjected to initiatory ceremonies in which wine is a ritual element and also has symbolic value in ṣūfism (v.). The common people, among whom all women are included as beings without rational souls, are left to the material practices of worship; notably, they know nothing of the mosque, while they frequent, with popular devotion, the tombs of the sect’s saints. To the two great feasts of orthodox Islam (the Breaking of the Fast and the Sacrifices), to those proper to the Shīʿites, and to the solar feasts, widespread in the East, of the spring and autumn equinoxes, the proximity of Christians has added Christmas, Epiphany, Palm Sunday, Pentecost and St Barbara’s Day. Their sacred book is the Kitāb al-maḡmū.

BIBLI: R. Dussaud, Histoire et religion des notariis, Paris 1900; H. Lammena, L'Islam: croyances et institutions, Beirut 1926, pp. 186-93; L. Massignon, N., in Encyclopédie de l'Islam, III, p. 1030; G. Levi Della Vida, N., in Enc. Ital., XXV, p. 84; F. M. Pareja, Islamologia, Rome 1931, pp. 381-83.

Martino Mario Moreno