Nuṣayrī

NUṢAYRĪ. - The N. are a sect which, numbering over 300,000 souls, occupies the regions between Tripoli of Syria and Antioch, with its center at Laodicea. Although their beliefs and practices cause the other Muslim confessions to place them outside islām, and although European authors have exaggerated the pre-Islamic and extra-Islamic elements that flowed together through syncretism, it is a Muslim sect and, specifically, a šī'ite one. They take their name from their first theologian Ibn Nuṣajr, who lived around 859; they are also called anṣārījah, but they prefer the name 'ala-wījah (Alawites, that is, followers of 'Alī), under which they constituted a State during the French mandate over Syria.

The legitimism of the šī'ites, in opposing to the caliphs of the Sunnis their imām, descendants of 'Alī, has reached, in its final stage, which the orthodox call that of exaggeration (guluwā), the identification of 'Alī with God. To arrive at this, it passed through the steps of an ever more daring theory, which is affected by philosophical, gnostic and mystical influences and, at the same time, by the historical vicissitudes of the movement. From beloved companion of Muhammad and his expressly designated successor, 'Alī soon passes to a higher rank, necessary to give legitimism a religious justification. Muhammad is a prophet, but the prophets bring only an external law, intended to maintain order in the community, and truths of faith expressed in the coarse manner that suits the multitude. Alongside the prophet there is need of a man who knows how to draw from the revelation its intimate meaning and transmit it to one who is capable of receiving it. In this respect 'Alī enjoys a divine illumination superior to that of Muhammad. Consequently, at the same moment in which Sunnism, not content with a Muhammad conceived as a common mortal, makes of his spirit a being anterior to the creation of the world, which Neoplatonizing emanazionism carries further to the dignity of the first emanation of God, the šī'ites, and in particular the ismā'īlites, attribute the same nature to 'Alī, seen not in his bodily form, but in the pure light of his spirit. Or else, if they do not wish to wrong the prophet, they discern behind the physical persons of Muhammad and of 'Alī, in two manifestations, a single essence, from which, ascending one step on the ladder of emanations, it is easy to reach God.

According to the Koran, Muhammad was preceded by other divine envoys. On this dogma the ismā'īlite propagandist 'Abdāllah b. Majmūn al-Qaddāh (d. ca. 1874) built a system of his own of world eras, seven in number like the ismā'īlite imām, each with its "speaking" prophet (nāṭiq) and its "silent" depositary of the esoteric truth (ṣāmī): the second superior to the first. One step further. The šī'ite propaganda had its leaders, heralds of the authority of the imām, visible or hidden. To these too it wished to give a high place. It called them bāb, or gate of access to the imām and, through him, to the divinity, of which it likewise presented them as manifestations. The person exercising this function on behalf of 'Alī it found in Salmān, a Persian whom the biography of Muhammad presents as the foreannouncer of his advent and his counselor in the digging of a ditch that prevented the Meccan army from entering Medina.

Although belonging to the šī'ite sect of the duodecimans, who recognize twelve imām, and not seven like the ismā'īlites, the N. have taken from extremist ismā'īlism the doctrine of the cycles, the part attributed to Salmān, and the exaltation of 'Alī carried to the limits of guluwā. Their series of ṣāmī and of nāṭiq (the former frankly placed before the latter) is as follows:

Preexistent to the world, the superterrestrial 'Alī lived, as in the historical 'Alī, so in all his predecessors. The same may be said of Muhammad. And even the bāb Salmān had a series of premanifestations, the first of which is the archangel Gabriel. In the divinity one adores the mystery of the three letters 'M.S. = 'Alī, Muḥammad, Salmān. 'Alī is God as Logos (ma'nā), Muhammad is God insofar as he manifests himself (ism = "name"), Salmān is God as vestibule to his own knowledge (bāb = "gate"). From 'Alī proceeds Muhammad and from the latter Salmān, who creates the world and governs it with the help of five other entities. If up to this point emanazionism still draws a very thin veil over the identification of 'Alī with God, the formula of the faith is more explicit: "There is no God but 'Alī son of Abū Ṭālib". With astral symbolism, they assimilate the divinity to the sun (northern group) or to the moon (southern group). The ism, the bāb and the five entities associated with him, together with others, constitute the "great luminous world"; below it is "the small luminous world" of spirits imprisoned in bodies; women, devoid of rational soul, and animals form "the small dark world"; at the very bottom stands "the great dark world" of demons, of dead organisms and of inert matter. The re-ascent of the fallen souls is effected in seven cycles. By precipitating them into the third and fourth world God punishes the reprobate.

Because of their monistic interpretation of Being the N. consider themselves monotheists (ahl at-tawḥīd) par excellence, and reserve the full knowledge of their doctrine only to the elect class, subject to initiatory ceremonies in which wine is a ritual element, which also has symbolic value in ṣūfism (v.). The common people, among whom are included, as devoid of rational soul, all women, are left to the material practices of the cult; they are ignorant, a noteworthy thing, of the mosque, while they frequent with popular predilection the tombs of the saints of the sect. To the two great feasts of orthodox islām (Breaking of the Fast and Sacrifices), to those proper to the šī'ites, and to the solar feasts, widespread in the East, of the spring and autumn equinox, the proximity of Christians has added Christmas, Epiphany, Palm Sunday, Pentecost and St. Barbara's Day. Their sacred book is the Kitāb al-maḡmū.

Martino Mario Moreno