Apocalyptic Imaginaries: The Human Form and Borderlines According to Abū Yaʿqūb al-Sijistānī

Abstract

ABSTRACT This study is interested in how apocalyptic imaginaries establish borderlines as it reconsider the manners in which Abū Ya‘qūb al-Sijistānī's discussions of the End Time resisted the messianic sovereignties implicit in 10th-century Fāṭimid Ismā’īlī thought, in particular, as he introduces a Qā'im-ology without specific reference to the Ismā’īlī imām. To do so, this study first takes a broad theoretical perspective on the aesthetics and anesthesia of the destruction and violence of the End Time, giving careful consideration to apocalyptic imaginaries in calibrated political and soteriological landscapes, turning then to Sijistānī's theories of the barzakh, the cyclical resurrection of the soul, the perfection of the human form (ba’th), and the Qā'im as a process of istishfāf, or rendering transparent the human form as the nafs zakiyyah (pure soul). The coded symbolism of a messianism that questions time's time-line points to how the political and historical horizon event of the Qā'im's rising remains obscure in select works of Sijistānī. In Sijistānī's subtle staging of Fāṭimid Ismā’īlī doctrines of messianism and divine guidance, the apocalyptic plot line of returning to an original unity is suspended. As well, the images of the End Time’s cataclysmic events are displaced.