Imam Al Nasir Ahmad Ibn Yahya (D. 325AH)
Imam al-Nāṣir li-Dīn Allāh Aḥmad ibn Yaḥyā
Son of Imam al-Hādī ilā al-Ḥaqq — Peace Be Upon Him
At the time of his father’s death, Imam al-Nāṣir was in the Ḥijāz. When he arrived — after Imam al-Murtaḍā had withdrawn and secluded himself for worship — the two Imams met, and Imam al-Murtaḍā pledged allegiance to his brother Imam al-Nāṣir.
Imam al-Murtaḍā said — in an address of his when he withdrew from the Imamate:
“Then, O company of Muslims, you turned to me at the death of al-Hādī (peace be upon him) and pressed me to accept your pledge of allegiance. So I conducted your affairs in the manner that al-Hādī used to conduct them, and I did not clothe myself in any of the trappings of your world, nor did I take little or much of your wealth. Then, when God disgraced the Qarmaṭī and spared the believers the fighting — and God is Strong, Mighty — I pondered my affair and yours, and considered what I encounter of your dispositions, and I found your affairs running other than upon their proper course, and I found you inclining toward falsehood and recoiling from the truth.
And from what we command you of obedience to God, you are turning away and recoiling from it, and toward the enemies of God and the enemies of His religion — the ignorant, the dissolute — inclining; while the Wise, the All-Knowing has said: “And do not incline toward those who do wrong, lest the Fire touch you, and you would have no protectors besides God; then you would not be helped.” [Hūd: 113]
So when I did not find among you anyone who aids the truthful, the upholder of truth, who enjoins the good, who desires jihād, and who chooses the pleasure of God over the pleasure of the created — except the few in the tribe and the scant of the community — I lowered this world to the basest of stations in my soul, and I gave preference to the Hereafter.
And that is not out of any disdain on my part for the duty of struggle against the wrongdoers, the confronting of the dissolute, and the disavowal of the unjust. I became certain that safety with God lies in renouncing the world, occupying oneself with the worship of the Lord of the Worlds, and secluding oneself from all created beings — after my returning to the Book of God, my mind’s occupation with pondering its verses, and the employment of my thought on its commands and restraints, its clear and its ambiguous, its particular and its general, its command and its prohibition, its abrogating and its abrogated — and I found it making incumbent upon me a firm obligation to disavow this affair and binding me with a decisive bond to abandon it. So thereupon I followed the command of God and submitted to His judgment.
If, after that, a valid case is established for God upon me, and I find for the truth helpers and in the religion brethren, I will rise with the command of God, seeking His reward, judging by His Book, following the Sunnah of His Prophet ﷺ — I will not part from it until God makes the truth mighty and brings falsehood to nothing. But if I do not find for that truthful helpers and brethren following the command of God, I will not, after certainty, enter into doubt; and I would be in that as God Most High said: “So turn away from them, for you are not to be blamed.” [al-Dhāriyāt: 54]
— Imam al-Murtaḍā Muḥammad ibn Yaḥyā (peace be upon him)
When Imam al-Murtaḍā pledged allegiance to his brother Imam al-Nāṣir and the people pledged allegiance to him at the mosque of Imam al-Hādī ilā al-Ḥaqq — a great multitude having gathered on a Friday — the erudite scholar Ibrāhīm ibn Muḥammad al-Tamīmī composed this splendid ode, recorded in both Al-Ḥadāʾiq al-Wardiyya and Maṭlaʿ al-Budūr:
A people whose father is the Messenger of God — it suffices them
that he is, to the exclusion of all mankind, a father to them.
Who is it that vies in glory with the children of the Prophet,
and who comes near, in their lineages, in his own lineage?
A people such that when other peoples boast and strive,
you find every object of pride among them to have been merely acquired.
Had not God redeemed us through their religion,
we would not have ceased prostrating as idolaters, worshipping the crosses.
Gabriel abode in their houses for long ages,
reciting from God, within their precincts, the revealed scriptures.
You are persons whom we found God has made for us a means toward Him,
when we take refuge in Him.
The religion and the world are not set right by anyone but you,
and it cannot be said of one who is exalted through you that he has lied.
Whoever finds fault with you out of envy has found fault with God;
and whoever finds fault with God has perished and is destroyed.
God did not ordain any recompense other than your love —
to your grandfather, the Seal of the Messengers, who was chosen.
The due of blessing upon you and supplication for you is an obligation
upon everyone who prays and everyone who delivers a sermon.
This is Abū al-Ḥasan — and generosity is paired with him —
who has become, in Yemen, a source of security for whoever feared.
He governed affairs that had before been neglected,
and rose among us with the religion of God, seeking its reward.
When the people of wealth veil themselves from supplicants and refuse,
you do not find him, out of fear of poverty, veiled.
He has firm traits: his words are “yes,” his deeds are generosity;
he is gladdened if something is asked of him.
He gives the abundant, is not content with the little,
and does not treat a friend harshly for a fault, in earnest or in jest.
When the son of the Messenger of God appeared, sword drawn, on the day of Friday
in Khawlān when he rode,
Bands surrounded him so dense that bands were cramped for them,
around which were bands following yet other bands —
The men of Saʿd ibn Saʿd and of al-Rabīʿa, when they came to him all together,
a clamorous1 host,
As though he were the open sea when its surging waves heaved,
when the waves of the ocean dashed against one another and piled up;
Or like the wide cloud when its rain-clouds gathered,
and it covered the earth and the horizons and poured down.
He pleased the eyes, and the Muslims rejoiced in him,
and he grieved whoever opposed Islam, so he became downcast.
Upon the brink of a crumbling, caving bank were their positions —
they could not flee from its sparks,
until a Lord came to their rescue from it, through your grandfather,
and delivered them — He who delivered the Arabs from it.
So God joined, through His benefaction, between the two of them2 —
by your blessing — so He removed the war and they kept company.
Those are the favors you have with all the worlds for you,
against which they would not weigh either silver coin or gold.
So you are a mercy among us for our first and our last;
and this gratitude has now become obligatory.
— Ibrāhīm ibn Muḥammad al-Tamīmī (may God be pleased with him)
By God, how excellent he is! How sweet are its wordings, how fragrant its diffusion, and how truthful its meaning! As the report has it — brought forth by Aḥmad in his Musnad and by Abū Dāwūd from Ibn ʿAbbās: “Indeed, of eloquent speech there is that which is like magic, and of poetry there is that which is wisdom.” And Abū Dāwūd also brought forth, from the ḥadīth of Burayda: “Indeed, of eloquent speech there is magic, of knowledge there is ignorance, of poetry there is wisdom, and of speech there is tongue-tied ineptitude.”
Imam al-Nāṣir continued upholding the command of God and contending with His enemies, and God gave him ascendancy over all the regions of Yemen. The rulings of the upright ḥanīfī creed rang out clear, the banners of the Muhammadan lineage were extended over it, and he extirpated the masters of the heretical call from among the Bāṭinī Qarāmiṭa.
They had formed strong factions, and the earth quaked with them — but the swords of Imam al-Nāṣir took them: in a single battle at Nughāsh,3 forty-eight chiefs of their callers were killed, while the armies and followers suffered losses beyond counting — until the blood ran like the running of rivers.
ʿAbdullāh ibn ʿUmar al-Hamdānī,4 author of the biography of the Imam and one of his horsemen, said:
“I have witnessed war, but I never saw a day like the day of Nughāsh with more slain from the enemies of God, the Qarāmiṭa. I halted my horse in a place where the slain were many, and I heard a gurgling of blood like the gurgling of water when it descends from a height. When the rout fell upon them, they took to the mountain generally, on account of their multitude, and the wild beasts entered among them and were killed. We found among them dead men with their weapons intact, having no wound upon them — and that was on account of God’s help for the People of the House of His Prophet.”
— ʿAbdullāh ibn ʿUmar al-Hamdānī
By this battle the props of the heretics collapsed, and God annihilated them from the land of Yemen after they had attempted to demolish Islam and to undo the bonds of the religion.
There is no doubt that the renewers (mujaddidūn) of the third century AH are these Imams — and the greatest impact in the renewal belongs to al-Hādī ilā al-Ḥaqq and al-Nāṣir al-Uṭrūsh. Their two swords renewed the religion in the east and the west of the Islamic world, while their pens filled it with the proofs of the intellects and the soundly-transmitted reports.
- Kitāb al-Tawḥīd — of the utmost clarity and refinement
- Kitāb al-Najāt — thirteen parts
- Kitāb Masāʾil al-Ṭabariyyīn — two parts, on jurisprudence
- Kitāb ʿUlūm al-Qurʾān
- Four parts on jurisprudence
- Kitāb al-Tanbīh
- Answer to the Ibāḍī Khawārij
- Kitāb al-Dāmigh — four parts
God took him on the eighteenth of Dhū al-Ḥijja in the year 325 AH. The duration of his undertaking the Imamate was twenty-three years. His grave is at the shrine of his father Imam al-Hādī ilā al-Ḥaqq in Ṣaʿda (may God be pleased with them).
- Abū Muḥammad al-Qāsim al-Mukhtār
- ʿAlī
- Yaḥyā progeny in Yemen
- Ismāʿīl progeny in Aleppo (Ḥalab) and elsewhere
- Al-Ḥasan al-Muntajab children in Baghdad
- Dāwūd progeny in Rām Hurmuz and elsewhere
- Al-Rashīd progeny in Damascus
- Ibrāhīm progeny in Egypt
- Muḥammad in Aleppo
- Al-Ḥusayn
- Al-Mahdī
The attachment of the prepositional phrase that precedes the negating mā to what comes after it — as in our saying “bi-sayfayhimā mā in tuʿaddu al-waqāʾiʿ” (“with the two of their swords — innumerable the battles”) — has precedent in Arabic usage. An example is the saying of ʿAbdullāh ibn Rawāḥa (may God be pleased with him): “wa-naḥnu ʿan faḍlika mā istaghnaynā” (“and we, of your bounty, have never been independent”). So there is no weakness of construction in it — noted by the Author (peace be upon him).
Scholarly References & Annotations
Al-lajab (with vowels): clamor and shouting; an army that is lajib is one possessing clamor — noted by the Author (peace be upon him).
That is, the two warring tribes — God joined between them through Imam al-Hādī ilā al-Ḥaqq and through his children (peace be upon them), just as He joined between the Aws and the Khazraj through the Messenger ﷺ; the poet alludes to that by his words “for our first and our last” — noted by the Author (peace be upon him).
Nughāsh (with ḍamma on the nūn): a town in the mountain of ʿIyāl Yazīd, north of ʿAmrān; to it the Battle of Nughāsh is ascribed.
In Al-Shāfī he is named ʿAbdullāh ibn Muḥammad al-Hamdānī, but it has been verified that he is Ibn ʿUmar in all the other references — such as Al-Ḥadāʾiq al-Wardiyya, Maṭlaʿ al-Budūr, and Al-Tuḥfa — and he is the one mentioned in the reports and the verses. What is in Al-Shāfī is perhaps a slip of the pen. He is among the eminent, sincere mujāhidīn — noted by the Author (peace be upon him).