Доклады Международного конгресса ИИСАА. Т. 1

II. Middle East, Caucasus and Central Asia / Ближний Восток, Кавказ и Центральная Азия Доклады Международного конгресса по источниковедению и историографии стран Азии и Африки. Т. 1. 2020 93 His first encounter with Ismaili literature took place four years later in 1916 when the Russian scholar of Iranian languages, Ivan Ivanovich Zarubin (d. 1964), brought a collection of Ismaili manuscripts from the Pamirs of modern-day Tajikistan to the Asiatic Museum in St Petersburg. It was there that Ivanow began to study and edit Umm al-kitāb (The Mother of the Book) for two years until the spring of 1918. 1 Although this work remained unfinished, Ivanow did publish a short notice on this Ismaili manuscript collection in Russian. Other than that, as he writes, his knowledge of Ismailism was based on the study of Syrian manuscripts inArabic. In the 1920s, he sent some of these works in the original Persian together with English translations and commentaries to the ‘Ismaili’weekly and they were then published in Mumbai in Gujarati. 2 Learning more about the Ismaili communities in Mumbai, Ivanow decided to approach the leaders of the Khoja Ismaili community for a job and he then started working on Ismaili literature. In 1931, the 48 th Ismaili imam of the Time, Sulṭān Muḥammad Shāh, Aga Khan III (r. 1885–1957), formally appointed Ivanow to work on Ismaili literature, whichwould include all branches of the Ismaili interpretation of Islam, from literature and history to politics and philosophy. Apart from this broad instruction, theAga Khan emphasised that Ivanow should concentrate on the history of his ancestors, 3 a topic that would lead Ivanow to confront and interrogate the fabricated accounts of the ʿAbbāsids and other anti-Ismaili propaganda. However, there was a severe scarcity of genuine Ismaili texts. The state of Ismaili literature differed between the Bohra 4 and the Nizārī 5 Ismaili communities. The former had a 1 Ivanow W. Autobiography. P. 81–82. 2 Ibid. P. 82. 3 Ibid. P. 86. 4 The Bohras are a sub-branch of the Ismaili branch of Shiʿi Islam. They trace the lineage of their imam back to the Imam-caliph al-Mustaʿlī (r. 1094–1101), son of the Fatimid Imam- caliph al-Mustanṣir (r. 1036–1094). Bohra Ismailis are divided into two main sub-branches - the Dāwūdīs and the Sulaymānīs, comprising respectively circa 95 % and 5 % of the community. While there are no disagreements in their religious tenets, they differ from one another only in following the line of successors from two different dāʿīs, namely the 27th Dāʿī Muṭlaq Dāwūd b. Quṭb Shāh (1591–1612) and Dāʿī Sulaymān b. Ḥasan (fl. ca 1589) respectively. 5 The Nizārī Ismailis represent the largest segment of the Shiʿi Imami Ismaili branch. They trace their lineage back to al-Mustanṣir’s eldest son and designated successor, Niẓār Aga Khan III (r. 1885–1957) Courtesy National Portrait Gallery, London