From: The Encyclopedia of Canada's Peoples/Ismailis/Milton Israel
Ismailis trace their lineage to the seventh-century founding of the Shiite branch of Islam, which evolved out of an early dispute with the other principal branch, Sunni, concerning religious authority after the death of the Prophet. While both Shiite and Sunni branches of Islam affirm that Muhammad was the last and final prophet of Allah, they differ as to the devolution of his authority. Sunnis maintain that the Prophet had not designated a successor and that the Koran and the traditions of the Prophet were sufficient guidance for the community. Shiites, however, insist that the need for spiritual guidance continued and that the Prophet had chosen his son-in-law, Ali, as his successor and first imam.
The seventh and eighth centuries were a time of great intellectual ferment in Islam, and there was further division after the death of Jafar Sadiq, an eighth-century imam. Those who followed an elder son, Ismail, were called Ismailis. Others who followed a younger son, Musa, became known as Ithna Asharis. Although a different group, the Ithna Asharis shared with Ismailis a belief in the union of political and religious authority in the descendants of Ali. The central tenet of Ithna Ashari belief is that one of Musa’s descendants, the twelfth imam in their tradition, went into hiding and one day will reappear and bring salvation. There is a substantial community of Ithna Asharis in Canada, and their immigration pattern is similar to that of the Ismailis. About 3,000 Ithna Asharis arrived in Canada from Uganda in 1972. They have built their own educational and religious institutions in this country and retain their connection with other members of their community around the world.
The need for taqiya (secrecy) is part of the general Shiite tradition and therefore of Ismaili tradition as well. Since the Ismailis are part of a Shiite minority, they deliberately concealed their story during long periods of their history in order to protect themselves and their tradition from the dominant and frequently militant Sunni opposition. They also developed an organizational and communications network (da’wa). Their goal was the building of an Ismaili state and, by the ninth century, missionaries (da’is) were at work in the Arabian peninsula, North Africa, India, and Central Asia. In the tenth century Ismailis established the Fatimid Empire, which was centred in Egypt. The Fatimids built their capital at Cairo, whose rich intellectual and cultural life was reflected in its universities and libraries and in the quality of its scholarship in the arts and sciences. From their imperial city, Ismaili imams ruled a vast empire stretching across the Muslim world from the Mediterranean to the Sind (present-day southeastern Pakistan).
By the end of the eleventh century, Fatimid power began to decline, and another division occurred between the followers of an elder and younger son of the eighteenth Ismaili imam. The followers of the younger son, al-Mustali, eventually were concentrated in Gujarat, India, and are called Bohras. There is a small Bohra community in Canada, which retains its association with a hierarchy centred in Bombay. The followers of the elder son, Nizar, came to be known as Nizaris and, after the collapse of Fatimid power in the twelfth century, they remained active in Syria and Persia. In the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, Nizari missionaries from Persia returned along the path of their ninth-century ancestors and created in India a community of Ismaili converts who came to be known as Khojas. The Khojas would play an important role five hundred years later when the centre of Ismaili religious and political life shifted to India.
By the early sixteenth century, there was a revival of Ismaili life in Persia, where the Safavids, a Shiite dynasty, were in power. Over time, the Ismaili imams were recognized as part of the Persian hierarchy and, in 1817, the forty-sixth imam, Shah Hasan Ali Shah, was granted the title Aga Khan, which has continued to be passed down to his successors. By the 1830s renewed hostility threatened to end the long period of accommodation and, eventually, in 1848, the Aga Khan was forced to leave Persia and migrate with many of his followers to India. The Khojas, who had been building an Ismaili community life for centuries, were largely concentrated in Gujarat and Bombay. These refugees from Persia settled among them and there the Aga Khan took up his role as their leader.
During the period of British colonial rule, the Indian subcontinent was linked to a worldwide trading system that Great Britain helped to build and then dominated. Encouraged by their imam, Ismailis were among the large numbers of Indians who left the homeland in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century to seek jobs and business opportunities in the British colonies to the west. The intimate association of Indians with East Africa is a reflection of centuries of participation as merchants and traders in the great exchange of goods that connected the markets of the island world of the “Indies” and the west coast of India with Zanzibar, East African coastal ports, Arabia, Egypt, and Mediterranean Europe. The trade of north India passed through Gujarat ports on the Arabian Sea on its westward journey, and eventually substantial numbers of Indians joined in this movement as temporary sojourners and then as settlers.
By 1838 Ismailis had already built their first jamaat khana (place of gathering) in Zanzibar. In 1875 there were approximately five thousand Indians on the island, half of them Ismailis. The construction of a railway to Lake Victoria attracted thousands of labourers and skilled workers, as well as businessmen, storekeepers, and civil servants, so that by 1901 more than thirty thousand Indians were resident in East Africa. Many returned home, but a permanent community, including a substantial Ismaili population, settled in Kenya, Uganda, Tanganyika, Zanzibar, Ruanda (Rwanda), Urundi (Burundi), the Belgian Congo (Zaire), Mozambique, and South Africa.
This was a complex Indian society made up of a wide range of ethnic, linguistic, and religious groups who were part of the whole but also established their own individual communities. One of these communities were the Ismailis, who shared the Gujarati language with the majority of Indians in East Africa but were set apart by their distinctive religion and community organization. Although such divisions were the norm in their ancestral homeland, the extraordinary compartmentalization of African colonial society added another dimension of isolation, with Indians, whites, and blacks living in their own worlds and generally touching each other’s only on the margins. Behind these barriers, the Indians created religious and civic institutions, while hard work and enterprise contributed to the growth of the host countries and provided them with a livelihood and, in some cases, affluence. After generations of residing in Africa, they felt at home.
The end of British rule in East Africa in the decades after World War II placed the Indian community in jeopardy, however. Its members had generally played the classic middle role in business, the workplace, and government, filling a niche provided by the colonial regime. While some Indians may have contributed to local African independence movements, because of their relatively better economic situation and social isolation, they were generally seen as an obstacle to African aspirations to full autonomy. Business constraints, nationalization, declining job opportunities, and anti-Asian rioting quickly eroded the idea of an African homeland for an increasing number of Indians. By the late 1960s they began to leave. Initially, many moved to Great Britain but in 1971 restrictive immigration legislation closed that long-open door to most East African Indians. When Ugandan president Idi Amin expelled approximately eighty thousand Indians together with other Asians the following year, they had to look elsewhere for a new home. The six thousand who arrived in Canada were mostly Ismailis. They were required to leave behind everything that they and their families had built up over three generations and start again.
