Knowledge through the Imam in Isma'ilism

This week's blog will not be as interesting as I have been sick the entirety of last week and thus have not been able to engage with the material, either through the lectures or the readings and thus this blog will be based on notes I have received from some fellow students.

So far the ideas on modes of knowledge have been centered around me. How I could come to knowledge. Sometimes it was to be found within myself and sometimes it needed a connection with something higher; the active intellect or God, yet never another person. This week diffiates from that as in the Ismaeli conception of knowledge we need someone else, the imam, to give us knowledge.

Imams are the means through which God communicates his messages and shares his will. They are the descendants of the prophet. They are infallible in what they tell us as he sent the imam as his messenger and God is good and therefore just, and so he would make sure the message delivered to us would not be corrupted and thus the ones he choose to convey his message must necessarily be infallible or error-free. For divinity to manifest itself we need an imam and so he was the locus of this manifestation and a representation of the secrets of cosmology.

The Ismaeli’s were very interested in the secrets of cosmology and were practitioners of the occult as talked about earlier. By imitating the Imam we can also get some of the knowledge he has by tapping into its source.