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By Root 2118 0

are mystical Sufi orders, who often penetrated a new land before the armies of Islam reached it. A great many Islamic traditions pick up the mystical mythology of heavenly ascent. They seem deeply affected by the Merkabah and Gnostic traditions that preceded them, but the traditions also develop in purely Islamic directions.37 Islam in its classical formulation disallows intercession. This powerful notion of improving one’s passage to the hereafter (or, in contemporary Islamicist explanation, improving one’s loved ones status) makes a strong comeback in Sufi and Marabout Islam, as well as in the description of the martyrs’ rewards for extremist Islamic terrorism. Veneration of saints seems to be an almost universal phenomenon in human life and Islam contains its fair share of it.38

Jews and Muslims both emphasize their own strict monotheism in any polemic against Christianity and so tend to downplay these minority traditions of mediators. The issue of mediation is important in early Christianity and certainly continued in mystical Judaism. The Kabod figure, otherwise named Metatron by the Rabbis, and one of the bases of the conception of the risen Christ as a hypostasis of God, was occasionally reimagined in mystical Islam. In Islam it also designated the primary human representation of the divinity. For instance, we find a peculiar report in the Quran that the Jews compromise Biblical monotheism by worshiping Ezra: “The Jews say, “Ezra (‘Uzair) is the Son of God’; the Christians say, ‘The Messiah is the Son of God.’” This suggests that the prophet knew of these mystical traditions of mediation among Jews as well as among Christians.

Gordon Newby argues that ’Uzair is not actually the Biblical Ezra but should be equated with another familiar Biblical figure-namely, Enoch-who becomes the angel Metatron in 3 Enoch.39 All of these traditions seem to underlie the Quran’s statements and to make them most fully intelligible. Steve Wasserstrom also suggests that the original name may be Azaz’el, from the term for the Biblical scapegoat (e.g., Lev 16:10) that eventually becomes the name for an angel (one of “the sons of God”), though a fallen one in the Enoch tradition.40

But, in spite of the warning, the same kind of doctrine shows up in Islam, in the ghuluww (the early extremist Gnostics and mystical Shi’a, a forerunner to Ṣufism which was often held heretical).41 According to these doctrines, God himself did not create the universe, rather relegated (fauwwida) the act of Creation to a lesser divinity.42 The clearest instance of this binitarianism is quite similar to the Jewish traditions about Metatron and can be found in the ’Umm al-Qitab, a Persian Gnostic apocalypse of the eighth century. Salman al-Farisi, a human, becomes a demiurgic divine potency in the ’Umm al-Qitab. But the demiurge is patterned on Metatron, as suggested by the phrase “lesser Salman,” as in Metatron’s “the lesser Lord.”43 Mas’udi in the tenth century, brings up the “Ashma’ath” (themselves categorized as a kind of Isra’iliyyun, “Judaizers”),44 who adore a “little Lord,” (ar-rabb aṣ-ṣaghir). The name itself is related to the Latin demon Asmodeus and may go back to Biblical traditions about the Samaritans, a mixed population of those Israelites left behind by the Assyrians and those whom the Assyrians brought in to resettle the land of Israel. Those who came from Hamath are said to have made Ashima their god (2 Kgs 17:31).

The transmitter of these traditions is likely to be Karaite Jews, not the Samaritans, who are too marginal to carry such a well-attested tradition. Maqdisi also mentions the Ashma’ath but says that most Jews follow the beliefs of Ashma’ath or ‘Anan, the founder of Karaism, apparently assuming they are both founders of sects, if they are not meant to be the same. Ibn Hazm mentions the Ash’aniyya, whom he thinks are Rabbinic Jews. He criticizes them as worshipers of the Little Lord (ar-rabb aṣ-ṣaghir). Su’udi in the sixteenth century says that the Ashma’iyya assert that their creator has the form of an old man with white hair and a beard.