The Evaluations on Hamdanids’ Shi‘ah and the character of Hamdanid Shi‘ah

The Amirs who want to benefit from the weakening of Abbasid Caliphate, began to declare their independence in the places remote from the central onwards of the tenth century. As a result of these developments, Hamdanids who had dominated al-Djazira, Mosul and Aleppo, had established a detached state in the region but they also had accepted the political domination of the Abbasids. Due to Hamdan b. Hamdûn as their ancestor, this Amirats named as Bani Hamdan, Al-Hamdan has managed to capture northern Syria, al-Djazira, and Iraq's some cities in a short period of time. In which retain, they played an important role in the political and religious life. Hamdanids who had begun as executive manager in areas under their control, were influenced from Shia in that century and then as a result of accepting Shiism, they behaved it in their various applications. After dominating al-Djazara, Hamdanids who had completed the nationalization process, have shown their adopting Shiism in suppressed coins, in the restoration of the places sacred by Shia, in the poetries of the poets who had joined to Hamdanids and the extremists Shiites under their patronage. Besides, many debates over the nature of faith adopted by Hamdanids took place and each scholar has suggested some evidence to prove his opinion. The most prominent issues in that sense, it is questionable whether Hamdanids are Nusayri. After the death of Ibn Nusayr, Husayn b. Hamdan al-Hasibî an Alawi Nusayri, When he came to Syria’s Aleppo city, he presented his work named "al-Hidaya” in which praising twelve imams and emphasizing the Shiism identity, to Aleppo orders Sayf ad-dawla and this is seen as the most important claim of the proponents dealing with the Nusayrîya of Hamdanids. However, differing the imagination of Nusayri about the Twelve Imams and the imagination of the person or group supported by Hamdanids, is relatively eliminate the claim of that the Hamdanids are Nusayris.

Keywords

Abbasid Caliphate, Hamdanids, al-Djazira, Mosul, Aleppo, Shi’ah, Nusayris