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Three concepts in particular played a major role in the Ismaili survival of the Mongol depredations: taqiyya (precautionary dissimulation); the Ismaili da'wa, which literally means “summons”; and the soteriological dimension of the imamate. The latter was exceptionally important as it emphasized the role of the Imam of one's time in leading the adept to salvation and a mystical recognition of God.

As their wave of devastation swept through the Near East, Mongol hordes led by Hulagu Khan sought the complete extermination of the Ismailis and the destruction of their state centered at Alamut. Misled by the writings of Hulagu's courtier Juwayni, many of the Persian historians and later Western authors believed that the community had indeed been annihilated. While the continued survival of the Ismailis has now become clear, what has hitherto remained largely underestimated — if not completely unnoticed — is the persistence of their activities in the South Caspian regions of Gilan, Daylam, and Mazandaran, including at the fort of Alamut itself in the wake of the Mongol invasions.

This chapter concentrates on two distinct periods in the history of the Nizari Ismailis of Gujarati ancestry, namely the East African era and the Western settlement and the way in which cultural commodities have been transported, adapted and remoulded as a result of these migratory processes. Gulbanu and Kassamali connect their experiences of leaving India for East Africa. Communal networking in Britain was re-established by way of letter writing, telephone calls and other social activities. The recitation of ginans is an integral part of congregational worship amongst the Ismailis. The Ismailis mirrored the ways of life in their original homeland, Gujarat, while adapting aspects of the local majority culture and sometimes they merged the two together to create new hybrid forms, many of which are still in existence today.

This chapter includes several of the postcolonial issues raised by Harjot Oberoi's work and analyzes them in the context of a newly conservative community of Ismaili Muslims. It talks about Tazim Kassam who published her book Songs of Wisdom and Circles of Dance: Hymns of the Satpanth Ismā'īlī Muslim Saint, Pīr Shams in 1995. A thirteenth-century saint, Pīr Shams was also a composer and a pivotal figure in the tradition of Ginans, daily liturgical hymns used by the Fatand Nizari Ismaili sect of Shia Muslims. This chapter mentions the Ginans that represent a Hindu–Muslim synthesis of a highly creative kind. Like Oberoi with his historical study of the Sikhs, Kassam attempts a historical reconstruction of the origins of a religious group: the Sat Panths Ismailis, the Indian version of the Fatand Nizari sect.

This chapter examines the origins of the concept of taqiyya or dissimulation, and its practice among Ismailis through the ages. It also discusses the various geographies in which the Ismailis lived as a religious minority. Taqiyya has two contradictory effects among Ismailis. It helped preserve the Ismailis as a community in their own right, but also fostered assimilation into the larger and more powerful groups among whom they lived such as the Twelver Shi،ites, Sunnis and Sufis. But even when communities were preserved, they also developed syncretistic belief systems, showing hybridities due to acculturation into the beliefs of other communities. Although the principle of taqiyya provided a measure of security against external threats, it also led to internally generated threats through syncretism, and through the hybrid practices and systems of belief it created and fostered.

Chapter 6 seeks to re-frame or redescribe this so-called golden age by arguing that Islam provided the intellectual and religious context for the florescence of Judaism at a formative moment in its development. In this, the context was little different from what went on in the late antique period. The chapter argues that the border separating Jew from Muslim in this period may still be more retrofitted from the present than real. It examines some key Jewish thinkers—Judah Halevi, Baḥya ibn Paqūda, Abraham ibn Ezra, Moses Maimonides—with the aim of showing how they continued to destabilize the line between Judaism and Islam. Even in the late twelfth century, “Islamic Judaism” existed subsequent to that fact that rabbinic Judaism had been historically overdetermined as normative. Indeed, so much so that rabbinic Judaism continued to absorb many elements of Islam to change not only its margins but also its center.