A Yemeni Family at the Cradle of the Dawat
When the Imam al-Tayyib (AS) entered concealment after the assassination of his father Imam al-Amir (AS) around 526 AH / 1131–1132 CE, the leadership of the Mustaali-Tayyibi community passed to the institution of the Dai al-Mutlaq, established in Yemen under the patronage of the Sulayhid queen al-Sayyida al-Hurra Arwa bint Ahmad (RA). The men who carried this office in its first generations were drawn overwhelmingly from one great Yemeni tribal confederation — the Banu Hamdan — and most especially from one of its scholarly branches, the family known to the dawat as the Hamidis (al-Hamidi).
The Hamidi tradition is, in effect, the founding scholarly tradition of the Tayyibi dawat. From it came the second, third and fourth Dais al-Mutlaq, a continuous line of father-to-son succession, and the earliest systematic works of Tayyibi esoteric science (haqaiq) that have shaped the community’s thought ever since. To understand the Hamidi dais is to understand how a hidden Imamate in Egypt became a durable, learned, transmissible tradition rooted in the mountains of Yemen.
For the wider framework, see Dai Al Mutlaq Institution, Imam Al Tayyib, Hurrat Al Malika and Bohra History.
The Hamdani Foundation: Sayyidna Dhuayb and al-Khattab
The first Dai al-Mutlaq, Sayyidna Dhuayb ibn Musa al-Wadii al-Hamdani (RA), was himself a son of the Banu Hamdan, from its Wadii branch. Appointed by Queen Arwa (RA) — the sources place his designation in the years following 526 AH, with his tenure conventionally reckoned as 532–546 AH / 1138–1151 CE — he led the dawat from northern Yemen and died at Huth.
Sayyidna Dhuayb’s first great deputy (mazoon) was another towering Hamdanid, the warrior-poet and theologian al-Khattab ibn al-Hasan al-Hamdani (RA), of the chiefs of al-Hajur, who fell defending the dawat and the Sulayhid cause and died around 533 AH / 1138 CE. Al-Khattab’s poetry and treatises were among the earliest literary monuments of Tayyibi thought. Although al-Khattab himself did not hold the office of Dai, his learning helped set the scholarly tone that the Hamidi family would inherit and systematise.
It was as Sayyidna Dhuayb’s later mazoon that the figure who would define the tradition first rose to prominence: Sayyidna Ibrahim ibn al-Husayn al-Hamidi (RA).
Sayyidna Ibrahim al-Hamidi — Architect of the Tayyibi Haqaiq
Sayyidna Ibrahim ibn al-Husayn ibn Abi al-Suud al-Hamidi (RA) belonged to the Hamidi branch of the Banu Hamdan. Chosen as the chief assistant (mazoon) of the first Dai, he succeeded him on Sayyidna Dhuayb’s death and became the second Dai al-Mutlaq, c. 546–557 AH / 1151–1162 CE. He died in 557 AH (1162 CE).
Sayyidna Ibrahim (RA) is rightly regarded as the principal founder of the Tayyibi system of esoteric exegesis. His major work, the Kitab Kanz al-Walad (“The Treasure of the Child”), became the seminal text of Tayyibi haqaiq and the basis upon which generations of later authors built. In it he drew the cosmological framework of the great Fatimid dai Hamid al-Din al-Kirmani into a new synthesis, and he is credited with bringing the encyclopaedic Rasail Ikhwan al-Safa (“Epistles of the Brethren of Purity”) firmly into the Tayyibi curriculum. The result was a distinctive cosmology and a layered science of tawil (esoteric interpretation) that gave the community in concealment a complete intellectual world. See Ilm Divine Knowledge and Tawil for the doctrines this literature elaborates, and Fatimid Caliphate for the al-Kirmani inheritance.
Sayyidna Hatim — Consolidation in the Haraz Mountains
Sayyidna Ibrahim (RA) designated his own son as successor, beginning the hereditary Hamidi line. Sayyidna Hatim Muhyi al-Din ibn Ibrahim al-Hamidi (RA) thus became the third Dai al-Mutlaq, 557–596 AH / 1162–1199 CE, with one of the longest tenures of the early period. He died on 16 Muharram 596 AH / 6 November 1199 CE at al-Hutayb in the Haraz region of Yemen.
Operating from the mountainous fortresses of Haraz, Sayyidna Hatim (RA) consolidated the dawat at a time of shifting political fortunes in Yemen. He was a prolific author whose writings clarified the theology of the Imamate and the succession of the Tayyibi line. Works associated with him include the celebrated Tuhfat al-Qulub (“The Gift of Hearts”), as well as collections of his teaching assemblies (al-Majalis al-Hatimiyya) and further treatises in the haqaiq genre. His resting place at al-Hutayb later became, and remains, a major site of ziyarat for the community; the present mausoleum there is a modern structure built and renovated in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Sayyidna Ali — The Last of the Hamidi Line
The third Dai (RA) was succeeded by his son, Sayyidna Ali Shams al-Din ibn Hatim al-Hamidi (RA), the fourth Dai al-Mutlaq, 596–605 AH / 1199–1209 CE, who died on the last day of his tenure in 605 AH (31 May 1209 CE). His designation, the sources note, came on the recommendation of his father’s learned mazoon, Ali ibn Muhammad ibn al-Walid, who had served as his tutor.
Sayyidna Ali’s (RA) period was marked by political pressure in the Tayyibi heartland. Conflict among the families ruling Haraz forced him to move the headquarters of the dawat from the Haraz fortresses to Sanaa, where the Hamdanids of the city welcomed him and the prevailing Ayyubid authorities did not oppose his presence. He is reported to have been buried in Sanaa.
With Sayyidna Ali (RA) the Hamidi family line of dais came to an end. The office did not remain within the Hamidi household; it passed instead to his father’s mazoon and tutor, Sayyidna Ali ibn Muhammad ibn al-Walid (RA), the fifth Dai (605 AH / 1209 CE onward), who founded the long-lasting Banu al-Walid al-Anf line of the Quraysh that would hold the office, with interruptions, for several centuries. (Some community reckonings group the early Yemeni dais broadly as a single Hamdani-rooted era; strictly, the Hamidi family proper supplied the second, third and fourth dais, while the first Dai was a Hamdanid of the Wadii branch and the fifth inaugurated the distinct Walid line.)
Legacy of the Hamidi Tradition
The Hamidi dais bequeathed to the Tayyibi-Bohra community far more than a chain of succession. They established three enduring legacies. First, the principle of designated, learned succession — the Dai naming the most qualified scholar as his deputy and heir — which became the structural backbone of the Dai Al Mutlaq Institution. Second, a canon of haqaiq literature, anchored by Sayyidna Ibrahim’s Kanz al-Walad and Sayyidna Hatim’s Tuhfat al-Qulub, that fused Fatimid cosmology with the Tayyibi science of tawil and remains foundational to the community’s curriculum. Third, the sacralisation of Yemeni geography — above all al-Hutayb in Haraz — as a landscape of dawat memory and pilgrimage.
When the dawat eventually migrated from Yemen to India in later centuries, giving rise to the Dawoodi Bohra community of today (see Bohra History and Duat Mutlaqeen), it carried the Hamidi inheritance with it. The intellectual world first mapped by a Hamdani family in the mountains of twelfth-century Yemen continues to shape how the community understands its hidden Imam, its Dai, and its sacred sciences.
Note: dates and details for this early period are drawn from scholarly and community sources that occasionally differ on precise regnal years and on the attribution of individual works; figures here are given as conventionally reported and should be read accordingly.