Ismaili Ta'wil of al-Qiyama — Resurrection: How Physical Resurrection on the Day of Judgment Is Given a Spiritual and Cyclical Reading in Ismaili Ta'wil as (1) the Individual's Spiritual Resurrection Through Bay'ah in Every Age and (2) the Cosmic Qiyama of the Seventh Dawr When the Batin Finally Becomes Zahir for All

In Ismaili ta'wil, al-Qiyama (القِيَامَة — Resurrection, the Rising; from *q-w-m*: to stand up, to rise; the Day of Judgment [Yawm al-Qiyama] when the dead are raised for divine judgment; the Quranic verses: 75:1-2 'I swear by the Day of Resurrection / And I swear by the soul that reproaches itself'; 22:7 'And that the Hour is coming — no doubt about it — and that God will resurrect those in the graves'; 36:51 'And the Horn is blown and at once from the graves to their Lord they hasten'; the classical reading: qiyama = a literal, physical, universal event at the end of time; the dead will be raised in their bodies; the soul and body will be reunited; judgment will occur; paradise and hell are literal; the Ash'ari majority: the resurrection is bodily and literal; the Mu'tazili and philosopher positions: the resurrection may be spiritual (souls without bodies); Ibn Rushd's double-truth reading; al-Ghazali's critiques of philosophers who denied bodily resurrection as one of the three matters of kufr; the Ismaili ta'wil of qiyama — two levels: [1] the individual qiyama: every act of bay'ah to the Imam is a personal qiyama — a spiritual rising from death [mawt kufr al-mithaq] to life [hayat walayah]; 'you were dead and He gave you life' [2:28] is the verse of the individual qiyama; this qiyama happens in history, in every age, for every mu'min who receives ta'wil; [2] the cosmic qiyama: the seventh dawr of prophecy, when the cycle of six natiq/asas pairs is complete; in the seventh dawr, the distinction between zahir and batin dissolves; the batin becomes zahir for all; there is no longer a zahiri community that observes externally and a batin community that knows internally — the totality of reality is disclosed; this is the 'rising' of the full truth; [3] the Imam and qiyama: the Imam in every age presides over individual qiyama events — each bay'ah is a mini-qiyama; the coming of the seventh dawr natiq will preside over the cosmic qiyama; [4] the takwil of physical resurrection: the physical resurrection is read as the outer form [zahir] of the spiritual reality [batin] of perpetual qiyama in the walayah relationship; the body 'rising' = the spiritual form of the mu'min being reconstituted through ta'wil; bones = the zahir of religious law; flesh = the ta'wil that gives it form; [5] the Ismaili Qiyama controversy: in 559 AH/1164 CE the Nizari Imam al-Hasan 'ala dhikrihi al-salam proclaimed the 'great qiyama' at Alamut — declaring that the spiritual qiyama had arrived and the zahiri obligations of sharia were fulfilled in the batin; this was a radical application of the ta'wil theory that was later walked back by subsequent Imams; [6] yawm al-qiyama in daily ta'wil: every moment of genuine ta'wil reception is a mini-qiyama; the mu'min 'rises' each time a deeper layer of meaning is disclosed) is the Ismaili temporal cosmology's culminating event and its ongoing personal dimension.