The Symbols (Sha’a’ir) and Their Inner Meaning
The Quran establishes the rite in a single dense verse: ‘Indeed, al-Safa and al-Marwa are among the symbols (sha’a’ir) of God; so whoever performs hajj to the House or makes umra, there is no blame upon him for going between them (an yattawwafa bihima)’ (2:158). Ismaili ta’wil seizes on the word sha’a’ir, which the tradition reads not as arbitrary cultic landmarks but as deliberately appointed signs, each pointing past its physical form to a spiritual referent in the world of walayah and the hudud al-din (the ranks of religion). To honour the sha’a’ir, on this reading, is not merely to circumambulate two outcrops of rock but to recognise the realities they signify. The da’i thus teaches that the zahir of the pilgrimage is a perfectly real obligation, performed in the body, while its batin is the recognition of the persons and ranks through whom God’s guidance reaches creation. The two hills, standing distinct yet bound to one another by the path the pilgrim treads, become a map of the cosmos of guidance.
In the classic exegesis preserved by the Fatimid da’wa, al-Safa, whose name derives from safa’ (purity and limpid clarity), is taken to designate the Natiq, the speaking-Prophet of each cycle who promulgates a revealed law in its outward, luminous form. al-Marwa is taken to designate the Asas (foundation) or Wasi (legatee), the silent partner of the Natiq, who in the Muhammadan cycle is Ali ibn Abi Talib, the carrier of the batin and the source of its ta’wil. The pair is never one without the other: just as the rite is invalid if the pilgrim touches only one hill, so guidance is incomplete with a Natiq but no Asas, with sharia but no haqiqa.
The Sa’y as the Soul’s Movement Between Zahir and Batin
The act prescribed at the two hills is not stillness but the sa’y, the brisk running back and forth, repeated seven times. Ismaili ta’wil reads this oscillation as the very condition of the believing soul, which must travel ceaselessly between the two poles of religion. Movement from al-Safa to al-Marwa is descent from the manifest revelation of the Natiq toward its hidden meaning held by the Asas; the return from al-Marwa to al-Safa is the ascent that carries the soul, now enriched by ta’wil, back to a deeper grasp of the zahir. Neither pole may be abandoned. To rest only at al-Safa is to become a literalist who clings to the husk of the law; to rest only at al-Marwa is to fall into the antinomian error of those who claim the batin while discarding the sharia. The sa’y enacts the balance the da’wa demands: zahir and batin held together, each illumining the other.
The number of circuits is itself a cipher. The seven runs are correlated with the seven Natiqs who open the great cycles of sacred history (Adam, Nuh, Ibrahim, Musa, Isa, Muhammad, and the awaited Qa’im), and with the seven Imams or the seven heptads (adwar) through which the da’wa’s cosmology unfolds. The believer who completes the seven circuits thus rehearses, in his own body, the whole arc of prophetic time and his own progressive ascent through the ranks of knowledge. The verse’s assurance that ‘there is no blame’ upon the one who makes tawaf between them is read as a quiet affirmation that the inner devotion the rite encodes, walayah to the Imams, removes the burden of sin and is the condition of acceptance.
Hagar’s Thirst and the Living Water of Knowledge
The historical root of the sa’y is the desperate search of Hajar (Hagar), left in the barren valley of Mecca with the infant Isma’il, running seven times between al-Safa and al-Marwa in search of water until the spring of Zamzam burst forth at the child’s heel. Ismaili ta’wil reads this narrative as the paradigm of the soul’s quest. Hajar is the seeking nafs, athirst not for ordinary water but for the living water of ilm, the esoteric knowledge without which the spirit perishes. Her frantic movement between the two hills mirrors the seeker’s anxious passage between the outer law and its inner truth, finding rest only when the wellspring is opened.
That wellspring is the da’wa itself, and the water is the ta’wil dispensed by the Imam of the age and his hudud. As Zamzam gushed forth not where Hajar searched on the heights but at the lowly place of the child, so the saving knowledge is granted not to the proud literalist but to the humble believer who has entered the covenant of bay’a and submitted to walayah. The Quran’s repeated coupling of water with life (‘and We made from water every living thing,’ 21:30) underwrites the figure: the sa’y of the pilgrim is the perpetual reminder that the soul lives only by drinking from the source the Imam keeps flowing, and that the two hills, the Natiq and the Asas, frame the very ground on which that water is found.
See also: Ismaili Tawil Of Al Zamzam, Ismaili Tawil Of Al Qiblah, Ismaili Tawil Of Al Hajar Al Aswad, Bayah And Walayah, Ismaili Cosmology Hudud Al Din