Baha al-Din al-Muqtana

Abu al-Hasan Ali ibn Ahmad al-Sammuqi (Arabic: أبو الحسن علي بن أحمد السموقي, romanized: Abu al-Ḥasan ʿAlī ibn Aḥmad al-Sammuqī; died after 1042), better known as Baha al-Din al-Muqtana (Arabic: بهاء الدين المقتنى, romanized: Bahāʾ al-Dīn al-Muqtanā), was an 11th-century Isma'ili missionary, and one of the founders of the Druze religion. His early life is obscure, but he may have been a Fatimid official. By 1020 he was one of the chief disciples of the founder of the Druze faith, Hamza ibn Ali. The disappearance of Fatimid caliph al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah, considered by the Druze to be the manifestation of God, in 1021, inaugurated a period of anti-Druze persecution. Al-Muqtana took over the leadership of the remnants of the Druze movement in 1027, and led the missionary activity (the "divine call") of the widely scattered Druze communities until 1042, when he issued his farewell epistle (Risālat al-Ghayba, 'Epistle of Occultation'), in which he announced his retirement and the closing of the divine call due to the imminence of the end times. The Druze have been a closed community ever since. Al-Muqtana's epistles comprise four of the six books of the Druze scripture, the Epistles of Wisdom.