The Qarmaṭians (Qarāmiṭa, sing. Qarmaṭī) were a subsect of the Ismāʿīlī Shīʿī branch of Islam. The name is derived from that of one of the earliest propagandists (dāʿī) of the sect in Lower Iraq, Ḥamdān b. al-Ashʿath, called Qarmaṭ, whose nickname was said to mean “short-legged, of short stature” in the local Aramaic dialect (Ibn al-Nadīm, 238). Other variants of the name are Qarmaṭūya (al-Nawbakhtī, 61) and Karm…