After the Prophet: The Epic Story of the Shia-Sunni Split in Islam (26 page)

After Hussein, all the Imams steered clear of political involvement in favor of pure theology. But where it seemed that the Umayyads could afford to ignore them so long as they were safely distant in Medina, their existence posed more of a threat to the Abbasids. Their line of direct descent from Muhammad represented a clear contradiction of the Abbasid claim to leadership. The Imams, that is, were potential rallying points for resistance and rebellion. So whereas the Umayyads had apparently let them be in Medina, the Abbasids brought them close. In fact, from the seventh Imam on, each one was brought to Iraq and either imprisoned or kept under house arrest. And it seems quite likely that each one was indeed poisoned.

The gold-domed shrines so easily confused by Westerners are built over the tombs of the Imams. The shrines of Ali in Najaf and the
twin shrines of Hussein and his half brother Abbas in Karbala draw the largest numbers of pilgrims, but the sanctity of the other shrines is almost as great. The Khadhimiya shrine in Baghdad contains the tombs of the seventh and ninth Imams; the Imam Reza shrine in the Iranian city of Mashhad is built over the tomb of the eighth Imam; and the tenth and eleventh Imams are entombed in the Askariya shrine in Samarra, on the Tigris River sixty miles north of Baghdad.

The name of the Askariya shrine encodes the fate of the two Imams buried there. It comes from the word for a military garrison or camp, and this is what Samarra was—the Pentagon, as it were, of the Abbasid dynasty. The tenth and eleventh Imams were kept under house arrest there, making them literally
askariya,
“the ones kept in camp.”

But the Askariya shrine has even greater significance in Shiism, for the Samarra garrison is where the Shia say the twelfth Imam was born—the last and ultimate inheritor of the pure bloodline of Muhammad through Fatima and Ali, and the central messianic figure of mainstream Shiism.

His birthday is celebrated each year in what might be seen as the Shia equivalent of Christmas Eve, a joyful counterpoint to Ashura. “The Night of Wishes and Prayers,” it is called, a night when homes are hung with balloons and strings of colored lights, when people drum and sing and dance, when confetti and candies are strewn in the streets and fireworks light up the sky. A night, it seems, when wishes and prayers really could come true, which is why on this night the Shia faithful make their way not to Samarra, where the twelfth Imam was born, but to Karbala, where it is believed he will return, followed by Hussein on one side and Jesus on the other.

The twelfth Imam’s name is Muhammad al-Mahdi: “the one who guides divinely.” He is often referred to by a host of other names, including Al-Qaim, “He Who Rises Up”; Sahib as-Zaman, “Lord of the
Ages”; and Al-Muntazar, the “Awaited One.” Mostly, though, he is known simply as the Mahdi.

It is said that he was the sole child of a clandestine marriage between the eleventh Imam and a captive granddaughter of the Byzantine emperor, and that his birth was kept secret lest Abbasid poisons find him too. But on the death of his father in the year 872, when he was only five years old, a far more radical means of protection was needed, so it is the core tenet of mainstream Shia belief that in that year the Mahdi evaded the fate of his predecessors by descending into a cave beneath Samarra.

He did not die in that cave, but entered a state of
ghrayba,
“occultation,” a strictly correct translation that is also perfect in the spiritual sense, since it comes from astronomy, where it refers to one planetary body’s passing in front of another, hiding it from view. An eclipse of the sun or the moon is a matter of occultation, the source of light hidden and yet the light itself radiating out around the edges. But more plainly speaking,
ghrayba
means simply “concealment,” which is why the Mahdi is often called the Hidden Imam.

This concealment is not permanent. It is a temporary state, a suspension of presence in the world rather than an absence, and it has lasted more than a thousand years so far. The Mahdi will reveal himself again only on the Day of Judgment, when he will return to herald a new era of peace, justice, and victory over evil.

The day and month of his return are known: the tenth of Muharram, the very day on which Hussein was killed at Karbala. But the year remains unknown. And precisely because it is unknown, it is always imminent, and never more so than in times of turmoil.

One much-quoted eleventh-century treatise lists the signs and portents leading up to the Mahdi’s return, many of them familiar from Christian apocalyptic visions. Nature behaves in strange and ominous ways: lunar and solar eclipses within the same month, the sun rising in the west and then standing still, a star in the east as bright as the full
moon, a black wind, earthquakes, locusts. But the chaos and disorder of nature are merely mirrors of chaos and disorder in human affairs.

The power of the nonbelievers will spread. Fire will drop from the sky and consume Kufa and Baghdad. False mahdis will rise up and wage bloody battles against one another. Muslims will take arms to throw off the reins of foreign occupation and regain control of their land. There will be a great conflict in which the whole of Syria will be destroyed.

All this and more can sound extraordinarily specific in the modern Middle East. Iranians threw off the reins of foreign control in the revolution of 1979–80, first taking hostage and then expelling the Americans who had shored up the Shah’s regime. Fire dropped from the sky in the form of American bombardment of Baghdad during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and false mahdis waged bloody sectarian battles against one another in the vacuum of power created by the invasion. The great conflict in Syria is easily seen as that against Israel, whose territory was once part of the Muslim province of Syria.

So when Khomeini took such a strong anti-American stance and framed his stranglehold on power by announcing that he was the representative of the Mahdi and thus carrying out the Mahdi’s will, it was only a matter of time until rumors spread that he was in fact the Mahdi himself, returned to the world. There is no knowing how the rumors began—such is the nature of rumor—but it seems reasonable to suppose that they had some guidance from interested parties. Since Kho meini had already been hailed as “the heir of Hussein” and “the Hussein of our time,” it was not such a great leap from the third to the twelfth Imam. Indeed, Khomeini would take the title Imam, as though he were the natural successor to the twelve, and though he never confirmed the rumors, he never quite denied them either. They subsided only with his death in 1989, when he was entombed in a gold-domed shrine clearly modeled on those of Ali and Hussein.

Messianic fervor also helped fuel the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s,
when Iranian troops at the front woke many nights to see a shrouded figure on a white horse blessing them. Who else could it be, it was said, but the Mahdi himself? In the event, the mysterious figures turned out to be professional actors sent to create exactly that impression, but nobody could ever be sure if they appeared as a sincere homage or in cynical manipulation of popular faith.

Certainly there was nothing cynical about the way Iranian president Mahmud Ahmadinejad invoked the Mahdi when he took office in 2005. He was utterly sincere, and this made what he said all the more disturbing. Government policy would be guided by the principle of hastening the Mahdi’s return, he said—an idea quite familiar to fundamentalist Christians trying to hasten the second coming of the Messiah, and to fundamentalist Jews trying to hasten the first. Ahmadinejad appeared to be tapping into a deep well of sincerely felt faith, both his own and that of others. But as he repeatedly used the symbolism of “hastening the return” over the years, linking it to anti-American and anti-Israel rhetoric, many in the West worried about the apocalyptic implications, especially given Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

In Iraq, the sense of apocalypse was closer to home as chaos followed the American invasion of 2003. The radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr could not have chosen a more powerfully emotive name for his Mahdi Army. The name itself is a call to action that goes far beyond Muqtada’s declared aims of freeing Iraq from American occupation and battling Sunni extremism, and he made this crystal clear when he announced the formation of the social and political wing of his movement in 2008. It was to be called Mumahdiun, “those who prepare the way for the Mahdi.”

But if faith can be used as a way to channel hope for the future, it can also be used against that hope. That was what happened in February 2006, when somebody—most likely the extremist Sunni group Al Qaida in Iraq—placed explosives throughout the Askariya Mosque in Samarra. The magnificent golden dome collapsed, setting off a vicious
cycle of Shia reprisals and Sunni counterreprisals just when it seemed that the civil war was finally calming down—a cycle made yet worse when the two gold minarets that had survived the first bombing were blown up and destroyed the following year.

Al Qaida in Iraq could not have made a stronger statement. No Shia missed the significance of this wholesale destruction, for the Askariya Mosque contained not only the tombs of the tenth and eleventh Imams but also the shrine built over Bir al-Ghayba—the “Well of Disappearance”—the cave where the twelfth Imam had descended and disappeared from the world, to remain hidden until his return.

That cave was the real target of the attack. Attack the shrine of Hussein at Karbala, as has been done many times over the centuries, most notably in living memory by Saddam Hussein’s troops, and you attack the heart of Shia Islam. Attack Ali’s shrine in Najaf, as was done when American troops tried to oust the Mahdi Army from it in 2004, and you attack its soul. But attack the Askariya shrine in Samarra, and you commit something even worse: you attack the Mahdi and thus the core of Shia hope and identity. The destruction of the Askariya shrine was an attack not just on the past, or even the present, but on the future.

A
TROCITIES LIKE THE
A
SHURA MASSACRE AT
K
ARBALA IN 2004
and the destruction of the Askariya shrine in 2006 inevitably become the focus of news reports, serving as markers of escalating conflict. Imprinted as deep in the collective memory as the events of fourteen hundred years ago, they seem to ensure that the Karbala story is one without end, destined only to grow in power and significance with every new outrage.

But destiny is not so straightforwardly determined. Within a hundred years of Hussein’s death at Karbala, the split between Sunni and Shia had begun to solidify, yet it did so more around theology than politics. The extraordinary range of ethnic differences in the vast empire meant that central political authority was hard to maintain; by the ninth century, as the Abbasid dynasty weakened, religious and political authority were well on the way to being separate spheres. In the lack of a political consensus, the
ulama—
religious scholars and clerics—created an Islamic one across ethnic lines and gained the status they still have today, when more than four out of five Muslims are non-Arab.

Separate Sunni and Shia collections of
hadith
were compiled, and
the differences between them represented competing historical memories. They told different versions of the same stories, disagreeing not on what had taken place in the seventh century but on what it meant. Where Sunnis would see Muhammad’s choice of Abu Bakr as his companion on the
hijra—
the emigration to Medina—as proof that he intended Abu Bakr to be his successor, for instance, the Shia would see his declaration at Ghadir Khumm as proof of his designation of Ali. The Sunnis, in effect, would honor history as it had taken shape; the Shia would honor it as they believe it should have taken shape, and as they maintain it indeed did in a realm other than the worldly one.

By the tenth century, the Sunni Abbasid Caliphs had been reduced to little more than figureheads. Political power was in the hands of the Buyids, a strongly pro-Shia group from northeastern Persia that instituted the Ashura rituals as we know them today. But Baghdad’s hold on the empire continued to weaken, and by 1258 the city was helpless to resist the Mongol invasion under Hulagu, a grandson of Genghis Khan. The once-great empire split into a welter of localized dynasties, both Sunni and Shia. It would be another two centuries until relative stability was achieved, with the Middle East once more divided as it had been under the Byzantines and the Persians. This time the divide would be between the Sunni Ottoman empire based in Turkey and the powerful Safavid dynasty in Persia—today’s Iran—which made Shiism the state religion. Again, Iraq was the borderland, the territory where the two sides met and clashed most violently.

Yet despite the horrendous eruptions of violence in Iraq—Karbala itself came under attack numerous times, most savagely by the Wahhabis in 1802 and by Turkish troops in 1843, when one-fifth of the city’s population was slaughtered—Shia and Sunnis for the most part accepted difference rather than exacerbate it. On the everyday level, they sometimes even embraced it. The
ulama
would never be able to control popular religious customs that contradicted official practice. Veneration of Ali was common among Sunnis as well as Shia, and still is. Despite official
Sunni abhorrence of “idolatry,” pilgrimage to shrines and prayer for the intercession of holy men remained popular among Sunnis as well as Shia. And while Ashura commemorations sometimes sparked Sunni attacks, at other times Sunnis participated in the rituals along with their Shia neighbors. What happened was less a result of theological difference than of the politics of the time. As with any matter of faith, in modern America as much as in the Middle East of centuries ago, the Sunni-Shia split could always be manipulated for political advantage.

Whatever balance there was would be changed utterly by World War I and the consequent partitioning of the former Ottoman Empire. Western intervention reshaped the Middle East, often in what seems astonishingly cavalier fashion. The British enabled the Wahhabi-Saudi takeover of Arabia, installed a foreign Sunni king over Shia majority Iraq, and shored up the Nazi sympathizer Reza Khan as Shah of Iran. After World War II, the United States took over as prime mover. Motivated by Cold War ideology, it helped engineer a coup d’état against Iran’s newly elected prime minister Muhammad Mossadegh and reinstated the autocratic regime of Reza Khan’s son, Shah Reza Pahlavi, under whom Iran first aspired to nuclear power—with American encouragement. Successive U.S. administrations backed the Wahhabi-dominated kingdom of Saudi Arabia not only for access to its oil but also as a bulwark against Nasser’s pro-Soviet regime across the Red Sea in Egypt. In the 1980s the United States joined forces with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan to fund the anti-Soviet
mujahidin—
literally
jihad
fighters, or as Ronald Reagan preferred to call them, freedom fighters—in Afghanistan, and in a rather stunning example of unintended consequences, these troops later formed the basis of the Taliban. In that same decade, the United States found itself arming both sides in the Iran-Iraq War, supporting Saddam Hussein in order to counter the fierce anti-Americanism of postrevolutionary Iran, while also supplying Iran in the murky “arms for hostages” Iran-Contra affair.