After the Prophet: The Epic Story of the Shia-Sunni Split in Islam (27 page)

Such heavy-handed intervention helped create the intense anti-Westernism
that today underlies both Sunni and Shia radicalism. The fear and resentment of manipulation by the West were expressed in best-selling fashion by Iranian cultural critic Jalal Al-e Ahmad, whose 1962 book
Gharbzadegi—“
Occidentosis,” or “Westoxification”—saw Western cultural and financial dominance as a fatal disease that had to be rooted out of the Iranian body politic and by extension out of Islam as a whole. Ahmad’s call was taken up across the Shia-Sunni divide by Egyptian radical ideologue Sayyid Qutb, who helped lay the groundwork for modern Islamism. In his 1964 book
Milestones,
Qutb wrote that “setting up the kingdom of God on earth and eliminating the kingdom of man means taking power from the hands of the human usurpers and restoring it to God alone”—a deliberate echo of “Judgment belongs to God alone,” the seventh-century rallying cry of the
khariji
Rejectionists who assassinated Ali.

Sunni and Shia radicals alike called on a potent blend of the seventh century and the twentieth: on the Karbala story and on anti-Westernism. By the 1980s such calls were a clear danger signal to the pro-American Saudis, who were highly aware that radical Sunni energies could come home to roost in an Arabian equivalent of the Iranian Revolution. Their answer, in effect, was to deal with radical Islamism by financing it abroad, thus deflecting its impact at home. The Saudis became major exporters of Wahhabi extremism and its bitterly anti-Shia stance, from Africa to Indonesia, countering a newly strengthened sense of Shia identity and power—“the Shia revival,” as it’s been called—energized by the Iranian Revolution. The Sunni-Shia split had again become as politicized as when it began.

In such a confrontation, the Sunnis would seem to have a clear advantage since the Shia are only some fifteen percent of all Muslims worldwide. But raw numbers can be misleading. In the Middle East heartland of Islam, the Shia are closer to fifty percent, and wherever oil reserves are richest—Iran, Iraq, and the Persian Gulf coast, including eastern Saudi Arabia—they are in the majority. So long as oil dominates
the world economy, the stakes are again as high as they were at the height of the Muslim empire. And the main issue is again what it was in the seventh century—who should lead Islam?—now played out on an international level. Where Ali once struggled against Muawiya, Shia Iran and Sunni Saudi Arabia today vie with each other for influence and political leadership of the Islamic world, a power struggle demonstrated most painfully in the cities of Iraq and in the mountains of Afghanistan and Pakistan.

As the United States has at last recognized, with thousands of American troops killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, Westerners enter such a power struggle at their own peril, all the more since many in the Middle East suspect that Western powers have deliberately manipulated the Shia-Sunni split all along in order to serve their own interests. The chaos unleashed by the invasion of Iraq in 2003 may have resulted in yet another unintended consequence in American eyes, but it was not so unintended in Iraqi eyes. “The invader has separated us,” declared Muqtada al-Sadr in 2007. “Unity is power, and division is weakness.”

The idea of
fitna
has now achieved yet another level of meaning, and a still more incendiary one: discord and civil war within Islam manipulated from without, deliberately fostered by enemies of Islam in order to turn Muslims against one another and thus weaken them.

This may be giving Western powers credit for more understanding than they have ever demonstrated, but if they have indeed tried to exploit division, the attempt has only rebounded against them. By now it is clear that anyone so rash as to think it possible to intervene in the Sunni-Shia split and come away unscathed is at best indulging in wishful thinking. It may be tempting to imagine that if the Bush administration had known the power of the Karbala story, American troops would never have been ordered anywhere within a hundred miles of the holy cities of Najaf and Karbala, but that too is wishful thinking. As with Yazid in the seventh century, so with George Bush in the twenty-first, history is often made by the heedless.

After close to a century of failed intervention, Westerners finally need to stand back, to acknowledge the emotive depth of the Sunni-Shia split and to accord it the respect it demands. The Karbala story has endured and strengthened not least because it reaches deep into questions of morality—of idealism versus pragmatism, purity versus compromise. Its DNA is the very stuff that tests both politics and faith and animates the vast and often terrifying arena in which the two intersect. But whether sacredness inheres in the Prophet’s blood family, as the Shia believe, or in the community as a whole, as Sunnis believe, nobody in the West should forget that what unites the two main branches of Islam is far greater that what divides them, and that the vast majority of all Muslims still cherish the ideal of unity preached by Muhammad himself—an ideal the more deeply held for being so deeply broken.

Acknowledgment

This book had its origins in a series of conversations with the writer Jonathan Raban, and I am immensely grateful for his continuing interest in it and for the contribution of his fine, sharp mind in comments on the manuscript.

I am also grateful to Wilferd Madelung, Laudian Professor of Arabic at the University of Oxford, England, for his early encouragement, and to Ingvild Flaskerud of the Centre for Peace Studies at the University of Tromsö, Norway, for generously sharing her research.

Deep thanks to Stephen Rubin at Random House for his wholehearted support, to my editor, Kris Puopolo, at Doubleday for her advocacy of this book and for her splendidly acute editorial eye, and, as always, to my great friend and agent, Gloria Loomis.

Most of all, I am indebted to a man I never met and never could have: the famed Islamic historian Abu Jafar Muhammad ibn Jarir al-Tabari, who died in Baghdad in the year 923. Without his magisterial work, this book could never have been written.

Notes

P
ART
O
NE
: M
UHAMMAD

the price of revelation:
For discussion of Islamic theologians on Muhammad’s late-life childlessness, see Madelung,
Succession to Muhammad.

“Oh God, have pity on those who succeed me”:
Shia
hadith
quoted by, among others, Ayatollah Khomeini. See Khomeini,
Islam and Revolution.

brightly colored posters:
Popular Shia religious posters are reproduced in Steven Vincent’s article “Every Land Is Karbala: In Shiite Posters, a Fever Dream for Iraq,” in the May 2005 issue of
Harper’s,
and can also be seen in news photos, such as that by Shawn Baldwin for
The New York Times,
December 28, 2006, “Posters of Shiite religious figures and Iranian and Syrian leaders,” accompanying the article “Iran’s Strong Ties with Syria.”

“ I am from Ali and Ali is from me”:
This and other statements of Muhammad on Ali are examined in, among others, Momen,
Introduction to Shi’i Islam
and Jafri,
Origins and Early Development.

People of the Cloak:
See Jafri,
Origins and Early Development
and Momen,
Introduction to Shi’i Islam.

Nahj al-Balagha:
Translated into English by Sayed Ali Reza as
Nahjul Balagha = Peak of Eloquence: Sermons, Letters and Sayings of Imam Ali ibn Abu Talib
(Bombay: Imam Foundation, 1989). Shia scholars refer to this collection as “the brother of the Quran.”

44
Al-Fahisha:
This usage is discussed in Spellberg,
Politics, Gender, and the Islamic Past
and noted in Fischer,
Iran: From Religious Dispute to Revolution.

time and place … not in dispute:
Jafri, in
Origins and Early Development,
notes that although Ibn Ishaq, al-Tabari, and Ibn Saad did not record the events at Ghadir Khumm, “as far as the authenticity of the event itself is concerned, it has hardly ever been questioned or denied even by the most conservative Sunni authorities, who have themselves recorded it.” Jafri gives details of those records.

but on Ali’s:
Madelung,
Succession to Muhammad
and Jafri,
Origins and Early Development
both discuss this tradition, citing Ibn Saad,
Tabaqat.

P
ART
T
WO
: A
LI

severed head of Hussein:
This tradition is reported in Halm,
Shi’a Islam.

halal:
Though this word is generally known in the West only as it applies to Islamic dietary laws, it is used throughout Arabic-speaking countries for anything licit or permitted under Islamic law.

“tribal imperative to conquest”:
See, for instance, “Tribal states must conquer to survive,” on p. 243 of Patricia Crone’s controversial
Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987). A more nuanced look at the “tribal imperative” is in Berkey,
Formation of Islam.

“goat’s fart”
: Madelung,
Succession to Muhammad,
citing Ibn Asakir’s twelfth-century
Tarikh Madinat Dimashq
(History of the State of Damascus).

“millstone around his feet”:
Madelung,
Succession to Muhammad,
citing al-Baladhuri,
Ansab al-Ashraf
(Lineage of the Nobles).

“one of nine stuffed beds”:
Madelung,
Succession to Muhammad,
citing Shia
hadith
from al-Majlisi,
Bihar al-Anwar
(Ocean of Light).

“a bubbling spring in an easy land”:
This and other sayings of Muawiya on the exercise of power in Humphreys,
Muawiya,
citing al-Baladhuri,
Ansab al-Ashraf
(Lineage of the Nobles).

“will you be cuckolds?”:
Rogerson,
Heirs of the Prophet,
citing al-Waqidi’s eighth-century
Kitab al-Tarikh wa al-Maghazi
(Book of History and Campaigns).

135
“I see Syria loathing the reign of Iraq”:
Madelung,
Succession to Muhammad,
citing al-Minqari’s
Waqiat Siffin
(The Confrontation at Siffin).

“you had to be led to the oath of allegiance”:
Madelung,
Succession to Muhammad,
citing al-Baladhuri,
Ansab al-Ashraf
(Lineage of the Nobles).

Ibn Washiya’s
Book on Poisons: This fascinating and immensely detailed book is translated in full in Levey,
Medieval Arabic Toxicology.

“So was your brother cooked”:
Abbott,
Aisha
, citing Ibn al-Athir’s thirteenth-century
Al Kamil fi al-Tarikh
(The Complete History).

P
ART
T
HREE
: H
USSEIN

The hand that slipped the fatal powder:
Madelung,
Succession to Muhammad
cites several early historians, both Sunni and Shia, on Jaada’s role, noting that al-Tabari suppressed the incident for political reasons.

“a woman who poisons her husband?”:
Madelung,
Succession to Muhammad
, citing al-Baladhuri,
Ansab al-Ashraf
(Lineage of the Nobles).

“never any subject I wished closed
”: Abbott,
Aisha
, citing Ibn al-Jawzi,
Tahqiq
, twelfth-century Sunni collection of
hadith.

“your death as the most infamous act of Ali”:
Abbott,
Aisha
, citing Ibn al-Athir’s thirteenth-century
Al Kamil fi al-Tarikh
(The Complete History).

A vast cycle of
taziya: Most of the
taziya
Passion plays are based on al-Kashifi’s tenth-century
Rawdat al-Shuhada
(Garden of the Martyrs), discussed in Halm,
Shi’a Islam
and Momen,
Introduction to Shi’i Islam.
See also Pinault,
Horse of Karbala
on both
Rawdat al-Shuhada
and al-Majlisi’s seventeenth-century
Bihar al-Anwar
(Ocean of Light).

build the wedding canopy:
Ingvild Flaskerud’s DVD
Standard-Bearers of Hussein
includes rare footage of women commemorating Karbala.

“the Karbala factor”:
Momen,
Introduction to Shi’i Islam.
Michael Fischer refers to it as “the Karbala paradigm.”

“Let the blood-stained banners of Ashura”:
See Khomeini,
Islam and Revolution.

the Mahdi:
It should be noted that the term “Mahdi” is also used in Sunni Islam but not for a specific figure. Sunnis use it to refer to an ideal Islamic leader, and indeed many have claimed the title, over the centuries. In Shia Islam, however, there is only one Mahdi, the twelfth Imam, a clear messianic figure.