After the Prophet: The Epic Story of the Shia-Sunni Split in Islam (23 page)

“Man journeys in darkness, and his destiny journeys toward him,” he said, and traveled on.

Nobody disputes what happened. What is in dispute is why it happened. And that question hinges on the unknowable—on what Hussein was thinking.

Why did he continue when he knew that his cause was already lost? Was he so convinced of the rightness of his claim that he could no longer judge reality? So full of
nasb—
that inborn quality of nobility and honor—that he could not imagine anything but triumph for the
righteousness of his cause? So high-minded that he was, in the end, merely naive? Did he act in desperation or out of the purest of motives? In sheer folly or in supreme wisdom?

He was not a warrior or a statesman. He was a revered scholar, honored since his brother’s death as the one who more than any man alive embodied the spirit of Muhammad, and he was no longer a young man. Why not be content to live out his days in the peace and quiet of Mecca or Medina? Why not leave the business of politics and power to those who could handle it? And why place his fate in the hands of the Kufans, the people who not twenty years before had refused his father’s call to arms against Muawiya? They had knuckled under first to Muawiya and his governor Ziyad, and now to Yazid and his governor Ubaydallah. Did Hussein really think they had changed? Did he imagine that right and justice could prevail over power and strength? That seventy-two warriors could take on the whole might of Yazid’s army?

To Sunnis, Hussein’s determination to travel on to Iraq would be the proof of his unsuitability to take the helm of a vast empire. They would call it a quixotic and illfated quest, one that should never have been undertaken. Hussein should have acknowledged reality, they say, and bowed to history.

In time they would cite the bitterly anti-Shia thirteenth-century scholar Ibn Taymiya, whose writings are still central to mainstream Sunni thought. Sixty years with an unjust leader were preferable to a single night with an ineffective one, Ibn Taymiya declared. His reasoning was that without an effectively run state, the implementation of Islamic law was impossible. But he was also clearly stating that church and state, as it were, were no longer one and the same, as they had been in Muhammad’s time.

It was Ibn Taymiya who dubbed the first four Caliphs—Abu Bakr, Omar, Othman, and Ali—the
rashidun,
or rightly guided ones, and they are still known as such in Sunni Islam. The Caliphs who came after them were thus not rightly or divinely guided, no matter the lip service they
gave to Islam or the grandiose titles they claimed like the “Shadow of God on Earth.” But even those who lacked true spiritual authority could serve in other ways. Muawiya had prevented what had seemed the inevitable disintegration of the vast Islamic empire; if not for him, Islam might never have been able to survive. His son, Yazid, may have utterly lacked his father’s political skill, but so long as he did not try to assume religious authority—something he had no interest in doing—his rule was to be considered tolerable. Spiritual guidance was not to be expected of political leaders, Ibn Taymiya was saying, and in this he was defending his own turf. A whole new religious establishment had come into being under the Umayyads and their Abbasid successors—the clerics and theologians known as the
ulama—
and as the empire’s central political authority waned, they became the gatekeepers of Islam, much as the rabbis were the gatekeepers of Judaism through the centuries. The very idea of Hussein’s acting out of spiritual authority and divine guidance was thus anathema to Ibn Taymiya and his ideological heirs.

But to the Shia, Hussein’s journey to Iraq came to be the ultimate act of courage, the most noble self-sacrifice, made in a state of higher consciousness and with full knowledge of its import. Hussein would take the only way left him to expose the corruption and venality of the Umayyad regime, they would say. He would shock all Muslims out of their complacency and call them back to the true path of Islam through the leadership the Prophet had always intended, that of the
Ahl al-Bayt.
Divinely guided, he would sacrifice himself with the same purity of intention as the prophet Jesus did six hundred years before—a sacred sacrifice, willingly accepted for the sake of others. His surrender to death would be the ultimate act of redemption.

Hussein’s story was about to become the foundation story of Shiism, its sacred touchstone, its Passion story. The long journey from Mecca to Iraq was his Gethsemane. Knowing that the Kufans had betrayed him, he rode on nonetheless, in full awareness of what was waiting for him.

Three weeks after leaving Mecca, his small caravan was within twenty miles of Kufa. They halted for the night at Qadisiya, the site of Omar’s pivotal battle against the Persian army. That glorious victory now seemed to belong to another era, though it had been only forty-three years before. There would be no pivotal battle here this time. Ubaydallah had sent cavalry detachments from Kufa to block all the routes leading to the city, including the one from Qadisiya. His orders were to bring Hussein to him in chains to swear allegiance to Yazid.

But there would be no chains yet. Not even Ubaydallah could terrorize everyone. The captain of the hundred-man detachment that stopped Hussein was called Hurr—“freeborn” or “free man”—and as though living up to his name, he could not conceive of using force against the Prophet’s grandson and his family. Instead, in a gesture of peaceful intent, he approached Hussein with his shield reversed. Then, like so many before him, he tried to persuade him that if he could not pledge allegiance to Yazid, he should at least turn back to Mecca.

“No, by God,” came the answer. “I will neither give my hand like a humiliated man nor flee like a slave. May I not be called Yazid. Let me never accept humiliation over dignity.” And in demonstration of that dignity, Hussein stood high in his saddle and addressed Hurr’s men, many of them the same Kufans who had previously pledged to rise up against Yazid under his leadership.

“I have here two saddlebags full of your letters to me,” he said. “Your messengers brought me your oath of allegiance, and if you now fulfill that oath, you will be rightly guided. My life will be with your lives, my family with your families. But if you break your covenant with me, you have mistaken your fortune and lost your destiny, for whoever violates his word, violates his own soul.”

With men such as Yazid and his governor Ubaydallah in power, he said, “the goodness of the world is in retreat, and what was good is now bitter. Can you not see that truth is no longer practiced? That falsehood
is no longer resisted? When that is so, I can only see life with such oppressors as tribulation, and death as martyrdom.”

And there it was, out in the open: martyrdom
—shahadat—
the destiny toward which Hussein had been journeying, and that had been journeying toward him.

Shahadat
is a word of subtle shadings, though as with the double meaning of
jihad,
this may be hard to see when the image of Islamic martyrdom is that of suicide bombers so blinded by righteousness that they sacrifice not just their own lives but all sense of humanity. In fact, while
shahadat
certainly means “self-sacrifice,” it also means “acting as a witness,” a double meaning that originally existed in English too, since the word “martyr” comes from the Greek for witness. This is why the Islamic declaration of faith—the equivalent of the
Shema Israel
or the Lord’s Prayer—is called the
shahada,
the “testifying.” And it is this dual role of martyr and witness that would inspire the leading intellectual architect of the Iranian Revolution of 1979 to utterly redefine Hussein’s death as an act of liberation.

Ali Shariati is all but unknown in the West, yet for years he was idolized in Iran on a par with the Ayatollah Khomeini. He was not a cleric but a sociology professor well versed in theology. Educated at the Sorbonne, he was widely read in Western philosophy and literature and had translated both Sartre and Fanon into Persian, as well as Che Guevara. His blending of sociology and theology was to create a new kind of Islamic humanism that inspired millions, not the least because he was an absolutely charismatic speaker. By the early 1970s he was drawing crowds of thousands at a time—so many that they blocked the streets around his lecture hall in Teheran, listening in rapt silence to his voice on loudspeakers—and his published lectures had become Iran’s all-time best sellers. Students and laborers, religious and secular, male and fe-male
—all those who would soon take to the streets to oust the Shah’s regime—responded with an intense sense of hope and power as Shariati almost single-handedly gave new life to the core event of Shia Islam.

In one of his most famed lectures, he celebrated Hussein as the purest example of martyrdom. By refusing either to cooperate or to be pressured into silence, and by accepting that this would mean his own death, Hussein achieved nothing less than “a revolution in consciousness,” one that far surpassed the details of its historical place and time to become “an eternal and transcendent phenomenon.” And as Shariati went on to take his listeners into the seventh century, inside Hussein’s mind, he had no need to stress the parallel with what they themselves faced under the repressive regime of the Shah.

“There is nothing left for Hussein to inherit,” he said. “No army, no weapons, no wealth, no power, no force, not even an organized following. Nothing at all. The Umayyads occupy every base of society. The power of the tyrant, enforced with the sword or with money or with deception, brings a pall of stifled silence over everyone. All power is in the hand of the oppressive ruler. Values are determined solely by the regime. Ideas and thoughts are controlled by agents of the regime. Brains are washed, filled, and poisoned with falsehood presented in the name of religion, and if none of this works, faith is cut off with the sword. It is this power which Hussein must now face.

“This is the man who embodies all the values that have been destroyed, the symbol of all the ideals that have been abandoned. He appears with empty hands. He has nothing. The Imam Hussein now stands between two inabilities. He cannot remain silent, but neither can he fight. He has only one weapon, and that is death. If he cannot defeat the enemy, he can at least disgrace them with his own death. If he cannot conquer the ruling power, he can at least condemn it. For him, martyrdom is not a loss, but a choice. He will sacrifice himself on the threshold of the temple of freedom, and be victorious.”

As Shariati spoke,
shahadat
became not just an act of witnessing
but an act of revelation, exposing repression and oppression, corruption and tyranny. Hussein’s martyrdom was no longer an end but a beginning. It was a call to action in the here and now.

“Martyrdom has a unique radiance,” Shariati declared. “It creates light and heat in the world. It creates movement, vision, and hope. By his death, the martyr condemns the oppressor and provides commitment for the oppressed. In the iced-over hearts of a people, he bestows the blood of life and resurrection.”

Such sacrifice was not for Islam alone. It was for all people, everywhere. Hussein acted as witness “for all the oppressed people of history. He has declared his presence in all wars, struggles, and battlefields for freedom of every time and land. He died at Karbala so that he may be resurrected in all generations and all ages.”

Shariati was only forty-four when he himself died in 1977, two years before many of his students would be shot as they marched through the streets to oust the Shah. The cause of death was a heart attack, just three weeks after he had fled into exile in England. Some say it was brought on by the lingering effects of repeated arrest and interrogation by the Shah’s security forces; others, that it was the result of poison covertly administered by secret agents—a swift, sharp jab from a hypodermic needle, perhaps, and the poison as sure as the ones developed by Muawiya’s physician Ibn Uthal fourteen centuries earlier. Either way, the Shah was too late. Shariati had already transformed Hussein and his death at Karbala into the incandescent impetus for revolution.

For centuries, Hussein’s martyrdom had been the central paradigm of Shia Islam, the symbol of the eternal battle between good and evil, but Shariati raised it to the level of liberation theology. He transformed Ashura, the ten-day commemoration of what happened at Karbala, taking it out of the realm of grief and mourning and into that of hope and activism. Karbala would no longer merely explain repression; it would be the inspiration to rise up against it, and Shariati’s most famous call to action would become the new rallying cry of activist Shiism, chanted by
idealistic young revolutionaries in the streets of Teheran even as the Shah’s troops fired volley after volley into the crowd: “Every day is Ashura, and every land is Karbala.”

If Hussein had resolved on martyrdom, Hurr was equally resolved not to be the one who brought it about. But he was confronted with a terrible dilemma: his orders from Ubaydallah on the one hand, his respect for Hussein on the other. This was the last surviving member of the People of the Cloak, the Prophet’s own grandson, his flesh and blood. If Hurr could not allow him to continue on to Kufa, neither could he attack him.

It was Hussein himself who resolved Hurr’s dilemma by turning in the least expected direction—not back to Arabia, or on to Kufa, but to the north. He led his small caravan along the desert bluff overlooking the immense flat valley formed by the Euphrates and the Tigris, and Hurr and his men rode alongside, more like an escort than an enemy detachment. At dusk, with the women and children tired and thirsty, Hussein gave the order to pitch their tents just below the bluff, within sight of fields and orchards watered by a branch of the Euphrates. It was Wednesday, the first day of the month of Muharram, and Hussein had reached his destination. He would travel no farther.

Two mornings later, the third day of Muharram, the small encampment had been surrounded by an army. When news reached Ubaydallah that Hurr had allowed Hussein to travel north instead of arresting him, he had sent no fewer than four thousand cavalry and archers out from Kufa, under the command of a notoriously ruthless general. If Hurr could not do the job, this man would.