Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes (13 page)

Ali’s death ended the first era of Islamic history. Muslim historians came to call the first four post-Mohammed leaders the Rightly Guided Khalifas. Life in their time was certainly not undiluted sweetness and wonder, but in calling them the Rightly Guided Ones, I don’t think responsible Muslim historians mean to suggest such perfection. Rather, they’re saying that the evolution of the community from the time of the Hijra to the assassination of Ali was a religious drama. Yes there was bloodshed and heartache, but the turmoil didn’t stem from petty people vying for power, money,
or ego gratification. The four khalifas and Mohammed’s close companions who formed the core of the Umma in this period were honestly striving to make the revelations work. Each of them had a handle on some essential aspect of the project, but no one of them was big
enough to grasp the whole of it, as Mohammed had done. The Prophet’s immediate successors were like the six blind men trying to discern whether the elephant was more like a rope, a wall, a pillar, or what. All the struggles over the khalifate in the period of the Rightly Guided Ones had theological meaning because the issues they struggled with were essentially theological. After Ali’s death, the khalifate was just an empire.

 

 

O
F COURSE, MU’AWIYA did not present himself as the man who ended the religious era. He titled himself khalifa and said he was continuing the same great mission as his predecessors. Toward the end of his life, however, he convened a council of Arab tribal leaders to discuss who
his
successor would be, a meeting that had the outward form of a
shura,
a consultative committee like the one Omar established. The chieftains thought their opinions were sincerely being solicited and began discussing the merits of this and that candidate. Suddenly one of the khalifa’s henchmen jumped to his feet an
d glowered around the circle. “Right now,” he scowled, “
this
is the commander of the faithful.” He pointed to Mu’awiya. “After he dies, it’s this one.” He pointed to Yazid, the emperor’s eldest son. “And if any of you object, it’s
this
one!” He pulled out his sword.”
¹

The chiefs got the point. They went on through all the proper Muslim-democratic forms and made all the appropriate noises and gestures, but in the end they dutifully chose Yazid to be their next khalifa, and wh
en they went home that night, they all knew the principle of succession would never come up for discussion again.

When Yazid succeeded to the throne, however, he knew his father had not eliminated but merely suppressed rebellious elements. Yazid therefore kept close tabs on all who might challenge his power, especially Ali’s relatives and descendents. Hassan had passed away by this time, but his brother Hussein was still alive, and just to be on the safe side, the emperor decided to have this man assassinated on his next pilgrimage to Mecca.

Hussein was now in his forties. He knew his father’s partisans considered him to be the true khalifa; he knew that zealous Muslims looked to him to keep the spiritual revolution alive; but no one man could shoulder such a heavy mantle. Hussein had opted out of politics and lived a quiet life of prayer and contemplation all these years, meditating on his grandfather’s mission.

But when he learned of the plot to have him killed, and that Yazid’s assassins planned to murder him in the Ka’ba itself, Hussein could take no more. He had no troops and no military experience. Yazid had a network of spies, a treasury, and an army. Even so, in the year 60 AH (680 by the common calendar), Hussein announced that he was going to challenge Yazid and left Medina with a force of seventy-two people.

Actually, calling it a “force” goes too far: the seventy-two included Hussein’s wife, his children, and some doddering elderly relatives. Only a handful of the company were fighting-age males. What was the man thinking? Did he really imagine he could topple the Umayyad monarch with this tiny band? Was he perhaps thinking that if he just started marching, he would ignite a firestorm of revolt and inspire the tribes to join him?

Probably not. In a final sermon before his departure, Hussein told his followers that he was sure to be slain but was not afraid, because death “surrounds Adam’s offspring as a necklace surrounds a young girl’s neck.”
²
He noted a Qur’anic verse that told people to stand up to unjust rulers like Yazid. If the son of Ali and Fatima, the grandson of the Prophet himself, did not stand up to tyranny, who would? As portrayed in traditional accounts, therefore, Hussein was determined to make an example of his own life: right from the start, he saw himself as embarking on a pilgrimage with ri
tual significance. In a sense, he was committing noble suicide.

When Yazid heard that the Prophet’s younger grandson was on the move, he sent an army to swat him down. Hussein posed no real threat to the empire, but Yazid wanted to crush him with overwhelming force as a warning to other radicals who might be tempted to play the God-chose-me card. The army he sent outnumbered Hussein’s little group by enough to make it no contest. Legends put that number at anywhere from four hundred to forty thousand.

Whatever its size, this imperial army caught up with Hussein in the desert just south of Karbala, a city near the southern border of Iraq. If you glance at weather reports for that part of the world on any summer day, you’ll see temperatures ranging upward of 115 degrees. On just such a sweltering day, the emperor’s army trapped Hussein’s little band within smelling distance of the Euphrates River but cut off from the water. Hussein, however, did what his father had failed to do. He refused to settle, compromise, or bargain. God had chosen him to lead the community of virtue, he said,
and he would not disavow that truth.

One by one, the warriors in Hussein’s band sallied forth to fight Yazid’s army. One by one they fell. The women, children, and old folks, meanwhile, all died of thirst. When the last of the party was gone, the victorious general swooped in, cut off Hussein’s head, and shipped it to the emperor with a gloating note.

The severed head arrived just as Yazid was entertaining a Byzantine envoy, and it spoiled the whole dinner party. The Byzantine envoy said, “Is this how you Muslims behave? We Christians would never treat a descendant of Jesus in this manner.” The criticism angered Yazid, and he had the “Roman” thrown into prison. Later, however, he saw that keeping the severed head might be bad public relations, so he sent it back to Karbala to be buried with the body.

Yazid no doubt believed he had solved his problem: surely Ali’s descendents would never make trouble again. He was quite wrong, however. By crushing Hussein at Karbala, this emperor lit a spark. The passionate embrace of Ali’s cause now became a prairie fire called Shi’ism. What is Shi’ism? One often hears it summed up as if it were just another quarrel about dynastic succession, like the battles between Maud and Stephen in twelfth-century England. If that had really been the case, the movement would have faded out after Ali died. Who today calls himself a Maudist or a Stephenist? Who
today even cares which of these two had the more legitimate claim to the English throne? Ali, however, kept gaining new adherents after his death. The ranks of his Shi’i kept on swelling. People who were not even born when Ali died grew up to embrace his cause and shape their identities around the conviction that he should have been the first khalifa. How could this be?

The answer, of course, is that the dispute about the khalifate was no mere dynastic struggle. Key religious issues were embedded in it, because the choice involved not just
who
but also
what
the leader would be. Ali’s partisans saw in him something that they did not see in other claimants to the khalifate: a God-given spiritual quality that made him more than an ordinary mortal, a quality they had seen in Mohammed as well. No one said Ali was another Messenger of God. No one would have made that claim (at that point, anyway), and so they gave Ali a different title. They said he was the imam.

Originally,
imam
was simply the term for a person who led communal prayer. To most Muslims, that’s still what the word means today. It’
s a title of respect, to be sure, but no more grandiose than, say,
reverend
or
honor-able
. After all, every time a group of Muslims gathers to pray communally, one person among them has to lead the prayer; and he does nothing different than the others do; he just does it standing alone in front of the others to help keep the group moving in tandem through the ritual. Every mosque has an imam, and when he’s not leading prayer, he might be sweeping the floor or patching the roof.

But when Shi’i say “imam,” they mean something considerably more elevated. To Shi’i there is always one imam in the world, and there is never more than one. They proceed from the premise that Mohammed had some palpable mystical substance vested in him by Allah, some energy, some light, which they call the
baraka
of Mohammed. When the Prophet died, that light passed into Ali, at which moment Ali became the first imam. When Ali died, that same light passed into his son Hassan, who became the second Imam. Later, the spark passed into Hassan’s younger brother Hussein, who became the
third imam. When Hussein was martyred at Karbala, the whole “imam” idea flowered into a rich theological concept that addressed a religious craving left unnourished by the mainstream doctrines of that time.

The mainstream doctrine, as articulated by Abu Bakr and Omar, said that Mohammed was strictly a messenger delivering a set of instructions about how to live. The message was the great and only thing. Beyond delivering the Qur’an, Mohammed’s religious significance was only his sunna, the example he set by his way of life, an example others could follow if they wanted to live in God’s favor. People who accepted this doctrine eventually came to be known as Sunnis, and they comprise nine-tenths of the Muslim community today.

The Shi’i, by contrast, felt that they couldn’t make themselves worthy of heaven simply by their own efforts. To them, instructions were not enough. They wanted to believe that direct guidance from God was still coming into the world, through some chosen person who could bathe other believers in a soul-saving grace, some living figure who would keep the world warm and pure. They adopted the term
imam
for this reassuring figure. His presence in the world ensured the continuing possibility of miracle.

When Hussein went to Karbala, he had no chance of winning. His only hope lay in the possibility of God producing a miracle—
but then, the continuing possibility of miracle was the principle he embodied. He and his band chose death as symbolic refusal to disavow this possibility, and, in the final analysis, to Shi’i, a miracle did occur at Karbala, the miracle of Hussein’s martyrdom.

To this day, Shi’i around the world commemorate the anniversary of Hussein’s death with a day of cathartic mourning. They gather in “lamentation houses” to recount the story of the martyrdom, a religious narrative that casts Hussein in the role of a redemptive figure on an apocalyptic scale. By his martyrdom, Hussein has gained a place next to God and earned the privilege of interceding for sinners. Those who embrace him and believe in him will be saved and go to heaven, no matter what transgressions may foul their record. Hussein gave Shi’i this back door to the miracle they had h
oped for all along. Believing in Hussein could not get you gold or high office or luck in love, but it could get you into heaven: that was the miracle.

 

And now for the political story that unfolded after Mu’awiya took power. The Umayyad ascension may have ended the birth of Islam as a religious event, but it launched the evolution of Islam as a civilization and a political empire. In the annals of conventional Western history, the Umayyads marked the beginning of Muslim greatness. They put Islam on the map by kicking off a golden age that lasted long after they themselves had fallen.