by Hugh Kennedy
Islam was spared much of the speculative wrangling about issues of Trinity and Incarnation because the unity of God was paramount and indisputable; indeed Muslims defined themselves as those who rejected shirk (polytheism). There were, however, still two areas in which speculative theology crossed into wrong belief or heresy.
The first of these was the nature of the Qur’ān. All Muslims agree that the Qur’ān is the word of God; whereas most, though by no means all, Christians believe the Bible contains divine utterance but also a great deal of material, such as histories, proverbs and so forth, which is obviously composed by human beings. If you do not accept the Qur’ān as the word of God, you cannot be a Muslim. The question which separates Sunnis and Shias was whether the Qur’ān had existed through all eternity with God, or whether it had been authored by God at a particular moment in human history and revealed to Muhammad.
The second speculative issue which divided Muslims was that of anthropomorphism, the belief that God was in shape and form like a human (male) being, but much bigger and better. That is to say that He had arms and legs, sat literally on a throne and uttered words with His mouth in the way that we do. Nobody actually claimed to be anthropomorphist, but it was an accusation which could be levelled at Muslims who thought differently from true believers, and one which was used by the Almohads in the Maghreb to discredit the views of their enemies the Almoravids.
These were controversies which, though important at the time, were limited in scope and duration. The issue which really divided, and continues to divide the umma, is that of authority in the Muslim community. In this respect it is reminiscent of the controversies among Christians about papal supremacy, which proved equally divisive.
The Arabic word shia essentially means ‘a party’ in the sense of ‘a group of supporters’. From this derives the Arabic shīī, meaning an individual member of such a party, and this in turn gives us the English Shiite, the term I shall use. In early Islamic political discourse there were a number of shias, the shia of Uthmān, for example, or the shia of the Abbasids, but by the tenth century the term generally referred to the party of Alī, or the party of the Family of the Prophet.
The fundamental idea to which all Shiites subscribe is that the Family of the Prophet is a special status in the Muslim community. This in itself was neither controversial or divisive. Most Sunni Muslims, at least in pre-modern times, would accept that the members of the Family should be honoured and perhaps given pensions or other benefits. What distinguished the Shiites is that they believed that the Family of the Prophet, and only it, had a God-given right to lead the Muslim community as caliphs or imams and to make decisions on matters of sharia.
This belief, if accepted, gave rise to a number of further questions. Who exactly belonged to the Family of the Prophet? Clearly this included the direct blood descendants of Muhammad through his daughter Fātima, her husband Alī b. Abī Tālib and their two sons, Hasan and Husayn. But could it also include the descendants of Alī’s brother Jafar, or the Prophet’s paternal uncle Abbās, from whom the Abbasids were descended? Then there was the question of later descendants. Were all the offspring of Hasan and Husayn eligible to lead the community? If so, as the centuries rolled on, this provided a huge number of potential candidates—too many, in fact, for a proper choice to be made. But if the number of eligible members of the Family was to be restricted, who should do this and how? And even in the case of an imam who produced a number of sons, should it necessarily be the eldest who should succeed, or should the most able and suitable be selected? And what would happen if the presumed heir apparent seemed, God forbid, to behave in a wayward and un-Islamic way? Did this mean that he should be deposed and replaced by someone apparently more suitable as a candidate, or did it mean that God’s decisions were inscrutable to men and should be obeyed whatever the apparent situation?
Then there was the further question of what this God-given au thority amounted to. Virtually all Shiites believe that it means that the imam should be able to interpret uncertain and controversial passages in the Qur’ān and that it is him, not the scholars of Tradition, who had the knowledge to do this. The sharīa of the Shiites is to be decided by the imam, not by the ulama or by the consensus of the community. Some took the argument further than that, saying that the imam should be able to change and even abrogate the sharīa because of his superior judgement.
All these questions were serious and difficult and the answers to them had important implications for the leadership of the umma, so it is hardly surprising that they gave rise to a vast literature. Some of this literature took the form of heresiographies, or accounts of all the different sects which emerged. These numbered up to seventy-three, each named after a real or imaginary founder, each advocating a particular answer to the various questions. Some of these were clearly large groups; others amounted to little more than one lone individual proclaiming his own eccentric ideas.
This proliferation of such groups can give an impression of fissiparous chaos, or perhaps even frivolity, but most of them represent answers to the major questions which the idea of the God-guided ruler gives rise to. To understand these complex developments, we have to think of them as a result of pious, honest and intelligent men trying to find meaningful answers to difficult but very fundamental questions of belief and authority in the Muslim environment. There were other, more mundane factors which accounted for the emergence of so many different groups among the Shiites. At times, adherence to Shiism was the result of social tensions. As already explained, much of the enthusiasm for Alī and his descendants in Iraq in the early Islamic period seems to have been experienced by those who felt left out and resented their status as second-class citizens. There were also regional differences. Again, it has been pointed out that from a very early period devotion to the house of Alī went along with, and was part of, Iraqi resentment of Syrian dominance. In later centuries we find Shiites ruling in marginal areas of the Muslim world, the mountains of northern Iran, for example, or Yemen, where Shiism has emerged as a signifier of local sentiment, and the official Shiism of modern Iran is an inseparable part of Iranian national identity.
Among the many different strands into which Shiism divided, three main sects emerged. The first are the Imami or Twelver Shiites, who are the most numerous at the present day, comprising the Shiites of modern Iraq and Iran; the second are the Zaydis, now only really active in northern Yemen but a group with a long and interesting history; and the third are the Isma’ilis, the group who founded the Fatimid caliphate of Egypt (969–1171) and are now represented in a worldwide diaspora, many of whom accept the leadership of the Aga Khan.
IMAMI OR TWELVER SHIISM
Imami or Twelver (ithnā asharī) Shiism is defined by the fact that it recognizes twelve imams, descended from Alī through his son Husayn. None of these imams, after Alī himself, were caliphs or attained any significant political power, though their followers certainly thought that they should. After the failure of Husayn’s attempt to seize power from the Umayyads in 680 and his death at Karbala, his son Alī (d. 712), known to later generations of Twelvers as Zayn al-Ābidīn (Ornament of the Believers), seems to have led a life of retirement. Although the biographies of these early imams were elaborated later to give an impression of continuous activity, there is no evidence that this second Alī played any part in the politics of his day or that he was respected as an authority on religious questions. The same was broadly true of his son Muhammad al-Bāqir (d. c.735). There were Shiite revolts in Iraq, notably that of Zayd b. Alī in Kufa in 740, but the line of the Twelver imams played no part in them. There are reports that at the time of the Abbasid revolution the organizer of the Abbasid movement in Kufa, Abū Salama, tried to interest the then imam, Jafar al-Sādiq (d. 765), in putting himself forward for the caliphate, but Jafar, perhaps wisely, declined to get involved and Abū Salama paid for his initiative with his life.
Despite this, it seems to be Jafar who was the first of the Twelver imams t
o be more than a name in the genealogy. His status was certainly developed and probably exaggerated by later Shiite writers, but he is said to have distinguished himself as a dispenser of legal rulings and to have attracted a following which respected these rulings not just because he was learned but, more significantly, because he was a direct descendant of Alī and of the Prophet himself. Jafar appears to have made it clear that one could believe in the spiritual authority of the Family without committing oneself to open rebellion. This meant that accepting the Shiite imam as spiritual leader did not necessitate violent opposition to the Abbasid caliphate but could be a matter of private conviction. It may have been in his time that the distinctively Shiite doctrine of taqiyya was developed. Taqiyya held that it was completely legal, and not blameworthy, for a man to disguise his religious belief if he felt that to proclaim it openly would put his life at risk. That meant that, although one could accept the Shiite imam as rightful leader of the Muslims and as a man who should be caliph in an ideal world, this did not entail rising up against existing authorities or taking violent actions.
Many looked up to Jafar as a divinely inspired imam and learned authority and this is probably how he saw himself. But some, known to the Arab tradition as ghulāt, which can roughly be translated as ‘extremists’, believed that Jafar and other imams including, rather improbably, his contemporary the Abbasid caliph Mansūr, were saviours and messiahs. Their opinions were infallible and their lives were blameless. The two strands, the scholarly and the messianic, were in some senses contradictory, but they later came together as parts of the composite image of the imam.
It was under Jafar’s son and generally accepted heir Mūsā al-Kāzim that Twelver Shiism began to be organized as a political movement. Mūsā had agents who worked for him and collected money from his followers in what would seem to be preparations of a bid for political power in his name. He is one of the two imams commemorated at the great Baghdadi Shiite shrine at Kazimayn, which shows that his memory lingered on. He in turn was succeeded by his son, known as Alī al-Ridā (Chosen One: hence the name Reza, the Persian form of Ridā, being a common name for Iranian men, including the last two shahs). Alī was the only one of the Twelver imams to come anywhere near political power when he was adopted as heir, briefly, by the Abbasid caliph Ma’mūn in a bid to reunite the different branches of the Family of the Prophet and to attract much needed political support in Iraq. Alī, however, died before the caliph, some said of poison administered when he became politically inconvenient. His tomb, and the shrine that developed around it, at Meshed, in north-eastern Iran, is the largest and most opulent of all Shiite pilgrimage sites.
He was succeeded by a boy and the imams who came after him were more or less kept under house arrest by the Abbasid authorities. When the last generally accepted imam died in 874, his young son, if he ever existed, disappeared. His followers said he was in hiding: ghayba, the Arabic word, is rather disconcertingly translated into English as ‘occultation’.
To Twelver Shiites this occultation of the imam meant, and still means, that there is an imam in the world, indeed there has to be an imam or Islam would not be possible, but he is hidden. It is impossible to have any direct communication with him or for him to issue any decrees. Instead, decisions have to be made by learned men on the basis of decrees passed down from Alī and the known imams. This gives enormous authority in Twelver Shiism to scholars, the most important of whom are known, from the nineteenth century onwards, as ayatollahs or ‘signs of God’, for their position does not depend just on their learning, as it does for Sunni scholars, but also on their status as representatives of the ‘hidden imam’. Correspondingly, the existence of the ‘hidden imam’ leaves no space for a contemporary caliph: there is, so to speak, no vacancy. This is why Twelver and other Shiites will never be able to accept the pretensions of modern claimants to the caliphate. The Twelver Buyids who ruled Iraq in the late tenth and early eleventh century never appointed a caliph from the Family of the Prophet and the powerful and magnificent Safavid rulers of Iran were able to take the ancient Iranian title of shah but could not proclaim themselves caliphs.
THE ZAYDIS
The Zaydis stand in clear contrast to this quietist tradition. The essential idea behind Zaydi belief as it crystallized in the ninth and tenth centuries was that the caliph, who must, of course, be a descendant of Alī and Fātima, had to distinguish himself by taking up arms against the unjust rule of Muslims who rejected the rights of the Family of the Prophet. Any one of the numerous males of the Family was entitled to put himself forward and risk his life assuming this role. In practice, in later Zaydism, the leadership became hereditary in certain families, but that was not the guiding principle in the beginning.
In terms of political action, then, the early Zaydis were much more radical than the Twelvers. In other ways they were much closer to the Sunni mainstream. The Twelvers were Rāfidis, that is, they rejected the claims of the first three caliphs, Abū Bakr, Umar and Uthmān, believing that they had usurped the right to the caliphate which properly belonged to Alī. Some but not all Zaydis, on the other hand, were prepared to accept the legitimacy of the first two caliphs (even though they were, of course, inferior to Alī) and believed that it was only with Uthmān things began to go wrong. The Umayyads and Abbasids were, without doubt, completely illegitimate and should be violently challenged by true Zaydis. An imam who sat at home dispensing wisdom to a few peaceful followers was no imam at all and no use to anyone.
Apart from Alid descent and courage, the other quality a Zaydi imam needed to have was learning. Zaydis discussed whether this learning was different from the learning of ordinary men because of the Prophetic descent of the imam, or whether it was like other men’s learning only better. The imam was thus in a position to decide questions of sharīa and a fully qualified Zaydi caliph would not need to have ulama to advise him.
Zaydism takes its name from one Zayd b. Alī, a younger son of the fourth of the twelve imams. While his elder brother Muhammad al-Bāqir stayed at home, and was later accepted as a true imam by the Twelvers, Zayd led a revolt in Kufa against the Umayyads in 740. Like so many Alid revolts it was, at a practical level, a complete failure. The Kufans did not rise up en masse against Umayyad rule and Zayd was soon cut down and killed by troops sent by the governor. The revolt did produce some of the earliest political rhetoric in the Shiite tradition, however. Zayd had called for acceptance of himself as caliph because of his membership of the Family, but he also laid out a practical programme. As caliph he would restore to the Kufans their rights to salaries and pensions, rights which had been guaranteed by his ancestor Alī and effectively stolen by the Umayyads. His recorded speeches play on the idea of the Zaydis as righters of wrongs and champions of the dispossessed.
Zayd’s death did not spell the end of his ideas. His son Īsā took up his father’s cause and led a small, secret cell of believers in Kufa. Constantly harried by Umayyad and later Abbasid police, they nonetheless kept the flame of revolution alive and formed the core of support for the most spectacular of all the early Shiite revolts of the early Islamic period. Muhammad b. Abd Allah, known as ‘the Pure Soul’ (al-Nafs al-zākiyya), was not, like the twelve imams, a descendant of Husayn but of his elder brother Hasan. He was named after his ancestor the Prophet and lived in the Prophet’s city of Medina. Immediately after the establishment of the Abbasid caliphate he began preparations for revolt. His project was to restore the Islamic community to what it had been in the time of the Prophet and the earliest Muslims. Medina, which was remote from the main centres of Muslim power and population and dependent on food imported from Egypt, was a most impractical place to begin such a project. But that was not the point: the fact that it was the Prophet’s city, the city which he had defended against the enemies of Islam, was more important. It was a pious and romantic vision, pursued with courage and defended with eloquence.
We know a lot about his project because of a remarkable narrative put together b
y one Umar b. Shabba after the failure of the revolt, which is preserved not only in Shiite sources but also in the great History of the staunchly Sunni Tabarī. It is a heroic account, constantly referring back to the example of the Prophet himself and featuring a correspondence between the rebel, when he had declared himself in the Holy City, and his opponent, the Abbasid caliph Mansūr, in which each defended their right to lead the Muslim community. In the end force prevailed, as it was bound to. A small professional army, led by a cousin of the caliph, attacked the city. Muhammad defended it, as the Prophet himself had done, by digging a trench to impede the enemy, but to no avail and Muhammad was killed, fighting bravely.
In the aftermath of this and later defeats of Alid military revolts, many of the supporters of the rebellion chose to flee to avoid the inevitable punishment. Two of these fugitives had a lasting effect on the religious geography of the Muslim world, establishing a link between the Family and groups of Muslims in regions far from the centres of power and population.
One of these was the area of modern Morocco. This was a land which had been nominally conquered by the Muslims by 700, but Muslim population and government had been concentrated across the Straits of Gibraltar in Andalus and the indigenous Berber tribes had been little affected by the coming of Islam. It was into this world that Idrīs b. Abd Allah fled, hoping to escape the long arm of Abbasid authority. Idrīs was able to establish his prestige as a holy man and descendant of the Prophet, attracting a following among the Berber tribes but not able to save himself from Abbasid retribution. He died, it is said, from the effects of a poisoned tooth-pick sent by the caliph. The Idrisids, as his descendants were known, were never able to establish a lasting, stable state, but they set a pattern for rulership in the region which still has power today, a pattern in which descent from the Prophet through Idrīs (which the present king of Morocco claims) brings unique political prestige. At the same time, the Idrisid view was not strictly speaking a Shiite one as they did not claim to have semi-divine powers or wisdom. Nonetheless, the idea of a caliphate combining religious and political leadership remained and still remains an important part of Maghrebi political discourse.