by John McHugo
On the other hand, with Ja‘far al-Sadiq we can see some of the hallmarks of Shi‘ism becoming clear. He saw himself as the sole authoritative figure on the Sharia in his generation. He believed that, in this, he was following the position his father had held before him. But his claims for himself as the imam went much further. Starting with the Prophet’s designation of Ali as the First Imam, the imamate had been transmitted to Hasan and then Hussein. Each imam from Hussein onwards had specified a son who was to be his successor. The imam guides humankind. He is even essential for the continuation of the existence of the world, and knows the literal and hidden meanings of the Qur’an – the exoteric (zahir) and the esoteric (batin). He is therefore possessed of religious knowledge in a special and unique way, and is both infallible and the receiver of divine guidance. He is not necessarily a temporal ruler, and is content to confine himself to teaching until the right time comes for him to ascend to earthly power. Nevertheless, obedience to him in matters of religion is an absolute duty for all Muslims. He is the proof of God on earth.
Ja‘far al-Sadiq jealously guarded his position as the imam against any other members of the Prophet’s family who might believe they could claim it, and saw himself as the supreme authority on religious matters. However, he did not take the step which some might think would have followed on logically from this. He never attempted to become the political leader of the community, and never supported rebellion against either the Umayyads or the Abbasids. He also taught his followers that, when necessary, they could resort to taqiyya, that is to say that they could legitimately hide their true beliefs so as to avoid persecution. Taqiyya became an integral feature of Shi‘ism, and has made it very hard ever since to be certain whether a Muslim who denies Shi‘i claims is doing so sincerely. This has often caused much anger among Sunni Muslims.
V
One of the greatest crises in the history of Shi‘ism occurred in 765 when Ja‘far al-Sadiq died. He had designated his son Ismail to be his successor, but Ismail had died shortly before Ja‘far himself. This was a challenge to the faith of all those who believed in the idea of the Shi‘i imam. If God had designated Ismail to succeed his father, why had he predeceased him?
A period of confusion followed. Each of Ja‘far’s three surviving sons, Abdullah al-Aftah, Musa al-Kazim and Muhammad, now claimed to be the imam, and each had his own supporters, while a fourth group believed the succession should pass through the sons of Ismail. The idea that Ja‘far al-Sadiq had not actually died but had disappeared from view and entered into occultation also gained some traction for a while. The position became even more complex when Abdullah al-Aftah died a few months after his father, leaving no sons of his own. The group supporting him had been the largest, and most of them then transferred their allegiance to Musa al-Kazim.
Of these various groups, the two that would be by far the most significant in the long term were the followers of Musa al-Kazim and the followers of the descendants of Ismail. This became the great split within Shi‘ism. The followers of the line of Ismail would come to be known as the Ismailis. The followers of Musa al-Kazim would recognise him as imam and accept a further five imams in his direct line. For this reason, they are generally referred to in English as the Twelvers, since they accepted a line of twelve imams beginning with Ali and of which Ja‘far al-Sadiq was the sixth. For convenience, from now on we will refer to those who followed Musa al-Kazim and the following five imams as Twelvers from the time of Musal al-Kazim onwards, although, of course, he was only the Seventh Imam.
Musa al-Kazim received the support of the majority of Ja‘far al-Sadiq’s followers, including most of the leading Shi‘i scholars who had been in his entourage. Ja‘far al-Sadiq would be the last of the imams to be buried at the al-Baqi‘ cemetery in Medina. The Abbasid caliphs feared the imams, both as direct descendants of Ali and because of the status they merited as acknowledged religious scholars. When Harun al-Rashid came to the Hejaz on pilgrimage to Mecca, he ordered Musa al-Kazim to accompany him back to Baghdad where Musa al-Kazim was kept under surveillance and even imprisoned. He died in prison in 799, and Twelver writers would come to take it for granted that he was poisoned. In a pattern that by now will be familiar, some of his followers believed he was not dead but had gone into occultation.
Ali al-Rida, the Eighth Imam, was Musa al-Kazim’s son. As we saw in Chapter Three, he was designated by the Caliph Ma‘moun to be his successor, and Ma‘moun gave him a daughter in marriage. But Ali al-Rida died in 818, only two years later. If this was an attempt by Ma‘moun to reconcile the rival branches of the Prophet’s family, it had failed. Undeterred, Ma‘moun seems to have made another attempt at reconciliation. Ali al-Rida’s seven-year-old son Muhammad al-Jawad, the Ninth Imam, was betrothed to one of Ma‘moun’s daughters. He was kept in Baghdad. Although he was subsequently allowed to go back to Medina, he was summoned back to Baghdad by Ma‘moun’s successor, Mu‘tasim, when he was twenty-four, and died shortly thereafter.
The Tenth Imam was Muhammad al-Jawad’s son, Ali al-Hadi, who, while still a boy, was brought from Medina by the Caliph Mutawakkil and taken to Samarra where he was kept in custody until his death over forty years later in 868. Mutawakkil feared the descendants of Ali. In 850, he destroyed the tomb of Hussein at Karbala and thereby earned himself the lasting enmity of Shi‘is. His intention was to stop pilgrimages there, but the custom of visiting the tombs of the imams had become deeply engrained among the Shi‘is. Samarra would now also become a place of pilgrimage for visitors to the tomb of Ali al-Hadi and his son, al-Hasan al-Askari, who was the Eleventh Imam and was also held there until his death in 874.
As far as was known at the time of his death, al-Hasan al-Askari had left no son. He was only twenty-eight, and the Twelver movement was thrown into the same sort of disarray as Shi‘ism itself had been after the death of Ja‘far al-Sadiq. This was called the period of hayra, or confusion. It will be recalled that Twelver Shi‘is believe that the presence of the imam in the world is necessary for it to continue to exist. Some thought the imamate had transferred to al-Hasan al-Askari’s brother Ja‘far, while other candidates were also suggested. The idea that eventually won out, however, was that al-Hasan al-Askari had in fact been the father of a son who was only five at the time of his death. The birth of the boy in 869 had been kept secret, and his identity was known to only a few trusted people, because of the risk to him from the Abbasids. His name was Muhammad al-Mahdi, and he was recognised by Twelvers to be the Mahdi as well as the Twelfth Imam. Because he was in hiding (known as the period of ‘the Lesser Occultation’) he was known as the Hidden Imam.
In 892, the Caliph Mu‘tadid finally abandoned Samarra and returned to Baghdad, leaving Samarra to be turned into an additional Shi‘i shrine city, because it contained the tombs of the Tenth and Eleventh Imams. Baghdad was also becoming increasingly important at this time as a centre for Twelver Shi‘ism, something that occurred at the expense of Kufa. There were members of the sect in high places at the caliphal court, including powerful viziers from the Nawbakhti family. The version of the history of this period that later came to be accepted by the Twelvers asserts that there were four ‘ambassadors’ who were able to communicate with the Hidden Imam. They would give written answers, like legal opinions, on questions believers wished to put to the imam. The third of them, Ibn Rawh al-Nawbakhti, died in 938. After the fall from favour and execution of his patron, the great vizier Ali al-Furat, in 924, he often had to operate in secret, and died in prison. He nominated Ali bin Muhammad al-Simmari to be his successor, but Ali died only three years later in 941. The channel of communication with the Hidden Imam had been broken.
Tradition would say that it was the imam himself who had broken off contact with his community. He had done this because of his disgust at the sin, tyranny and oppression in the world. He had therefore told the final safir or ‘ambassador’, only a few days before his death, not to designate a successor.
The death of the final ‘ambassado
r’ in 941 began what is called the period of the ‘Greater Occultation’, which Twelvers believe continues to this day. The eventual coming of the imam will be part of the End Times, of eschatology. A saying of the Prophet is said to have predicted: ‘Day and night will not end before God has sent forth a man from my house who bears the same name as I. He will fill the world with justice and equity just as it was filled with tyranny and oppression before.’23 His coming will be preceded by portents and omens, plagues, eclipses and earthquakes. The sun will rise in the west, and the Tigris and Euphrates will flood Iraq, while Baghdad and Kufa will be consumed by fire descending from the sky. False prophets and unbelievers will fight apocalyptic battles before the world is cleansed. Then, the Mahdi (that is, the Hidden Imam) will appear at the shrine of the Ka‘ba in Mecca on the 10th of Muharram, the anniversary of the martyrdom of Hussein. He will fight those Muslims who have parted from the true faith and destroy their mosques before ushering in a paradise-like era by the side of a canal stretching from Ali’s shrine at Najaf to that of Hussein at Karbala. His righteous rule will see the end of poverty (and therefore of taxes, including the religious zakat, defined below) and last until the Day of Resurrection.
VI
The tradition of quietism among Twelver Shi‘is did not prevent them from becoming soldiers, and rising to political power as a result. The Buyid dynasty was a case in point. They were a family of mercenary leaders from Daylam to the south of the Caspian Sea. In the 930s, Ali, al-Hasan and Ahmed, the three sons of Buya after whom the dynasty is named, began to carve out principalities for themselves and rule them in a kind of confederation. Ali set himself up in Shiraz and al-Hasan did the same in Isfahan, while Ahmed crossed over the mountains into Iraq. In 945 he marched into Baghdad. As we saw in the last chapter, he replaced the Caliph Mustakfi with his brother, Muti‘, and thereby showed where real power lay. The mighty Abbasid caliph was now the helpless prisoner and client of a Shi‘i ruler.
Propriety, however, was observed. Ahmed was appointed commander of the Caliph’s armies (amir al-umara’), while the Caliph decreed that his brothers would be the governors of the provinces they held. We do not know the precise nature of their Shi‘i sympathies. Were they Twelvers or Zaydis? Although it seems that the family became Twelvers, Daylam had been a stronghold of Zaydism, that is to say of those who considered Zayd bn Ali, the son of Ali Zayn al-Abidin and brother of Muhammad al-Baqir, to have been a true imam.
Whatever the case concerning the form of Shi‘ism followed by the early Buyids, they were all prepared to accept the lavish titles they were awarded by the Sunni caliph. The reality was that the majority of the population were Sunni and it would have been politically difficult for the Buyids to end the Abbasid Caliphate – assuming that they wished to do so, which is far from certain. What is quite clear, however, is that the Shi‘i-inclined Buyids looked to the institution of the caliphate to legitimise them, just as Sunni rulers did.
They also had another source of legitimisation: the traditions of kingship of ancient Persia. These had never died, especially in remote areas like Daylam from which the dynasty came, and where Arab penetration had been small. The history of the old kings had been preserved, and some Buyid rulers even adopted the ancient Persian title of Shahanshah, ‘king of kings’, an honorific that would now be used by the Shi‘i prince who effectively controlled the Abbasid caliph.
The Buyid era was not a prosperous or a happy one. There were struggles within the Buyid family, revolts by unpaid soldiers, friction between Daylami and Turkish units in the army, brigandage, a steady decline in agriculture, trade and tax receipts, and the emigration of leading families to Egypt in the hope of a better life: all these were features of those times. Another was communal strife, of an increasingly sectarian nature, in Baghdad.
It was in the decades immediately before the Buyids entered Baghdad that sectarian communal violence gradually began in the Abbasid capital. In 925, the Caliph Muqtadir ordered the demolition of a mosque in the Shi‘i quarter of Karkh. Ali himself had prayed at this mosque, and it was a meeting place for Shi‘is. Nevertheless, the event does not seem to have sparked sectarian rioting. By contrast, ten years later, the Caliph Qahir signed a decree ordering Hanbalis – that is to say, Muslims who followed the doctrinal law school established by Ahmad ibn Hanbal – to stop rioting against Shi‘is, a sure sign that sectarian tensions had appeared at street level and had become a real danger to communal life in the capital.
These tensions were initially stoked by fear of the Qarmatis (a militant Shi‘i grouping which will be discussed in the next chapter) when they seized and pillaged the pilgrimage caravan to Mecca in 924, and left those pilgrims who were not worth a ransom to die of thirst in the desert. Anger at the government’s powerlessness was combined with dread that the Qarmatis might actually take Baghdad and massacre its inhabitants. This led to distrust of Shi‘is and the downfall of the vizier, Ibn al-Furat, whose family was known for Shi‘i sympathies. The Qarmati threat would ease in the 930s, but by then communal strife was appearing in Baghdad as mobs of Hanbalis began rioting against Shi‘is in 933.
The immediate cause was a report (accounts differ as to whether it was true) that Ali bin Yalbaq, a key member of the entourage of the Caliph al-Qahir, had tried to institute the cursing of Mu‘awiya from the pulpit. This led to further Hanbali agitation against Shi‘is and attempts at the repression of Hanbalis. The next Caliph, Radi, would castigate the Hanbalis as hypocrites who physically assaulted other Muslims who disagreed with them while posing as defenders of Islam, and ‘ascribing to the party of the blessed Prophet’s house unbelief and error’.24 But the Caliph did not succeed in calming the situation. While he persecuted the Hanbalis, the response by their mobs was only to intensify their attacks on Shi‘is.25
We can see in these riots how Muslims were dividing themselves into Sunnis (as represented here by the Hanbalis) and Shi‘is over their contestation of the history of Islam. For Shi‘is, Mu‘awiya was inevitably one of the villains of that history. It was he who had prevented Ali being accepted as caliph by the entirety of the Muslim community. He was also believed by Shi‘is to have poisoned Ali’s son, Hasan, whom he deceitfully promised would be his successor. On the Sunni/Hanbali side, the view was very different. Mu‘awiya had been a Companion of the Prophet and therefore his memory should not be attacked. Mu‘awiya’s rule, however controversial it may have been, was nevertheless legitimate and had led to stability in the Muslim polity and the further expansion of Islam. The caliphs were trying to hold the ring between the two factions, and finding increasingly that they could not do so as rioters roamed the streets.
Sectarian tension can thus be seen to have been well and truly present in Baghdad before 945 and the coming of the Buyids and their proudly pro-Shi‘i Daylami soldiers. In 962, the Buyid Mu‘izz al-Dawla had curses on Abu Bakr and Umar painted onto walls in the city. The following year, he gave permission to the Shi‘i community for the public commemoration of the mourning rituals of Ashura and the celebration of Ghadir Khumm.26 Around this time, important figures began asking for their bodies to be buried at Karbala, rather than be interred where they died (as had previously been the tradition). Lawlessness on the roads may also have been a factor in growth of pilgrimage traffic to the Shi‘i shrines rather than undertaking the perilous journey across Arabia necessary for the Hajj.
The division between Daylami soldiers who were Twelvers and Turkish soldiers who were Sunnis became a source of violence from 972 onwards. A military expedition against the Christians of Byzantium turned round and went back to Baghdad, where its Turkish soldiers attacked the Buyids, their Daylami troops, and Shi‘is in general. The Shi‘i suburb of Karkh was sacked and burned down on two separate occasions. Sunnis instituted their own feasts to rival those of the Shi‘is. Their counterpart to Ghadir Khumm was the feast to commemorate the night during the Hijrah when the Prophet and Abu Bakr took refuge in the cave to hide from the Quraysh after they left Mecca on their way to
Medina. But the damage to the Muslim community was now permanent. Baghdad was divided into quarters that were specifically Sunni or Shi‘i. These were often patrolled by thuggish, sectarian gangs, which clashed in the streets. The pattern of sectarian riots and specifically sectarian quarters also began to spread to other cities and regions of the Islamic world.
There were figures such as the gifted Buyid Adud al-Dawla who managed to calm things down to a certain extent, and forbade provocative, sectarian commemorations. Another Buyid, Baha al-Dawla, had rival Shi‘i and Sunni gang leaders tied together with rope and thrown into the Tigris to drown. Nevertheless, from now on it was all too frequently a process of containing sectarian violence, as well as sectarian excuses for brigandage and other crimes, rather than stamping them out.
Yet, at the same time, there was much positive and courteous interaction, particularly at the highest levels of society. There was an official representative, the naqib, of the descendants of Ali living in Baghdad who attended the caliph’s court. Although the descendants of Ali were by no means necessarily all Shi‘is, some naqibs such as al-Sharif al-Radi (d. 1015) won the trust and intimacy of the caliph despite being well known to be Twelvers. Al-Sharif al-Radi was a friend of the caliph, wore the official black robe of the Abbasids, and was entrusted with two important positions by him. He was the commander of the pilgrimage caravan to Mecca and was put in charge of the tribunal that dealt with mazalim – complaints by members of the public against wrongdoing by government officers. He was also politically useful to the Abbasid caliph. The rival Fatimid caliph in Cairo (see Chapter Five) claimed descent from Ali. Al-Sharif al-Radi was among a number of eminent Twelvers who joined the Abbasid Caliph Qadir and the Buyid prince Baha al-Dawla in signing a document that publicly disputed the authenticity of the Fatimid caliph’s ancestry.