Posted on 05/05/2003 5:58:38 PM PDT by restornu
Recent television footage from Iraq has furnished Western viewers with graphic images of Shi‘ite pilgrims, many bloody from self-inflicted wounds, engaged in rituals long banned by Saddam Hussein. News reports have also told of Shi‘ite demonstrations demanding the departure of coalition troops and the establishment of a theocratic Islamic state.
Who are the Shi‘ites? What historical experiences have formed them? Why do they think and do as they do?
The term Shi‘ite comes from the Arabic phrase shi‘at ‘Ali, meaning “the faction of ‘Ali.” ‘Ali was the cousin of the Prophet Muhammad, the founder of Islam, as well as the husband of Muhammad’s daughter Fatima and the father of the Prophet’s only surviving male descendents. When Muhammad died suddenly in 632 A.D., a crisis erupted. “The faction of ‘Ali” insisted that only male relatives of Muhammad qualified as his legitimate successors. In general, however, the Shi‘ites lost out to what came eventually to be known as the “Sunni” view, that, while someone needed to keep order and enforce Islamic law, that person needn’t be a relative of Muhammad.
Nonetheless, ‘Ali did finally come to power in 656 A.D., as the fourth “caliph” or successor to the founding Prophet. But his rule was uneasy, unpopular in certain quarters, and, ultimately, brief. In 661, he fell victim to an assassin’s poisoned saber, becoming the first of many martyrs in the history of Shi‘ism.,
Ali is buried in the town of Najaf, in Iraq, four miles from the medieval city of Kufa. The first major shrine was built over his tomb in 977 by a Shi‘ite dynasty, the Buyids or Buwayhids, that conquered Baghdad in the tenth century and held it for several decades. The shrine has been destroyed and rebuilt several times since then, but, in the Shi‘ite world, it is known as a mashhad, a “place of a martyr.” It has been an object of pilgrimage for many centuries.
Ali’s death did not end Shi‘ism. Indeed, the common saying about early Christianity that “the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church” applies with even greater force to Shi‘ite Islam. Eventually, ‘Ali’s son Husayn claimed the right of succession and rebelled against the Umayyad dynasty that, based in Damascus, had seized control of the large and still rapidly growing Islamic empire. However, his rebellion ended catastrophically in 680. At Karbala, sixty miles southwest of Baghdad, a much larger Umayyad force massacred Husayn’s tiny army of six hundred. Husayn’s head was taken to Damascus as proof of his death. (According to tradition, it was later removed to Egypt, where it now resides in the Sayyidna Husayn [Our Master Husayn] Mosque in Cairo.)
The battle of Karbala reinforced and made permanent the breach between Sunnis and Shi‘ites. Ever since, Shi‘ites have cultivated a sense of grievous wrong, of oppression by tyrannous infidel usurpers, as well as what can justly be described as a religious cult of martyrdom. Karbala became a center of Shi‘ite pilgrimage in the following decades. The small tomb that first occupied the site was replaced in 979 by a monumental mausoleum and mosque, erected by the Buyids. That mosque, too, has been destroyed and rebuilt several times, owing to both accidental fires and violent anti-Shi‘ite persecutions, but Karbala remains today the holiest shrine for the leading Shi‘ite sect – known as Ithna‘ashariyya, or “Twelvers,” for their belief in a succession of twelve imams – after the sacred city of the Prophet himself, Mecca. (Twelver Shi‘ites today dominate Iran, constitute roughly 60% of the population of Iraq – though Saddam Hussein and his government were, at least nominally, Sunni – and have a significant presence in southern Lebanon.)
Shi‘ites commemorate Husayn’s martyrdom on the tenth of the Islamic month of Muharram, by reenacting it in elaborate passion plays. These and similar rituals express a sense of communal guilt and penitence for having abandoned the Prophet’s grandson – whom, it is said, Muhammad dearly loved -- at his supreme moment of need: Had Shi’ites been faithful to Husayn, they believe, the righteous imams would have prevailed and the divine order of Islam would have been maintained. Modern suicide bombers and other Islamic terrorists, both Sunni and Shi‘ite, draw on the stories of ‘Ali and Husayn to justify and motivate their own acts of what they see as resistance to oppression.
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