The Shi’a-Sunni Split, Part 3

So, the more that I thought about this post, the more I kept on thinking it would be a crash-course in Middle Eastern history, and honestly, in my ~1500 word cap for this post, I simply could not do it justice.  As a result, I decided to BRIEFLY describe the succession of Caliphates and explain how they allowed Shi’a to survive.  Mind you, there’s been a lot of other people who have claimed to be Caliphs.  Later Ottoman Sultans began identifying as Caliphs, the Ahmadiyya Muslim movement in northern India has a Caliph – even ISIS has a Caliph.  It really doesn’t take much to call yourself something, but only a handful of people have had the capability to realize the actual power of a Caliph.

Europe and the Middle East in 750

So to start today’s story, we’re going to fast forward to the year 750, which is, I admit, skipping a lot.  The Byzantines had more or less given up on the whole idea of maintaining their African empire, as the local Berber and Vandal populations had risen up against them while the Umayyad armies swept across the Maghreb.  Under the newly-converted Berber Tariq ibn Ziyad (whose story I’ll tell you someday), the Muslim armies conquered essentially all of Spain, aside from the mountains in the north, where the Basques held out.  Meanwhile, the Byzantines had been too busy dealing with the Slavs and Avars in the North and the Lombards in Italy to wage a prohibitively expensive war against the Umayyads.

The Umayyad popularity was largely based on their battlefield success.  In fifty years, they had conquered Visigothic Spain, Sindh, in what is now Southern Pakistan, the Caucasus Mountains, and all of the northern coast of Africa.  A series of defeats in the mid-8th Century, however, left the Umayyads with very few friends.  The first of these came in 718, at the Siege of Constantinople, in which an army of as many as 120,000 Arabs (likely exaggerated but technically possible at the time).  The Byzantine Emperor Leo the Isaurian’s signature victory had a number of consequences within his own empire, but in the Caliphate, it set off a chain reaction of losses.  In 725, in India, against the Kingdom of Avanti, the Muslim armies suffered what appears to have been a major defeat.  Very little information still exists about this, but the momentum of Muslim conquest in India clearly slowed after this.  Meanwhile, in the West, what was at least at the time considered a major defeat at the hands of the Franks in Battle of Tours resulted in the abrupt halt of Muslim advances into Europe (I know some people like to downplay Tours, but I’ve never heard a good explanation as to why a follow-up expedition was never even planned).

The lack of historical material about the latter two battles makes their importance somewhat difficult to determine, but what happened soon afterward, with the overthrow of the Umayyad clan, would imply that these were hardly inconsequential to the people of the time period.  The revolt of the Abbasid clan in 750 saw everyone save the Arab tribal establishment turn on the unpopular Caliphs.  Even the Shias sided with the mainline Abbasids.  The Umayyads would re-emerge six years later in modern Spain and Portugal and would set up their own “Caliphate” there, but they would never expand their influence much beyond the Iberian Peninsula.

Now, what does all this have to do with the Shi’a, you might ask?  I’m glad you did, because that makes a great segue into my next point… Multiple different Islamic states is what preserved the existence of the Shi’a faith.  For the first 150~ years of Islam’s existence, the entire faith was under a single political head.  With the Umayyad revolt in Spain, and sixty years later, the Tahirids’ revolt in Persia would make the break-up of the Islamic Empire permanent. With this development, the descendants of Ali could flee to more tolerant nations to escape persecution.

In 909, the first Shi’ite state was established in North Africa.  Over the remainder of the 10th Century, they would come to control Egypt and would establish the city of Cairo.  Under the Caliph Mansur, the Shias would come to control Jerusalem.  Mansur’s an interesting guy in a lot of ways, and his disappearance in 1021 is almost a fitting end to such a bizarre life.  All that was found of him was his donkey and bloodstained garments.

Mansur changed his policy on religious minorities several times, even saying a couple of things that almost sound like he thought all religions were basically the same (this is not orthodox Islamic teaching).  He was known to impulsively condemn men to death, and he and his men destroyed the famed Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem  This led to his moniker “the Mad Caliph” in the West, but in Isma’ili Shi’a, he is considered a sage teacher.

The Crusades, which broke out less than a century after the death of Mansur, would weaken both the Fatimids and the Abassids so greatly that both of them would suffer on as puppet governments for another century and a half, until the Mongol invasions acted as an impetus for their final overthrow.  The fragmentation of the Islamic Empire allowed for the survival of fringe groups like Shi’a, which, in the top-down regime of the Caliphs, would not have been able to survive.

Today, four majority-Shi’a countries exist – Iran, Iraq, Azerbaijan, and Bahrain, with significant minorities existing in Pakistan, India, Lebanon, and Syria.

Distribution of Islamic Sects and Schools

Now, about 1300 years removed from the Shi’a-Sunni split, more splits have occurred within the sects themselves, although within the Sunnis, most all Hanafis would call the Maliki Muslims, the Shafi’i would call the Hanbali Muslims, etc.  The only intra-sect split that has become a large, faith-determining issue is the Isma’ili-Jafari split in Shi’a.  For the most part, however, Shias and Sunnis do not consider one another to be true followers of the prophet.

So, hopefully this somewhat meandering post covers the bases that my first two posts did not.  If you have additional questions, feel free to comment, and I’ll do what I can to answer.  Some questions might be better posed to an actual Muslim, however. 🙂

Thanks for reading,

Paul

The Shi’a-Sunni Split, Part 2

So last time we left off on Ali’s victory over Aisha at the Battle of the Camel.  In the moment, it seemed like Ali had some momentum behind him, but he still faced a number of issues.  For one thing, it was not as though everyone in the Caliphate suddenly got along after they were conquered.  Less than forty years before, Syria and Mesopotamia had been on opposite sides of the bitterest Byzantine-Sassanid Persian conflict ever (this was briefly mentioned in my post a few days ago, but once again… it’s a story for another time), and now they were supposed to just get along?  Faith and religion can be incredible uniting forces, but they don’t change the fundamental tendencies of people.  People will still hold grudges and they will not suddenly become amnesiacs, simply because they all worship the same god suddenly.

Although the contemporary sources don’t cite this as a major problem, reading between the lines is not difficult.  There are certain regions of the Caliphate that consistently pose problems for central control, and the Syrian-Mesopotamian-Arab rivalry would be a repeating issue.

Another issue was the rise of the Khawarij, better known as the Kharijites.  Literally meaning “outsiders,” the Kharijites were purists of the highest order, and they would pose issues for many a Caliphate for years to come.  The root of early Kharijite ideology comes from Uncle Ben’s famous quote, “With great power comes great responsibility,” and the Caliphs were certainly claiming great power.  The problem was that they were not always responsible, or at least their behavior was not above reproach, so the Kharijites would invoke takfir (a less formal means of excommunication for Muslims) against them.  A precursor group of the Kharijites had even been the ones responsible for the murder of Caliph Uthman.  After a battle with Muhammad’s own widow, the Kharijites, who had originally supported Ali, seem to have begun to question his authority as Caliph.

Map of the Mediterranean 650

From Basra, Ali marched his army toward Muawiyah, and the two armies met at Siffin in Syria.  The details of the battle are a little unclear, but it appears to have ended with the refusal of both sides to continue fighting fellow Muslims, due to the Qu’ran’s explicit commandments against just such an act.  Other accounts cite concern of what would happen to their families should the Byzantines counterattack or should the Persians reorganize and revolt (mind you Persia had only truly been subjugated for about fifteen years at the time).

Now, in retrospect, we can see that a Byzantine attack was somewhat unrealistic.  Emperor Constans II was in defense mode, and although the Byzantine navy remained the unquestioned superpower of the Mediterranean Sea, his land army was busy fighting off Slavs in the Balkans.  The Muslims do not seem to have understood this, and both sides withdrew after considerable bloodshed.

To outsiders, the general opinion was that Muawiyah had won, and this narrative was reinforced by the permanent break of the Kharijites with Ali.  Trusting in his tentative truce with Muawiyah, Ali proceeded to pursue the Kharijites until he and his son Hasan drew them into battle at Nahrawan in Iraq in 659.  Ali’s faction was victorious, but he solidified himself as Enemy No. 1 for the Kharijites, despite their being more ideologically opposed to Muawiyah.

In 661, while in prayer, Ali was assassinated by a Kharijite with a poisoned blade, and his son Hasan claimed succession.  Hasan personally decapitated his father’s assassin, but if his father’s claim had been questioned by Muawiyah, Hasan’s was outright contested.  Ultimately, Kharijite resistance never really allowed Hasan to assemble an army of any note, and when Muawiyah arrived in force with his army of Syrians, Hasan had little choice but to surrender.  He would live out the last eight years of his life in Medina, keeping his head down and publishing theological writings, but there remained a substantial number of Muslims, particularly in modern-day Iraq, who continued to hold Hasan as the rightful Caliph.

The Umayyad Caliphate, which Muawiyah established in 661 after Hasan’s surrender, would go on to be almost unarguably the least popular Caliphate of the four major Caliphates (Rashidun, Umayyad, Abbasid, and Fatimid) and less than a hundred years later, their rule would implode.  During this time, the rift between the followers of Hasan and his direct descendants in the male line and the less-organized majority, whose head was decided far less systematically.  To this day, the Shi’a remain more organized than Sunnis, particularly in the Ithnā’ashariyyah’ (called “Twelver” in English) branch.

I suppose it might be useful here to see what “Sunni” and “Shi’a” actually mean, because this really helps when you’re trying to understand the sect.  Sunni (which is the sect that today constitutes, conservatively, 85% of Muslims is derived from the word sunnah, meaning “habit,” “custom,” or “tradition.”  Today, Sunnis are typically more ritualistic than the Shi’a, as you probably noticed in their Five Pillars in my post yesterday.

Shi’a is an abbreviation of Shia-ne-Ali (followers of Ali).  Essentially, Shi’a means “follower,” and, as a result, their works tend to emphasize the teachings of the Imams (the direct descendants of Ali).  Now, there are disputes among Shias about who the rightful Imam was/is, the majority believing in the Occultation (in essence, Muhammad al-Mahdi’s disappearance in 941, to return at an unknown date).  Because so much of their faith is based on theological writings, rather than tradition, Shi’a belief tends to be a little more analytical and systematic than Sunni (I’m painting with really broad strokes here).

So, there’s a number of other theological differences between Sunnis and Shias that I’m going to try to quickly sum up here (they can’t be quickly summed up).  As we mentioned yesterday, Shias do not believe that they will actually see Allah when they go to heaven.  There are also some differences in prayer.  Sunnis cross their arms while they pray, but Shias keep their hands by their sides.  Additionally the five times a day thing for Sunnis doesn’t apply to Shias; Shias condense it all into three times a day.  Most of the leading Sunni scholars are now dead, and modern-day Sunnis do most of their theological work either with the Qu’ran itself, the Hadiths, or with the writings of prominent Sunni scholars, but the Sunnis lack a central body of “theological government” like the Shias have.  The Marja’ (often called Grand Ayatollahs) are the highest rank in the Shi’a clergy, of whom there are currently 64 (this is not a fixed number).  Below these are the Ayatollahs, and below them are the Muitjahids (essentially, people who have shown enough competency in Islamic jurisprudence so as to form their own opinions).  Mutijahids are not obligated to follow a Marja’, but a Muqallid, (literally, a follower of a Marja’) does not have permission to create his own theological opinions and must follow one more educated and well-versed than himself.

So, next time we’re going to go over how it is that Shi’a survived (which is an interesting story on its own) and why today, the country with the largest Shi’a population in the world is Iran.  As kind of a teaser, here’s a little chart of countries by Shi’a population.