The Division of Power and Influence: The Role of Sunni and Shi’a Islam in the heart of Islamic Middle East
By: @Nihonjin1051, Ph.D.
A Treatise on Sunni Islam and Shia Islam
When one examines the religious dynamic of Islam in the Middle East one has to consider the role of Sunni Islam and Shia Islam on population dynamics. The Middle East during the pre modern era was considered a syncretistic adaptation of the local religious traditions of the day whether it be the traditions of the Indian Subcontinent, the Hindu Kush region, North Africa, Asia Minor or event in around the islands of the Malay Archipelago. Islam, as global religion that had come to encompass various geographies around the world was a regionally influenced faith that was affected by landscapes and domestic cultural practices of the newly converted peoples of Southeast Asia, South Asia, Western Asia, North Africa.
These geographical variables also play a role in conjunction to the philosophical and theological impetus of Sunni and Shia Islam. Within the large family of Islam , with over 1.2 billion adherents to the faith, some 15% belong to Shia Islam and about 85% belong to Sunni Islam. One then has to understand the fundamental dichotomy of houses of Islam.
The Muslim World, and practitioner distribution in the global landscape.
Shi’ism is distinguished from Sunni in that Sunni places great trust in their imams, or divinely guided leaders and there are traditions unuqe to themand passed won by them. Complicating th situation are the imams that were recognized at different times and in different places in the early centuries of Islamic history. Of course, all imams descend from the Prophet through Ali and Fatima. Despite this difference, both Sunni and Shia Islam recognize the Q’uran and the Sunna as the basic source of Islamic jurisprudence in application to society and on the individualist level. Shi’ism is highly authoritarian with its adherents’ strong conviction that God teaches and guides his people through his imams. Authority flows from above to below, whereas in Sunnism, the relationship is the other way around, at least in theory. In Shi’ism, moreover, Ijtihad has continued to be prominent and effective, especially among the Imamis, whose hidden imam necessitates a succession of scholars (mujtahids) to manage juristic affairs until h returns again in a futuristic messianic age. In Isma’ili’ Shi’ism, the uninterputed succession of living imams provides a constant legislavie and legal guidance. In practice, Shi’I law bears some semblance to Sunni figh , in that athough ijtihad continues to operate, the tendency is to revere and maintain what has long been regarded as authoritative in the teachings and opinons of the early legists of their communities. One great difference between Shi’i and Sunni is that a form of temporary marriage known as mut’a that the Shi’I community recognize but what most Muslims and all Sunni schools regard as a little different.
The Split between the Sunni and Shi’i
The caliphate was founded in an atmosophere of urgency right after the death of the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh), who seems not to have prescribed any specific procedures or institutions for when he would no longer be the leader of the Muslims. The Shi’I , of course, contend that he had designated Ali as his successor, a view that carries with it the corollary assumption that all other Islmaic heads outside the Prophet’s lineage, through Ali and Fatima have been usurpers. The split between the Shi’I and Sunnis since the earliest period has been mainly political and the Shi’I presented an identifiable alternative quite early, with their characteristic ‘Alid loyalism (which was not restricted to Shi’is). But the Sunni movement itself, whose name for Ahl al-Sunna w’al-jama’a, “the people of the Prophetic sunna and the community” did not take on its definitive charactetistic until well after Shi’ism had established itself in various forms.
The Sunni movement was solidified about the time of Ahmad ibn Hanbal , when the grassroots Ulama and pious Muslims had agreed that rational speculation, such as that of the Mu’tazilites , was wrong and that only by means of obedience ato and conformity with the prophetic Sunna, a rather literalistic interpretation of the Q’uran, and imitating and transmiting the opinons and decisions of the learned and respected scholars of the past culd the umma truly carry out the commands of the Shari’a and live in security. But Sunnism had poteent antecedents and forebears , which th finally dominant majority traced back tot h rightly guided caliphs: Abu Bakr, Umar, Uthman, and Ali. So, if Sunnism only very gradually developed inot the more or less unified form that it enjoyed by the third Islamic century, it nevertheless regarded itself as the original and continuing orthodoxy from the beginning.
The Shi’I however, can in no way be characterized as having been any less devoted to the Prophet’s Sunna. If anything, they were more so than the Sunnis because they gave centrality to the Prophet’s family in determining who should be the true imams down through the descending generations. But Shi’I political and religious authority did not reside in the community, whose decisions by its qualified laders in jurisprudence were believed to be correct. It aly in the actual imams, who then exercised their right to rule as superior, essentially superhuman representatives of God.
The Iranian Political Clout in Regional Policy: Shia Islam’s Contextual Role
The final example of Islam and modern national entities is also the most dramatic in form and fateful in results. The Shia revolution in Iran in 1978 – 1979 brought to a brutal end te long period of Sha Reza Pahlavi’s program of modernization of what ancient nations’ economy, society, educational system, and military. The Shah was an autocrat who dealt very harshly with his opponents, to the point of maintaining a large secret police that arrested people on the slightest suspicious or pretext and often imprisoned them without trial. The Shah’s repressive internal security measures, combined with his westernizing ways and the increasingly hostile relationship between popular modern culture and Islamic values and customs led to a situation that was exploited by the Ulama and other religiously or ideologically oriented factions whether conservative, middle of the road or radical.
There had been rivalry and competition and at times bitter conflicts between the rulers of Iran and its religious scholars who regarded themselves as rulers of that Shii nation by divine right, which they also have imagined coincides with the real wishes of the masses. This is not fantasy in Shii countries because of the people’s continuing identification with the special legacy that has descended to them from Muhammad through Ali and Fatima and their martyred son Husayn.
Shiism was appropriate for Iran because of its tendency toward a metaphysical dualism of good versus evil, light against darkness and a view of history that sees in the future a final showdown between God’s true worshippers and the wicked. These and other notions reflect something of Iran’s Zoroastrian past, even as they go beyond it in new, Islamic ways with symbols and observances appropriate to the triumphal religion. Iran throughout the great struggle with American interventionism in the 1970s and then against its struggle against Iraq during the Iranian-Iraqi war had then led division of thought amongst the Sunni and Shia dominant countries with Iran playing a proxy role in support of Syria, Jordan and to an extent Palestine. This interventionist role then later influenced Saudi Arabia, a major nexus of regional clout, and foreign policy in containing what it considered the Shia ideological antagonist to Saudi Wahhabi ideology espoused in the Kingdom.
The House of Saud’s interjection in regional political affairs
But worldwide socioeconomic changes after World War II profoundly affected Muslim communities. In a rapidly globalizing economy, farmers and other rural workers abandoned the countryside to find work in capitals such as Teheran, Cairo, and Jakarta. The suddenly wealthy Gulf emirates and Saudi Arabia drew labor migrants from throughout South Asia. Thus — to take one example — hundreds of thousands of Pakistanis migrated to the Arabian peninsula in the 1970s and 1980s in search of jobs. They returned with their earnings not to their villages of origin but to urban centers such as Karachi and Lahore. These migrants no longer found so appealing the old regionally based Islam they had once known. Deracinated Muslims, facing the challenges of modernity in unfamiliar city settings, were susceptible to evangelizing by the missionaries of a revivalist and universalist Islam, an Islam based on Qur'anic scriptural authority rather than the charisma associated with local saints' tombs or Sufi shrines. The preachers of this revivalist Islam were quick to condemn the traditional folk rituals of the countryside as — depending on the locale — Hindu-tainted, Christian-derived, or simply pagan.
Much of the funding for such preaching came from oil revenues at the disposal of Saudi Arabia's Wahhabi Salafists. These are followers of a dichotomizing mentality that divides the world into mu'minin (believers) and kafirs (infidels, who are to be either converted or combated as enemies). Saudi Arabia's religious authorities have long regarded themselves as the natural leaders of global Islam, citing their role as guardians of the haramayn (the "sacred cities" of Mecca and Medina). The Saudi government, as host of the hajj-pilgrimage to Mecca that draws millions every year, has used this opportunity to proselytize fellow Muslims, seeking to shape a unified and standardized Islam that will place all believers under Wahhabi leadership.
The Etiology of Saudi-styled Wahhabism’s antagonism to Shi’ism espoused in Iran
Shiism arose in the seventh century because of a political dispute over leadership of the ummah after the death of the prophet Muhammad in 632. Most Muslims (those who ultimately became known as Sunnis) supported the principle of election in selecting the caliph (the political title of the prophet's successor). But a minority insisted that the caliphate should be reserved for Ali ibn Abi Talib (Muhammad's cousin and son-in-law) and for the offspring of Ali and his wife Fatima. Such individuals were known as Shi' at Ali, "the adherents of Ali." These Shias resented bitterly those Muslim leaders who tried to block Ali's bid for the caliphate. In particular Shias condemned Abu Bakr and Umar, the first and second caliphs, who are revered by Sunnis as al-shaykhayn (the two elders). Shia partisans claimed that Abu Bakr and Umar conspired to rob Ali of his rightful throne.
Ali did manage to take power and rule as caliph for five years, only to be murdered in the year 661. Further tragedy befell his descendants. According to Shia sources, Ali's elder son Hasan was poisoned by order of the reigning caliph. Thereupon the title of imam passed to Hasan's younger brother, Husain ibn Ali.
The term "imam" is important for understanding doctrinal differences between Sunnis and Shias. All Muslims use the term to mean "prayer leader," someone who leads a congregation in worship. But most Shias (especially those belonging to the Ithna-'Ashari or "Twelver" denomination, which is by far the most common form of Shiism, as well as the state religion of the Iranian Islamic Republic) also use the term in a more restricted sense, to refer to the rightful spiritual leader of the entire ummah. Twelver Shias insist that this global imam must be from the prophet's immediate bloodline, and that he be both ma'sum (sinless, perfect, and divinely protected from error) and mansus (chosen by Allah as leader, thereby avoiding the vagaries of any human electoral process). The first such imam, say Twelver Shias, was Ali; the third was his younger son, Husain.
In the year 680, at the urging of Shia partisans in Kufa, Husain set out from Arabia to Iraq to organize a rebellion against the reigning caliph, Yazid ibn Mu'awiyah. Husain was accompanied by the women and children of his household and only a small number of bodyguards and servants.
He never reached his destination of Kufa. Yazid's soldiers intercepted Husain near the river Euphrates at Karbala, which today is revered as Shiism's foremost pilgrimage site. Not wanting Husain to become a martyr and rallying point for further Shia resistance, Yazid ordered his soldiers to force Husain to surrender and offer the caliph bay'ah (an oath of allegiance). So the soldiers besieged Husain and his family, preventing them from reaching food or water. Husain and his family suffered torments of thirst under Iraq's pitiless desert sun. Shia preachers recount these sufferings in vivid detail during annual observances of Muharram, the Islamic month during which the siege of Karbala occurred.
In the end, Husain chose death rather than surrender. On Ashura, the tenth day of Muharram (the high point of the liturgical calendar of lamentation for Shias today), Husain died in combat against Yazid's forces. This effectively put an end to Twelver Shia hopes for reclaiming the caliphate.
Khomeini’s Politics and Iran’s Bid in Challenge of Saudi Leadership of Muslim World
The regime in Teheran, fully aware of the widespread hostility to Shiism among Sunni populations, has pursued a policy — dating back to the reign of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini — of downplaying its Shia identity in international pronouncements directed to the general Muslim public. Hence Iran's support for the militant group Hamas; hence Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's frequent televised appearances featuring maps of Palestine and photos of Jerusalem's Dome of the Rock. Support for Palestinian militancy constitutes an attempt to gain popularity among Sunni Arabs by focusing on shared objects of revulsion: Israel, Zionism, and America. Saudi-based Wahhabi Salafists, eager to derail Iran's drive for leadership, have been reminding Sunnis of precisely those sectarian differences that are most likely to keep anti-Shia sentiment alive. The first of these differences (and one that Sunni informants referred to angrily, in interviews I conducted in Yemen and Pakistan) involves the centuries-old Shia practice called sabb al-sahabah (reviling the companions). As noted above, Shias to this day fault those companions of Muhammad who blocked Ali ibn Abi Talib from the caliphate; particular blame is focused on the first two caliphs, Abu Bakr and Umar. Since Sunnis revere these two figures as "rightly guided" Muslim leaders, this is a particularly sore point. Partly because of this issue, Shias are sometimes derided with the term Rafidi (rejectionist or renegade), a pejorative that recurs in present-day anti-Shia polemics.
Since 1994, Ali Khamenei, Khomeini's successor as supreme leader of Iran, has issued fatwas forbidding the public performance of self-flagellation. Khamenei's stated justification? "It is not a question of individual or physical harm," he has argued, "but of great injuries linked to the reputation of Islam." In forbidding the public performance of bloody matam, he's claimed that outsiders might point to this ritual in order to "present both Islam and Shiism as an institution of superstition."
Khamenei's fatwas represent a trend currently discernible among competing Shia and Sunni missionaries: the attempt to eradicate traditional, regionally based forms of Muslim worship and replace them with a standardized and homogenized version of Islam — a global Islam that would be easier to supervise from one centralized source.
These fatwas have encountered considerable resistance. Shias I have visited since the 1990s in Muslim locales in Pakistan and India continue to stage spectacularly bloody public performances of matam. They express resentment at what they see as attempts by Iranian outsiders to meddle in local affairs. Sunni polemicists, for their part, regard Khamenei's decrees as a ruse to disguise Shiism's inherently unorthodox and un-Islamic character and as a tactic to further the Khomeinist policy of tasdir al-thawrah al-iraniyah (exporting the Iranian revolution).
A Concluding Discourse on how political division of power is the epitome of global Multipolarity
In regards to the historical dynamic of Iran and Saudi Arabia, we must tend to venture deeper into state politic with the ideological differences of various schools of Islam. The conflict in the region is thus a result of various forces vying for influence n the region and ultimately the issue of leadership in the Ulama. With Saudi Arabia and the GCC’s role in intervening in Syria through ideological exportation of Wahhabi thought and also economic support against the Alawite regime, it is an epitome of proxy. This correlates, also, to the current air and ground war that Saudi Arabia has initiated in Yemen, an example of Interventionism to prevent Iranian ideological influence and expansion in the Arabian Peninsula. With the current drop in oil prices, with recent change in policy regarding Iran’s sanctioning mechanisms, the rise of Iran and the dereliction of Saudi Arabia imposes a quandary for Islam and the leadership in the region. Given the historical breadth of competition and various factions playing a role, we must deign to declare that the current episode in Syria and Iraq is an example of Multipolarity. The paradigm of Iran’s clout is undeniable. The Iranian equation will be a factor for analysis for global players for years to come. Solution must come from an ideological catalyst that will require scholastic and theological leadership amongst Sunni and Shia schools to collaborate. If there can be no consensus, then the diversion will continue in perpetuity.
Reference:
After the Prophet: The Epic Story of the Shia-Sunni Split in Islam. (2009). Kirkus Reviews, 77(19), 6.
Haddad, F. (2013). Sunni-Shia relations after the Iraq War / Fanar Haddad.
Haivry, O. (2014). Shifting Alliances in the Middle East. Commentary, 138(3), 29-32.
Kyser, B. (2014). The dynamics of Sunni-Shia relationships: doctrine, transnationalism, intellectuals and the media. Journal Of Shiʻa Islamic Studies, 7(2), 252-253.
Roy, O. (2011). The long war between Sunni and Shia. New Statesman, 140(5058), 20-23.
Pinault, D. (2010). Sunni-Shia Sectarianism and Competition for the Leadership of Global Islam. Tikkun, 25(1), 45-75.
The solution to the Isis uprising must come from the Middle East. (2014). New Statesman, 143(5215), 5.
Younglove, A. (2006). The Heirs of Muhammad: Islam's First Century and the Origins of the Sunni-Shia Schism. Library Journal, 131(20), 140-141.
By: @Nihonjin1051, Ph.D.
A Treatise on Sunni Islam and Shia Islam
When one examines the religious dynamic of Islam in the Middle East one has to consider the role of Sunni Islam and Shia Islam on population dynamics. The Middle East during the pre modern era was considered a syncretistic adaptation of the local religious traditions of the day whether it be the traditions of the Indian Subcontinent, the Hindu Kush region, North Africa, Asia Minor or event in around the islands of the Malay Archipelago. Islam, as global religion that had come to encompass various geographies around the world was a regionally influenced faith that was affected by landscapes and domestic cultural practices of the newly converted peoples of Southeast Asia, South Asia, Western Asia, North Africa.
These geographical variables also play a role in conjunction to the philosophical and theological impetus of Sunni and Shia Islam. Within the large family of Islam , with over 1.2 billion adherents to the faith, some 15% belong to Shia Islam and about 85% belong to Sunni Islam. One then has to understand the fundamental dichotomy of houses of Islam.
The Muslim World, and practitioner distribution in the global landscape.
Shi’ism is distinguished from Sunni in that Sunni places great trust in their imams, or divinely guided leaders and there are traditions unuqe to themand passed won by them. Complicating th situation are the imams that were recognized at different times and in different places in the early centuries of Islamic history. Of course, all imams descend from the Prophet through Ali and Fatima. Despite this difference, both Sunni and Shia Islam recognize the Q’uran and the Sunna as the basic source of Islamic jurisprudence in application to society and on the individualist level. Shi’ism is highly authoritarian with its adherents’ strong conviction that God teaches and guides his people through his imams. Authority flows from above to below, whereas in Sunnism, the relationship is the other way around, at least in theory. In Shi’ism, moreover, Ijtihad has continued to be prominent and effective, especially among the Imamis, whose hidden imam necessitates a succession of scholars (mujtahids) to manage juristic affairs until h returns again in a futuristic messianic age. In Isma’ili’ Shi’ism, the uninterputed succession of living imams provides a constant legislavie and legal guidance. In practice, Shi’I law bears some semblance to Sunni figh , in that athough ijtihad continues to operate, the tendency is to revere and maintain what has long been regarded as authoritative in the teachings and opinons of the early legists of their communities. One great difference between Shi’i and Sunni is that a form of temporary marriage known as mut’a that the Shi’I community recognize but what most Muslims and all Sunni schools regard as a little different.
The Split between the Sunni and Shi’i
The caliphate was founded in an atmosophere of urgency right after the death of the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh), who seems not to have prescribed any specific procedures or institutions for when he would no longer be the leader of the Muslims. The Shi’I , of course, contend that he had designated Ali as his successor, a view that carries with it the corollary assumption that all other Islmaic heads outside the Prophet’s lineage, through Ali and Fatima have been usurpers. The split between the Shi’I and Sunnis since the earliest period has been mainly political and the Shi’I presented an identifiable alternative quite early, with their characteristic ‘Alid loyalism (which was not restricted to Shi’is). But the Sunni movement itself, whose name for Ahl al-Sunna w’al-jama’a, “the people of the Prophetic sunna and the community” did not take on its definitive charactetistic until well after Shi’ism had established itself in various forms.
The Sunni movement was solidified about the time of Ahmad ibn Hanbal , when the grassroots Ulama and pious Muslims had agreed that rational speculation, such as that of the Mu’tazilites , was wrong and that only by means of obedience ato and conformity with the prophetic Sunna, a rather literalistic interpretation of the Q’uran, and imitating and transmiting the opinons and decisions of the learned and respected scholars of the past culd the umma truly carry out the commands of the Shari’a and live in security. But Sunnism had poteent antecedents and forebears , which th finally dominant majority traced back tot h rightly guided caliphs: Abu Bakr, Umar, Uthman, and Ali. So, if Sunnism only very gradually developed inot the more or less unified form that it enjoyed by the third Islamic century, it nevertheless regarded itself as the original and continuing orthodoxy from the beginning.
The Shi’I however, can in no way be characterized as having been any less devoted to the Prophet’s Sunna. If anything, they were more so than the Sunnis because they gave centrality to the Prophet’s family in determining who should be the true imams down through the descending generations. But Shi’I political and religious authority did not reside in the community, whose decisions by its qualified laders in jurisprudence were believed to be correct. It aly in the actual imams, who then exercised their right to rule as superior, essentially superhuman representatives of God.
The Iranian Political Clout in Regional Policy: Shia Islam’s Contextual Role
The final example of Islam and modern national entities is also the most dramatic in form and fateful in results. The Shia revolution in Iran in 1978 – 1979 brought to a brutal end te long period of Sha Reza Pahlavi’s program of modernization of what ancient nations’ economy, society, educational system, and military. The Shah was an autocrat who dealt very harshly with his opponents, to the point of maintaining a large secret police that arrested people on the slightest suspicious or pretext and often imprisoned them without trial. The Shah’s repressive internal security measures, combined with his westernizing ways and the increasingly hostile relationship between popular modern culture and Islamic values and customs led to a situation that was exploited by the Ulama and other religiously or ideologically oriented factions whether conservative, middle of the road or radical.
There had been rivalry and competition and at times bitter conflicts between the rulers of Iran and its religious scholars who regarded themselves as rulers of that Shii nation by divine right, which they also have imagined coincides with the real wishes of the masses. This is not fantasy in Shii countries because of the people’s continuing identification with the special legacy that has descended to them from Muhammad through Ali and Fatima and their martyred son Husayn.
Shiism was appropriate for Iran because of its tendency toward a metaphysical dualism of good versus evil, light against darkness and a view of history that sees in the future a final showdown between God’s true worshippers and the wicked. These and other notions reflect something of Iran’s Zoroastrian past, even as they go beyond it in new, Islamic ways with symbols and observances appropriate to the triumphal religion. Iran throughout the great struggle with American interventionism in the 1970s and then against its struggle against Iraq during the Iranian-Iraqi war had then led division of thought amongst the Sunni and Shia dominant countries with Iran playing a proxy role in support of Syria, Jordan and to an extent Palestine. This interventionist role then later influenced Saudi Arabia, a major nexus of regional clout, and foreign policy in containing what it considered the Shia ideological antagonist to Saudi Wahhabi ideology espoused in the Kingdom.
The House of Saud’s interjection in regional political affairs
But worldwide socioeconomic changes after World War II profoundly affected Muslim communities. In a rapidly globalizing economy, farmers and other rural workers abandoned the countryside to find work in capitals such as Teheran, Cairo, and Jakarta. The suddenly wealthy Gulf emirates and Saudi Arabia drew labor migrants from throughout South Asia. Thus — to take one example — hundreds of thousands of Pakistanis migrated to the Arabian peninsula in the 1970s and 1980s in search of jobs. They returned with their earnings not to their villages of origin but to urban centers such as Karachi and Lahore. These migrants no longer found so appealing the old regionally based Islam they had once known. Deracinated Muslims, facing the challenges of modernity in unfamiliar city settings, were susceptible to evangelizing by the missionaries of a revivalist and universalist Islam, an Islam based on Qur'anic scriptural authority rather than the charisma associated with local saints' tombs or Sufi shrines. The preachers of this revivalist Islam were quick to condemn the traditional folk rituals of the countryside as — depending on the locale — Hindu-tainted, Christian-derived, or simply pagan.
Much of the funding for such preaching came from oil revenues at the disposal of Saudi Arabia's Wahhabi Salafists. These are followers of a dichotomizing mentality that divides the world into mu'minin (believers) and kafirs (infidels, who are to be either converted or combated as enemies). Saudi Arabia's religious authorities have long regarded themselves as the natural leaders of global Islam, citing their role as guardians of the haramayn (the "sacred cities" of Mecca and Medina). The Saudi government, as host of the hajj-pilgrimage to Mecca that draws millions every year, has used this opportunity to proselytize fellow Muslims, seeking to shape a unified and standardized Islam that will place all believers under Wahhabi leadership.
The Etiology of Saudi-styled Wahhabism’s antagonism to Shi’ism espoused in Iran
Shiism arose in the seventh century because of a political dispute over leadership of the ummah after the death of the prophet Muhammad in 632. Most Muslims (those who ultimately became known as Sunnis) supported the principle of election in selecting the caliph (the political title of the prophet's successor). But a minority insisted that the caliphate should be reserved for Ali ibn Abi Talib (Muhammad's cousin and son-in-law) and for the offspring of Ali and his wife Fatima. Such individuals were known as Shi' at Ali, "the adherents of Ali." These Shias resented bitterly those Muslim leaders who tried to block Ali's bid for the caliphate. In particular Shias condemned Abu Bakr and Umar, the first and second caliphs, who are revered by Sunnis as al-shaykhayn (the two elders). Shia partisans claimed that Abu Bakr and Umar conspired to rob Ali of his rightful throne.
Ali did manage to take power and rule as caliph for five years, only to be murdered in the year 661. Further tragedy befell his descendants. According to Shia sources, Ali's elder son Hasan was poisoned by order of the reigning caliph. Thereupon the title of imam passed to Hasan's younger brother, Husain ibn Ali.
The term "imam" is important for understanding doctrinal differences between Sunnis and Shias. All Muslims use the term to mean "prayer leader," someone who leads a congregation in worship. But most Shias (especially those belonging to the Ithna-'Ashari or "Twelver" denomination, which is by far the most common form of Shiism, as well as the state religion of the Iranian Islamic Republic) also use the term in a more restricted sense, to refer to the rightful spiritual leader of the entire ummah. Twelver Shias insist that this global imam must be from the prophet's immediate bloodline, and that he be both ma'sum (sinless, perfect, and divinely protected from error) and mansus (chosen by Allah as leader, thereby avoiding the vagaries of any human electoral process). The first such imam, say Twelver Shias, was Ali; the third was his younger son, Husain.
In the year 680, at the urging of Shia partisans in Kufa, Husain set out from Arabia to Iraq to organize a rebellion against the reigning caliph, Yazid ibn Mu'awiyah. Husain was accompanied by the women and children of his household and only a small number of bodyguards and servants.
He never reached his destination of Kufa. Yazid's soldiers intercepted Husain near the river Euphrates at Karbala, which today is revered as Shiism's foremost pilgrimage site. Not wanting Husain to become a martyr and rallying point for further Shia resistance, Yazid ordered his soldiers to force Husain to surrender and offer the caliph bay'ah (an oath of allegiance). So the soldiers besieged Husain and his family, preventing them from reaching food or water. Husain and his family suffered torments of thirst under Iraq's pitiless desert sun. Shia preachers recount these sufferings in vivid detail during annual observances of Muharram, the Islamic month during which the siege of Karbala occurred.
In the end, Husain chose death rather than surrender. On Ashura, the tenth day of Muharram (the high point of the liturgical calendar of lamentation for Shias today), Husain died in combat against Yazid's forces. This effectively put an end to Twelver Shia hopes for reclaiming the caliphate.
Khomeini’s Politics and Iran’s Bid in Challenge of Saudi Leadership of Muslim World
The regime in Teheran, fully aware of the widespread hostility to Shiism among Sunni populations, has pursued a policy — dating back to the reign of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini — of downplaying its Shia identity in international pronouncements directed to the general Muslim public. Hence Iran's support for the militant group Hamas; hence Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's frequent televised appearances featuring maps of Palestine and photos of Jerusalem's Dome of the Rock. Support for Palestinian militancy constitutes an attempt to gain popularity among Sunni Arabs by focusing on shared objects of revulsion: Israel, Zionism, and America. Saudi-based Wahhabi Salafists, eager to derail Iran's drive for leadership, have been reminding Sunnis of precisely those sectarian differences that are most likely to keep anti-Shia sentiment alive. The first of these differences (and one that Sunni informants referred to angrily, in interviews I conducted in Yemen and Pakistan) involves the centuries-old Shia practice called sabb al-sahabah (reviling the companions). As noted above, Shias to this day fault those companions of Muhammad who blocked Ali ibn Abi Talib from the caliphate; particular blame is focused on the first two caliphs, Abu Bakr and Umar. Since Sunnis revere these two figures as "rightly guided" Muslim leaders, this is a particularly sore point. Partly because of this issue, Shias are sometimes derided with the term Rafidi (rejectionist or renegade), a pejorative that recurs in present-day anti-Shia polemics.
Since 1994, Ali Khamenei, Khomeini's successor as supreme leader of Iran, has issued fatwas forbidding the public performance of self-flagellation. Khamenei's stated justification? "It is not a question of individual or physical harm," he has argued, "but of great injuries linked to the reputation of Islam." In forbidding the public performance of bloody matam, he's claimed that outsiders might point to this ritual in order to "present both Islam and Shiism as an institution of superstition."
Khamenei's fatwas represent a trend currently discernible among competing Shia and Sunni missionaries: the attempt to eradicate traditional, regionally based forms of Muslim worship and replace them with a standardized and homogenized version of Islam — a global Islam that would be easier to supervise from one centralized source.
These fatwas have encountered considerable resistance. Shias I have visited since the 1990s in Muslim locales in Pakistan and India continue to stage spectacularly bloody public performances of matam. They express resentment at what they see as attempts by Iranian outsiders to meddle in local affairs. Sunni polemicists, for their part, regard Khamenei's decrees as a ruse to disguise Shiism's inherently unorthodox and un-Islamic character and as a tactic to further the Khomeinist policy of tasdir al-thawrah al-iraniyah (exporting the Iranian revolution).
A Concluding Discourse on how political division of power is the epitome of global Multipolarity
In regards to the historical dynamic of Iran and Saudi Arabia, we must tend to venture deeper into state politic with the ideological differences of various schools of Islam. The conflict in the region is thus a result of various forces vying for influence n the region and ultimately the issue of leadership in the Ulama. With Saudi Arabia and the GCC’s role in intervening in Syria through ideological exportation of Wahhabi thought and also economic support against the Alawite regime, it is an epitome of proxy. This correlates, also, to the current air and ground war that Saudi Arabia has initiated in Yemen, an example of Interventionism to prevent Iranian ideological influence and expansion in the Arabian Peninsula. With the current drop in oil prices, with recent change in policy regarding Iran’s sanctioning mechanisms, the rise of Iran and the dereliction of Saudi Arabia imposes a quandary for Islam and the leadership in the region. Given the historical breadth of competition and various factions playing a role, we must deign to declare that the current episode in Syria and Iraq is an example of Multipolarity. The paradigm of Iran’s clout is undeniable. The Iranian equation will be a factor for analysis for global players for years to come. Solution must come from an ideological catalyst that will require scholastic and theological leadership amongst Sunni and Shia schools to collaborate. If there can be no consensus, then the diversion will continue in perpetuity.
Reference:
After the Prophet: The Epic Story of the Shia-Sunni Split in Islam. (2009). Kirkus Reviews, 77(19), 6.
Haddad, F. (2013). Sunni-Shia relations after the Iraq War / Fanar Haddad.
Haivry, O. (2014). Shifting Alliances in the Middle East. Commentary, 138(3), 29-32.
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