What is Shia Religious? The history of Shia Muslims?
Why the aggravation?
Bad blood did not always flow between Sunnis and Shias
“BETTER sixty years of tyranny than one day of fitna.” The term in the Arabic saying refers to civil strife, particularly the kind caused by religious schism. Not only is fitna a calamitous sign of the coming day of judgment; it also reflects fears deeply embedded in Muslim memory. The schism between Sunnis and Shias in the early centuries of Islam was blamed for blunting the new religion’s expansion. Later, it was blamed for weakening Muslims in general, and for opening the way to invasion by infidel hordes.
Few mention such things now, but long ago a communistic Shia sect raided Mecca, stole the sacred Black Stone, and held it hostage for 22 years before returning it, broken in pieces. Shia dynasties once ruled Tunisia, Egypt and the eastern end of the Mediterranean. Their overthrow by orthodox Sunnis was seen by them as a greater triumph than the defeat of the Crusaders. And of course Ashoura, the day of martyrdom celebrated last week, commemorates Shia suffering at the hands of Sunnis.
Yet for the last 800 years or so, sectarian divisions have lain mostly dormant. Shias tended to live in isolation and on the margins—in the mountains of Lebanon and Yemen, on the hot, swampy shores of the Persian Gulf, in self-contained Indian trading communities. In Iran, where they formed a majority, Shiism overlapped with and reinforced an exclusive Iranian national identity. Neither Sunnis nor Shias knew or cared much about their cousins. Few challenged the Sunni assumption of superiority, while the Shias, with their doctrinal emphasis on martyrdom and victimhood, thrived on their own marginalisation.
Urbanisation, migration and the imposition of national borders have brought the sects into renewed proximity. Mostly, the mixing has been painless. For decades, city-dwelling Sunnis and Shias in Beirut and Baghdad happily intermarried. Forty years ago, Egypt’s leading cleric of the time even declared mainstream Shiism to be an accepted branch of the faith. But other strains of Sunnism have been less tolerant.
The puritan revival known as Wahhabism has, since its beginnings in Saudi Arabia, been particularly hostile to Shiism. In the early 19th century, Wahhabi raiders sacked Shia shrines in Mecca, Medina and Karbala, accusing their keepers of worshipping idols. Saudi Arabia still denies many rights to its large Shia minority, and vilifies it in school textbooks.
Wahhabism has strongly influenced modern Sunni militant movements, including Afghanistan’s Taliban, radicals in Pakistan, and some components of Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda. On the morning of this Ashoura, for instance, a Kuwaiti sheikh, Hamed al-Ali, posted on his website a letter condemning the rite as “the world’s biggest display of heathens and idolatry”. He accused Iraq’s Shias of plotting to assassinate Sunni leaders, foment strife across the region, grab the Gulf’s oil, and form an evil axis linking Washington, Tel Aviv and the Shia holy city of Najaf.
Even more poisonous vitriol appears in a letter that American intelligence attributes to the alleged leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Musab al Zarqawi. The Shias, he says, are a more pernicious enemy than the Americans, and the best strategy for the poor, weak and sleepy Sunnis is to “strike their religious, military and other cadres”—in other words, to stokefitna so as to preclude the transfer of power to a Shia-dominated democracy.
Yet many Muslims, including Iraqi Shias, shy away from accepting that fellow Muslims could commit so heinous a crime as this week’s slaughter. Hassan Nasrallah, the charismatic leader of Hizbullah, the Lebanese Shia militia, declared that the main beneficiaries of the attacks were America and Israel. Yet, he added, if it turned out that the perpetrators were “petrified extremists living in the stone age who claim allegiance to Islam”, then this was a far sadder and greater danger.
