A Concise History of Sunnis and Shi'is Read online

  A CONCISE HISTORY OF SUNNIS AND SHI‘IS

  ALSO BY JOHN MCHUGO

  A Concise History of the Arabs

  Syria: A Recent History

  Published by Saqi Books 2017

  Copyright © John McHugo 2017

  ISBN 978-0-86356-163-4

  eISBN 978-0-86356-158-0

  John McHugo has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  First published in Great Britain in 2017 by

  Saqi Books

  26 Westbourne Grove

  London W2 5RH

  www.saqibooks.com

  A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY

  To the memory of my parents, with love and gratitude

  Christopher Lawrence McHugo, 1909–1987

  Jan McHugo, 1913–2001

  May they rest in peace

  Contents

  List of Maps

  Glossary

  Preface

  Part One

  1. In the Beginning: Before There Were Sunnis and Shi‘is

  2. How Civil War Came to Islam

  3. Of Umayyads and Abbasids

  4. The Split Between Sunnis and Shi‘is

  5. Of Ismailis, Assassins, Druze, Zaydis, Gnostic Shi‘is, Alawis and Sufis

  6. How Iran Became Shi‘i

  7. The Ottoman Empire, India and the Muslim Reformation

  Part Two

  8. The Long Nineteenth Century and the Coming of Western Dominance

  9. Between the Two World Wars

  10. Tides Ebb and Flow

  11. The Iranian Revolution and The Iran-Iraq War

  12. From the Iranian Revolution to the 2003 Invasion of Iraq

  13. Wedges into Fault-Lines

  Family Trees

  Acknowledgements

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Sources and Further Reading

  Index

  List of Maps

  Arabia in the Time of the Prophet

  The Arab Conquests under the Rashidun and the Umayyads

  Map of Iran and Neighbouring Countries Showing Important Cities, and with Modern Political Boundaries

  The Ottoman Empire at its Maximum Extent

  The Central Islamic Lands Showing Areas with Majority Sunni and Shi‘i Populations

  Glossary

  Abbasid: the dynasty of Caliphs who were descended from the Prophet’s uncle Abbas and who ruled during the period 750–1258.

  Akhbari: a school of Twelver Shi‘i theology which rejects the rationalist methods of the rival Usuli school.

  Alawi: a member of a secretive Shi‘i sect; the Alawis predominate in the mountains above Lattakia in Syria and in parts of the Orontes valley further east. There are also Alawis in Turkey.

  Alevi: a Shi‘i grouping in Turkey who are the present-day spiritual descendants of the Kizilbash.

  Ansar: the Muslims during the time of the Prophet who were natives of Medina.

  Ashura: the Shi‘i commemorations of the martyrdom of Hussein, the Prophet’s grandson, on the 10th day of the month of Muharram.

  Ayatollah: literally ‘sign of God’. A pre-eminent religious scholar in Twelver Shi‘ism.

  Al-Azhar: a university mosque originally founded in Cairo by the Fatimids during the 970s. Today it is the most influential teaching institution of Sunni Islam.

  Batini: literally, ‘esotericists’. A derogatory name for the Fatimid Ismailis.

  Caliph: the word can mean either ‘deputy’ or ‘successor’: a title adopted by the successive leaders of the Muslim community after the death of the Prophet Muhammad; hence ‘caliphate’ for the caliph’s office, or the area under the caliph’s stewardship.

  Da‘i: an Ismaili missionary

  Da‘wa: the ‘call’ or the ‘preaching’

  Druze: a member of a secretive sect that is an offshoot of Shi’i Islam. They are numerous in parts of Lebanon and the Hawran plateau, southeast of Damascus. There is also a Druze community in Israel.

  Faqih: a Muslim religious scholar who is versed in the detail of the Sharia.

  Fitna: civil disturbance or discord.

  Gnostic Shi‘is: Shi‘i movements preserving heterodox beliefs that predate Islam.

  Hadith: the sayings or traditions ascribed to the Prophet Muhammad.

  Hijra: emigration, specifically the Prophet’s emigration from Mecca to Medina.

  Ijtihad: independent judgement, especially in a legal or theological context.

  Imam: a religious leader. The word may mean no more than a prayer leader or preacher, but for Shi‘is the word is used for the divinely inspired and infallible teacher whom all Muslims are bound to follow. See the discussion of the term in Chapter Four.

  Ismailis: the second largest Shi‘i sect. They believe that the line of the Imams descended through Ismail, who died before his father, the sixth Imam, Ja‘far al-Sadiq. His line has continued until today and is now represented by his descendant, the Aga Khan.

  Jahiliyah: literally, ‘the age of ignorance’, the age before the preaching of Islam.

  Jazeera: ‘island’ or ‘peninsula’ in Arabic. Also the name of the large area of steppe between modern Iraq and Syria.

  Jihad: literally, ‘expenditure of effort’ or ‘endeavour’. Jihad is the struggle a Muslim should wage against his ego and for his religion. This includes religious warfare in the name of the Muslim community, which is the most common use of the term today.

  Ka‘ba: the shrine in Mecca.

  Kharijis: a Muslim sect that rejected both Ali and Mu‘awiya as the leader of the Muslim community and is neither Sunni nor Shi‘i.

  Kizilbash: literally ‘redheads’. The Kizilbash were a confederation of Turkic tribes who supported Shah Ismail and subsequent rulers of Iran.

  Madhhab: a doctrinal law school in Sunni Islam that is considered valid by all Sunnis.

  Madrasa: a religious school or seminary.

  Mamluk: a slave soldier usually brought as a boy from a distant country and brought up to be a member of a military elite.

  Maronite: a member of a Christian sect predominant in parts of Lebanon but also with followers scattered throughout Greater Syria. This sect has retained its own traditions and autonomous structure while being in communion with the Roman Catholic Church since the time of the Crusades.

  Mufti: a religious scholar of sufficient eminence to give opinions on questions of Islamic law that it is reasonable for other Muslims to follow.

  Muhajirun: literally ‘the emigrants’, those Muslims who followed Muhammad to Medina.

  Muharram: the month in the Muslim calendar in which Hussein was killed.

  Mujtahid: an expert jurist whose degree of learning and piety is such that he is able to use his independent reasoning to interpret and develop questions on the Sharia.

  Munafiqun: ‘the hypocrites’, those Muslims who converted to Islam in Medina for reasons of expediency and were judged to be insincere.

  Mu‘tazili: a movement in the Abbasid era that applied the logical techniques of Greek rationalism to developing Muslim theology.

  Notables: the elite, aristocratic families of the Ottoman Empire and its successor states.

  Rashidun: the first four cal
iphs, Abu Bakr, Umar, Uthman and Ali, who are accepted by Sunni Muslims.

  Safavids: the dynasty that ruled Iran from 1501 to 1722 and converted most of the country to Twelver Shi‘ism.

  Salaf: ancestors, predecessors, specifically al-salaf al-salih, ‘the righteous ancestors’ or ‘forefathers’, namely the first three generations of Muslims.

  Salafi: literally ‘a follower of the forefathers’. The term is generally used for a Sunni Muslim who follows a rigid and literalist form of Islam and tries to base his life as closely as possible on that of the Prophet and his Companions in the seventh century. Hence, ‘Salafism’.

  Sharia: the religious, or canonical, law of Islam.

  Sheikh: literally, ‘old man’. The term denotes respect and is used of a tribal or religious elder or leader. A man who learns the entire Qur’an by heart is automatically a sheikh whatever his age.

  Shi‘i: a follower of Shi‘i Islam, the second largest Muslim sect.

  Shirk: polytheism, idolatry.

  Shura: the Arabic word for consultation.

  Source of emulation: a Twelver religious scholar whose learning is so deep and his piety so great that ordinary members of the faithful adopt his teachings as the model they will follow in their spiritual lives.

  Sultan: literally ‘authority’ in Arabic. The word came to mean a Muslim ruler who is the supreme political authority within his dominions and whose authority stems from the fact that he implements the Sharia.

  Sunna: habitual practice or custom; specifically that of the Prophet Muhammad, which came to be regarded as legally binding precedent.

  Sunni: a follower of Sunni Islam, the largest Muslim sect.

  Takfir: declaring another Muslim to have betrayed the faith by apostasy and to be worthy of death. Hence takfiri, a person who makes such declarations.

  Taliq (plural Tulaqa’): a Meccan who converted to Islam only after Muhammad had entered the city.

  Taqiyya: a doctrine followed by Shi‘is under which it is permitted, when need arises, to dissemble about one’s true religious beliefs in order to avoid persecution by the Sunni Muslim majority.

  Tawhid: the affirmation of the unity of God.

  Twelver: the largest sect of Shi‘i Islam. They believe that the Prophet was followed by twelve divinely-guided imams who were his direct descendants. The last went into hiding as a boy in the ninth century and is still alive although in hiding (or ‘occultation’) until he reappears in the End Times. The Twelver methodology for discerning the Sharia is substantially different from that of Sunni Muslims.

  Umayyad: founded by Mu‘awiya, the dynasty of caliphs that ruled the Islamic world until supplanted by the Abbasids in 750.

  Umma: ‘community’, especially (but not necessarily) the community of Muslims.

  Usuli: a school of Twelver Shi‘i theology in which rational argument deployed by learned and pious religious scholars (mujtahids) is used to develop theology and religious law.

  Velayat-e faqih: government by the mujtahid, who is expert in the Sharia: the principle developed by Ayatollah Khomeini and now enshrined in the constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

  Wahhabi: a strict, puritanical Muslim sect founded by Muhammad ibn ‘Abdal-Wahhab in Central Arabia in the mid-eighteenth century. It is the prevailing ideology of Saudi Arabia. Today, it overlaps with Salafism, which Saudi Arabian Wahhabis seek to export to Muslim communities across the world.

  Zaydi: a small Shi‘i sect that believes any descendant of the Prophet may become the imam by unsheathing his sword and establishing righteous rule. Today, there is a large Zaydi community in Yemen which includes slightly over a third of the population.

  Preface

  We live in a time of appalling violence across large swathes of the Arab world and many other Muslim countries. When people ask how this has come about, they often find themselves presented with an answer citing the Sunni-Shi‘i divide.

  Muslims often disagree among themselves about the meaning of particular Qur’anic verses and the way of life God wishes them to follow. Nevertheless, these disagreements are minor in the scale of things when set alongside the essentials of the faith that are shared by Sunnis and Shi‘is, and put a certain cultural stamp on Muslim societies everywhere.

  Sectarianism is frequently given as the ultimate cause of the bloodshed in Syria, Iraq, and even Yemen. Behind these conflicts lurks the regional rivalry of Sunni Saudi Arabia and Shi‘i Iran. The appearance of the so-called Islamic State (which we will call by its Arabic acronym, Daesh) led to some tens of thousands of young Sunni men travelling to Syria and Iraq to establish a new caliphate in which an extreme version of the Sharia was to be the law of the land. The world – including, it is important to stress, the overwhelming majority of Muslims – has watched in horror at the atrocities Daesh has committed in the name of Islam. Many are carried out against non-Muslims such as Christians and Yazidis. These are the ones that generally hit the headlines. Most, however, have been perpetrated against Shi‘is, whom Daesh see as heretics who have deserted the faith: in other words, as traitors.

  Islam is the world’s fastest-growing religion. It is predominant from the Atlantic Coast of Morocco and Mauritania across a vast belt of land all the way to the islands of the Indonesian archipelago, the major exception being largely-Hindu India. Its predominance also extends north into Central Asia and parts of southern Russia, and southwards into large chunks of Sub-Saharan Africa. There are also Muslim minorities in many other countries, some of which have come into existence as a result of immigration that began only in the second half of the twentieth century. Most Muslims are Sunnis. Although reliable figures are hard to come by, it is generally assumed that they make up 85–90 per cent of the world’s Muslim population of some 1.6 billion people or more. Most of the rest are Shi‘is.

  There are only four countries in which Shi‘is are the majority: Iran, Iraq, Azerbaijan and Bahrain. Lebanon is the only country in which the Shi‘i minority outnumber their Sunni co-religionists. Although Shi‘i minorities also exist outside the central Islamic lands, they tend to be very small proportions of the total Muslim population. They have either arrived as traders or other migrants, or have converted to Shi‘ism since the Iranian Revolution of 1979.

  The Shi‘is, being the minority among Muslims, have often been the underdogs and marginalised. As long ago as the eighth century, they even developed a doctrine called taqiyya, which allowed them to conceal their true beliefs from other Muslims so as to avoid persecution. Throughout the history of the caliphate from the death of the Prophet in 632 to the sack of Baghdad in 1258, the Muslims we now call Sunnis were the rulers of the Muslim empire that the Arab conquests built in the seventh and eighth centuries. The only ruling caliph during this period whom the Shi‘is recognise is Ali. In 661, after less than five years of a reign characterised by civil war, he was murdered (his murderer was not a Sunni, incidentally). After Ali’s son Hussein was martyred at Karbala in 680, many Shi‘is came to despair of the establishment of a just Islamic society ruled by a descendant of the Prophet. This frequently led to an attitude of quietism, of withdrawal from politics and worldly power, and putting faith in the ultimate triumph of God’s justice. Many aspects of Shi‘ism, especially the ritual commemoration of the martyrdom of Hussein, provide strength to sustain the oppressed.

  It thus becomes easy to see the Shi‘is as the victims in the long history of Sunnis and Shi‘is. There is much truth in this. The Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s pitiless repression of Shi‘is is still very recent memory. But the overall picture is more nuanced. In the early centuries of Islam, there were many Shi‘i rebellions against Sunni rule. One of these led to the great Shi‘i empire of the North African/Egyptian Fatimids, who disdainfully ruled over many more Sunnis than Shi‘is. Later on, there was another sparkling Shi‘i empire, that of the Iranian Safavids, who forcibly converted their Sunni subjects to Shi‘ism in the sixteenth century. The commemorations of Ashura (the date on which Shi‘is mourn the killi
ng of Hussein) were not purely for the oppressed and downtrodden. In India in 1784, during the time of the Shi‘i kingdom of the nawabs of Awadh (also called Oudh), the ruler Asaf-ud-Daula built a magnificent structure in Lucknow called the Imambarah, to provide a fitting location for the commemoration of Ashura. It would also house his own tomb. The Ashura procession in Lucknow was led by royal elephants and was joined by large numbers from both the Sunni community and the Hindu majority population, who reinvented Hussein as a Hindu god of death.1

  It is often forgotten that many of the giants of medieval Persian literature such as (Jalal ad-Din Muhammad) Rumi (1207–73) and Hafez (Khwaja Shams-ud-Din Muhammad Hafez-e Shirazi: 1315–90) were Sunnis rather than Shi‘is, although sectarian issues tended to be of little importance to them. This brings us to an important point. These literary giants, whose works are so full of Islamic allusions that some understanding of Islam is needed in order to appreciate translations of their work, are still at the heart of the culture of Shi‘i Iran today. Their Sunni background does not prevent this. Sunnism and Shi‘ism have always been interlinked and able to cross-fertilise. A leading scholar has recently pointed out that Sunnism can be understood only by differentiating it from Shi‘ism, and vice versa.2 Even when Sunnis and Shi‘is are clearly distinguished from each other, they have often lived harmoniously together and combined forces against invaders.

  The aim of this book is to explain the great divide in Islam throughout the entirety of its history. There is no other route to understanding the divide, or to seeing why in recent years it has suddenly led to so much conflict. When we describe Sunnism and Shi‘ism as ‘sects’ (a term I use because I cannot find a better alternative) we have to be careful not to import subconscious assumptions taken from Christian theology, where the word ‘sect’ originated. We tend to think of a sect as a religious grouping that split off from the mainstream at some identifiable historical point, possibly under the leadership of a charismatic spiritual figure. It did so in order to preach and practise the ancestral faith in a way that was sufficiently different as to be incompatible with the faith of those who decided not to join the new movement. Yet in Islam, the split between Sunnis and Shi‘is did not arise in this way. Instead, there were two different conceptions of who should exercise religious authority among Muslims, more or less from the moment of the Prophet’s death. This led to a civil war breaking out between Muslims while many of those who had been closest to the Prophet were still alive. These questions of authority were the central issue in that conflict.