The Shi'i World

Pathways in Tradition and Modernity

Farhad Daftary, Amyn Sajoo, Shainool Jiwa, Farhad Daftary, Amyn Sajoo, Shainool Jiwa

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780857729675
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

I.B.Tauris in association with the Institute of Ismaili Studies The world's 200 million Shi'i Muslims express their faith in a multiplicity of ways, united by reverence for the ahl al-bayt, the family of the Prophet. In embracing a pluralistic ethic, fourteen centuries of Shi'i Islam have given rise to diverse traditions and practices across varied geographic and cultural landscapes. The Shi'i World is a comprehensive work authored by leading scholars from assorted disciplines, to provide a better understanding of how Shi'i communities view themselves and articulate their teachings. The topics range from Shi'i Islam's historical and conceptual foundations, formative figures and intellectual, legal and moral traditions, to its devotional practices, art and architecture, literature, music and cinema, as well as expressions and experiences of modernity. The book thus provides a panoramic perspective of the richly textured narratives that have shaped the social and moral universe of Shi'i Muslims around the globe.This fourth volume in the Muslim Heritage Series will appeal to specialists and general readers alike, as a timely resource on the prevailing complexities not only of the 'Muslim world', but also of the dynamic Shi'i diasporas of Europe and North America.

9

Shi‘i Communities in History

Farhad Daftary

Islam is a major world religion, with some 1.3 billion adherents scattered in almost every region of the globe, especially in the Middle East, Asia and Africa. Currently, around 15 per cent of the Muslim population of the world belongs to various communities of Shi‘i Islam, with the Sunni Muslims accounting for the remaining 85 per cent. The Shi‘i Muslims themselves are comprised of a number of major communties, including the Ithna‘asharis or Twelvers who account for the largest numbers, the Ismailis and the Zaydis.

In addition to their significant numbers, around 200 million, Shi‘i Muslims have played a key role, proportionately much greater than their relative size, in contributing to the intellectual and artistic accomplishments of Islamic civilisation. Indeed, Shi‘i scholars and literati of various communities and regions, including scientists, philosophers, theologians, jurists and poets, have made seminal contributions to Islamic thought and culture. There have also been a multitude of Shi‘i dynasties, families or individuals who variously patronised scholars, poets and artists as well as numerous institutions of learning in Islam. Amongst such major Shi‘i dynasties, particular mention should be made of the Buyids, the Fatimids, the Hamdanids and the Safawids, as well as a host of lesser dynasties of North Africa, the Middle East and South Asia. In sum, the Shi‘i Muslims have contributed significantly over the entire course of Islamic history to the richness and diversity of Islamic traditions, enabling Islam to evolve not merely as a religion, but also as a major world civilisation.

The unified nascent Muslim community, or umma, of the Prophet Muhammad’s time soon split into numerous rival factions and lesser groups, as Muslims disagreed on a range of fundamental issues after the death of the Prophet in 632. Modern scholarship has shown that at least during the first three centuries of their history, marking the formative period of Islam, Muslims lived in an intellectually dynamic and theologically fluid milieu characterised by a multiplicity of communities of interpretation and schools of thought with a diversity of views on a range of religio-political issues.

The early Muslims were confronted by many gaps in their religious knowledge and understanding of the Islamic revelation, which revolved around issues such as the attributes of God, the nature of authority and the definitions of true believers and sinners, amongst other theological concerns. It was during this formative period that different groups and schools of thought began to articulate their doctrinal positions and gradually acquired their distinctive religious identities and designations. In this effervescent atmosphere, Muslims engaged in lively discourses and disputations on a variety of religio-political issues, while ordinary Muslims as well as their scholars moved rather freely between different communities of interpretation. In terms of theological perspectives, which remained closely linked to political loyalties, pluralism in early Islam ranged from the stances of those Muslims, later designated as Sunnis, who endorsed the historical caliphate and the authority-power structure that had actually emerged in Muslim society to various religio-political communities, notably the Shi‘a and the Khawarij, who aspired towards the establishment of new orders and leadership paradigms.

In this emerging partisan context, the medieval religious scholars (ulama) of the Sunni Muslims produced a picture of early Islam that is at great variance with the findings of modern scholarship on the subject. According to this Sunni narrative, endorsed unwittingly by the earlier generations of orientalists, Islam was from the beginning a monolithic phenomenon with a well-defined doctrinal basis from which different groups deviated over time. In other words, Sunni Islam was portrayed by its exponents as the ‘true’ interpretation of Islam, while all non-Sunni Muslim communities of interpretation, especially the Shi‘a, who had supposedly ‘deviated’ from the right path, were accused of heresy (ilhad), innovation (bid‘a) or even unbelief (kufr). The Shi‘a, who elaborated their own paradigmatic model of ‘true Islam’, soon disagreed among themselves, however, regarding the identity of the legitimate spiritual leaders or imams of the community. As a result, the Shi‘a were soon subdivided into a number of major communities as well as several minor groupings.

In such a milieu of theological pluralism and diversity of communal interpretations, abundantly recorded in the heresiographical tradition of the Muslims, obviously general consensus could not be attained on designating any one interpretation of Islam as the ‘true Islam’. To make matters more complicated, different regimes lent their support to particular doctrinal positions that were legitimised in their state by their ulama, who in turn were accorded a privileged social status in society. It is important to bear in mind that many of the original and fundamental disagreements among Sunnis, Shi‘is and other Muslims will in all likelihood never be satisfactorily explained and resolved, mainly because of a lack of reliable sources, especially from the earliest centuries of Islamic history. Needless to add that the later writings of the historians, theologians, heresiographers and other categories of Muslim authors display variegated ‘sectarian’ biases.

In spite of its relative significance, however, Shi‘i Islam has received very little scholarly attention in the West. And when it has been discussed, whether in general or in terms of its subdivisions, it has normally been treated marginally, often as a ‘heterodoxy’, echoing the attitude of Sunni Muslims who have always accounted for the majority share of Muslim society. Scientific orientalism, based on the study of textual evidence, began in Europe in the 19th century. European scholars now started to produce their studies of Islam on the basis of manuscripts, which had been written mainly by Sunni authors and reflected their particular perspectives. Consequently, the orientalists, too, studied Islam according to the Sunni stances of their original sources; and, borrowing classifications from their own Christian contexts, they treated the Sunni interpretation of Islam as ‘orthodoxy’, in contrast to Shi‘ism which was taken to represent ‘heterodoxy’, or at its extreme a ‘heresy’. The Sunni-centric approach to the study of Islam has continued to hold prominence to various degrees in Western scholarship on the subject. At the same time, Shi‘i studies have also remained extremely marginalised in Muslim countries outside Iran and Iraq with their vibrant religious seminaries and Shi‘i theological traditions as well as massive collections of Shi‘i manuscripts. Increased accessibility to Shi‘i texts, during more recent times, promises to bring about drastic revisions in the approaches of Western scholars to Islamic studies.

Origins and Early History of Shi‘i Islam

The origins of Islam’s main divisions into Sunni and Shi‘i may be broadly traced to the crisis of succession to the Prophet Muhammad, who died in 632 after a brief illness. The successor to Muhammad could not be another prophet or nabi, as it had already been made known through divine revelation that Muhammad was the ‘seal of the prophets’ (khatam al-anbiya). However, a successor was needed in order to ensure the continued unity of the nascent Islamic community. According to the Sunni view, the Prophet had left neither formal instruction nor a testament regarding his succession. Amidst much ensuing debate, this choice was resolved by a group of Muslim notables who elected Abu Bakr, a trusted Companion of the Prophet, as successor to the Messenger of God (khalifat rasul Allah), a title which was soon simplified to khalifa (whence the word ‘caliph’ in Western languages). By electing the first successor to the Prophet, these Muslims had now also founded the distinctive Islamic institution of the caliphate (khilafa).

Abu Bakr and his next two successors, Umar and Uthman, belonging to the influential Meccan tribe of Quraysh, were among the earliest converts to Islam and the Prophet’s Companions. Only the fourth of the so-called ‘rightly-guided caliphs’, Ali b. Abi Talib (r. 656–661), who occupies a unique position in the annals of Shi‘i Islam, belonged to the Prophet’s own clan of Banu Hashim within the Quraysh. Ali was also very closely related to the Prophet, being his cousin and son-in-law, bound in matrimony to the Prophet’s daughter, Fatima.

It is the fundamental belief of the Shi‘a of all branches that the Prophet had designated Ali as his successor, a designation (nass) instituted through divine command and revealed by the Prophet at Ghadir Khumm shortly before his death. The Shi‘a have also interpreted certain Quranic verses in support of Ali’s designation. Ali himself was firmly convinced of the legitimacy of his own claim to Muhammad’s succession, based on his close kinship and association with him, his intimate knowledge of Islam as well as the merits of his early deeds in the cause of Islam. Indeed, Ali made it plain in his speeches and letters that he considered the Prophet’s family or the ahl al-bayt to be entitled to the leadership of the Muslims as long as there remained a single one of them who recited the Quran, knew the sunna and adhered to the religion of the truth.1 And from early on, Ali did have a circle of supporters who believed he was better qualified than any other Companion to succeed the Prophet. This minority group expanded in time and in Ali’s brief caliphate became generally designated as the shi‘at Ali, or the ‘party of Ali’, and then simply as the Shi‘a.

1 W. Madelung has produced an exhaustive analysis of the historiography on this subject in his The Succession to Muhammad: A Study of the Early Caliphate (Cambridge, 1997).

The Shi‘a also held a particular conception of religious authority that set them apart from the other Muslims. They believed that Islam contained inner truths that could not be understood directly through human reason. Thus, they recognised the need for a religiously authoritative guide, or imam as the Shi‘a have traditionally preferred to call their spiritual leader. In addition to being the guardian of the Islamic revelation and leader of the community, as perceived by the majority of the Muslims, the succession to the Prophet was seen by the Shi‘a as having a key spiritual function connected with the elucidation and interpretation of the Islamic message. And for the Shi‘a the Prophet’s family, or the ahl al-bayt, provided the sole authoritative channel for elucidating fully the teachings of Islam. These ideas, which may not be attributed entirely to the earliest partisans of Ali, eventually found their full elaboration in the central Shi‘i doctrine of the imamate.

Pro-Ali sentiments and broad Shi‘i tendencies persisted in Ali’s lifetime; and the early Shi‘a survived Ali’s murder in 661 and numerous subsequent tragic events. After Ali, his partisans in Kufa, to where Ali had transferred his capital to confront a challenge to his authority by Mu‘awiya, the governor of Syria, recognised his eldest son al-Hasan as his successor to the calip...

Table of contents

• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• About the Contributors
• Introduction
• Remembering Muhammad
• Imam Ali
• Imam Ja‘far al-Sadiq and the Elaboration of Shi‘ism
• Legal Traditions
• Intellectual Traditions
• Governance and Pluralism under the Fatimids (909–996 ce)
• Moral Authority in the Safawid State
• Devotional Practices
• Shi‘i Communities in History
• Remembering Fatima and Zaynab: Gender in Perspective
• Art and Architecture
• Literature
• Music
• Shi‘ism in Iranian Cinema
• Diasporas
• Modernity: The Ethics of Identity
• Glossary