Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

THE UMMA t 137
rather non-Arab notion. But it has characterized the support of Ali
from the beginning. Where simple loyalty to the house of Ali (Alidism)
became Shiism was the point at which it began to acquire,
besides a memory of Ali’s importance in the earliest days of Islam,
an ideology to explain the transfer of Muhammad’s spiritual charisma,
if not of his prophetic gift, to Ali and thence to certain members
of his house. When or how that happened is not easy to explain
since there are no Shiite documents earlier than the tenth
century, when that ideology was already fully developed.
The historical footing grows firmer in the events of 680, when
Ali’s second son Husayn was lured from Medina by promises of
support for his family’s cause across the steppe toward Kufa. Husayn
was intercepted by Umayyad forces at a place called Karbala,
where he and most of his followers were slaughtered. It was the
end, for the moment, of Alid political aspirations, but the massacre
at Karbala was also, as it turned out, one of the foundation stones
of religious Shiism.
There was no single Shiite view of the Imamate or leadership of
the community and no greater degree of agreement among various
Shiite factions than among the Sunnis, save on the principle that
rule over the umma belonged by right and by designation to the
descendants of Ali ibn Abi Talib, Muhammad’s cousin and son-inlaw
and the actual fourth caliph, and that that ruler should possess
religious as well as secular powers. Which descendant and which
powers were much debated questions. The Umayyads never succeeded
in destroying a strong sense of loyalty to Ali, his sons (notably
the martyred Husayn), and their offspring. For their part, the
claims to power of the Alid loyalists generally came to naught.
One group, the followers of Muhammad ibn al-Hanifiyya, a son of
Ali, found a zealous propagandist in a certain al-Mukhtar who
proclaimed him Imam and Mahdi. The claim was taken seriously
enough by the first Abbasids, who had seized power from the Umayyads
in 750 and attempted to eradicate their rivals, for them to
have put out the story that the Imamate had been transferred to
them, the descendants of Abbas, by the son of Muhammad ibn al-
Hanifiyya. The movement around Muhammad ibn al-Hanifiyya
was one of the earliest signs of what was later branded “extremist”