Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

140 t CHAPTER SIX
should likewise be a spiritual leader; if not a prophet like Muhammad,
then a charismatic governing and teaching authority; and
finally (3) that God in the Quran—Shiites eventually dropped their
accusations that the actual text had been tampered with—and
Muhammad in his public pronouncement (since suppressed) had
announced that Ali was rightfully that Imam and that his family
would hold the office after him. They never really did so; the actual
power remained in the hands of the majority Sunnis, shorthand for
“partisans of custom (sunna) and the unity of the umma,” who
were content to accept the “facts” created by history in all its
worldly imperfection.
The point at issue thus is who shall rule the umma. The Sunnis
were willing to accept the verdict of history as reflected in the
choices of that “whole first generation” of Muhammad’s contemporaries
and their immediate successors. The Shiites argued
against history in asserting Ali’s preeminence, but in so doing they
were forced, to one degree or another, to attack the consensual
wisdom of the Companions of the Prophet from whom all the
Prophetic sunna ultimately derived. Disappointed by history, the
Shiites turned where some Jewish groups may also have resorted,
to a Gnostic wisdom, a kind of particularist and underground
sunna transmitted, generation after generation, by infallible Imams
of the Alid house or by their delegates. In fully developed Shiism,
which found its most lasting base by connecting itself with
Persian nationalism, the entire range of Gnostic ideas is on display:
the exaltation of wisdom (hikma) over science (ilm); a view of historical
events as reflection of cosmic reality; and a concealed (batin)
as opposed to an open (zahir) interpretation of Scripture. It
was simply a matter of time before Shiite Gnosticism found its
siblings within Sufism and philosophy.
When Westerners returned to the Middle East at the beginning
of modern times as travelers, traders, missionaries, and merchants,
some thought they could best understand the Sunnis and Shiites
as, respectively, a version of Catholics and Protestants. Or so it
seemed to some Catholic adventurers who saw the Sunnis as the
“orthodox” Muslims and the minority Shiites as some species of
heterodoxy, an attiitude that has not entirely disappeared. Func-