of a cosmic struggle between good and evil, justice and tyranny, in which the wicked always seem to get the upper hand. Where Sunnis have made the life of Muhammad a myth, Shiis have mythologized the lives of his descendants. In order to understand this Shii faith, without which such events as the Iranian Revolution of 1978–79 are incomprehensible, we must briefly consider the development of the Shiah.
When the Prophet Muhammad died in 632, he had made no arrangements for the succession, and his friend Abu Bakr was elected to the caliphate by a majority of the ummah. Some believed, however, that Muhammad would have wished to be succeeded by his closest male relative, Ali ibn Abi Talib, who was his ward, cousin, and son-in-law. But Ali was continually passed over in the elections, until he finally became the fourth caliph in 656. The Shiis, however, do not recognize the rule of the first three caliphs, and call Ali the First Imam (“Leader”). Ali’s piety was beyond question, and he wrote inspiring letters to his officers, stressing the importance of just rule. He was, however, tragically assassinated by a Muslim extremist in 661, an event mourned by Sunnis and Shiis alike. His rival, Muawiyyah, seized the caliphate throne, and established the more worldly Umayyad dynasty, based in Damascus. Ali’s eldest son, Hasan, whom Shiis call the Second Imam, retired from politics and died in Medina in 669. But in 680, when Caliph Muawiyyah died, there were huge demonstrations in Kufa in Iraq in favor of Ali’s second son, Husain. To avoid Umayyad reprisals, Husain sought sanctuary in Mecca, but the new Umayyad caliph, Yazid, sent emissaries to the holy city to assassinate him, violating the sanctity of Mecca. Husain, the Third Shii Imam, decided that he must take a stand against this unjust and unholy ruler. He set out for Kufa with a small band of fifty followers, accompanied by their wives and children, believing that the poignant spectacle of the Prophet’s family marching in opposition to tyranny would bring the ummah back to a more authentic practice of Islam. But on the holy fast day of Ashura, the tenth of the Arab month of Muharram, Umayyad troops surrounded Husain’s little army on the plain of Kerbala outside Kufa and slaughtered them all. Husain was the last to die, with his infant son in his arms.26
The Kerbala tragedy would develop its own cult and become a myth, a timeless event in the personal life of every Shii. Yazid has become an emblem of tyranny and injustice; by the tenth century, Shiis mourned the martyrdom of Husain annually on the fast day of Ashura, weeping, beating their bodies, and declaring their undying opposition to the corruption of Muslim political life. Poets sang epic dirges in honor of the martyrs, Ali and Husain. Shiis thus developed a piety of protest, centering on the mythos of Kerbala. The cult has kept alive a passionate yearning for social justice that is at the core of the Shii vision. When Shiis walk in solemn procession during the Ashura rituals, they declare their determination to follow Husain and even to die in the struggle against tyranny.27
It took some time for the myth and cult to develop. In the first years after Kerbala, Husain’s son Ali, who had managed to survive the massacre, and his son Muhammad (known respectively as the Fourth and Fifth Imams) retired to Medina and took no part in politics. But in the meantime, Ali, the First Imam, had become a symbol of righteousness for many people who were dissatisfied with Umayyad rule. When the Abbasid faction managed finally to bring down the Umayyad caliphate in 750, and established their own dynasty (750–1260), they claimed at first to belong to the Shiah-i Ali (the Party of Ali). The Shiah was also associated with some wilder speculations, which most Muslims regarded as “extreme” (ghuluww). In Iraq, Muslims had come into contact with an older and more complex religious world and some were influenced by Christian, Jewish, or Zoroastrian mythology. In some Shii circles, Ali was revered as an incarnation of the divine, like Jesus; Shii rebels believed that their leaders had not died but were in hiding (or “occultation”); they would return one day and lead their followers to victory. Others were fascinated by the idea of the Holy Spirit descending into a human being and imparting divine wisdom to him.28 All these myths, in a modified form, would become important to the esoteric vision of the Shiah.
The cult in honor of Husain transformed a historical tragedy into a myth that became central to the religious vision of Shii Muslims. It directed their attention to a ceaseless but unseen struggle between Good and Evil at the heart of human existence; the rituals liberated Husain from the particular circumstances of his time and made him a living presence; he became a symbol of a profound truth. But the mythology of Shiism could not be applied practically in the real world. Even when such Shii rulers as the Abbasids managed to seize power, the harsh realities of political life meant that they could not rule according to these lofty ideals. The Abbasid caliphs were highly successful in worldly terms, but once in power they soon dropped their Shii radicalism and became ordinary Sunnis. Their rule seemed no more just than that of the Umayyads, but it was pointless for true Shiis to rebel, since any revolution was of necessity brutally suppressed. Indeed, the myth of Husain seemed to suggest that any attempt to oppose a tyrannical ruler was doomed to failure, no matter how pious and zealous for justice it might be.
The Sixth Shii Imam, Jafar as-Sadiq (d. 765), realized this and formally abandoned armed struggle. He declared that even though he, as the Prophet’s descendant, was the only legitimate leader (Imam) of the ummah, his true function was not to engage in a fruitless conflict but to guide the Shiah in the mystical interpretation of scripture. Each Imam of Ali’s line was, he taught, the spiritual leader of his generation. Each one of the Imams had been designated by his predecessor, who had transmitted to him a secret knowledge (ilm) of divine truth. An Imam was, therefore, an infallible spiritual director and a perfect judge. The Shiah thus abjured politics and became a mystical sect, cultivating the techniques of meditation in order to intuit a secret (batin) wisdom that lay behind every single word of the Koran. The Shiis were not content with the literal meaning of scripture, but used the text as a basis for new insights. Their symbolism of the divinely inspired Imam reflected the Shii sense of a sacred presence, which a mystic experienced as immanent and accessible in a turbulent, dangerous world. It was not a doctrine for the masses, who might interpret it crudely, so Shiis must keep their spiritual as well as their political views to themselves. The mythology of the Imamate, as developed by Jafar as-Sadiq, was an imaginative vision that looked beyond the literal and factual meaning of scripture and history to the constant, primordial reality of the unseen (al-ghayb). Where the uninitiated could see only a man, the contemplative Shii could discern a trace of the divine in Jafar as-Sadiq.29
The Imamate also symbolized the extreme difficulty of incarnating God’s will in the flawed and tragic conditions of daily life. Jafar as-Sadiq effectively separated religion from politics, privatizing faith and confining it to the personal realm. He did this to protect religion and enable it to survive in a world that seemed essentially hostile to it. This secularization policy sprang from a profoundly spiritual impulse. Shiis knew that it could be dangerous to mix religion and politics. A century later, this became tragically evident. In 836, the Abbasid caliphs moved their capital to Samarra, some sixty miles south of Baghdad. By this date, Abbasid power was disintegrating, and though the caliph remained the nominal ruler of the whole Muslim world, real authority lay with the local amirs and chieftains throughout the far-flung empire. The caliphs felt that in these disturbed times they could not permit the Imams, the descendants of the Prophet, to remain at large, and in 848, Caliph al-Mutawakkil summoned the Tenth Imam, Ali al-Hadi, from Medina to Samarra, where he was placed under house arrest. He and his son, the Eleventh Imam, Hasan al-Askari, could only maintain contact with the Shiah by means of an agent (wakil) who lived in al-Karkh, the mercantile quarter of Baghdad, practicing a trade to deflect the attention of the Abbasid authorities.30
In 874, the Eleventh Imam died, probably poisoned at the behest of the caliph. He had been kept in such strict seclusion that Shiis knew very little about him. Did he have a son? If not, what would happen to the succession? Had the line died out, and, if so, did this mean that the Shiah was deprived of mystical guidance? Speculation ran rife, but the most popular theory insisted that Hasan al-Askari indeed
