Ancient Paradigms and New Realities

The fall of Baghdad and end of the Baathist regime in Iraq has blown the lid off the pent up frustration and seething anger in the majority Shia population in that country. While the US has embarked upon setting up a stable and compliant political system in Iraq, the newly found religious freedom and politico-religious activism - an integral element of Shia religious philosophy - would be a wild card in post-Saddam Iraq. The roots of this activism go back 1400 years to the very early history of Islam in the 7th century.

At Prophet Muhammad’s death in 632 AD a partisan conflict over his succession surfaced. There were those in the community who wanted Ali ibn Abi Talib, prophet’s cousin and son in law to succeed him as the new head of the state. Then there were others who did not want the succession to be based on blood kinship. The latter group prevailed when a majority of the citizens of Medina, the fledging capital of the new state in present-day Saudi Arabia, gathered in prophet’s mosque and swore allegiance to Abu Bakr, one of prophet’s closest companion and his father in law. The dissenters came to be known as Shias or the party of Ali and others as Sunnis.

According to historic accounts of the era Ali accepted the verdict and did not publicly challenge the authority of Abu Bakr or Umar bin Khattab and Othman bin Uffan, the two caliphs who succeeded Abu Bakr. Ali became the fourth caliph in 656 and ruled for four years until his assassination in 660 AD.

After Ali the mantle passed to his elder son Hassan. But tribal and factional loyalties led the clan of Umayyads to force his abdication and transfer the seat of government from Medina to Damascus. Under the Umayyads the caliphate turned into an absolute monarchy.

Shias considered the new rulers as usurpers and when the second Umayyad ruler Yazid succeeded his father they rose in rebellion. In a watershed incident that would change the course of Islamic history, Ali’s younger son Husayn (spelled variably Hussain, Hussein and Hussien) led his family and a small group of followers on a fateful journey from Medina to Kufa, a city in south central Iraq. During Ali’s caliphate Kufa had served as the capital and there were many sympathizers who wanted the caliphate restored to the family of the prophet. Hussayn’s journey to Kufa was meant to challenge the legitimacy of Yazid.

In the desert of Karbala near Kufa a confrontation ensued where Husayn, his family and most of his entourage were put to sword sparing only the women. For Shias the massacre in Karbala created a new paradigm of human suffering and the struggle for emancipation against all kind of exploitation. After the fall of Saddam Hussein last month when hundreds and thousands of Shias took to the road to Karbala, mourning and self-flagellating, they were commemorating the righteousness of a few against the tyranny of a brutal regime from their remote history.

Over time Shia religious philosophy culminated in the establishment of the Abbasid empire that ruled Iraq, western Iran and the Middle East for a century starting in 750 AD. This was followed by the Fatimid dynasty that ruled Egypt and North Africa for almost 300 years between 909 and1171 AD. The latest triumph of Shia religious philosophy occurred when in 1979 Ayatollah Khomeini led a successful revolution to emancipate Iranians from the harsh and often brutal rule of Muhammad Reza Shah and his Pahlavi dynasty. This was a Shia dream eight hundred years in the making and it caught the imagination of 100 million Shias in the world.

Over time the political differences between the Sunnis and the Shias have also translated into doctrinal and theological differences between the two except for the basic tenets of Islam that have remained common and indisputable. Despite the philosophical and doctrinal differences however the main stream Shia and Sunnis have historically gotten along rather well. It is the extreme orthodox and fundamentalist elements on both sides that do not consider each other within the fold of Islam. The rise of Sunni fundamentalism in recent decades has strained relations between the two communities. When Sunni Taliban of Afghanistan massacred Hazara Shias in the north and when Hazaras massacred the Taliban in the city of Mazar Sharif, they were acting on their traditional religious hatred of each other. The same is true of the ongoing communal violence in Pakistan. In Iraq the historic fissures between the Shias and the Sunnis are reappearing in the southern strongholds of Shias.

Whither Iraq now? How do we fit in the new realities in context to old history?

The Shias of Iraq would not give up their ancient identity and their newly found religious freedom. They would assert their majority religious status in any form of government cobbled together by the Americans. Whether it takes the shape of Khomeini’s Wilayat-e-Faqih - Rule by a Jurist - a representative secular democracy or combination thereof, in all this the Iraqi Shias would be guided by the paradigm that was created in the desert of Karbala 1400 years ago.