The Battle for God: Fundamentalism in Judaism, Christianity and Islam

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 had a son, Abu al-Qasim Muhammad, the Twelfth Imam, who had gone into hiding to save his life. It was an attractive solution, because it suggested that nothing had changed. The last two Imams had been virtually inaccessible. Now the Hidden Imam would continue to make contact with the people through his wakil, Uthman al-Amri, who would dispense spiritual advice, collect the zakat alms, interpret the scriptures, and deliver legal judgments. But this solution had a limited life span. As time passed beyond the point where the Twelfth Imam seemed likely to be still alive, Shiis became anxious once again, until, in 934, the current agent, Ali ibn Muhammad as-Samarri, brought the Shiah a message from the Hidden Imam. He had not died, but had been miraculously concealed by God; he would return one day shortly before the Last Judgment to inaugurate a reign of justice. He was still the infallible guide of the Shiah and the only legitimate ruler of the ummah, but he would no longer be able to commune with the faithful through agents, or have any direct contact with them. Shiis should not expect his speedy return. They would only see him again “after a long time has passed and the earth has become filled with tyranny.”31

The myth of the “occultation” of the Hidden Imam cannot be explained rationally. It makes sense only in a context of mysticism and ritual practice. If we understand the story as a logos, one that should be interpreted literally as a plain statement of fact, all kinds of questions arise. Where in the world had the Imam gone? Was he on earth or in some kind of intermediate realm? What kind of life could he possibly have? Was he getting older and older? How could he guide the faithful, if they could neither see nor hear him? These questions would seem obtuse to a Shii who was involved in a disciplined cultivation of the batin, or secret sense of scripture, which bypassed reason and drew on the more intuitive powers of the mind. Shiis did not interpret their scriptures and doctrines literally. Their entire spirituality was now a symbolic quest for the Unseen (al-ghayb) that lies beneath the flux of outward (zahir) events. Shiis worshipped an invisible, inscrutable God, searched for a concealed meaning in the Koran, took part in a ceaseless but invisible battle for justice, yearned for a Hidden Imam, and cultivated an esoteric version of Islam that had to be secreted from the world.32 This intense contemplative life was the setting that alone made sense of the Occultation. The Hidden Imam had become a myth; by his removal from normal history, he had been liberated from the confines of space and time and, paradoxically, he became a more vivid presence in the lives of Shiis than when he and the other Imams had lived a normal life in Medina or Samarra. The Occultation is a myth that expresses our sense of the sacred as elusive and tantalizingly absent. It is present in the world but not of it; divine wisdom is inseparable from humanity (for we can only perceive anything, God included, from a human perspective) but takes us beyond the insights of ordinary men and women. Like any myth, the Occultation could not be understood by discursive reason, as though it were a fact that was either self-evident or capable of logical demonstration. But it did express a truth in the religious experience of humanity.

Like any esoteric spirituality, Shiism at this date was only for an elite. It tended to attract the more intellectually adventurous Muslims, who had a talent and a need for mystical contemplation. But Shiis also had a different political outlook from other Muslims. Where the rituals and disciplines of Sunni spirituality helped Sunni Muslims to accept life as it was and to conform to archetypal norms, Shii mysticism expressed a divine discontent. The early traditions that developed shortly after the announcement of the doctrine of the Occultation reveal the frustration and impotence felt by many Shiis during the tenth century.33 This has been called “the Shii century” because many of the local commanders in the Islamic empire who wielded effective power in a given region had Shii sympathies, but this turned out to make no appreciable difference. For the majority, life was still unjust and inequitable, despite the clear teaching of the Koran. Indeed, the Imams had all been victims of rulers whom Shiis regarded as corrupt and illegitimate: tradition had it that every single one of the Imams after Husain had been poisoned by the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphs. In their longing for a more just and benevolent social order, Shiis developed an eschatology centering on the final appearance (zuhur) of the Hidden Imam during the Last Days, when he would return, battle with the forces of evil, and establish a Golden Age of justice and peace before the Final Judgment. But this yearning for the End did not mean that the Shiis had abandoned the conservative ethos and become future-oriented. They were so strongly aware of the archetypal ideal, the way things ought to be, that they found ordinary political life intolerable. The Hidden Imam would not bring something new into the world; he would simply correct human history to make human affairs finally conform to the fundamental principles of existence. Similarly, the Imam’s “appearance” would in a profound sense simply make manifest something that had been there all along, for the Hidden Imam is a constant presence in the life of Shiis; he represents the elusive light of God in a dark, tyrannical world and the only source of hope.

The Occultation completed the mythologization of Shii history which had begun when the Sixth Imam gave up political activism and separated religion from politics. Myth does not provide a blueprint for pragmatic political action but supplies the faithful with a way of looking at their society and developing their interior lives. The myth of Occultation depoliticized the Shiah once and for all. There was no sense in Shiis taking useless risks by pitting themselves against the might of temporal rulers. The image of an Imam, a just political leader who could not exist in the world as it was but had to go into hiding, expressed the Shiis’ alienation from their society. From this new perspective, any government had to be viewed as illegitimate, because it usurped the prerogatives of the Hidden Imam, the true Lord of the Age. Nothing could be expected of earthly rulers, therefore, though in order to survive, the Shiis must cooperate with the powers-that-be. They would live a spiritual life, yearning for a justice that could only return to earth in the Last Days “after a long time has passed.” The sole authority they would accept was that of the Shii ulema, who had taken the place of the former “agents” of the Imams. Because of their learning, their spirituality, and their mastery of the divine law, the ulema had become the deputies of the Hidden Imam and spoke in his name. But because all governments were illegitimate, ulema must not hold political office.34

Shiis thus tacitly condoned a total secularization of politics that could seem to violate the crucial Islamic principle of tawhid, which forbade any such separation of state and religion. But the mythology of this secularization sprang from a religious insight. The legend of the Imams, who had nearly all been assassinated, poisoned, imprisoned, exiled, and, finally, eliminated by the caliphs, represented the basic incompatibility of religion and politics. Political life belongs to the realm of logos; it must be forward-looking, pragmatic, able to compromise, plan, and organize society on a rational basis. It has to balance the absolute demands of religion with the grim reality of life on the ground. Premodern, agrarian society was based on a fundamental inequality; it depended upon the labor of peasants who could not share the fruits of civilization. The great confessional religions of the Axial Age (c. 700–200 BCE) had all been preoccupied with this dilemma and tried to grapple with it. Where there were insufficient resources, and where lack of technology and communications made it harder to impose authority, politics became more brutal and aggressively practical. It was, therefore, extremely difficult for any government to live up to the Islamic ideal or to tolerate the existence of an Imam, an embodiment of divine wisdom, who made its shortcomings so sadly evident. Religious leaders could admonish, criticize, and protest against flagrant abuses, but in some tragic sense the sacred had to be either marginalized or kept within bounds, as the caliphs had interned the Imams in the Askari fortress in Samarra. But there was nobility in the Shii devotion to an ideal which must be kept alive, even though, like the Hidden Imam, it was concealed and currently unable to operate in a tyrannical and corrupt world.

Even though the Shiah had become a mythological faith, that did not mean that it was irrational. In fact, Shiism became a more rational and intellectual version of Islam than the Sunnah. Shiis found that they were in agreement with the Sunni theologians known as the Mutazilites, who tried to rationalize the doctrines of the Koran. In their turn, the Mutazilites gravitated toward the Shiah. Paradoxically, the a-rational doctrine of the Occultation allowed the Shii ulema more freedom to exercise their rational powers in the pragmatic world of affairs than the Sunni ulema. Because the Hidden Imam was no longer available, they had to rely on their own intellectual powers. In the Shiah, therefore, the “gates of ijtihad” were never declared closed, as in the Sunnah.35 At first, it is true, Shiis did feel mentally hobbled when their Imam vanished, but by the thirteenth century, an eminent and learned Shii cleric was known precisely as a mujtahid, one who was deemed capable of the rational activity of ijtihad.

Shii rationalism was, however, different from our current secularized rationalism in the West. Shiis were often critical thinkers. The eleventh-century scholars Muhammad al-Mufid and Muhammad al-Tusi, for example, were worried about the authenticity of some of the hadith reports about the Prophet and his companions. They felt that it was not sufficient simply to quote one of these unreliable traditions in support of their doctrines but that clerics should use reason and logic instead; yet the rational arguments they produced would not convince a modern skeptic. Tusi, for example, “proved” the doctrine of the Imamate on the grounds that, since God is good and desires our salvation, it is reasonable to believe that he will provide us with an infallible guide. Men and women can work out for themselves the necessity for social justice, but a divine sanction makes this imperative more urgent. Even Tusi, however, found himself at a loss when it came to finding a rationale for the Occultation.36 But this was not disturbing to Shiis. Mythos and logos, reason and revelation, were not in opposition but simply different from one another and complementary. Where we in the modern West have discounted mythology and mysticism as a source of truth and rely on reason alone, a thinker such as Tusi saw both ways of thinking as valid and necessary. He sought to show that doctrines which made perfect sense while he was engaged in mystical meditation were also reasonable, in an Islamic context. The introspective techniques of contemplation provided insights that were true in their own sphere, but they could not be proved logically, like a mathematical equation that was the product of logos.

By the end of the fifteenth century, as we have seen, most Shiis were Arabs and the Shiah was especially strong in Iraq, particularly in the two shrine cities of Najaf and Kerbala, dedicated respectively to Imam Ali and Imam Husain. Most Iranians were Sunni, though the Iranian city of Qum had always been a Shii center, and there were significant numbers of Shiis in Rayy, Kashan, and Khurasan. So there were Iranians who welcomed the arrival of nineteen-year-old Shah Ismail, head of the Safavid order of Sufis, who conquered Tabriz in 1501, subdued the rest of Iran within the next decade, and announced that Shiism would become the official religion of the new Safavid empire. Ismail claimed descent from the Seventh Imam, which, he believed, gave him a legitimacy not enjoyed by other Muslim rulers.37

But this was obviously a break with Shii tradition. Most Shiis, known as “Twelvers” (because of their veneration of the twelve Imams), believed that no government could be legitimate in the absence of the Hidden Imam.38 How, then, could there be a “state Shiism”? This did not trouble Ismail, who knew very little about Twelver orthodoxy. The Safavid order, a mystical fraternity which had been founded in the wake of the Mongol invasions, had originally been Sufi but had absorbed many of the “extreme” (ghuluww) ideas of the old Shiah. Ismail believed that Imam Ali had been divine, and that the Shii messiah would return very soon to inaugurate the Golden Age. He may even have told his disciples that he was the Hidden Imam, returned from concealment. The Safavid order was a marginal, populist, revolutionary group, far removed from the sophisticated circles of Shii esotericism.39 Ismail had no qualms about setting up a Shii state, and, instead of trying to find a civilized modus vivendi with the Sunni majority, as Shiis had done since the time of Jafar as-Sadiq, he was fanatically opposed to the Sunnah. There was a new sectarian intolerance in both the Ottoman and the Safavid empires that was not dissimilar to the feuds between Catholics and Protestants that were developing in Europe at about this time. In recent centuries, there had been a détente between Sunnis and Shiis. But during the early sixteenth century, the Ottomans were determined to marginalize the Shiah in their domains, and, when Ismail emerged in Iran, he was equally determined to wipe out the Sunnah there.40

It did not take the Safavids long, however, to discover that the messianic, “extremist” ideology that had served them well in opposition was no longer suitable once they had become the establishment. Shah Abbas I (1588–1629) was determined to eliminate the old ghuluww theology, dismissed “extremists” from his bureaucracy, and imported Arab Shii ulema to promote Twelver orthodoxy. He built madrasahs for them in Isfahan, his new capital, and Hilla, endowed property (awqaf) on their behalf, and gave them generous gifts. This patronage was essential in the early days, since the ulema were new immigrants entirely dependent upon the shahs. But it inevitably changed the nature of the Shiah. Shii scholars had always been a minority group. They had never had madrasahs of their own but had studied and debated in one another’s homes. Now the Shiah was becoming establishment. Isfahan became the official scholastic center of the Shiah.41 Shiis had always held aloof from government before, but now the ulema had taken over the educational and legal system in Iran as well as the more specifically religious duties of government. The administrative bureaucracy was composed of Iranians who were still loyal to the Sunnah, so they were given the more secular tasks. A de facto split between the secular and religious spheres had developed in the government of Iran.42

The ulema, however, continued to be wary of the Safavid state; they still refused official government posts and preferred to be ranked as subjects. Their position was, therefore, quite unlike that of the Ottoman ulema, but was potentially more powerful. The generosity and patronage of the shahs had made the ulema financially independent. Where the Ottomans and their successors could always control their ulema by threatening to withdraw their subsidies or confiscate their property, the Shii ulema could not be cowed in this way.43 As Shiism spread among the Iranian people, they would also benefit from the fact that they, and not the shahs, were the only authentic spokesmen of the Hidden Imam. The early Safavids were strong enough to keep the ulema in check, however, and the clergy would not come fully into their own until the Iranian people as a whole were fully converted to Shiism in the eighteenth century.

But power corrupts. As the ulema became more at home in the Safavid empire, they also became more authoritarian and even bigoted. Some of the more attractive traits of the Shiah were submerged. This new hard line was epitomized by Muhammad Baqir Majlisi (d. 1700), who was one of the most powerful and influential ulema of all time. For centuries, Shiis had encouraged an innovative approach to scripture. Majlisi, however, was deeply hostile to both mystical spirituality and philosophical speculation, both of which had been the mainstay of the old esoteric Shiah. He began a relentless persecution of the remaining Sufis in Iran and tried to suppress the teaching of both the philosophic rationalism known as Falsafah and mystical philosophy in Isfahan. He thus introduced a profound distrust of both mysticism and philosophy that persists in Iranian Shiism to the present day. Instead of engaging in an esoteric study of the Koran, Shii scholars were encouraged to concentrate on fiqh, Islamic jurisprudence.

Majlisi also transformed the meaning of the ritual processions in honor of the martyrdom of Husain.44 These had become more elaborate: now camels draped in green were ridden by weeping women and children, who represented the Imam’s family; soldiers shot rifles in the air, and coffins representing the Imam and his martyred companions were followed by the governor, the notables, and crowds of men who sobbed and wounded themselves with knives.45 A highly emotional account of the Kerbala story, the Rawdat ash-Shuhada by the Iraqi Shii Waiz Kashift (d. 1504), was recited at special meetings known as rawda-khani (“recitals of the Rawdat”), while the people wailed and cried aloud. The rituals had always had a revolutionary potential, demonstrating as they did the willingness of the people to fight tyranny to the death. Now, however, instead of encouraging the masses to see Husain as an example, Majlisi and his clergy taught them to see the Imam as a patron who could secure their admission to paradise if they showed their devotion to him by lamenting his death. The rituals now endorsed the status quo, urging the people to curry favor with the powerful, and look only to their own interests.46 It was an emasculation and a degradation of the old Shii ideal; it also bowdlerized the conservative ethos. Instead of helping people to attune themselves to the basic laws and rhythms of existence, the cult was simply used to keep the masses in line. It was a development that showed in quite a different way how destructive political power could be to religion.