The Other Islam: Shi’Ism: from Idol-Breaking to Apocalyptic Mahdism

© 2012 by Muhammed Al Da’mi. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 08/31/2012

ISBN: 978-1-4772-6236-8 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4772-6234-4 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4772-6235-1 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2012915281

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Contents

Executive Summery

Preface

Chapter I Introduction

Chapter II Precursors Of Shi’i Islam

Chapter III The Rebellious Ethos: Nay-Sayers, Fighters And Silent Rebels

Chapter IV Arab-Centered Or Man-Centered: Shi’ism And The Persian Connection

Chapter V Ghuluw Extremism: Hero-Worship, Myth-Making And Apocalyptic Mahdism

Chapter VI Finale The Shi’a: Idol-Breakers, Revolutionaries And Mahdists

Appendix I

Appendix Ii

Guide To Further Reading

Arabic Sources

To the memory of my parents, and

to my beloved wife Liqa’

EXECUTIVE SUMMERY

This volume on Shi’i Islam attempts to transcend most of the vicissitudes that clang or made to cling to the reputation of Shi’ism right from its beginning with the advent of Islam itself, that is long before the hypothesized years suggested by a number of historians who trace it to later periods within their distortive efforts to misrepresent it as an emergent and alien divisive outgrowth of Islam with a lasting impact on the unity of the Islamic community. This endeavor entails shedding light on the social aspects of Islam that are responsible for dividing the early Muslims into two groups with different and, at times, opposing sympathies or aspirations concerning class, ethnicity and gender, though the division was then not mature enough to be designated under a specific title for the Shi’i group, except for the fact that those who allied of themselves with Ali, Prophet Muhammed’s cousin and son-in-law, came to be identified by a derivation of his name as the Alawites. Those are the precursors of Shi’ism who were lured into Islam, not for its spiritual appeal only, but for its social promise as well.

The above covert polarization process starts the first movement of the major argument of the book, making chapter II the essential historical base for the following movements which elaborate on various issues relevant to Shi’ism as they also derive their significance from responses to stimuli already set up in chapter I. Given the significance of such extra-spiritual dimensions which made of shi’ism a faith of the oppressed right from the time of the advent of Islam, the third movement demonstrates how the oppressed never tolerated their failure of vision as they gave Shi’ism its life blood by demonstrating the possibility to modify the original idol-breaking message of Islam through a broader conception of the term idol which can be a family oppressor, a ruler, a foreign power, or a set of regressive values that recreate the essential idolatry of the pre-Islamic era together with its antidote, essential Shi’ism. Hence the continuity of the rebellious ethos ever geared in Islamic history with the matter of the Shi’i, amounting to various manifestations of the revolutionary ideal, from passive nay-saying to silent control of the state. The next movement attempts an explanation of the Persian (or Iranian) connection to Shi’ism with a specific reference to the early Arabs’ misconception of Islam as an exclusively Arab religion. Thus the original social traits Shi’ism championed have liberated Islam from the fetters of chauvinism, re-presenting Islam as a God-centered and man-centered trans-ethnic faith worthy of its status as a globalizing world religion.

This very trait of openness to foreign peoples and cultures is by no means free from its negative consequences as the universalist appeal of Shi’i Islam facilitated incorporating residual remnants of religious beliefs and spiritual notions remaining from the various religions and cults that used to be embraced by the various ethnic communities which embraced Islam, finding out that they were torn between a world view that was dying and another that was unable to be born. Hence the so-called Ghuluw extremist groups which accelerated the wheel of revolutionary action to be repeatedly suppressed by the ruthless state authorities, constituting a recurrent historical pattern that made the Shi’a seek refuge in an apocalyptic vision of a Messianic or Mahdist savior who would come one day and make good the losses. The final movement attempts to bring together most of the issues discussed throughout the work with a specific reference to present-day Shi’ism, its behavioral patterns, and its potential energies that would be formative in any future vision of the Islamic world, including its superheated Middle-Eastern core.

PREFACE

This book is meant to be something of a panoramic picture of Shi’i Islam reconstructed out of the heap of broken images, to use T.S. Eliot’s excellent and self-illustrating metaphor, which is left to us by writers and historians of various shades of belief and with diverse motivations and compulsions. With the contradictory and conflicting intentions of Muslim writers, whose accounts of Shi’i Islam were mostly composed under the shadow of fear and the temptations of reward for flattering the authorities, this Other Islam has further been distorted and, therefore, dismissed outside the domain of the faith as an extremist or perverted version of Islam, to use two of the recurrent clichés dictated by the ruler to drform Shi’ism and justify his ways to the ruled. My ultimate purpose is of course to provide the interested perceiver with a comprehensive and composite overview of Shi’i Islam, that Islam which has unfortunately been reduced into a surrealistic, ‘foe-to-graphic’ picture due to various and contradictory purposes to be indicated in the course of the following pages.

To continue the above pictorial metaphor, the chapters that follow attempt to combine the multi-perspectival shots of the chapters that follow to present a composite image of Shi’ism by organizing the shattered pieces left over by biased and bias-free historians and writers who accepted the challenge of presenting and re-presenting the matter of the Shi’i for interested readers inside and outside the world of Islam.

Given the breadth and depth of this complicated task, this work builds bridges toward its center of interest, Shi’ism, from various directions by examining touchstones and analyzing them, with specific references to the misconceptions and misrepresentations which have clung, or made to cling to Shi’ism through lengthy periods of turmoil, sectarian incongruity and, now, animosities arising from the Western powers’ opposition to the revolutionary politics of today’s so-called Islamic awakening. Such conflicts are essentially clashes of loyalties which may color and shape life in the Islamic world in the decades to come unless Muslims transcend their differences and disagreements to aspire for a unifying bond of [rogressive nature consistent with the essence of the faith they are supposed to embrace and with the demands of a globalizing epoch, irrespective of variations and divisive pressures that are originally meant to subdue and rule them by the tools of reaction and dismemberment. As sectarian conflicts have, unfortunately, become a defining element of politics in almost all of the Islamic world, it is significant to understand them with a specific reference to Shi’ism which has customarily been hidden from the outsider’s eyes as a shadow Islam or as an unofficial Islam, the Islam of the oppressed, the ignorant and the ever-protesting downtrodden communities.

Since Shi’ism in history unravels a Chinese-box pattern of divisions and subdivisions abounding to the creation of various Shi’i groups: some semi-Shi’i, some proto-Shi’i and some quasi-Shi’i, groups that developed their own visions and versions out of the basic Shi’i principles laid down by the early Shi’is, or the partisans of Ali ibn Abi Talib, Prophet Muhammed’s cousin and son-in-law as early as the first years of the advent of Islam by the seventh century of our era. This volume has, therefore, dwelled particularly on the basic principles which Shi’ism adopted to acquire its social and socialistic philosophy that kept on defining its basic idol-breaking function, past and present. In such an endeavor, we would inevitably stumble on this throny way right from the beginning of the historical journey which requires a prerequisite comprehensive guide to define Shi’ism including all or at least most of its distinctive elements which encompass the offshoots of Shi’ism that are dismissed by unfriendly writers into the vague category of ghuluw, extremist Shi’ism, which branched from the main tree of Shi’i Islam in the course of time, accentuating with the various phases of historical movement as contemporaneous responses to specific religious and political stimuli.

This book has, therefore, made its purpose to combine and contain most of the distinctive elements that make Shi’ism Shi’ism with a particular reference to its regenerative capacity for, probably, limitless production and dichotomy, yet without losing its essential character of being Islam’s identical twin, the one which is bent on idol-breaking and myth-making on the way to the promised city to be inaugurated by al-Mahdi, the Messianic figure who is expected to restore justice on earth. Such an endeavor cannot be realized without comprehending and mastering the essential Shi’ism of history particularly of the early years of Islam at Mecca where the seeds of the new social order were sown (see: chapter II) within an opposing socio-political environment that eventually yielded to protest and rebellious action to break the idols and break free from the chains of their blind and blinding evil through a revolutionary and incitory discourse which transcended the reactionary tribal values to reach out to a universal ideal embracing the weaker social sectors, particularly those of the down-trodden, the poor, women and the tribeless foreigners in an effort to reject distinctions based on class, sex and ethinicity. This effort, to bring together all or most of the distinctive features of Shi’i Islam together into one volume, is bound to have a point of reference to turn to as a yardstick to measure and value the Shi’ism of the various Shi’i groups that emerged in the course of history. This referential basic pattern is the so-called Imami or Twelver Shi’ism, the commonest and supposedly the most unifying of the versions of Shi’ism existent in the present time, particularly because it contains the essential beliefs and practices shared by the Shi’a at large, irrespective of variants. With this inescapable limitation kept in mind, the book lays no claim to originally whatsoever. If any fresh insights have come up within the course of its argument, they have done so unbidden and undetected.

To understand the true accent in which the Shi’a speak would inevitably lead to the persistently worrisome question of the transliteration of idioms and special expressions that have no synonyms or close equivalents in European languages or in other religious traditions. The absence of a Note on the Transliteration, that which is usually coupled in similar books by special tables and sample words, is deliberate as it has been observed that such notes are rarely viewed or consulted by readers in a hurry to get hold of the argument at the essence of the subject matter. The transliteration system adopted in the following pages is simply that of the Library of Congress which is preferred by readers and writers of Arabic due to its simplified replications for the Arabic sound system symbols by minimizing the use of supra-segmental signs to produce identical or close-to-identical sounding equivalents of Arabic terms by the use of the English alphabet. It has been my intention to help the English-reading public come as close as possible to the original words, averting the tiresome and close-ended maze of pronunciations, Arabic dialect variants, and mispronunciations which serve no practical purpose. The reader is invited to work out his way concerning how the Arabic vocabulary items are pronounced throughout the process of reading. To be sure, this effort is not going to difficult. After all, this book is not meant to teach Arabic. Frequently used technical terms and religious idioms have directly been escorted by their closest equivalents in English. Due to cultural variations, the reader may find some of the terms difficult to understand at first, but the problem of incomprehension would gradually fade away with reference to the historical and intellectual context as he continues reading. On the other hand, the reader is expected to accept the available interpretations of religious terms for granted wherever they seem to apply while his understanding of such a rich and complex religious tradition matures and sharpens gradually. The short Guide to Further Reading at the end calls attention to some works of particular value to the reader wishing to complement and enrich his knowledge of the topics that appear on the pages of this volume only in bare outline. This book list is not a complete roster of the many volumes from which I have acquied much and pilfered not a little.

Another point of significance is relevant to the indication of the years in the book: the Georgian calendar, that of the Christian era (A.D.) has consistently been adopted for practical purposes, and for the avoidance of overlapping with the Hijra, or Islamic calendar years, in the reader’s mind. Muslim readers are expected to cope with this method particularly that it has become common in the Islamic world as well.

I owe thanks to my wife, Liqa al-Ward, who read and commented on the book page by page as she typed its manuscript with the amiable severity of a religionist and a critic; I cannot hope to repay her for the numerous corrections of factual errors and false emphases that she marked, and, I gratefully adopted. I must also express my deep sense of gratitude to the encouragement and trust of my promising young children, Hayder, Ali and Rawa, who have been forced to flee the blind and bloody sectarian tensions of Iraq, in 2006, to find a safe haven in the New World. Finally, I should express my love to my granddaughter, Layla Al Da’mi, now about ten months old after her birth (September, 2011) in the USA to become the first American Al Da’mi.

Muhammed Al Da’mi, 2012.

Chapter I

Introduction

Shi’ism as a Contemporary Problem: The Western Reception of Shi’ism and Role of the ‘Ulama’

If it was superfluous to say to English people that the religion of the Koran has not that value of the religion of the Old Testament, still more is it superfluous to say that the religion of the Imams has not the value of Christianity.

__Matthew Arnold

Shi’ism is the Islamic version of the myth of Sisyphus____ condemned to roll the fiction of its own reality up the hill, against the grain of history, then watch it hopelessly roll down to the ground zero of its cyclical desperation for salvation.

__Hamid Dabashi

I. IN THE AFTERMATH OF THE ISLAMIC REVOLUTION

In the aftermath of the basically anti-Westernization Islamic Revolution of Iran (1977-79), and with the subsequent exacerbation caused by the American embassy hostage crisis, a special issue of one of the popular American weekly magazines (either Time or Newsweek ) was published with an article carrying one of the imagined portraits of Ali (Prophet Muhammed’s cousin and son-in-law) to whom Shi’ism is traced with the revealing title: Ali: Source of Troubles. Together with such apparently information-lacking and information-thirsty titles as Who Rules Iran, ¹ the article with Ali’s portrait obviously indicated America’s belated awareness of Shi’ism, an awareness that seemed to have come abruptly after decades of the Shah’s totalitarian regime which saw also the culmination of the US-Iran cooperation in the assurance suggested by the US top participation in the lavish celebrations marking the 2500 th anniversary of the Persian empire in the 1970’s. The irony stemmed from the fact that, though reliant on the predominantly Shi’i Iran for policing the oil-rich Persian Gulf region, ² the US administration miscalculated the situation there: firstly, by supporting the Pahlavi regime; and secondly, by showing a hostile attitude toward the revolution that was enthusiastically supported by huge masses of the Iranian people, antagonizing the largely popular leadership of the revolution and alienating itself to the new emerging theocracy. Washington failed also to anticipate the backfire of such a stance, a situation which smacked of ignorance and of the inability to comprehend what was really going on despite the huge American presence in pre-revolution Iran which witnessed