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

By Muhammed Al Da’mi

The reputation of Shiism in the Islamic world, as elsewhere, has undergone many vicissitudes, but it is now higher than ever. In this new study, The author moves us toward an understanding of the social, intellectual, and theological crises that Prophet Muhammed and his cousin, Ali, together with some of the impoverished early Muslims (the precursors of Shiism) were struggling to solve. The issues were many: the idols, their social and economic embodiments in class, tribe, gender and ethnicity; the necessity of the revolutionary spirit, and its resumption in the Shii rebellious ethos; the question of the non-Arab converts to Islam; the exaggeration of the status of the imams (Shii extremism); the extension of the Islamic idol-Breaking spirit to encompass and examine modern issues or novel contemporary phenomena. Al Dami brings to the discussion of these historically complicated questions the lively investigation that many readers of English are not expected to know and comprehend outside the context of the self-consuming sectarian conflicts which penetrate and segment the Islamic world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Nov 10, 2013
• ISBN: 9781491825969

Muhammed Al Da’mi

Muhammed Al Da'mi is Professor of English and Orientalist Literature. He worked in the academia for more than 27 years, Baghdad, Aden, Irbid and ASU (Arizona). He is author of a number of books and numerous scholarly papers in Arabic and English. He contributes to the Arabic press almost weekly. Al Da'mi is a member in a number of Iraqi and Arabic cultural and specialized societies, including The House of Wisdom, Baghdad. He has been interviewed by tens of satellite channels both in Arabic and English.

Book preview

2013 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 10/24/2013

ISBN: 978-1-4918-2595-2 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4918-2596-9 (e)

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

CONTENTS

Preface

Chapter I.   Introduction: Shi’ism as a Contemporary

Problem: On The Western Reception of Shi’ism

and the of Role of the ‘ulama’

Chapter II.   Precursors of Shi’i Islam

Chapter III.   The Rebellious Ethos: Nay-Sayers,

Freedom-Fighters and Silent Rebels

Chapter IV.   Arab-Centered or Man-Centered: Islam and

the Shi’i ‘Persian Connection’

Chapter V.   Ghuluw Extremism: Hero-Worship,

Myth-Making and Apocalyptic Mahdism

Chapter VI.   Finale The Shi’a: Idol-Breakers,

Revolutionaries and Apocalyptic Mahdists

Appendix I

Appendix II

Notes

Guide to Further Reading

Arabic Sources

Forthememoryofmyparents, and

Tomybelovedwife,Liqa’

PREFACE

T his 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 that which is left to us today 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 the fear of authorities and/or their temptations of reward for flattering them, this Other Islam was further distorted and, therefore, dismissed outside the main domain of the faith as an extremist or perverted version of Islam, to use two of the recurrent epithets dictated by the ruler to deform 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-perspective shots to present a composite image of Shi’ism by organizing the shattered pieces which were left over by biased and bias-free writers who had 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’, wrongly. Such problems are essentially clashes of loyalties which may color and shape life and politics in the Islamic world in the decades to come, unless Muslims transcend their medieval dream which fosters differences and disagreements instead of inspiring a unifying bond of progressive nature consistent with the essence of the faith they are supposed to embrace in 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 impoverished, the ignorant and the ever-protesting communities.

Since Shi’ism in history unraveled a Chinese-box pattern of divisions and subdivisions amounting to the advent 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 that had been put 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 unique social coloration and socialistic tendency that which kept on inspiring and defining its basic idol-breaking function, past and present. In such an endeavor, one would inevitably confront difficulties on this thorny 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 were dismissed by unfriendly writers into the vague category of ghuluw, or extremist Shi’ism, which had branched from the main tree of Shi’i Islam in the course of time, accentuating, meanwhile, 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 come out of occultation in order to restore justice on earth. Such an endeavor could not be accomplished without comprehending and mastering the essential Shi’ism of history particularly that 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 had eventually yielded to Muslim protest and rebellious action to break the idols and break free from the chains of their blind and blinding evil through a revolutionary discourse which transcended the reactionary tribal values to reach out to a universal ideal embracing the weaker social sectors, particularly those of the poor, women and the foreigners who were not affiliated to Arab tribes, in an effort to reject distinctions based on class, sex and ethnicity. This effort, to bring together all or most of the distinctive features of Shi’i Islam together into one inquiry 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 that are shared by the Shi’a at large, irrespective of variants. With this purpose 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 the European languages, or in the other religious traditions. The absence of a Note on the Transliteration, that which is usually coupled in similar volumes by special tables and sample words, is deliberate as it has been observed that such notes are rarely viewed or consulted by readers who are 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 for its simplified replications of the Arabic sound system and its minimized the use of supra-segmental signs in order to produce identical, or close-to-identical sounding equivalents of Arabic terms by the use of the familiar English alphabet. It has been my intention to help the English-reading public to come as close as possible to the original words, averting as much as possible 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 be 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 acquired much.

Another point of significance is relevant to the indication of the years in the book: the Georgian calendar of the Christian era (B. C. and A.D.) has consistently been adopted for practical purposes and for the avoidance of overlapping with the Hijra (or the Islamic calendar) years, in the reader’s mind. Muslim readers are also 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, the first American al-Da’mi.

Chapter I

Introduction

Shi’ism as a Contemporary Problem: On The Western Reception of Shi’ism and the of 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

I n 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 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, ¹the 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 2500th 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 police 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 also seemed to have failed 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 had witnessed the early stirrings of uprising, missing a full understanding of the essential springs of the collective consciousness and the collective patterns of behavior in Iran which surely included the principles of Shi’ism as a formative element of the then puzzling cultural paradigm of revolutionary Iran. Before the triumph of the revolution and the Shah’s thrilling escapade to a safe exile, Tehran and the other major Iranian cities had been frequented continually by considerable numbers of Americans who went there as experts, trainers, advisors and teachers of English. They were individuals or groups who seemed to take no serious notice of the predominant religious faith of an important ally which overlooked and overshadowed such a vital region to the Western world, its economy, hegemony and stability, the Persian Gulf region. The question that would inevitably come up to one’s mind should be: why was Ali suddenly discovered as the source of all troubles; and how did this saintly historical figure, who had lived more than a thousand years before, work his way into an American mind obsessed with the present: was the afore-mentioned title of the Ali article to uncover the indifference and, therefore, the resultant ignorance of the US policy-makers concerning an important ally’s religion in spite of the almost verified information that the Shi’i ‘ulama’ (clerics), were in fact the inciters and engineers of the Iranian internal unrest and political discontent that flared up fiercely with the rapid events of the revolution. Such clerics had provided the pre-revolution mutinies with a religious matrix of justifications replete with the deep-rooted historical and psychological accumulative dimensions it required. To very many commentators and analysts this was a clear case of neglect and unjustifiable recklessness on the part of the USA.

While Fuller and Francke put the case in this way: in 1977 the Iranian revolution places its Shi’ite brand of Islamic radicalism on the ideological map,³ Heinz Halm blames the Western ignorance of the Shi’a on the fact that primary sources in European languages were hardly accessible until now, and the combination of oriental and religious studies is still a new phenomenon.⁴ A brand of Islamic radicalism, and a by-product of the inaccessible combination of oriental and religious studies, today’s Shi’ism defies both views as inadequate since the one mistakes a long history of Shi’i revolutionary spirit for the alarming and much-feared main stream of contemporary terrorist Islamic radicalism, while the other dissolves the disruptive events of the Islamic Revolution and its backfire altogether into the cold water of anthropological inquiry which tends to insert all Orientals and their religions into a straight jacket. Within the context of such limitations, the urgent need to know Shi’ism better has necessitated the rapid descriptive reports and accounts of all kinds, rather than the in-depth scholarly inquiries which were really needed to approach the Shi’i elites and establish channels of communication and dialogue with them. Such channels are, therefore, seriously sought now, though too late unfortunately.

Before the Islamic Revolution, the recklessness was justified on the basis that as long as the Iranians had been controlled and contained by a friendly, allied regime, which functioned in harmony with our interests in a region with a fluid and, in certain cases, thick Shi’i population, there was no practical need for the pragmatic frame of mind to seek and accumulate a scientific body of knowledge on the Shi’a and Shi’ism, past and present. Quick and journalese snatches of descriptive writings provided by reporters and correspondents were good enough for the