Islam's Passion tale

After the Prophet: The Epic Story of the Shia-Sunni Split in Islam, by Lesley HazletonDoubleday, 239 pages, $26.95

Throughout this gem of a book, a gripping rendering of the foundation story of Shi'ite Islam harking back 1,400 years, I kept thinking how powerfully its narrative might well resonate with Jewish readers, of all people, and especially those here in Israel. For who better than we can understand the abiding, even prodigious and occasionally onerous sway that ancient history and myth have over our quotidian lives? After all, our very rationale for being here derives from a purportedly divine order delivered four millennia ago to an other-wise undistinguished Mesopotamian named Abram to "Go from your country ... to the land that I will show you" (Genesis 12:1 ). Each spring we gather to mark in ritual and song another "formative event" -- the exodus of the People of Israel from Egypt -- which leading archaeologists are now convinced never actually happened. And the list goes on.

Lesley Hazleton, an erstwhile Time Magazine correspondent in Israel and the author of two ingeniously fleshed-out biographies of biblical figures -- the Virgin Mary (2004 ) and Queen Jezebel (2007 ) -- was drawn to the subject of the early split in Islam by the ferocity of the Sunni-Shi'ite strife that erupted following the United States'ill-fated 2003 invasion of Iraq. Our interest in Israel is more likely to arise from our own encounters -- military and verbal -- with ascendant Shi'ite powers (Hezbollah, Iran ), as well as their influence over our closest Sunni neighbors, in Gaza and the West Bank. But whatever the motive for taking it up, "After the Prophet" is an animated introduction to the roots of the rift in Islam -- and, by extrapolation, to the Shi'ite ethos -- couched in a narrative that, while tilting toward the Shi'ite sensibility, is both measured in tone and fluent in style.

Drawing heavily on the translated works of the ninth-century Islamic historian Abu Jafar Muhammad ibn Jarir al-Tabari (though the book's full bibliography runs to eight pages ), Hazleton serves up a stirring tale propelled by ambition and naivete, rectitude and resentment, intrigue, venality, treachery, homicide and, ultimately, an act of self-sacrifice that has generated centuries of mourning and seething acrimony. Populated by noble but feckless heroes, cunning villains and an irrepressibly bold woman with a penchant for stirring the pot (Mohammed's second wife, Aisha ), the canvas extends over the half-century between the death of the Prophet Mohammed, in Medina (in today's Saudi Arabia ) in 632, and that of his grandson Hussein, at Karbala (in today's Iraq ) in 680. A film adaptation would deserve the likes of Cecil B. DeMille.

Hazleton also briefly sketches the history of Islam after the split, focusing on the theological and ritual differences between the rival sects. And she devotes some space to the impact of the schism on current affairs, noting that a power struggle over who will lead Islam is set in train again -- this time between the Sunni Saudis and the Shi'ite Iranians. Indeed, Hazleton warns Westerners that they stir that pot at their own peril, citing the chaos unleashed by the allied invasion of Iraq and remarking that by now it should be clear that "anyone so rash as to think it possible to intervene in the Sunni-Shia split and come away unscathed is at best indulging in wishful thinking."

But the lion's share -- and best part -- of the book is her retelling of early Islam's saga of succession. It centered on the issue of who should become, and who actually became, Mohammed's khalifa (caliph, meaning replacement or successor ), down through two generations. From the Shi'ite perspective, what transpired was an extended episode of stolen birthright -- akin, in a sense, to the Israelite story of Jacob and Esau, except that the Biblical tale ended with the brothers reconciling, while the jockeying to follow Mohammed as leader of the community of Islam led, over time, to bloodshed on a monumental scale.

This all happened because, even had he conceived of his political heir in dynastic terms -- and we lack definitive evidence that he did -- Mohammed sired no sons. His closest male blood relative, Ali, was his first cousin, as well as his adopted son and son-in-law. Three months before the onset of the illness that took his life, Mohammed made the pronouncement, "He of whom I am the master, of him Ali is also the master," which some of his closest followers read as the prophet's designation of Ali as his successor. As he lay dying, Mohammed called for "writing materials" to be brought to his bedside, presumably to record his last will and testament. But the instruments never materialized.

Nobody wanted to know

"It is the strangest scene," Hazleton writes. It definitely appeared that Mohammed was "ready to make his dying wishes known, perhaps even designate his heir, once and for all." That was "the one thing everyone wanted to know, and, at the same time, the one thing nobody wanted to know." If Ali turned out to be the designated heir, she continues, "nobody in that room wanted it put into writing."

Most likely, Hazleton surmises, Mohammad "knew that the moment he formally appointed a successor, he would be introducing divisiveness into the newly united community of Islam -- or, rather, feeding into the divisiveness that already existed." One tradition has it that his last words were: "Oh God, have pity on those who succeed me." If so, it was a prescient statement. For, bereft of instructions, after the prophet expired, the pillars of the community held a

shura, or inter-tribal council -- "a kind of seventh-century version of the smoke-filled back room," as Hazleton puts it -- to select a successor by consensus. In addition to Ali, who skipped the conclave to stand guard over the prophet's body until its burial, the candidates were two of Mohammed's fathers-in-law (Abu Bakr and Omar ) and another of his sons-in-law (Othman ) -- all of whom would eventually bear the title of caliph, as would Ali.

But Ali was not chosen on that occasion. In fact, of the four original pretenders, he would ascend to the position last, and not for another 24 years. Yet from the moment Mohammed's close companion and father-in-law Abu Bakr was elected by the shura, Ali's supporters (Shi'at Ali ) were convinced that the vote had been rigged to deprive their man of his rightful legacy as Mohammed's closest kin. Indeed, injustice and deprivation would become a leitmotif of the Shi'ite mindset.

Though passed over three times, Ali remained a paragon of patience and loyalty to his rivals, for the sake of the Muslim unity so cherished by the prophet. He finally became caliph in 656 but was to reign for only five years -- marked, ironically, by three bouts of civil war. Blaming him for the military putsch that had toppled his prodigal predecessor, Othman, the ever-feisty Aisha raised a contingent of 10,000 men routed by Ali's army in southern Iraq. A group of militant fundamentalists known as the khariji, or Rejectionists, was also quickly defeated in battle. Ali's real nemesis was Muawiya, the defiant Umayyad governor of Syria, described by Hazleton as the "epitome of evil" in Shi'ite eyes, who "delighted in the art and science of manipulation, whether by bribery, flattery, intelligence, or exquisitely calculated deception."

When Muawiya refused to swear allegiance, Ali resolved to crush him. But just as the caliph's army gained the upper hand in a three-day battle on Iraq's Plain of Siffin, the wily Muawiya had his men spear a parchment sheet of the Koran on the tips of their lances and charge the enemy lines -- whereupon Ali's troops, appalled at the notion of wielding their weapons against the holy book, laid them down. The fray ended with the two men submitting to arbitration, whose confused results (each side claimed that its leader would be affirmed as caliph ) further weakened Ali's grip over the empire. In January 661, he was felled by a Rejectionist assassin in a mosque in Kufa and was buried at the place that grew into Najaf, one of the two Shi'ite holy cities in Iraq.

Not built for battle, Ali's scholarly elder son, Hasan, deferred to Muawiya and retired to Medina, where, the Shia believe, he was poisoned by his wife at Muawiya's instigation. But in 680, when Muawiya was succeeded as caliph by his son Yazid -- "a silk-wearing drunkard," in one rendition -- Ali's younger son, Hussein, mounted the stage. Egged on by word from the people of Kufa that they would rebel against Yazid if only Hussein would return to lead them, the latter raised a modest army and headed for Iraq. Along the way, he was intercepted by a messenger from a cousin in Kufa who warned that "things had changed": The Kufans could not be trusted to support Hussein, and he should turn back. But Hussein soldiered on. "What is fated is fated," he pronounced, and marched on to his ineluctable death in October 680 at a site subsequently named Karbala, which became the second of Iraq's cities holy to the Shi'ites.

Hazleton calls Hussein's doomed journey and suicidal lone charge into the enemy's lines the foundation story and "Passion story" of Shi'ite Islam. "[It] came to be the ultimate act of courage, the most noble self-sacrifice, made in a state of higher consciousness and with full knowledge of its import," she writes. "He would take the only way left to him to expose the corruption and venality of the Umayyad regime ... He would shock all Muslims out of their complacency and call them back to the true path of Islam through the leadership the Prophet had always intended ... He would sacrifice himself with the same purity of intention as the prophet Jesus did six hundred years before ... His surrender to death would be the ultimate act of redemption."

Viewed in these terms, it's easier to appreciate the Karbala episode's visceral hold on the Shi'ites, to the point where they adopt self-flagellation as a mourning ritual on the annual Day of Ashura marking Hussein's martyrdom. Hazleton's comparison of Hussein's sacrifice with the Christian Passion story also provides insight into why Shi'ite Islam developed a mystical bent marked by expectations of the return of the hidden Twelfth Imam as the Mahdi (Messiah ). Yet the Karbala story "has endured and strengthened," Hazleton stresses, "not least because it reaches deep into questions of morality -- of idealism versus pragmatism, purity versus compromise. Its DNA is the very stuff that tests both politics and faith and animates the vast and often terrifying arena in which the two intersect."

As fellow denizens of that arena, we'd do well to grasp this opportunity to familiarize ourselves with its history and fathom its workings as best we can.

Ina Friedman, a Jerusalem correspondent for the Dutch daily Trouw, is co-author of "Murder in the Name of God: The Plot to Kill Yitzhak Rabin."

Haaretz Books, December 2009, haaretzbooks@gmail.com