After the Prophet: The Epic Story of the Shia-Sunni Split in Islam by Lesley Hazleton
Authors: Lesley Hazleton
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Abu Bakr declared that since the taxes belonged to Islam, to refuse them was an act of apostasy. And where grace could be extended to a nonbeliever, none could be offered an apostate, someone who had first accepted and then turned against the faith. Such a person was no longer protected by the Quranic ban on Muslims shedding the blood of Muslims. That was haram, taboo, in Islam. But since an apostate was to be considered an active enemy of Islam, to shed his blood was no longer taboo. It was now halal— permitted under Islamic law.
This was to become a familiar argument, one made over time bySunnis against Shia, by Shia against Sunnis, by extremists against moderates, by legalist clerics against Sufi mystics, and most notoriously perhaps, at least in the West, by the Ayatollah Khomeini against novelist Salman Rushdie. Declare your opponent an apostate, and as the Arabic phrasing goes, “his blood is halal.”
The Wars of Apostasy—the ridda wars—were as ruthless as Abu Bakr had promised. Within the year, all resistance had been crushed, and within another, Muslim forces had begun to strike north out of Arabia. It seemed that under Abu Bakr, the first of the four Caliphs the Sunnis would call rashidun, “the rightly guided ones,” Islam was poised to achieve its full potential. Yet a year later, even as his forces prepared to lay siege to the Byzantine-controlled city of Damascus far to the north, Abu Bakr lay deathly ill, struck by fever. He would be the only Islamic leader to die of natural causes for close on fifty years. This time, however, there would be no doubt about who was to be the successor.
Some Sunnis would later say that Abu Bakr acted as he did to spare the community the divisiveness it had gone through before his own election; others, that as the Arab conquest began, he wanted a strong military figure in command. The Shia would see it very differently, arguing that he was driven by his antagonism toward Ali and his desire to keep the younger man out of power. Whichever it may have been, Abu Bakr’s deathbed declaration was clear: there would be no shura, no conclave of tribal chiefs and elders. Though he had been elected by consensus himself, Abu Bakr had good reason to distrust the process.
How then to proceed? In the days before Islam, it would have been simple enough; one of Abu Bakr’s sons would have inherited his rule. Hereditary monarchy lasted so long through history because it established a clear line of succession, avoiding the messy business of negotiation, the political maneuvering, the difficult, wearing process of the fragile thing we now know as democracy. But Islam was essentially egalitarian. As Abu Bakr himself had argued when he prevailed over the proponents of Ali, leadership, like prophecy, was not to be inherited. Hewas thus faced with the questions that still dog even the best intentions in the Middle East: How does one impose democracy? How can it work when there is no prior acceptance of the process, when there is no framework already in place?
You might say that Abu Bakr settled on a middle course. He would appoint his successor, but appoint him on the basis of merit, not kinship. He would choose the man he saw as best suited to the task, and if that was the same man he had proposed at the shura just two years before, then this merely demonstrated how right he had been. In a move destined to be seen by the Shia as further evidence of collusion, the dying Abu Bakr appointed Omar the second Caliph.
Again, Ali had been outmaneuvered. Again, he had been passed over, and this time in favor of the man who had injured his wife and threatened to burn down his house. Yet even as Abu Bakr was buried alongside the Prophet—the second body to lie under what had once been Aisha’s bed—Ali insisted that his supporters keep their peace. Instead of challenging Omar, he took the high road a second time. He had sworn allegiance to Abu Bakr and been a man of his word, and now
Abu Bakr declared that since the taxes belonged to Islam, to refuse them was an act of apostasy. And where grace could be extended to a nonbeliever, none could be offered an apostate, someone who had first accepted and then turned against the faith. Such a person was no longer protected by the Quranic ban on Muslims shedding the blood of Muslims. That was haram, taboo, in Islam. But since an apostate was to be considered an active enemy of Islam, to shed his blood was no longer taboo. It was now halal— permitted under Islamic law.
This was to become a familiar argument, one made over time bySunnis against Shia, by Shia against Sunnis, by extremists against moderates, by legalist clerics against Sufi mystics, and most notoriously perhaps, at least in the West, by the Ayatollah Khomeini against novelist Salman Rushdie. Declare your opponent an apostate, and as the Arabic phrasing goes, “his blood is halal.”
The Wars of Apostasy—the ridda wars—were as ruthless as Abu Bakr had promised. Within the year, all resistance had been crushed, and within another, Muslim forces had begun to strike north out of Arabia. It seemed that under Abu Bakr, the first of the four Caliphs the Sunnis would call rashidun, “the rightly guided ones,” Islam was poised to achieve its full potential. Yet a year later, even as his forces prepared to lay siege to the Byzantine-controlled city of Damascus far to the north, Abu Bakr lay deathly ill, struck by fever. He would be the only Islamic leader to die of natural causes for close on fifty years. This time, however, there would be no doubt about who was to be the successor.
Some Sunnis would later say that Abu Bakr acted as he did to spare the community the divisiveness it had gone through before his own election; others, that as the Arab conquest began, he wanted a strong military figure in command. The Shia would see it very differently, arguing that he was driven by his antagonism toward Ali and his desire to keep the younger man out of power. Whichever it may have been, Abu Bakr’s deathbed declaration was clear: there would be no shura, no conclave of tribal chiefs and elders. Though he had been elected by consensus himself, Abu Bakr had good reason to distrust the process.
How then to proceed? In the days before Islam, it would have been simple enough; one of Abu Bakr’s sons would have inherited his rule. Hereditary monarchy lasted so long through history because it established a clear line of succession, avoiding the messy business of negotiation, the political maneuvering, the difficult, wearing process of the fragile thing we now know as democracy. But Islam was essentially egalitarian. As Abu Bakr himself had argued when he prevailed over the proponents of Ali, leadership, like prophecy, was not to be inherited. Hewas thus faced with the questions that still dog even the best intentions in the Middle East: How does one impose democracy? How can it work when there is no prior acceptance of the process, when there is no framework already in place?
You might say that Abu Bakr settled on a middle course. He would appoint his successor, but appoint him on the basis of merit, not kinship. He would choose the man he saw as best suited to the task, and if that was the same man he had proposed at the shura just two years before, then this merely demonstrated how right he had been. In a move destined to be seen by the Shia as further evidence of collusion, the dying Abu Bakr appointed Omar the second Caliph.
Again, Ali had been outmaneuvered. Again, he had been passed over, and this time in favor of the man who had injured his wife and threatened to burn down his house. Yet even as Abu Bakr was buried alongside the Prophet—the second body to lie under what had once been Aisha’s bed—Ali insisted that his supporters keep their peace. Instead of challenging Omar, he took the high road a second time. He had sworn allegiance to Abu Bakr and been a man of his word, and now
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