The Other Islam

This volume on Shi’i Islam attempts to surpass 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 much earlier than 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 negative 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 each 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 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 to find 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.