Shia Islam

• 1. Introduction

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  Shia Islam is the second-largest branch of Islam, and its story begins at a meeting that, in the eyes of its followers, went terribly wrong. When Muhammad died in 632, Ali ibn Abi Talib and the Prophet's closest relatives were busy with the funeral arrangements. While they prepared the body, a separate gathering took place at a place called Saqifa. There, Abu Bakr, Umar ibn al-Khattab, and Abu Ubaidah ibn al Jarrah secured the election of Abu Bakr as the first caliph. Shia Muslims have never accepted that this was right. They believe Ali was the cousin and son-in-law whom Muhammad had openly chosen, and that his right to lead was unjustly taken from him. Out of that conviction grew a faith now numbering roughly 200 to 260 million people, an estimated 10 to 13 percent of the world's Muslims. How does one disputed succession become a distinct religious world with its own holy cities, its own books, its own theology of God's justice? What does it mean to follow a line of divinely guided leaders, the last of whom is said to be alive and hidden? And why is a battle fought in the desert near Karbala still mourned every year? These are the questions that follow.

• 2. The Word And The Witnesses

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  The word Shia comes from shiatu Ali, an Arabic phrase whose root carries the sense of following, supporting, and obedience. In English it appears as Shiism, and its adherents as Shiites. The term was first used during Muhammad's own lifetime, and it came to mean those who hold that leadership after the Prophet belongs to Ali and his successors. Nawbakhti described the Shia as a group of Muslims who, both during Muhammad's life and after him, regarded Ali as Imam and caliph. Al-Shahrastani gave the definition more weight, explaining that the Shia are those who believe Ali was designated as heir, Imam, and caliph by Muhammad himself, with that authority passing on through his descendants. Shia scholars root this conviction in the Quran's pattern of chosen families. They point to the verse that says Allah chose Adam, Noah, the family of Abraham, and the family of Imran above all people, descendants of one another. For them, authority running through a sacred lineage is not an invention but a thread woven through the history of the Abrahamic prophets, and Ali stands at the head of that thread in Islam.

• 3. The First Civil War

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  Ghadir Khumm is where the Shia case for Ali begins. During a major sermon there, Muhammad declared, "Anyone who has me as his mawla, has Ali as his mawla," and many versions add the invocation, "O God, befriend the friend of Ali and be the enemy of his enemy." Shia sources record that those present immediately congratulated Ali, acclaiming him as Amir al-Mu'minin, commander of the believers. The meaning of those words sits at the heart of the Sunni-Shia divide. Sunni scholars tend to read them as praise of Ali's merit, while Shia Muslims read them as a clear appointment. After the election at Saqifa passed to others, Ali waited. Abu Bakr served from 632 to 634, then Umar from 634 to 644, then Uthman from 644 to 656. Only after Uthman's assassination did the Muslims of Medina finally turn to Ali as the fourth caliph, and he set up his capital in Kufa. His rule, from 656 to 661, was a fight from the start. The conflict known as the First Fitna was the first major civil war among Muslims. Ali's forces prevailed at the Battle of the Camel in 656 against the coalition of Aisha, Talhah, and al-Zubayr. At Siffin in 657 his campaign against Muawiyah, the governor of Damascus, was stalled by a forced arbitration that worked against him. In 658 he crushed the Kharijis, former allies who had broken away, at Nahrawan. Three years later a Khariji killed him while he was prostrate in prayer at the Great Mosque of Kufa, and Muawiyah seized the caliphate to found the Umayyad dynasty.

• 4. Karbala

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  Hasan ibn Ali, the elder son, inherited a losing position. After skirmishes with Muawiyah's army, he agreed to cede the caliphate on conditions: that the public cursing of Ali be stopped, that tax money not be spent on Muawiyah's private needs, that Hasan's followers be given security, that Muawiyah never take the title commander of the believers, and that he name no successor. Hasan retired to Medina, where in 670 he was poisoned by his wife Ja'da bint al-Ash'ath after she was secretly approached by Muawiyah, who wanted the caliphate for his son Yazid. In 680 Muawiyah died and handed power to Yazid anyway, breaking the treaty. Yazid demanded that Husayn ibn Ali, the younger brother, swear allegiance, and Husayn refused. With support swelling for him in Kufa, Husayn gathered his family and followers and set off from Medina. Near Karbala, Yazid's army intercepted him. Rather than surrender, Husayn and his people chose to fight. In the Battle of Karbala, Husayn and roughly 72 of his family and followers were killed, and his head was carried to Yazid in Damascus. The Shia regard Husayn as a martyr, a shahid, and he is the last Imam after Ali recognized by every branch of Shia Islam. His martyrdom is widely cited as the moment the Shia and Sunni truly parted. It is mourned each year on the Day of Ashura, the tenth day of Muharram. Forty days later, on the 20th of Safar, Arba'in commemorates the women and children of Husayn's household, marched across the desert from Karbala to Damascus, some of them direct descendants of Muhammad who died of thirst and exposure on the way.

• 5. The Imams And The Hidden One

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  Most Shia denominations, including Twelvers and Ismailis, became Imamis, holding that the Imams are the spiritual and political heirs of Muhammad. An Imam, in this view, rules with justice but also keeps and interprets the divine law and its hidden meaning. Because the community must follow his example, he must be free from error and sin, chosen by divine decree, nass, through Muhammad. There is always an Imam of the Age, the appointed authority on every matter of faith and law. Ali was the first, followed by male descendants of Muhammad through his daughter Fatimah. The line does not end with a death. Imam Mahdi is the prophesied redeemer who will rule for seven, nine, or nineteen years, by differing accounts, before the Day of Judgment, ridding the world of evil. His coming is said to coincide with the Second Coming of Jesus, the Masih, who will descend at a white arcade east of Damascus, dressed in yellow robes with his head anointed, to join the Mahdi against the Masih ad-Dajjal. Twelver Shia Muslims believe the twelfth Imam, Hujjat Allah al-Mahdi, is already on Earth in Occultation and will return at the end of time. Tayyibi Ismailis and Bohra communities believe the same of their 21st Imam, At-Tayyib Abi l-Qasim, and hold that a Da'i al-Mutlaq keeps contact with him. This belief in a hidden guide carries a quiet consequence: in the age of Occultation, the duty of interpreting law falls to the clerics who stand in for him.

• 6. A God Who Cannot Be Unjust

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  Divine justice, adl, sits in Twelver theology where mainstream Sunni thought has no equivalent. It is one of the five usul al-din, the foundations of religion, ranked alongside monotheism, prophethood, imamate, and resurrection. The dispute behind it is old. The Ashariyya, the dominant Sunni school, holds that an act is good because God commands it and evil because God forbids it, so moral categories have no standing that could constrain God. Twelver theology, shaped by Imam Jafar al-Sadiq, rejects this. In Shia epistemology the human intellect, aql, can recognize on its own that justice is good and injustice evil, and God acts in accordance with these categories because His nature is good, not because He invents them by command. The doctrine of Amr bayn al-Amrayn, a matter between two matters, traced to Jafar al-Sadiq, threads the needle between pure compulsion and pure delegation. Humans genuinely choose and bear responsibility, yet that agency depends on God's sustaining will rather than operating outside it. This rationalist bent runs through Shia law. The intellect becomes one of the four sources of Jafari jurisprudence, alongside the Quran, the Sunnah, and the consensus of scholars. It even underwrites the Imamate itself, through the principle called qaida al-lutf: a just God would not leave humanity without an infallible guide, so the Imam is not a convenience but a logical necessity.

• 7. Rereading The Prophet

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  I was a prophet while Adam was still between water and clay. That saying, attributed to Muhammad in al-Kafi, anchors a Twelver claim that prophethood was not granted in the cave of Hira at the age of forty but was a pre-eternal reality fixed before the physical world existed. The event at Hira, in this view, was the command to declare publicly what was always true. That reading reshapes how Shia scholars treat famous Sunni narrations. The account in Sahih al-Bukhari describing Muhammad returning frightened, saying "I fear for myself" to Khadija and being reassured by her cousin Waraqah ibn Nawfal, a Christian scholar, is rejected on theological grounds. A prophet prepared from before birth, they argue, cannot fear for his sanity or need a Christian's confirmation of an Islamic mission. The same logic rejects narrations of the Prophet contemplating suicide during the pause in revelation, the hadith of being bewitched by a man named Labid ibn al-Asam, and reports that he forgot parts of the Quran. Behind all of this stands the doctrine of Nur Muhammad, the primordial light from which Muhammad and the Imams of his household were formed before the heavens and the earth. Because they share one pre-eternal reality, the question of succession was never about competence or seniority. It was a question about who carried the light, the knowledge, and the ismah to remain the proof, the hujja, of God on Earth, a question the Shia hold that Muhammad had already answered at Ghadir Khumm.

• 8. Branches, Books, And Borders

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  Twelvers are the largest branch, so much so that Shia Muslim often means Twelver by default. The name comes from belief in twelve divinely ordained Imams, the last of whom remains in Occultation. They are also called Imami or Jafari, after Jafar al-Sadiq, the 6th Imam who elaborated their jurisprudence. Besides the Quran, they turn to collections like Nahj al-Balagha, the famous sermons and letters attributed to Ali, and Kitab al-Kafi by al-Kulayni. The four canonical hadith books, the Kutub al-Arba'a, were compiled in the 10th and 11th centuries, and unlike Sunni collections they include sayings of the twelve Imams alongside the Prophet's. The Ismailis, known as Seveners, take their name from accepting Ismail ibn Jafar as successor to Jafar al-Sadiq, where Twelvers followed his younger brother Musa al-Kazim. After the Fatimid Caliphate, which Abdullah al-Mahdi Billah established in 909, the Ismailis split repeatedly. One line became the Druze, beginning with Al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah, who became ruler at eleven and whose mule returned in 1021 soaked in blood without him; the Druze eventually separated from Islam altogether. Another split, after the death of Ma'ad al-Mustansir Billah in 1094, divided Nizari from Musta'li. The Nizari line continues today under a present, living Imam, Karim al-Husayni Aga Khan IV. The Zaydis, sometimes called Fivers, follow Zayd ibn Ali as their 5th Imam and, unlike the others, do not hold their Imams to be infallible or divinely guided. These branches map onto the world unevenly. Twelvers form the majority in Iran, Iraq, and Azerbaijan, while Zaydis make up close to half of Yemen. After Mecca and Medina, the most revered cities are Najaf, home to the sanctuary of Ali, Karbala with the shrine of Husayn, Mashhad with the sanctuary of Imam Reza, and Qom with the shrine of Fatimah al-Ma'suma. In 2006 a bomb destroyed the shrine of the Al-Askari Mosque in Samarra, one more wound to a tradition that has long guarded its dead as carefully as its doctrines.