After the Prophet: The Epic Story of the Shia-Sunni Split in Islam (25 page)

Shimr’s men hacked off Hussein’s head, along with those of all seventy-two of his warriors. They slung most of the severed heads in sacks across their horses’ necks, each one proof of the kill, a guarantee of a cash reward from Ubaydallah back in Kufa. But Hussein’s head was singled out. Shimr ordered it speared on a lance and carried like a trophy in front of his army. As the Quran had been desecrated at Siffin, so now was Hussein’s head at Karbala.

Shimr did not bury the seventy-two headless corpses; instead, he ordered them left behind in the desert for hyenas and wolves to feed on. He had the women and children put in chains and led them on the long trek to Kufa, stumbling behind the head of Hussein. When they reached the governor’s palace, Ubaydallah laughed with pleasure as Shimr tossed the severed trophy onto the floor in front of him. He even poked at the head with his cane, sending it rolling over the stone tiles. At the sight, one elderly companion of the Prophet was so appalled that he could contain himself no longer, no matter the danger. “Take your cane away, by God!” he erupted. “How often have I seen the Messenger of God kiss that face you now desecrate!” And in tears, the old man limped out of the assembly hall before the soldiers could stop him, to speak his mind one last time.

“A slave has given power to a slave and has made the people his inheritance,” he told the people outside. “You, Arabs, are the slaves after today. You killed the son of Fatima when the bastard governor ordered you. You have accepted shame and humiliation. Let destruction come to those who accept humiliation.”

The old man’s anger and dismay struck deep into the collective conscience. The Prophet was dead not fifty years, yet here the men of his family had been massacred, and the women humiliated. As the news
spread throughout Islam, a sense of bitter shame spread with it, and a new name came into being for the family of Muhammad:
Bayt al-Ahzan,
the House of Sorrow.

Yet this ignominious death in the desert, like that ignominious death on the cross six centuries earlier, would prove to be not the end but only the beginning.

W
OLVES AND HYENAS DID NOT DEVOUR THE CORPSES AS
S
HIMR
had planned. Once he had led away his captives, farmers ventured out from a nearby village, buried the seventy-two headless bodies, and marked the graves. Just four years later, pilgrims—the precursors of the millions who now arrive each year—began to arrive on the anniversary of the massacre, and it was they who named the gravesite Karbala, “the place of trial and tribulation.”

Hussein’s head would have many resting places, its presence spreading along with the story of what had happened. Most say it is buried by the east wall of the Grand Mosque in Damascus, but some have it in a shrine near the main entry to the Al-Azhar Mosque in Cairo, while yet others maintain that it was spirited away to Azerbaijan for safekeeping. Some even say it was returned to Karbala. But far more important than the physical remains, what survived was the story, and it was the survivors who told it—the women and the girls, and one boy.

Ali Zayn al-Abidin, Hussein’s adolescent son, never took part in the fighting. He could not rise from his bedding in the women’s tent.
Struck by severe fever, he had tossed and turned helplessly as his friends, his kin, and finally his father went out to meet their deaths. So when Shimr and his men came bursting into the women’s tent and caught sight of him, the sick boy was an easy and obvious target, and he too would certainly have been killed were it not for his aunt, Hussein’s sister Zaynab.

“Do not let Satan take away your courage,” Hussein had told her on that final night, and now she displayed that courage. She hurled herself over her nephew and defied Shimr to run her through with his sword. “If you kill him, then you kill me with him,” she declared.

Not even Shimr, it seemed, could kill the granddaughter of the Prophet in cold blood. Instead, he gave the order to take the boy captive along with the women. But Zaynab would do more than keep alive Hussein’s one remaining son; she would keep alive the memory of Karbala itself. Her words of grief as she was being led away in chains, her clothing torn and head bare, would haunt Islam through the centuries.

“Oh Muhammad, Muhammad, may the angels of heaven bless you!” she wailed. “Here is Hussein in the open, stained with blood and his limbs torn off. Oh Muhammad! Your daughters are prisoners, your progeny are killed, and the east wind blows dust over them.”

Nobody in Iraq needed to be told what that east wind brought with it. That was the wind of blinding dust storms, the very breath of trial and tribulation.

Even Shimr’s men repented when they heard her, or so at least some of them would claim. “By God, she made every friend and every foe weep,” one said later. But if the soldiers did indeed weep, they still obeyed orders. Ubaydallah had the captives publicly humiliated by parading them through Kufa and, only once that was done, sent them on to the Caliph Yazid in Damascus, along with the severed heads.

Some say it was not Ubaydallah but Yazid himself who then
poked at Hussein’s head with a cane and laughed gleefully as it rolled on the floor at his feet. But most say he angrily cursed Shimr and Ubaydallah for their “excess of zeal,” his conscience roused by the fact that Zaynab was there to call him to account.

No matter the chains, the torn clothing, the dust and blisters of the long desert march from Kufa, she stood proudly in front of the Umayyad Caliph and publicly shamed him. “You, your father, and your grandfather submitted to the faith of my father, Ali, the faith of my brother Hussein, the faith of my grandfather Muhammad,” she told him. “Yet you have vilified them unjustly and oppressed the very faith you profess.”

At this, Yazid himself broke down in tears. “If I had been there, Hussein, you would not have been killed,” he swore, and gave orders for the captives to be treated as honored guests in his own household. On the fortieth day after Karbala—the day the Shia commemorate as
Arbain,
or “forty”—he gave the women and girls and the one surviving son his assurance of protection and had them escorted back to Medina.

Perhaps he had remembered what some say was Muawiya’s dying caution to him: “If you defeat Hussein, pardon him, for he has a great claim.” If so, it was too late. Reviled by the Shia, Yazid would hardly be better treated in memory by the Sunnis. Few would grieve when he died only three years after Karbala, just as his forces were poised to take the city of Mecca, which had risen up in rebellion under the son of Aisha’s illfated brother-in-law Zubayr. Fewer still would grieve when his sickly thirteen-year-old son died just six months after that. And it is probably safe to say that none grieved for his second cousin Marwan, who then proclaimed himself Caliph. The man who had played such a devious role behind the scenes throughout Othman’s and Ali’s caliphates finally achieved the power he had coveted for so long, but only briefly; within the year he would be smothered to death by his own wife.

All the while, “the Karbala factor,” as it would come to be called, was rapidly gaining strength. The story told by the seventh-century survivors
would not only endure but would grow in power to find renewed life in the twentieth century.

“Religion is an amazing phenomenon that plays contradictory roles in people’s lives,” said Ali Shariati, the charismatic lecturer who helped lay the intellectual foundation of the Iranian Revolution of 1979. “It can destroy or revitalize, put to sleep or awaken, enslave or emancipate, teach docility or teach revolt.”

Khomeini understood him perfectly. Like Shariati, the Ayatollah grasped that Karbala was an enormously loaded symbol, a deep well of emotional, social, and political significance, seemingly infinitely adaptable to time and circumstance. Under the regime of the Shah, with political dissent banned under pain of imprisonment, torture, and execution, religion could become the umbrella language of protest and resistance. The Karbala story was the perfect vehicle for this. Its themes broke through the usual social and economic dividing lines to resonate with clerics and secular intellectuals, liberals and conservatives, urban Marxists and tradition-bound villagers alike.

“Let the blood-stained banners of Ashura be raised wherever possible as a sign of the coming day when the oppressed shall avenge themselves on the oppressors,” Khomeini wrote from exile in France in November 1978, and on Ashura itself, which fell on December 11 that year, the traditional processions were transformed into a powerful political weapon. Under intense pressure, the Shah lifted martial law for just two days, and millions of Iranians responded to Khomeini’s call and marched in the streets, alternating the ritual cry of “Death to Yazid!” with a new one: “Death to the Shah!”

Forty days later, on
Arbain,
Khomeini again called on the Karbala factor, comparing those killed in the streets by the Shah’s troops with those killed by Yazid’s troops fourteen hundred years earlier. “It is as if the blood of our martyrs were the continuation of the blood of the martyrs
of Karbala,” he wrote. “It is our religious and national duty to organize great marches on this day.” Despite the reimposition of martial law, the Karbala story again became the means of mass mobilization, and again the Shah’s troops opened fire, creating yet more martyrs. By the end of the month the Shah had fled into exile.

The revolution had succeeded, but with what many would see as a vengeance. Within two months the Islamic Republic was declared, and Khomeini announced himself the Supreme Leader. Liberal Muslims and secular intellectuals now discovered the other side of the religious fervor they had helped foment. Revolution gave way to theocracy; freedom and justice, to Islamic dictatorship. Thousands of secular and liberal activists who had helped bring about the revolution were imprisoned and executed. Women disappeared behind head-to-toe veils, and even the young chador-clad women who had toted submachine guns in the streets of Teheran, calling themselves “the commandos of Zaynab,” were quickly assigned to more traditional duties. Many of Shariati’s teachings were soon declared un-Islamic, and his image, once featured alongside Khomeini on everything from posters to postage stamps, disappeared from view.

The Karbala story was still used, though in a far more deliberately manipulative way. In the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, thousands of Iranian boys were given headbands inscribed with the word “Karbala,” then sent off to become human minesweepers. Wave after wave of them ran headlong into Iraqi minefields to be blown up to clear the way for Iranian troops, each of them in the desperate faith that he was heading for a martyr’s paradise. Frontline troops were inspired to sacrifice by visits from singers and chanters of Karbala lamentations, the most famed of whom was known as “Khomeini’s Nightingale.” Khomeini had swept into power with the help of the Karbala factor, then taken control of it, taming it into the docility and obedience Shariati had warned of.

But the newly proven power of Karbala was not to be so easily
controlled in the country of its birth, Iraq, where it was soon to bind together not only the past and the present, but also the future.

Just one of Hussein’s five sons had survived, but for the Shia, that one was enough. He would be the fourth of twelve Imams, the twelve seen on posters all over the Shia world, seated in a V formation behind Ali at their head. The imamate passed from father to son, each of them endowed with divine knowledge and grace. And after Karbala, each of them, the Shia believe, was poisoned, first by order of the Umayyad Caliphs, then by order of their successors, the Abbasids. Each, that is, except the last, the twelfth Imam, the one whose face is hidden in the posters. Where his face should be, there is just a patch of white, as though the radiance of sanctity would be too much for human eyes.

In fact the fourth, fifth, and sixth Imams—Hussein’s one surviving son, his grandson, and his great-grandson Jaafar al-Sadiq, who laid the foundation of Shia theology—seem to have lived long lives in Medina. Whether poison did indeed account for their deaths is more a matter of faith than of record. But it is clear that once the Abbasids came to power, the life expectancy of the Shia Imams drastically decreased.

The Abbasids ousted the Umayyads just seventy years after Karbala and brought the caliphate back from Syria to Iraq. In 762 they built a magnificent new capital city on the banks of the Tigris. Laid out in a perfect circle, it was originally called Medinat as-Salaam—“City of Peace”—though it quickly became better known as Baghdad, from the Persian for “gift of paradise.”

By the end of the eighth century, under the fabled Caliph Harun al-Rashid, the Muslim empire stretched all the way from Spain to India, and Baghdad had become the center of an extraordinary flowering in the arts and sciences. Mathematics reached a new level of sophistication; indeed, the word “algebra” comes from Arabic. Literary output soared,
most notably with the famed
Thousand and One Nights,
which originated, as its stories put it, “in the time of Harun al-Rashid.” Exhaustive histories, the ones on which this book is based, were compiled. But for the Shia, it all came at a high price.

The Abbasids had seized power with strong Shia support, since they claimed to be descendants of Muhammad’s uncle Abbas. If not exactly
Ahl al-Bayt,
they presented themselves as at least very close. But once in power, they dropped the Shia banner, and the Shia reacted with a deep sense of betrayal—and with division on how to counter such betrayal. Those taking a more activist anti-Abbasid stand included the Zaydis, a Yemeni denomination, some of whom maintained that the imamate had ended with only seven Imams, and the Ismailis, who at first believed it had ended with five, and struck out for power in their own right. One Ismaili branch went on to found the Fatimid dynasty, build the city of Cairo, and rule Egypt from the tenth to the twelfth century, while another is still headed by the Aga Khan. But the vast majority of Shia would eventually hew to belief in twelve Imams and, following their example, focus more on religious devotion than on opposition to the Sunni Caliphs.