The Story of the Shi’a

Abstract

Shi’a Islam is the second largest stream in Islam with about 15 percent of all Muslims being Shiite compared to the Sunnah with 80 percent. The Sunni religious leaders in the Middle Ages did not consider the Shi’a to be part of Islam due to fundamental differences in religious doctrine, and the recognition of the Shi’a stream by the Sunnah took place only later at the end of the Ottoman period. The main reason for this was the active presence of Western colonialism in the Muslim states. It appears that Sunni scholars and modernists such as Muhammad Abduh and Jamal ad-Din al-Afghani, who were part of the national and modernist stream, acted more with words and less by real actions in their recognition of the Shi’a as part of the Muslim community so they could have them as allies in the pursuit of their anti-Western political aims.¹ Throughout the Ottoman rule, however, even though the Shiites were regarded as “sinful” or “deviationist,” they were still regarded as Muslims. Up to the mid-nineteenth century the Ottomans and the Wahhabis banned various Shi’i practices such as the ‘Ashura (ta’ziyah) processions, or public cursing of the first three caliphs, and destroyed their holy shrines² but did not disrupt the functioning of the Shi’i seminaries (madaris). Following the Ottoman suppression of the 1843–1844 Karbala rebellion, however, the Ottomans did allow these processions and the Shiites were not required to pay the jizya or any other tax that non-Muslims had to pay.³