The Battle for God: Fundamentalism in Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Karen Armstrong
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this date was only for an elite. It tended to attract the more intellectually adventurous Muslims, who had a talent and a need for mystical contemplation. But Shiis also had a different political outlook from other Muslims. Where the rituals and disciplines of Sunni spirituality helped Sunni Muslims to accept life as it was and to conform to archetypal norms, Shii mysticism expressed a divine discontent. The early traditions that developed shortly after the announcement of the doctrine of the Occultation reveal the frustration and impotence felt by many Shiis during the tenth century.33 This has been called “the Shii century” because many of the local commanders in the Islamic empire who wielded effective power in a given region had Shii sympathies, but this turned out to make no appreciable difference. For the majority, life was still unjust and inequitable, despite the clear teaching of the Koran. Indeed, the Imams had all been victims of rulers whom Shiis regarded as corrupt and illegitimate: tradition had it that every single one of the Imams after Husain had been poisoned by the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphs. In their longing for a more just and benevolent social order, Shiis developed an eschatology centering on the final appearance (zuhur) of the Hidden Imam during the Last Days, when he would return, battle with the forces of evil, and establish a Golden Age of justice and peace before the Final Judgment. But this yearning for the End did not mean that the Shiis had abandoned the conservative ethos and become future-oriented. They were so strongly aware of the archetypal ideal, the way things ought to be, that they found ordinary political life intolerable. The Hidden Imam would not bring something new into the world; he would simply correct human history to make human affairs finally conform to the fundamental principles of existence. Similarly, the Imam’s “appearance” would in a profound sense simply make manifest something that had been there all along, for the Hidden Imam is a constant presence in the life of Shiis; he represents the elusive light of God in a dark, tyrannical world and the only source of hope.
The Occultation completed the mythologization of Shii history which had begun when the Sixth Imam gave up political activism and separated religion from politics. Myth does not provide a blueprint for pragmatic political action but supplies the faithful with a way of looking at their society and developing their interior lives. The myth of Occultation depoliticized the Shiah once and for all. There was no sense in Shiis taking useless risks by pitting themselves against the might of temporal rulers. The image of an Imam, a just political leader who could not exist in the world as it was but had to go into hiding, expressed the Shiis’ alienation from their society. From this new perspective, any government had to be viewed as illegitimate, because it usurped the prerogatives of the Hidden Imam, the true Lord of the Age. Nothing could be expected of earthly rulers, therefore, though in order to survive, the Shiis must cooperate with the powers-that-be. They would live a spiritual life, yearning for a justice that could only return to earth in the Last Days “after a long time has passed.” The sole authority they would accept was that of the Shii ulema, who had taken the place of the former “agents” of the Imams. Because of their learning, their spirituality, and their mastery of the divine law, the ulema had become the deputies of the Hidden Imam and spoke in his name. But because all governments were illegitimate, ulema must not hold political office.34
Shiis thus tacitly condoned a total secularization of politics that could seem to violate the crucial Islamic principle of tawhid, which forbade any such separation of state and religion. But the mythology of this secularization sprang from a religious insight. The legend of the Imams, who had nearly all been assassinated, poisoned, imprisoned, exiled, and, finally, eliminated by the caliphs, represented the basic incompatibility of religion and politics. Political life belongs to the realm of logos; it must be forward-looking, pragmatic, able to compromise, plan, and organize society on a rational basis. It has to balance the absolute demands of religion with the grim reality of life on the ground. Premodern, agrarian society was based on a fundamental inequality; it depended upon the labor of peasants who could not share the fruits of civilization. The great confessional religions of the Axial Age (c. 700–200 BCE) had all been preoccupied with this dilemma and tried to grapple with it. Where there were insufficient resources, and where lack of technology and communications made it harder to impose authority, politics became more brutal and aggressively practical. It was, therefore, extremely difficult for any government to live up to the Islamic ideal or to tolerate the existence of an Imam, an embodiment of divine wisdom, who made its shortcomings so sadly evident. Religious leaders could admonish, criticize, and protest against flagrant abuses, but in some tragic sense the sacred had to be either marginalized or kept within bounds, as the caliphs had interned the Imams in the Askari fortress in Samarra. But there was nobility in the Shii devotion to an ideal which must be kept alive, even though, like the Hidden Imam, it was concealed and currently unable to operate in a tyrannical and corrupt world.
Even though the Shiah had become a mythological faith, that did not mean that it was irrational. In fact, Shiism became a more rational and intellectual version of Islam than the Sunnah. Shiis found that they were in agreement with the Sunni theologians known as the Mutazilites, who tried to rationalize the doctrines of the Koran. In their turn, the Mutazilites gravitated toward the Shiah. Paradoxically, the a-rational doctrine of the Occultation allowed the Shii ulema more freedom to exercise their rational powers in the pragmatic world of affairs than the Sunni ulema. Because the Hidden Imam was no longer available, they had to rely on their own intellectual powers. In the Shiah, therefore, the “gates of ijtihad” were never declared closed, as in the Sunnah.35 At first, it is true, Shiis did feel mentally hobbled when their Imam vanished, but by the thirteenth century, an eminent and learned Shii cleric was known precisely as a mujtahid, one who was deemed capable of the rational activity of ijtihad.
Shii rationalism was, however, different from our current secularized rationalism in the West. Shiis were often critical thinkers. The eleventh-century scholars Muhammad al-Mufid and Muhammad al-Tusi, for example, were worried about the authenticity of some of the hadith reports about the Prophet and his companions. They felt that it was not sufficient simply to quote one of these unreliable traditions in support of their doctrines but that clerics should use reason and logic instead; yet the rational arguments they produced would not convince a modern skeptic. Tusi, for example, “proved” the doctrine of the Imamate on the grounds that, since God is good and desires our salvation, it is reasonable to believe that he will provide us with an infallible guide. Men and women can work out for themselves the necessity for social justice, but a divine sanction makes this imperative more urgent. Even Tusi, however, found himself at a loss when it came to finding a rationale for the Occultation.36 But this was not disturbing to Shiis. Mythos and logos, reason and revelation, were not in opposition but simply different from one another and complementary. Where we in the modern West have discounted mythology and mysticism as a source of truth and rely on reason alone, a thinker such as Tusi saw both ways of thinking as valid and necessary. He sought to show that doctrines which made perfect sense while he was engaged in mystical meditation were also reasonable, in an Islamic context. The introspective techniques of contemplation provided insights that were true in their own sphere, but they could not be proved logically, like a mathematical equation that was the product of logos.
By the end of the fifteenth century, as we have seen, most Shiis were Arabs and the Shiah was especially strong in Iraq, particularly in the two shrine cities of Najaf and Kerbala, dedicated respectively to Imam Ali and Imam Husain. Most Iranians were Sunni, though the Iranian city of Qum had always been a Shii center, and there were significant numbers of Shiis in Rayy, Kashan, and Khurasan. So there were Iranians who welcomed the arrival of nineteen-year-old Shah Ismail, head of the Safavid order of Sufis, who conquered Tabriz in 1501, subdued the rest of Iran within the next decade, and announced that Shiism would become the official religion of the new Safavid empire. Ismail claimed descent from the Seventh Imam, which, he believed, gave him a legitimacy not enjoyed by other Muslim rulers.37
But this was obviously a break with Shii tradition. Most Shiis, known as “Twelvers” (because of their veneration of the twelve Imams), believed that no government