Though all discussion of the Middle East, Islam, Iraq, the current military action in Najaf, and seemingly the future of the world, involves discussion of the Shiah and the Sunni branches of Islam. But how many actually know what the differences between the sects are and what they mean? I, for one, did not. Reza Aslan provides a very fine, brief primer:

one must begin not with Ali's tomb in Najaf, but
with the barren plain of Karbala, where Ali's son, Husayn, along with most
of the Prophet Muhammad's family, were brutally massacred in the year 680 by
the forces of the Syrian Caliph, Yazid I.

When Ali died, the caliphate, or leadership of the Muslim community, had
passed to the governor of Syria, a man named Muawiyah, in a complicated
power-sharing agreement that ensured the title would once again belong to
the family of the Prophet upon Muawiyah's demise. However, after having
transformed Muhammad's small community of faith into a dominant, rapidly
expanding, and ethnically Arab kingdom of enormous wealth and power,
Muawiyah had no intention of relinquishing his rule to a small band of
religious purists living in the distant Arabian Peninsula. He therefore
named his son Yazid heir to his throne.

To those who believed that the leadership of the Muslim community should
have never left the Prophet's family in the first place, this was an
intolerably impious act. Throughout the Empire, but particularly in the
volatile regions of Iraq and Iran, a massive contingent of mostly non-Arab
Muslims calling themselves the Shiatu Ali ("the Partisans of Ali") rose up
in revolt. The partisans sent a message to Ali's eldest surviving son,
Husayn, to come to Kufa, the center of the rebellion in Iraq, to lead them
in battle against the evil usurper, Yazid.

Husayn agreed and prepared his family to march from their home in Medina to
Kufa. They never made it. Having already crushed the Kufan rebellion,
Yazid's army intercepted Husayn and his entourage at Karbala and, over a
period of 10 days, massacred nearly every last member of the Prophet
Muhammad's family.

The events at Karbala split the Muslim community into two major factions:
those who considered Yazid the legitimate caliph, and those who believed
that the rightful heirs to the Prophet's mantle had been unjustly removed
from power. Yet while Karbala signaled the end of the political aspirations
of the Shiatu Ali and the beginning of the world's first Muslim empire,
there was a far greater significance to the events than anyone could have
imagined at the time.

Four years after the massacre, a handful of the Shiatu Ali in Kufa gathered
secretly at Karbala, not only to mourn the death of Husayn but also to atone
for their failure to aid him at his hour of need. This concept of
lamentation as penance was an unprecedented phenomenon in Islam. Indeed, as
more and more partisans began gathering at Karbala, the Shiatu Ali gradually
transformed from a failed political faction who aimed to restore leadership
to the Prophet's family into a wholly new religious sect-Shiism, a religion
founded on the model of the righteous believer who, like Husayn, willingly
sacrifices himself in the struggle for justice against tyranny and
oppression.

page 1 | 2 | 3