Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

THE UMMA t 133
among some Muslims the concept of the head of the community as
a prayer leader (imam) or an eschatological chief or Mahdi, literally
“Guided One.” The latter has been invoked from time to time
in Islamic history as a challenge to the caliph or a magnet around
which to energize Muslim political action, but its successes have
been short-lived, and the figure of the Mahdi receded, like that of
the Messiah in rabbinic Judaism, into an indefinite future. That
was the majority view of the caliphate. But there were some who
saw, and continued to see, the office and role of the head of the
umma in a quite different light. This is the Shiat Ali, or “Party of
Ali,” who trace their origins back to the person and history of Ali
ibn Abi Talib.
Ali ibn Abi Talib was Muhammad’s much younger cousin—
thirty-one years younger by the traditional chronology—and it
was his father who raised Muhammad when the latter’s grandfather
and guardian died. Although Ali was only nine at the time,
tradition has remembered him as the first after Khadija to submit
and accept Islam. Ali, then twenty-one, migrated with his cousin to
Medina in 622 and thereafter he began to play an increasingly
important role in the life of Muhammad and the consolidation of
Islam. How important depends on whether one reads the standard
Sunni biographies of the Prophet, which certainly do not downgrade
Ali’s importance, or the Shiite hagiographies, which not only
exalt him to the heavens—Ali’s military prowess is equaled only
by his eloquence—but in their reading of some otherwise opaque
passages of the Quran (e.g., 5:55; 13:7) and in their remembrance
of other events in Muhammad’s life, understand the Prophet to
have explicitly promised the succession to Ali and his family. On
his deathbed, Muhammad is said to have called for pen and ink,
“So I may write for you something after which you will not be led
into error.” But death came before anything could be recorded.
According to the Shiites, as the Shiat Ali are called in English, what
Muhammad intended to put into writing was God’s appointment
of Ali as his successor. Sunnis also remember the occasion, but
have different explanations of what was intended by Muhammad’s
cryptic remark.