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Shia Islam is based on a hadith report concerning Muhammad's pronouncement at Ghadir Khumm. Shia Muslims believe that Ali, Muhammad's cousin and son-in-law, was the designated successor to Muhammad as Islam's spiritual and political leader.
- Overview
- Early development
- Anti-Umayyad movements: the Zaydi Shiʿah and the ʿAbbāsids
Shiʿi, member of the smaller of the two major branches of Islam, the Shiʿah, distinguished from the majority Sunnis.
The origins of the split between the Sunnis and the Shiʿah lie in the events which followed the death of the Prophet Muhammad. Muhammad was understood to be the messenger of God who, in the early 7th century ce, commenced to proclaim the Qurʾān, the sacred scripture of Islam, to the Arabs. In the 620s Muhammad and his followers were driven from his hometown of Mecca and settled in Medina. About a decade later, when he appeared at Mecca with a large army, the Meccans surrendered the city to him. In 632 the Prophet became ill and died. Muhammad’s role as God’s messenger was the basis of his political and military authority.
The earliest sources agree that on his deathbed Muhammad did not formally designate a successor or make public a plan for succession. Some members of the ummah (Muslim community) held that God had intended for that spiritual link, and the political and military authority associated with it, to continue via Muhammad’s family. Thus, they held, ʿAlī ibn Abī Ṭālib—the Prophet’s cousin and son-in-law—should have been the Prophet’s immediate successor and, thereafter, members of ʿAlī’s family. Others, however, maintained that with Muhammad’s death the link between God and humankind had ended and the community was to make its own way forward.
At the Prophet’s death certain members of the ummah—then composed of those who had left Mecca for Medina with him and those Medinans who later converted to Islam—met and chose Abū Bakr as Muhammad’s successor (khalīfah, or caliph). Abū Bakr in turn designated ʿUmar ibn al-Khaṭṭāb as his successor. After ʿUmar’s assassination in Medina in 644, ʿUthmān ibn ʿAffān was chosen as the third caliph. Amid charges of corruption, ʿUthmān himself was also killed, in 656. Following his death, delegations of the earlier Meccan and later Medinan Muslims, as well as Muslims from key provinces in the by now quite large Muslim empire, asked ʿAlī to become the fourth caliph. He accepted and made Kūfah, in modern-day Iraq, his capital.
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Opposition to ʿAlī’s leadership quickly arose from ʿUthmān’s clan, the Umayyads, and from others who were angry at ʿAlī’s failure to pursue ʿUthmān’s murderers. In 656 a group of challengers to ʿAlī, led by Muhammad’s third wife, ʿĀʾishah, were defeated at the Battle of the Camel by ʿAlī and forces from Kūfah. Muʿāwiyah ibn Abī Sufyān, an Umayyad and the governor of Syria, refused to pledge allegiance to ʿAlī.
Mawālī and South Arabian tribal elements were among Muḥammad’s supporters, but they also supported a series of later uprisings centred on the Prophet’s family that occurred in the region into the 8th century.
One of these risings was led by Zayd ibn ʿAlī, a half-brother of ʿAlī’s great grandson Muḥammad al-Bāqir by ʿAlī’s son Ḥusayn. In 740, encouraged by Kufan elements, Zayd rose against the Umayyads, on the principle that the imam could lay claim to leadership only if he openly declared himself imam. Zayd fell in battle, but his son Yaḥyā escaped to northeastern Iran. Later captured and released, he was killed in 743 after launching a further anti-Umayyad rising in Herat. The Zaydis survive today, mainly in Yemen, and are the third largest of the three still extant Shiʿi groups, after the Twelver and Ismāʿīliyyah sects.
- Andrew J. Newman
Apr 23, 2019 · Sunni and Shia Muslims share the most fundamental Islamic beliefs and articles of faith and are the two main sub-groups in Islam. They do differ, however, and that separation stemmed initially, not from spiritual distinctions, but political ones.
Shi‘a Islam, also known as Shi‘ite Islam or Shia, is the second largest branch of Islam after Sunni Islam. Shias adhere to the teachings of Muhammad and the religious guidance of his family (who are referred to as the Ahl al-Bayt) or his descendants known as Shia Imams.
Jul 31, 2019 · Though the two main sects within Islam, Sunni and Shia, agree on most of the fundamental beliefs and practices of Islam, a bitter split between the two goes back some 14 centuries. The divide...
- Sarah Pruitt
- 4 min
Shia Islam is based on a hadith report concerning Muhammad's pronouncement at Ghadir Khumm. Shia Muslims believe that Ali, Muhammad's cousin and son-in-law, was the designated successor to Muhammad as Islam's spiritual and political leader.
Shia Islam originated as a response [citation needed] to questions of Islamic religious leadership which became manifest as early as the death of Muhammad in 632 CE. The issues involved not only whom to appoint as the successor to Muhammad, but also what attributes a true successor should have.
