Little Brown £17.99 pp322

Apart from pockets of bigotry such as Northern Ireland, where theological differences have crystallised into conflicting social identities, Christians have put the wars of religion behind them, allowing a spirit of ecumenicism to develop under more or less secular systems of government. Islam, Christianity’s younger sibling by six centuries, may yet be forced down this path by the imperatives of globalisation. But, for the present, brutal forces of sectarianism remain at large. In 1998, the Taliban in Afghanistan (covertly backed by the anti-Shia Saudi government) massacred between 2,000 and 5,000 members of the Shia Hazara community after the capture of Mazar-e-Sharif. In Pakistan, Shia worshippers are routinely slaughtered by Kalashnikov-toting Sunni thugs on motorbikes, while in Iraq, where the tables have been turned after decades of anti-Shia policies under the brutal Ba’athist regime, Arab Sunni insurgents are resisting a government perceived as dominated by Shias and Kurds. Although Muslim leaders, both radical and moderate, regularly denounce sectarian strife as contrary to Islam, the default modes in Muslim societies (buttressed by endogamous marriages and separate places of worship) tend to fall along sectarian lines.

In this follow-up to his highly readable biography of the Prophet Muhammad, Barnaby Rogerson offers a vital service to western readers by exploring the origins of the Shia-Sunni schism that afflicted Islam (almost) from the time of its origin. A natural storyteller, he achieves his purpose not by viewing the first great schism of Islam from the outside, but by immersing his readers in the master- narrative of events as these came to be viewed — with the bitterness and benefits of hindsight — by subsequent generations.

Rogerson is generally scrupulous in his treatment of the sources, giving equal weight to both sides of the story. The Prophet Muhammad, who united the Arabian tribes under the banner of Islam, died in 632 in his sixties without unambiguously naming a successor. His closest kinsman, Ali (his young first cousin and the husband of his daughter Fatima), who, the Shia minority believe, had been designated to succeed him, was passed over three times before becoming caliph (the prophet’s successor) in 656, by which time the leadership of the Arab empire (vastly expanded by the conquests of Palestine, Syria, Egypt and Persia) was in danger of fragmenting. The first three caliphs (acknowledged by the Sunnis but rejected and, until recently, ritually cursed by the Shia) reunited the tribes and drove forward the Arab conquests in a series of stunning military victories over better equipped and organised Byzantine and Persian armies.

The flaw in the triumphant progress of the true Abrahamic faith emerged during the reign of the third caliph, Uthman, a pious believer and early convert to Islam, but also a member by birth of the old Meccan aristocracy who had fought against Muhammad and his message. Despite being personally virtuous, Uthman was unable to resist the demands of his newly converted clansmen, to whom he gave preferential treatment in the spoils and privileges of government. Some of the stresses that gave rise to Islam’s first schism can also be traced to tensions within Muhammad’s extended household — between Ali and Muhammad’s wife Aisha, the daughter of Abu Bakr, the first caliph (a contemporary of Muhammad, and the only “rightly guided” caliph to have died a natural death). By the time Ali succeeded Uthman (after the latter’s assassination by mutinous troops) as the fourth and last of the “rightly guided” caliphs, the stage had been set for establishment of the Umayyad dynasty in Damascus under Uthman’s kinsman, the brilliant and wily Muawiya.

Ali’s rule was never uncontested: his principled disdain for the dirty business of politics alienated some of his supporters (who would leave his camp to form a separate sect). After four conflict-ridden years, he died a violent and brutal death, as did his son Husayn, who perished in a heroic but doomed attempt to wrest the caliphate from Muawiya’s son Yazid in 680. Thereafter, the spiritual and secular streams of Islam would divide and merge in complex and sometimes dangerous patterns that continue to this day.

While Rogerson’s book does not address the ramifications of the Sunni-Shia divide, he sets the scene in an absorbing narrative that captures the epic quality of an era to which Muslims of all persuasions look for inspiration.

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