EMPIRE OF THE UMAYYADS 71of respect, to be sure, but no more grandiose than, say, reverend or honor-
able. After all, every time a group of Muslims gathers to pray communally,
one person among them has to lead the prayer; and he does nothing dif-
ferent than the others do; he just does it standing alone in front of the oth-
ers to help keep the group moving in tandem through the ritual. Every
mosque has an imam, and when he's not leading prayer, he might be
sweeping the floor or patching the roof.
But when Shi'i say "imam," they mean something considerably more
elevated. To Shi'i there is always one imam in the world, and there is never
more than one. They proceed from the premise that Mohammed had
some palpable mystical substance vested in him by Allah, some energy,
some light, which they call the baraka of Mohammed. When the Prophet
died, that light passed into Ali, at which moment Ali became the first
imam. When Ali died, that same light passed into his son Hassan, who be-
came the second Imam. Later, the spark passed into Hassan's younger
brother Hussein, who became the third imam. When Hussein was mar-
tyred at Karbala, the whole "imam" idea flowered into a rich theological
concept that addressed a religious craving left unnourished by the main-
stream doctrines of that time.
The mainstream doctrine, as articulated by Abu Bakr and Omar, said
that Mohammed was strictly a messenger delivering a set of instructions
about how to live. The message was the great and only thing. Beyond de-
livering the Qur'an, Mohammed's religious significance was only his sunna,
the example he set by his way of life, an example others could follow if they
wanted to live in God's favor. People who accepted this doctrine eventually
came to be known as Sunnis, and they comprise nine-tenths of the Muslim
community today.
The Shi'i, by contrast, felt that they couldn't make themselves worthy of
heaven simply by their own efforts. To them, instructions were not enough.
They wanted to believe that direct guidance from God was still coming into
the world, through some chosen person who could bathe other believers in
a soul-saving grace, some living figure who would keep the world warm and
pure. They adopted the term imam for this reassuring figure. His presence
in the world ensured the continuing possibility of miracle.
When Hussein went to Karbala, he had no chance of winning. His only
hope lay in the possibility of God producing a miracle-but then, the