Islam • 61esoteric disciplines observed the five "Pillars" (rukn) or essen-
tial practices of Islam. They were all in full agreement with
the shahadah, the brief Muslim confession of faith: "There is
no God but Allah, and Muhammad is his prophet." They per-
formed the salat prayer five times daily, paid the zakat alms,
fasted during Ramadan, and, if their circumstances permit-
ted, made the hajjto Mecca at least once in their lives. Any-
body who remained faithful to the Pillars was a true Muslim,
whatever his or her beliefs.
We have already discussed the quietist form of Shiism, ex-
pounded by Jafar as-Saddiq soon after the Abbasids came to
power. Even though Shiis were as committed to Shariah piety
as Sunnis and had their own madhhab (the Jafari School,
named after as-Saddiq himself), they looked chiefly for guid-
ance to the current imam, the repository of divine ilm for his
generation. The imam was an infallible spiritual director and a
perfect qadi. Like Sunnis, Shiis wanted to experience God as
directly as the Muslims in the first community, who had wit-
nessed the unfolding revelation of the Quran to the Prophet.
The symbol of the divinely inspired imam reflected the Shii
sense of sacred presence, discernible only to the true con-
templative, but nevertheless immanent in a turbulent, dan-
gerous world. The doctrine of the imamate also demonstrated
the extreme difficulty of incarnating a divine imperative in
the tragic conditions of ordinary political life. Shiis held that
every single one of the imams had been murdered by the
caliph of his day. The martyrdom of Husain, the Third Imam,
at Kerbala was a particularly eloquent example of the perils
that could accrue from the attempt to do God's will in this
world. By the tenth century Shiis publicly mourned Husain
on the fast day of Ashura (10 Muharram), the anniversary of
his death. They would process through the streets, weeping
and beating their breasts, declaring their undying opposition
to the corruption of Muslim political life, which continued to