196 | CHAPTER 6
countryside until the appearance of Muhammad, whose followers they be-
came. Sayf ’s strange story was eventually taken up by Tabarī—minus Paul,
and identifying the poisonous example given by the Jews with the role of the
Shiites, to whom the historian was so opposed.^149
The umma had remained politically unified until the mid- ninth century;
and it was only toward the end of the tenth, from the 970s, that serious civil
disturbances between Baghdadi Sunnis and Shiites led to irremediable rup-
ture between them.^150 Paradoxically, just as the central strands of Arabic
scholarship mentioned above were reaching a certain maturity, the end of the
First Millennium marked the passing of any pretence at spiritual, let alone
political, unity, except at the minimalist level represented by conventional
lists such as the four legal communities, the four “rightly guided” caliphs (ac-
commodating both Umayyads and Shiites), or the five pillars (faith, charity,
prayer, pilgrimage, and fasting but not jihād).^151 Henceforth there was to be
the Sunni majority with its exoteric appeal to Qurʾān, Prophetic tradition,
the consensus of the community, and the authority of the powers that be,
along with a growing taste for systematic dogma, catechisms, and creeds.^152
Ashʿarism emerged, from the tenth century, as the central, orthodox expres-
sion of this dominant current in Islam. Over against the Sunnis stood the
Shiite minority (today it is about 10 to 15 percent of the Muslim world, but
widely perceived to be again on the offensive, as it was in the tenth century
too), with its belief in twelve (or, for some, seven) Imams after the Prophet,
its hope for the return of the last, “occluded” Imam after his mysterious dis-
appearance in 941, its esoteric conviction that the Qurʾān’s inner meaning
must be revealed through the Imam, and a consequent efflorescence of scrip-
tural exegesis.^153 As for Shiite law, it differs in no essentials (except inheri-
tance rules) from Sunni, the final split between the two branches of Islam
having come after the formation of the four legal communities.^154
There is irony in the coexistence in tenth- century Baghdad of the armed
thuggery of Sunni and Shiite factions and the division of the city into sectar-
ian neighborhoods on the one hand, with the open- minded circles around
Kindī and Fārābī already evoked in the previous chapter and about which I
149 S. W. Anthony, “The composition of Sayf b. ʿUmar’s account of King Paul and his corruption
of ancient Christianity,” Der Islam 85 (2009) 164–202; A. Barzegar, “The persistence of irony: Paul of
Tarsus, Ibn Sabaʾ, and historical narrative in Sunni identity formation,” Numen 58 (2011) 207–31. For
further Sunni assertions of commonalities between Jews and Shiites, see S. M. Wasserstrom, ““The Šīʿīs
are the Jews of our community”: An interreligious comparison within Sunnī thought,” Israel oriental stud-
ies 14 (1994) 297–324.
150 Kennedy, The Prophet and the age of the Caliphates [4:79] 228–29.
151 C. F. Robinson, “Conclusion: From formative Islam to classical Islam,” in New Cambridge his-
tory of Islam [2:106] 692–93.
152 These last are examined by Wensinck, Muslim creed [3:24] 102–276.
153 Cf. M. A. Amir- Moezzi, “Le Tafsīr d’a l- Hibarī,” Journal des savants (2009) 3–23.
154 Schacht, Introduction to Islamic law [6:47] 16–17.