70 DESTINY DISRUPTED
One by one, the warriors in Hussein's band sallied forth to fight Yazid's
army. One by one they fell. The women, children, and old folks, mean-
while, all died of thirst. When the last of the party was gone, the victori-
ous general swooped in, cut off Hussein's head, and shipped it to the
emperor with a gloating note.
The severed head arrived just as Yazid was entertaining a Byzantine
envoy, and it spoiled the whole dinner party. The Byzantine envoy said, "Is
this how you Muslims behave? We Christians would never treat a descen-
dant ofJesus in this manner." The criticism angered Yazid, and he had the
"Roman" thrown into prison. Later, however, he saw that keeping the sev-
ered head might be bad public relations, so he sent it back to Karbala to be
buried with the body.
Yazid no doubt believed he had solved his problem: surely Ali's descen-
dents would never make trouble again. He was quite wrong, however. By
crushing Hussein at Karbala, this emperor lit a spark. The passionate embrace
of Ali's cause now became a prairie fire called Shi'ism. What is Shi'ism?
One often hears it summed up as if it were just another quarrel about dynas-
tic succession, like the battles between Maud and Stephen in twelfth-century
England. If that had really been the case, the movement would have faded out
after Ali died. Who today calls himself a Maudist or a Stephenist? Who today
even cares which of these two had the more legitimate claim to the English
throne? Ali, however, kept gaining new adherents after his death. The ranks
of his Shi'i kept on swelling. People who were not even born when Ali died
grew up to embrace his cause and shape their identities around the conviction
that he should have been the first khalifa. How could this be?
The answer, of course, is that the dispute about the khalifate was no
mere dynastic struggle. Key religious issues were embedded in it, because
the choice involved not just who but also what the leader would be. Ali's
partisans saw in him something that they did not see in other claimants to
the khalifate: a God-given spiritual quality that made him more than an
ordinary mortal, a quality they had seen in Mohammed as well. No one
said Ali was another Messenger of God. No one would have made that
claim (at that point, anyway), and so they gave Ali a different title. They
said he was the imam.
Originally, imam was simply the term for a person who led communal
prayer. To most Muslims, that's still what the word means today. It's a title