think they had changed? Did he imagine that right and
justice could prevail over power and strength? That
seventy-two warriors could take on the whole might of
Yazid’s army?
To Sunnis, Hussein’s determination to travel on to
Iraq would be the proof of his unsuitability to take the
helm of a vast empire. They would call it a quixotic and
ill-fated quest, one that should never have been
undertaken. Hussein should have acknowledged reality,
they say, and bowed to history.
In time they would cite the bitterly anti-Shia
thirteenth-century scholar Ibn Taymiya, whose writings
are still central to mainstream Sunni thought. Sixty
years with an unjust leader were preferable to a single
night with an ineʃective one, Ibn Taymiya declared. His
reasoning was that without an eʃectively run state, the
implementation of Islamic law was impossible. But he
was also clearly stating that church and state, as it were,
were no longer one and the same, as they had been in
Muhammad’s time.
It was Ibn Taymiya who dubbed the ɹrst four Caliphs
—Abu Bakr, Omar, Othman, and Ali—the rashidun, or
rightly guided ones, and they are still known as such in
Sunni Islam. The Caliphs who came after them were
thus not rightly or divinely guided, no matter the lip
service they gave to Islam or the grandiose titles they
claimed like the “Shadow of God on Earth.” But even