those who lacked true spiritual authority could serve in
other ways. Muawiya had prevented what had seemed
the inevitable disintegration of the vast Islamic empire;
if not for him, Islam might never have been able to
survive. His son, Yazid, may have utterly lacked his
father’s political skill, but so long as he did not try to
assume religious authority—something he had no
interest in doing—his rule was to be considered
tolerable. Spiritual guidance was not to be expected of
political leaders, Ibn Taymiya was saying, and in this he
was defending his own turf. A whole new religious
establishment had come into being under the Umayyads
and their Abbasid successors—the clerics and
theologians known as the ulama—and as the empire’s
central political authority waned, they became the
gatekeepers of Islam, much as the rabbis were the
gatekeepers of Judaism through the centuries. The very
idea of Hussein’s acting out of spiritual authority and
divine guidance was thus anathema to Ibn Taymiya and
his ideological heirs.
But to the Shia, Hussein’s journey to Iraq came to be
the ultimate act of courage, the most noble self-sacriɹce,
made in a state of higher consciousness and with full
knowledge of its import. Hussein would take the only
way left him to expose the corruption and venality of the
Umayyad regime, they would say. He would shock all
Muslims out of their complacency and call them back to
the true path of Islam through the leadership the Prophet