chapter 15

ATROCITIES LIKE THE ASHURA MASSACRE AT KARBALA IN 2004 and the

destruction of the Askariya shrine in 2006 inevitably
become the focus of news reports, serving as markers of
escalating conɻict. Imprinted as deep in the collective
memory as the events of fourteen hundred years ago,
they seem to ensure that the Karbala story is one
without end, destined only to grow in power and
significance with every new outrage.

But destiny is not so straightforwardly determined.
Within a hundred years of Hussein’s death at Karbala,
the split between Sunni and Shia had begun to solidify,
yet it did so more around theology than politics. The
extraordinary range of ethnic diʃerences in the vast
empire meant that central political authority was hard
to maintain; by the ninth century, as the Abbasid
dynasty weakened, religious and political authority were
well on the way to being separate spheres. In the lack of
a political consensus, the ulama—religious scholars and
clerics—created an Islamic one across ethnic lines and