Read After the Prophet: The Epic Story of the Shia-Sunni Split in Islam for Free Online

is, but one, and that was the man to whom Muhammad now turned for advice in the Affair of the Necklace.

chapter 3
    I F THERE WAS A SINGLE PERSON WHO SEEMED DESTINED TO BE Muhammad’s successor, it was Ali, his first cousin and the man whose name the Shia were to take as their own. They were, and are, the followers of Ali, or in Arabic, Shiat Ali— Shia, for short.
    Ali had been the first man to accept the new faith of Islam. He’d been only thirteen years old at the time, yet he’d remember it with the kind of absolute clarity that marks the most momentous points of one’s life. It had happened just after Muhammad’s first soul-shaking encounter with the angel Gabriel. Still caught up in the utter terror of a human who had come face-to-face with the divine, he had sought refuge in Khadija’s arms, and once she had reassured him—“This truly is an angel and not a devil, and you will be the prophet of this people”—he had called together his closest kinsmen and asked for their support. “Which of you will assist me in this cause?” he asked.
    As Ali would tell it, “They all held back from this, while I, although I was the youngest of them, the most diseased in eyesight, the most corpulent in body and thinnest in the legs, said ‘I, oh Prophet of God, will be your helper in this matter.’ ”
    Diseased eyes? Corpulent? Thin legs? Was Ali joking at his own expense? His self-description bears no resemblance to the virile yet tender warrior in the brightly colored posters so popular among the Shia faithful, who have little of the Sunni abhorrence of visual representation. On sale in kiosks and from street vendors throughout the Shia heartland, from Lebanon to India, the posters show not an awkward teenager but a handsome man in his forties. The jaw set firm beneath the neatly trimmed beard, the strong eyebrows, the dark eyes raised upward—you might almost mistake his portrait for the conventional image of Christ except that it has more of a sense of physical vitality and strength.
    There is the sword for one thing. Sometimes slung over his back, sometimes laid across his lap, this sword was destined to become more famed throughout the Islamic world than King Arthur’s sword Excalibur ever would be in Christendom. Like Excalibur, it came with supernatural qualities, and it too had a name: Dhu’l Fikar, the “Split One,” which is why it is shown with a forked point, like a snake’s tongue. In fact it wasn’t the sword that was split but the flesh it came in contact with, so that the name more vividly translates as the Cleaver or the Splitter.
    It had been Muhammad’s own sword, given by him to Ali—bequeathed, you might say. And after he had fought valiantly in battle with this sword, despite multiple wounds, Ali earned the best known of the many titles Muhammad would confer on him: Assad Allah, Lion of God. That is why he is often shown with a magnificently maned lion crouched at his feet, staring out at the viewer with the calm gaze of implacable strength.
    The name Lion of God was intended to convey spiritual as well as physical strength, and that is the sense you get from these ubiquitous posters. With his high cheekbones, kohl-rimmed eyes, and green keffiya artfully draped around his head and falling onto his shoulders—the green of Islam from the banner of Muhammad’s clan, the color so evocative of ease and bounty to a mountain desert people—Ali is shown as the perfect Islamic man.
    So what if at thirteen he was a shortsighted, spindly-legged adolescent? As Shia Muslims point out, these are not direct portraits but representations. They express the feel of Ali, who he is for them—the man mentored and groomed by Muhammad himself, inducted by the Prophet into the inner, gnostic meaning of Islam so that his understanding of the faith would far surpass that of all others. What does it matter if in life he was not the most handsome man in the world? In spirit is where he lives, stronger in body