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were not Arabs, still less aristocrats; the inferior social and economic status assigned to them by the dominant Arab aristocracy created a sense of injustice, and made them willing recruits to movements that questioned the legitimacy of the existing order. Nor were the Arab conquerors themselves immune to these discontents. Pious Arabs deplored the worldliness of the Caliphs and the ruling groups; nomadic Arabs resented the encroachments of authority - and many others, who suffered from the sharper economic and social differences that came with conquest and riches, began to share the griefs and hopes of the new converts. Many of these had traditions of political and religious legitimism - the Jewish and Christian belief in the sanctity and ultimate triumph of the royal house of David, through the anointed Messiah, the Zoroastrian expectation of a Saoshyans, a saviour who would arise at the end of time from the holy seed of Zoroaster. Once converted to Islam, they were readily attracted by the claims of the house of the Prophet, which seemed to offer an end to the inequities of the existing order and the fulfilment of the promise of Islam.
In the transformation of the Shia from a party to a sect, two events are of special significance, both of them arising from unsuccessful attempts by Shiite claimants to overthrow the Umayyad Caliphate. The first, in the year 68o, was led by Husayn, the son of Ali and his wife Fatima, the daughter of the Prophet. On the tenth day of the month of Muharram, at a place called Karbala in Iraq, Husayn, his family, and his followers encountered an Umayyad force and were ruthlessly put to death. Some seventy died in the massacre; only a sick boy, Ali ibn Husayn, who was left lying in a tent, survived. This dramatic martyrdom of the kin of the Prophet, and the wave of anguish and penitence that followed it, infused a new religious fervour in the Shia, now inspired by the potent themes of suffering, passion and expiation.

A second turning point came at the end of the seventh and beginning of the eighth century. In 685, one Mukhtar, an Arab of Kufa, led a revolt in the name of a son of Ali known as Muhammad ibn al-Hanafiyya, who was, he said, the Imam, the true and rightful head of the Muslims. Mukhtar was defeated and killed in 687, but his movement survived. When Muhammad ibn al-Hanafiyya himself died in about 700, there were some who said that the Imamate had passed to his son. Others claimed that he was not really dead, but had gone into hiding in the mountains of Radwa, near Mecca; from there, in God's good time, he would return and triumph over his enemies. Such a messianic Imam is called the Mahdi, the rightly-guided one.
These events set the pattern for a long series of religious revolutionary movements. There are two central figures in such a movement: the Imam, who is sometimes also the Mahdi, the rightful leader who comes to destroy tyranny and establish justice, and the dd'i, the summoner, who preaches - and often also devises - his message, enlists his disciples, and finally, it may be, leads them to victory or martyrdom. In the middle of the eighth century one of these movements even won a transitory success, bringing about the overthrow of the Umayyads and their replacement by the Abbasids, another branch of the family to which both the Prophet and Ali had belonged - but in the hour of their triumph the Abbasid Caliphs renounced the sect and dais that had brought them to power, and chose the path of stability and continuity in religion and politics. The resulting frustration of revolutionary hopes gave rise to new and fierce discontents, and a new wave of extremist and messianic movements.
In early times both the doctrines and organizations of the Shia were subject to frequent variation. Numerous pretenders appeared, claiming, with varying plausibility, to be members or agents of the house of the Prophet and, after enriching the mythical description of the awaited redeemer with some new