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division between the Sunnis and the Shiites began.)
     
    T HE T EMPLE OF D OOM
     
    Shia Islam was founded in a.d. 661 by Ali ibn Abi Talib. It was from his name that Shia evolved. It is literally a derivation of Shiat Ali —“partisans of Ali.” As a descendant of Muhammad, Ali was thought to be the last of the true caliphs. He was wildly popular until he came face-to-face in a battle with the army of the governor of Damascus in a.d. 661. It is said that the Damascene soldiers attached verses from the Quran to the tips of their spears. When faced with fighting a force hiding behind the words of Muhammad, Ali’s army declined to fight. Ali, left only with the option of negotiating with his enemy, sought appeasement. While he escaped death at the hands of his enemy in open combat, Ali was eventually killed by one of his own rabid followers.
    When Ali died, the governor of Damascus, Mu’awiya, anointed himself caliph. Ali’s son, Hassan, the rightful heir to the caliphate, died under suspicious circumstances, while the next in the line of succession, Hussein, agreed to do nothing until Mu’awiya died. He was soon disappointed yet again, however, when Mu’awiya’s son, Yazid, appropriated the position of caliph and went to battle against Hussein. The bloody battle of Karbala that erupted resulted in the deaths of Hussein and his army. Only Hussein’s baby boy survived the carnage, and he became the hope of reestablishing Ali’s claim to the caliphate.
    With the ascension of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to the position of power in Iran, we have heard much about the last known descendant of Hussein, Muhammad al-Mahdi, or the Mahdi . Al-Mahdi was the Twelfth Imam in the line of Ali who disappeared down a well at the age of four. Refusing to believe that he was dead, his followers imbued him with timelessness. They declared him to be merely “hidden,” and that on some future date he would suddenly appear to reestablish an Islamic caliphate worldwide. Their eschatology, however, proved problematic; it espoused an apocalyptic upheaval in order for the Mahdi, or Hidden Imam, to ascend to his rightful place of leadership. These “Twelvers” championed the belief that every individual, regardless of their religious belief, would one day bow to Islam—or die.
    As time passed and the Mahdi failed to make an appearance, authority passed to the ulema , a body of mullahs endowed with the power to appoint a supreme leader. Perhaps one of the best-known imams was Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
    Notable among the various dynasties of Persia were the Safavids who ruled from 1501 to 1736. It was under this dynasty that Shia Islam became Iran’s official religion. It was also during this time that Persia was united as a single sovereignty that became the bridge to what we now know as Iran.
    It was the Afsharid leader Nadir Shah who first declared himself the shah of Iran in 1736. He invaded Khandahar in Afghanistan, and two years after assuming the throne in Iran, he overran India. He amassed great wealth, including the seizure of the renowned Peacock Throne and the 105-carat Koh-i-Noor (Persian for “mountain of light”) diamond. (The magnificent diamond was presented to Queen Victoria in 1851 and is now part of the celebrated British Crown Jewels.) Nadir Shah was a tyrannical ruler; his reign ended with his assassination in 1747.
    The Afsharid dynasty was followed by the Zand and Qajar dynasties. In 1906, Iran experienced a constitutional revolution that divided the power of rule between the shah and a parliamentary body called the Majlis. The last of the Qajar dynasty rulers, Ahmad Shah Qajar, was overthrown in a coup in 1921, and the Pahlavis—who sat on the Peacock Throne until 1979—took the power as shahs. Ahmad Shah Qajar died in exile in France in 1930.
    It was the first Pahlavi, Reza Shah Pahlavi the Great, who in 1935 asked the world to stop referring to his nation as Persia and to use the name Iran instead. Iran means