The Empire That Called Itself Islam

Mahdawiyyah, Part 33 · The Architecture of Guidance, Part 17 · The House Beside the Grave, Part 9

The Empire That Called Itself Islam

They took a true word — the oneness of God — and put it to work for an emirate.

Three weeks ago this majlis said that something happened between Malik and now, and that whatever it was, it did not happen in the books. We also said we would not give the easy version — the one that names somebody, so that everybody feels a little better for ten seconds and a little worse for a week. This week we go and look, and we keep that word. No blame to feel better by. The movement's own chronicles, read from the page, beside the witnesses who saw what it did — and where their pages say something in its favour, that is read out too.
Start with a report that every school of Islam carries: the Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him and his family, asking that his grave not be taken as a place of worship. It is in their books. It is in ours — in one of our four great collections, with an Imam's answer beside it. So the quarrel was never over the report. It is over what it forbids, and what was done with it.

What was done with it begins in the eighteenth century, in a small settlement in central Arabia, with a preacher and an emir. As the movement's own later chronicler tells it, the emir's tax and the spoils of war were both part of their agreement — the preacher hoping the second would one day let the emir give up the first, for God's sake. In 1802 its forces took Karbala, and its chronicler recorded what they carried away from the shrine of Imam Husayn, peace and blessings be upon him, and how the spoils were divided. Within a few years the domes over the graves of Mecca and Medina had come down. We do not have to prove any of it. Their own historian wrote it down.

The question underneath it

How do you tell a true word from the use it is put to?

And the harder question, which is about us: how do you tell this story without turning it into a grievance?

What the evening covers

• A word of truth. At Siffin, where the Commander of the Faithful, peace and blessings be upon him, faced the army of Sham, the copies of the Qur'an were raised on the field — and men from his own army turned a true sentence, no rule but God's, into a slogan against him. His answer, in a single line, is the key to the whole evening.
• The book, then the pickaxe. Before the agreement, a demolition in a small town of Najd — told in the movement's own first chronicle, with its reason in its own words, and with its denial of what it was accused of read out beside it.
• What the travellers saw. A Swiss traveller in Mecca in 1814 found the dome over the grave of Sayyedah Khadija, peace be upon her, broken and not yet rebuilt — and the grave still visited, especially on Friday mornings. A little over a century later an Englishman walked into al-Baqi' and found it looking like a town razed to the ground.
• Nobody gets to make this Sunni against Shi'a. Some of the sharpest answers came from inside the Sunni world — from the preacher's own brother, in his own lifetime, and from a Hanafi jurist of Damascus. And a marja' of Najaf answered with a book, courteous from its first page, while the first state still stood.
• A letter from Najaf. In February 2015 a letter of advice went out from Najaf to the men on the battlefield. One paragraph of it answers, point for point, the verdict at the centre of this evening: whoever bears witness that there is only one God and that Muhammad is His messenger is a Muslim, and his life and property are to be safeguarded.
  And the method is the Commander of the Faithful's own. He heard his men reviling the army they were fighting, told them to describe its deeds instead, and gave them a prayer for their enemies' guidance. So the evening describes, and does not revile. It ends at al-Baqi', with Sayyedah Fatimah al-Zahra, peace and blessings be upon her — whose grave was hidden by her own will — and the greeting the visitors were taught to say at that ground.