ABSTRACT
Every great movement splits into sects and schisms. Rival interpretations of its aims and beliefs and disputes concerning the best way to implement them destroy the original unity of the church or party or community. Islam was no exception to this rule. The murder of Othman in 656, only twenty-four years after the Prophet’s death, first disrupted the young Muslim umma and led to a bloody civil war. Around his successor Ali there gathered the Shi‘a, the ‘party’ destined to live in eternal opposition to Sunni or orthodox Islam. In the fourth century of the Hijra, corresponding roughly to the tenth century of the Christian era, this quarrel erupted into a violent and widespread revolutionary movement which tore whole provinces away from orthodoxy, shook the Muslim world to its foundations, and presented Christendom with its first serious chance to recover some of its lost ground and regain partial control of the Mediterranean. The literature of the Isma‘ilians, Karmathians, Fatimids and Assassins, the principal off-shoots of the ‘Sevener’ Shi‘a, has perished, save for some late documents which have come to light in recent times in India; we see these sects only through the eyes of their enemies, and we are as yet ignorant of the social forces which set in motion what seems to have been an organized challenge to the whole existing order.
