Story of Imam Ali

Happy New Year to everyone. May the year bring you much joy and happiness. The springtime of a friend of Ali is always full of the efflorescence of Ali. None deserves eminence and praise among the people except he who befriends Ali. The heart of every Shi’i is protected from Satan in the fortress of Ali. As Ali is from the Prophet’s family, the true Shi’i belongs to the family of Ali. A hundred years of praise is not equal to even one in a thousand praises of Ali. Courage, knowledge, abstinence, generosity: these are the qualities I revere in…

In the contemporary period Shi’ah is the standard short form for Shi’ah Ali, the Partisans of Ali. The Shi’ah have a history that goes back as far as the time of Prophet Muhammad (PBUH), and form one of the two main schools of thought in Islam; the other group being the Sunni, short for Ahl us-Sunnah wa Jama’ah, the People of Tradition and Consensus. The main division between these two groups relates to questions of religious authority, and who has that authority. In this post I want to give a brief outline of Shi’ah understandings of authority. Rather than cover…

Tony had mentioned something about the Caliphate in the comments of an earlier post. And it got me thinking about the whole issue of what a call to a “Caliphate” could mean to OBL. Chapati Mystery has a really good post about the contemporary meanings of that term, and it really is a must read. My take was, and is, going to be slightly more historical. However, since they have filled in some of the contemporary background, my post will be abbreviated. [Just one criticism on the line “ some linear descendan[t] of the Fatimids found in a derelict bookstore…