Video: Myths of Sects and Sectarianism in Islam

Mohammad Sagha, Lecturer in the Modern Middle East at Harvard University, delivered the lecture, "Myths of Sects and Sectarianism in Islam," on December 4, 2023.

Full transcript:

SPEAKER 1: Harvard Divinity School.

SPEAKER 2: Myths of sects and sectarianism in Islam. December 4, 2023.

MOHAMMAD SAGHA: All right. Well, welcome, everyone. It's great to see you all. The weather is surprisingly pleasant. I was expecting it to get a bit worse by now. But I'm glad to see you all. I know it's the end of the semester. But hopefully, this can be a type of study break. But I might quiz you at the end, so you know.

So the overall idea behind this workshop is formulated based on many years of research completed by myself and, of course, conversations with many colleagues, other advisors, scholars, and so on on the issue of Shia and Sunni Islam and sectarian diversity within Islam itself.

This workshop is the first of several workshops that we're planning to actually host throughout the rest of this academic year. So we'll have a break, of course, winter break. Enjoy it because afterwards we're going to have a lot of hopefully, very rich academic workshops throughout next semester to provide resources for students here at HDS as well as across Harvard on the study of Islam and particularly of Shia Islam.

So this workshop is sponsored by the Project on Shi'ism and Global Affairs, which relocated to the Harvard Divinity School last year. And it's been a very, very enriching and lively environment here. I was just talking to some of the attendees earlier that each one of the schools at Harvard really has its own bureaucratic culture and so on. So here at the Harvard Divinity School, you really do have our safe spaces where we can talk about the core issues of religion.

And one of the main things that we hope to do with the Project on Shi'ism is actually twofold. So one is to explore the diversity within Islam and to show the pluralism, the internal rich pluralism that Islam has and has always had arguably from the beginning. And two, to also center Indigenous voices within Islam to speak for itself.

This is one of our really, I think, major areas of focus in the sense that it's very easy as we'll see in today's lecture. It's a very easy to look at Islam through someone else's eyes. And that has been a large legacy of Islamic studies both because of the colonial history and the ways in which European powers interacted with Islam.

And then also just due to maybe implicit biases that aren't even necessarily malintent. There's no malintent behind it. But we tend to look at the other through our own eyes and that oftentimes can lead to misunderstanding of what the other is.

So today, the title of the workshop is particularly-- is specifically entitled myths of sects and sectarianism in Islam because I want to focus on a set of myths throughout time. So my own-- just to give a little bit of background, my own PhD is in early Islamic history. So I wrote my dissertation. If we get to it today, I'll talk about it a bit on the early Islamic period and the formation of Shia identity.

But I hope here, my position is as a lecturer in the modern Middle East. So I'm interested really on the core concept of sectarianism and the intersection of religion and politics throughout time. So really what I'm hoping to do in this discussion is to challenge a lot of the constructions and definitions we have of sex and what Shia and Sunni is.

And hopefully, provide a few potential avenues and to actually really try to start a conversation because these are really big themes that cover today almost two billion Muslims around the world and through extraordinary geographic diversity from Muslim Spain through to north Africa to the Persian Gulf to South Asia. So these are expansive, huge expansive domains with a large amount of diversity.

I'll just give a brief outline of the talk today. And, of course, if you guys have any questions, please do feel free to interject at any point. I'm hoping to have a bit of a conversation today. So we'll first start-- what I'll first start off with is the category of religion. How do we actually understand what religion is?

We're at the Harvard Divinity School, this is a good conversation to be had. And one of the strengths of religious studies is in theory. So really just asking, what is religion. Oftentimes, again, we have assumptions about what it is.

And really one of the main missions of any scholar, I would argue, is to challenge the normativity and the ways that we think what normal concepts are and theories are and actually show through historical examples or theoretical examples how we can actually-- how humans in the past and human societies have actually imagined what we think is normal in different ways. So we'll do that in the first part.

And once we do that, the second part of the discussion will be on what I call centering salience. So salience means how do you know what's important. So you can-- salience is an issue of-- that is an issue of ordering the-- is ordering things in the correct way. So you could have, for example, the issues of salience when it comes to identity for example.

You can be-- all of us have different identities. We're students here at Harvard. This is our main identity or teachers when we go in our family environments though, we're brothers, we're sons, mothers, and so on. So we have all those identities at once. But our identities gain salience in different contexts and environments. And so there's a similar type of thing that I would say we have to apply when it comes to defining what religion is and what and how we understand Shia and Sunni Islam.

 

And then we'll, of course, additionally, go into different theories. As was discussed in the abstract of the event, I want to provide a survey of different mainstream theories within academia and how scholars have understood Shia and Sunni Islam because I think that it's important to get a wide survey and a wide view before we make any conclusions.

And as I mentioned, also to look at how Muslims think about sects inside Islam, to look at the diverse ways theoretically that Muslims have focused on the issue of leadership, which is very central to understanding sects in Islam and how to legitimize any head of a Muslim polity or political organization.

And we'll look at case studies in Islamic history. We'll look at early Islamic examples. We'll look at post Mongol confessional ambiguity, Safavid-Ottoman split as well as the First World War and the surprising interactions you saw between Shia and Sunni actors at that time.

Before we do that, though, let's play Jeopardy-- Sectarian Jeopardy. So let's-- it sounds more nefarious than it is, hopefully. If you guys have phones or laptops, we can go to slido.com, S-L-I-D-O. Let me open up the quiz as well. And you put the code. And if you guys are having issues, please let me know.

 

Are you guys able to enter? You guys are in?

AUDIENCE: Uh-huh.

MOHAMMAD SAGHA: So how we'll be playing is-- let me start the quiz. I will show a-- I'm sorry, one second, a passage of text. Don't worry. You don't have to read the Arabic right now. But for those who can read Arabic, just to give a little bit of a context. I'll provide a passage in an original primary Islamic source. And those-- and then you'll guess whether Shia, Sunni, or other.

So let's first start. This is a famous work on the necessity of imamate. So here's the English translation. I'll read it. And then at the end, you can vote on question 1, whether assurance-- and is question 1 coming up for you guys, show Shia, Sunni-- OK.

So question 1, the source argues that the imamate is prescribed and to succeed prophethood as a means of protecting the dean, a religion, and managing the affairs of the world. There is a consensus of opinion that the person who discharges the responsibilities of this position must take on the contract of the imamate of the ummah. The ummah here meaning the large universal Muslim community.

There's a difference of opinion as to its obligation, whether it's obligatory for rational reasons, 'aql reasons, or because it's prescribed in the Sharia. And you oftentimes see this differentiation made by medieval Muslim scholars. Is it based on 'aql, our reason that we should-- or 'aql is in the heart, according to Islamic thought, or is it through the Sharia or what God has revealed through his prophet Muhammad.

One group of fuqaha, which means Islamic scholars, say it's obligatory for rational reasons because of the natural inclinations of men, of sound mind to submit the authority of a leader, who prevents mutual injustice-- and I'll just-- I'll skim through who reserves debates, and without governance, disorder and barbaric behavior would arise.

Another group says it's obligatory because of the Sharia for rational reasons. The imam carries out the affairs of the Shariah. Sharia here meaning sects are hard to define, specifically, but Islamic law are the norms in Islam. And that it's rationally conceivable that he undertakes this imamate as a form of worship, as a form-- the imamate is a form of worship as it is because it's Sharia. Anything that you undertake in the terms of the Shariah is a type of worship because it's revealed obedience. It's obedience to the revealed word of God.

So let's take a vote, Shia, Sunni, something else. If you go to slido.com, for those-- is everyone good? All right. We'll look at the-- so, we-- maybe I'll reveal at the end what the different numbers are. Question 2, is question 2 coming up for you now, or--

AUDIENCE: I don't have it switched.

MOHAMMAD SAGHA: No? Let me-- Question 2 should be live now, yes?

AUDIENCE: Yes.

MOHAMMAD SAGHA: All right. So 67% of you said Sunni. Good job. It's a Sunni work. It's the first chapter of al-Mawardi's Ahkam al-Sultaniyya. This is a very famous work. I was hoping to trick many of you into putting Shia. But you guys saw through it. Good job. In the sense that-- the type of language here, when I read it, I thought it was a Shia work because my own specializations in Shi'ism, this is how I understand-- this is how I understood how Shia theorists actually talk about-- the Twelver Shia theorists talk about the imam.

And so this is one of the things in my own study is that I start in a specific sect, and I assume there are these boundaries around Shia. There are these boundaries around Sunni. We have different rules. There are four caliphs and 12 imams, and then we split.

When you actually then start reading into the genres of all of them, you start-- those differences start to break down very fast. Even things-- as we'll talk about later, the idea of the marja and the grand ayatollah. Shia scholars, Sunni scholars, there are different-- yes and no. It's actually you can really see them as part of a larger spectrum.

So question 2, well-ordered religious affairs are decidedly a purpose of the man of a man with revelation, may God grant him peace. So this is-- meaning the prophet Muhammad. This is an unquestionable premise about which no dispute is imaginable. We add to it another premise that the well-ordered religious affairs-- here meaning Sharia, basically, can only be achieved through an imam who is obeyed.

This is a common term that you'll see in Arabic, [ARABIC] It's obligatory to follow. The correctness of the proposition that the appointment of an imam is obligatory follows from these two premises. It's said that religious-- well-ordered religious affairs can only be achieved through an imam. It's only through the imam that you can establish Sharia and order.

Then we say its demonstration that is only through well-ordered affairs and can only be achieved through an imam who is obeyed. Let's take a vote on that, Shia, Sunni, other. Good. Has everyone voted, I think? We'll see. Give them another few seconds. It's anonymous, so don't worry I won't judge.

So I see-- so with the votes in, 89% said it's Shia. 11% said Sunni. This is Sunni work, Ghazali. This is Ghazali's was-- let me get the exact quote. I think it's an iktisab, if I'm not mistaken. This is a famous work by al-Ghazali. So why did we put-- why did someone put Shia? And that's what I would have assumed as well, by the way. So maybe that can open up. Why did it seem Shia for those who voted for it? Uh-huh.

Because it says that an imam is a prerequisite for Islamic Sharia.

Yeah, exactly. So we think that that's a Shia. So as I had mentioned, it's stated that an imam is a prerequisite for Sharia to be enforced. We tend to think that's a Shia thing. We tend to think, OK, Sunnis, they had the historical caliphate. Now it's just something else that you don't need an imam necessarily.

And this is-- by the way, Ghazali prefaces this with-- were saying that it's actually not that-- it's not a good idea to get into these debates too much. And so because of the type of divisions it could produce in Muslim societies at that time. So he had in his own political and social context arguing that. But then right immediately afterwards saying that you have to have an imam. So it's not-- so you see some of these distinctions.

Sectarian Jeopardy question number 3--

AUDIENCE: Is there a date?

MOHAMMAD SAGHA: The date of-- so Ghazali died in 1111 CE, so this is 1,000-- about 900 years ago. And Mawardi, around the same time, so the first one we looked. That these are both classical medieval Islamic theories. So Sectarian Jeopardy question 3, the imam and Islamic thought, but just the Arabic up there for those-- what's that?

AUDIENCE: We don't see it.

MOHAMMAD SAGHA: Oh, thank you. Thank you. Let me go and-- question 3 should be live now.

AUDIENCE: All right, thank you.

MOHAMMAD SAGHA: Our proof for obeying the imam, literally, the imam must be followed-- those who can read the Arabic there can follow, in matters in which no one else is obeyed, such as implementing the hudud, obligatory Islamic-- Qur'anic injunction, so as in set legal punishments for certain crimes, and legal rulings the ahkam upon the Qur'an and Sunnah fighting the enemies and deceiving them-- or at least basically engaging in warfare, and gathering the Muslims and distributing welfare among them.

These and similar matters are obligatory obedience of Allah, Aswajah, and no one amongst the people has a right to implement these on the behalf of God except the imam. And whoever disobeys or abandons the imam in these matters has destroyed or corrupted himself. So let's take a vote, Shia, Sunni, or something else.

Good. We have more of-- I'll give maybe just a couple more seconds for those who haven't voted yet. So we have 50% voted Sunni, 38% Shia, other 13%. This one was a bit of a trick question in the sense that this is a classic Abbasid-- pro-Abbasid treatise. So this is Ibn al-Muqaffa, who is in the mid-8th century CE.

Now, you can call this potentially proto-Sunni in a sense. There are some scholars who do that. I wouldn't feel very comfortable calling it that because this is a different genre of the people who support the Abbasid claims of leadership. The Abbasids are not part of the Khulafa Rashidun. So they're not-- so classical Sunni theory, you have some people who support them. You have some people who are more ambivalent, some people who are against.

So this book, this section from Ibn Muqaffa is from the Al-Shafi-i's Risala. It's a very important sort of-- it's an important treatise that was written as a policy prescription for the caliph. So Ibn Muqaffa is telling the caliph, look, you're over these-- you're ruling over these domains. There's diversity in the peoples that you're ruling over. And you have to think about how to treat your own soldiers from Khurasan-- this is northeastern Iran, which is where the base of the Abbasid army was.

So what he's talking about here, we can't even really call it Sunni or Shia because it's its own category of obeying the Abbasid caliph as the imam of the ummah. And so here, you'll see he mentions, from that Amir al-Mu'minin or the Imam, for Shias, when we hear Amir al-Mu'minin, we always think of Imam Ali. But when you go and look into the early sources, this is the most common phrase usually that you'll see for early Islamic rulers, Amir al-Mu'minin.

So that everyone's calling themselves the-- it has a nice translation as Prince of the Believers or the person who's ordering or leader of the Mu'minin, the believers. So al-Muqaffa writes that from that, the Imam or Amin al-Mu'minin tied their etiquette and learning the Qur'an and deeper understanding of the prophetic tradition, Sunnah, and the safety and infallibility-- here, he's using the word 'isma. And differentiation from the course followers of worldly desires, ahl al-hawa.

Why is 'isma important here? Maybe I'll open that up. So what is the concept of 'isma?

AUDIENCE: Protection, broadly speaking.

MOHAMMAD SAGHA: Good. And so protection. It also can refer to infallibility as well, which has a related meaning. 'Isma is believed-- so infallibility is one of the main things-- today, if you go into Sunni-Shia debates say that Shias believed that the 12 Imams are masoom, as in they're infallible. They're protected from sin. Just like the prophet Muhammad could not sin, Shias believe that the Imams-- the 12 Imams afterwards, the Twelver line.

And then the 'Isma'ilis and other Shia groups believe that their lines of Imams also can't sin. But what you see here is Ibn Muqaffa is really using-- now this could be-- as Sayahi mentioned, it could be a generic sense of 'Isma'ilis protection. But it could also have a deeper theological meanings. And it's probably, I would say, closer to those deeper theological meanings.

When you read the whole text, it's very heavy on the station of the Abbasid caliph as the pivot and the core of the Islamic world and humanity itself. So these aren't just political rulers. Sometimes we think-- again, when we think about Shia-Sunni debates, we think that imams have infallibility, and they're stationed high. But the Sunnis, they've de-emphasized the spirituality and the esoteric components of the imams and caliphs.

But when you actually go, again, read these sources, it's not-- that doesn't really seem to be the case for a lot of the main Muslim writers. Let me go to question number 4. This is the last question. I think question 4 should be live for you. This is-- let's guess where the Hadith is located. This would be dangerous in the wrong context. [CHUCKLES]

We shouldn't just attribute Hadith. But this Hadith is that "He who honors the sultan of Allah"-- sultan meaning a ruler of Allah, the most honored and high in the world, "Allah will honor him on the Day of Judgment. Whoever insults or disrespects the sultan of Allah"-- or the ruler of God, "Allah will insult him on the Day of Judgment," mean Al-akrama Sultan Allah. So let's take a vote, Shia, Sunni, or something else.

 

So the results are suddenly 50% of you voted that this is a Sunni text, 33-- sorry, 44% voted that it's a Sunni, Shia 33%, and other 22%. This work is in a Zaydi Shia Hadith compilation, Amali al-Kubra of Yahya Ibn Husayn al-- I think it's Shajari, if I'm not mistaken, a Zaydi Shia work.

Now, why would this be somewhat surprising that this is from a Zaydi Shia work, or maybe unexpected for at least for outsiders. We'll just go back to this. There tends to be a notion in Islamic studies that the Zaydis have this anti-status quo disposition that they fight for justice through-- in part, not just, but in part, through armed rebellion against the sultans, the unjust sultans.

Now, of course, here, it says Sultan Allah, so this a-- this would be just sultan, this would be a sultan who has legitimate backing. However, the words that are used here are not imam. They're not caliph. Here, it's sultan. Sultan tends to have a implication of worldly power. So these are like the dynasties that aren't in the-- aren't caliphs or imam. So it does have that kind of connotation.

So it's notable for that. Now this is a Hadith. Of course, Hadiths are one component of larger Islamic jurisprudence or ideas. So these Hadiths can be interpreted in different ways. But it's so notable in these Hadiths.

So I just wanted to provide some examples for counterintuitive ideas about what are Shia and Sunni. And basically the idea is and what I'll really be arguing here is that we don't have sects in Islam, at least not in the way that we generally-- usually talk about. While there is a plurality and diverse pathways in Islam, we arguably do not have sects in Islam.

The dominant-- why is that the case? The dominant understanding of sects and sectarianism in academia today is largely a secularized Christian or even Protestant influence understanding of sects and religion. The next section, I'll talk about the implications of this. Instead-- and that is based on a church sect dichotomy. There's a Catholic Church, so there's a Pope. There's papacy. And then there's break-off heterodox or heresies, generally.

Again, this is obviously very complex, but just to give the basic theory-- that's the basic assumption behind the theories. Instead, what I would argue is that what we have are different movements based on following the Sunnah or the lifestyle of the model or lifestyle of the prophet Muhammad through authority-based models.

This authority-- so for people that are following the Prophet Muhammad, whether they're imams, caliphs, sultans, muhtasib, other words that are used, the authority is often love-based, or if it's not love-based, as in it's based on walayah, it's a requirement or necessity based in order to preserve order and establish justice and society.

The vast majority of political-- of Shia theoretical work-- sorry, Islamic political theory that you'll read usually will divide the necessity of the imamate in these two sections, either it's a love-based walayah because we love the Prophet Muhammad and what he represented. The Prophet Muhammad is the means and form through which the human beings reach their inner potential.

And it's through the human form that knowledge is actually revealed. It's not an abstract text or an outside world. Everything is within the heart of the believer. And the heart of the believer hosts the ruh [spirit] of Allah and also the light of the prophet Muhammad. And that light of the prophet Muhammad, we see for Shia, Sunni, and across the Islamic spectrum is really at the core of the cosmology, the whole reason that humanity is created and where we return to.

So in Islam, when we look at different-- what I would argue is that instead of looking at sects, these are-- there's an orthodoxy, and then there's a heterodoxy that has a certain implication. Instead, we have different movements based on the authority of leaders-- of various leaders in Islam throughout different parts of the Muslim world that are all of them, without exception, almost, we could argue, trying to replicate and follow the Sunnah of the Prophet Muhammad.

So this is why when we say Sunnis follow Sunnah, Shias follow-- it's not really Shias also are very interested and focused on the Sunnah, meaning the lifestyle or the model of the Prophet Muhammad. The West looks at these different movements and calls them sects-- or academia in the West, I should say, and especially if you look within the last 200 years the colonial history and how different European colonists understood what Islam was. This was very much influenced by the church sect dichotomy.

So in Islam, the church sect dichotomy cannot have a sect. Why? Because in Islam we don't have a church. There is no one central authority or church that has a list of doctrines that is really at the center of the religious organization and that defines who [are or] are not as Muslim. You have people-- you have institutions that have tried to do this. But they have not really been able to establish a church in the same way that we see in the European and Christian world.

Due to the centrality of leadership in Islam, sects can more closely be understood as leadership pathways. So what I would argue is that instead of a sect, let's look at leadership pathways and ways that different caliphs, imams, sultans, and others have defined what the priorities of the Muslim world is and how they have governed and defined justice.

And because of the centrality of leadership, Islamic states and governments play a large role in influencing internal Muslim definitions of in-and-out categories and even sectarian divisions, meaning that it's not just abstract theories that scholars are writing in a closed academic environment. So we can't just jump to a book that's written by a Sunni scholar in, let's say, Iran or Iraq in the medieval period and then say, OK, this is the definition of what a Shia and Sunni is.

Those are embedded in the political leadership that is either ruling in a particular part of the Muslim world or part of the larger political imperial context. So the imperial competition between leaders in the Muslim world has been one of the main driving forces of defining different leadership pathways and sectarianism itself, the idea of Shia and Sunni, so the whole--

As we know that from the very beginning, who succeeded the Prophet Muhammad was at the core of the dispute. Shias saying it was Ali. Sunnis saying that it was Abu Bakr or whoever was chosen through either elected means or other means.

So in this next section, take a little bit of a step back and look at the theoretical discussions of religion in Islam in a comparative world theology. What is religion? Welcome to academia, there is no one definition of religion. There's no one consensus position on how to define religion. Instead, there are several ways to define a religion depending on your intellectual camp.

What I'll do here is the non-exhaustive but I think reflects a lot of the mainstream understandings of religion. Many definitions of religion rely on the relationship between religion and experience. How do we define the truth or the big T Truth, and what are legitimate or acceptable experiences or evidence for determining the truth?

So this is one understanding of religion. As you can see, it is a bit-- it's focused on experience, meaning that you have a turn in post-enlightenment Europe that only defines positivism or experienced the day-to-day sort of regular experiences that 99% of humans experience, sight, touch, smell, the things that we're used to saying that, OK, this is the main standard or category of experience.

People who are having mystical visions, going on spiritual journeys, well, not everyone can replicate those, so because we can't replicate it, that doesn't define true religion. And that's what that theory says. So the debates on religion within academia today can be defined in several ways. One is-- one of the-- so there are several dichotomies. One is religion versus secularism, so religion meaning that it's the religion here, then takes on a specific meaning of how the individual understands the relationship with themselves and life and death and afterlife.

Secularism then is when religion is removed from-- when those discussions of God or the meaning of life, basically, in a non-experiential way are then removed and then only those things that can be tested are put in the center. You have-- but that's only one way. That tends to be one of the-- if you go and talk to people in society, this is probably one of the most dominant understandings across the world today, not just in the West.

Another way, though, that many scholars have understood, debates on religion, is religion versus religion. That these categories of religion and secularism are false. They're constructs that don't actually reflect reality. Why? Because religion is a universal-- is a universal concept that applies to all human beings in all times and all spaces. Why? Because if a religion is how you understand yourself and the values that drive your actions, everyone has that. Even if you say that I don't believe in a religion, you have a set of values that's determining how you order your life and what you do in the day-to-day or in the long run as well.

And then there are other ways of defining things as well, religion versus irreligion. In the Qur'an, you do have "ya lakum deenukum waliya deen," to you, as your way, your deen, your path your religion, to us is ours. So there seems to be some credence in the Qur'an for that. And for this reading of religion versus religion also because one of the main words used for in the Qur'an is kafira or kafir meaning person who covers the truth.

So everyone-- the truth, big T Truth, can't be escaped. Whether you see it or not is a different question. And of course, religion versus science, which is today, of course, similar to the religion versus secularism, how do you-- how do you determine what's true or false. I'll just skim through it just for the sake of time.

So many of these mainstream understandings of religion are often based on a secular understanding of religion rooted in, as I mentioned, European enlightenment discourses and strands of Protestant understandings of the church, sect, state dichotomy as well. So then so the church sect, I'll go into shortly, is about the Catholic Church and then opposition movements to the church, to the centrality of the church.

And then you have the emergence, of course, of the state and nation state and secular authorities. But you oftentimes see a difference between pre-modern and modern definitions of religion in which pre-modern definitions usually don't talk about religion and secularism, how we talk about it today. They talk about religion versus superstition, meaning that everyone has a correct religion. But the religion just has to be purged of the superstitious elements that they have within them.

This is a encyclopedia reference to in sociology of religion, some of the main discourses that impact or define what church sect is. So I'll just read this because I think it's a useful context for understanding the church sect dichotomy. The sociology of religion developed a model of religious organization, which referred to the church sect typology.

As originally formulated by Max Weber in the sociology of religion in 1922 and Ernst Toeltsh-- I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing that right. It was argued that the church sect-- that the church type attempted to embrace all members of a society on a universalistic basis. The church-- so the church attempts to embrace all members of society on a universalistic basis.

The church, as a result, is a large bureaucratic organization with a ministry and a priesthood. It develops a formal orthodoxy, meaning the correct beliefs or doctrines or thought, ritualistic patterns of worship, and recruits its members through socialization rather than evangelical conversion. So these are very relevant discussions in the European and Christian context. The church is in political terms accommodated to the state and in social terms predominantly conservative in its beliefs and social standing.

By contrast, the sect is a small evangelical group, which results-- which recruits its members through by conversion and which adopts a radical stance towards the state and society. The medieval Roman Catholic Church is the principal-- was the principal example of a universalistic church. Sects include Baptists, Quakers, and Methodists, so different Protestant challenges to the church.

So as you can see, this model is an interesting and possible-- and a useful model in the European context because you actually do have qualitative debates over the church sect dichotomy. So church, universal. Sect, break-off, challenge, conversion, and it recruits through conversion. We don't-- you can maybe find instances in Islamic history that have this. But generally, this is not the case in Islamic history. Yeah.

AUDIENCE: I was going to say that this model is actually extensively used in the economics of religion to study Judaism, in particular, this postmodernity, you have a split between Orthodox Judaism and the general Jewish population, which adopts a low-cost religion, the church, versus the high-cost religion of Orthodox Judaism. Some people use this model in economics to study orders, so Sufi orders being a sect and the church being Islam, in general.

And that the high cost that is imposed on the sect helps produce the most dedicated people who then-- the leadership that then guides the church.

MOHAMMAD SAGHA: Yes, that's a great point. And I would say that I think that there might be some credence to that. But largely, the Sufi sects are not challenges to the orthodoxy of Islam. They are-- they consider themselves the orthodoxy. And you could argue that Sufi denominations and orders were the Islamic orthodoxy in the medieval period, premodernity.

So if you look across the Muslim world, the Ottomans. The Safavids themselves are a Sufi order. The Ottomans recruited their-- had heavy influences about Sufi orders and before. So in reality, you can maybe even say that the church would actually be the Sufi order if you wanted to use that analogy because of its mainstream acceptance.

But it's not a church in the sense that the Sufi order is based on the Sufi leader at the top. So you have dozens of Sufi orders in the Muslim world. There's no one. You have Naqshbandi. You have other ones, the Gilani order, and so on, so many, many different ones, each of which the-- and really, I think one of the main areas that should be focused on a lot more is the history of Sufism.

Not just the way we think about Sufism today, it's maybe just as a new age sort of religion or something. It can have some of those contexts in the West. But it's much, much more than that. It's really at the center of the Islamic historical experience, I would say. So thank you for bringing up that example.

The implications of applying the church sect typology to other world religions is that it may misapply the categories of heresy and heterodoxy to other world religions, such as thinking that Shia Muslim-- Shia and Sunni Muslims consider the other to be heretics, which is not the case by mainstream Shia and Sunni Muslims across time.

So one of the drawbacks of using this sect and sectarianism is, do Shias consider Sunnis Muslim? Yes. Do Sunnis consider Shia Muslims? Yes, mainstream. Of course, you can have-- you do have what I would call fringe elements that could argue this. But even the most-- even the most extreme hardline anti Shi'i Sunni scholars will generally accept that Shias are Muslims, in part, because of the low entry cost to Islam, which is I have to say, just a few syllables basically. And you have "la ilaha illa Allah Muhammadun Rasul Allah."

Even some scholars say that even the "Muhammadun Rasul Allah" in the early period wasn't even required. It was just "la ilaha illa Allah," meaning there's no God but God. So it's the message of unity and breaking idols and polytheism and anti-polytheistic movement. There's another problem that we come across when we try to look at sects and sectarianism, which is the word for orthodoxy. For those of you who might know Arabic or Persian or have studied this, what's the word for orthodoxy in Arabic or Persian? Just wondering.

AUDIENCE: Taqlidiyy.

MOHAMMAD SAGHA: Taqlidiyy? OK.

AUDIENCE: Traditional

MOHAMMAD SAGHA: Yes.

AUDIENCE: Maybe usur?

MOHAMMAD SAGHA: Usur? OK. Like a-- you could maybe use those to an extent. But they give a very different feel.

AUDIENCE: It could be [INAUDIBLE]

MOHAMMAD SAGHA: Maybe. Yeah, maybe you could argue that as well. We don't really have a word for orthodoxy. Orthodoxy, if you look at the Greek origins or the Western origins of doxo's being around a doctrine or thought or correct thought, so orthodoxy being the correct form of thought.

Maybe in Arabic or Persian, you could say something like-- it's maybe the usul, perhaps actually could be a more accurate translation. So the usul meaning the foundations of the religion, and so sort of the beliefs that you need to have to be a Muslim. Among Muslims, there isn't even a consensus on what that is. So what are the usul ad-Din?

If you go to mainstream Sunni circles today-- and again, this is-- some them is such a broad category that there's many different definitions. Usul ad-Din is-- does anyone know what-- like, the pillars of Islam? Sure, all of us probably already-- yeah.

AUDIENCE: There's these pillars of faith in the Islam. So faith is like-- or Islam is like saying the--

MOHAMMAD SAGHA: Shahada.

AUDIENCE: Yeah, shahada, and then praying and then fasting--

MOHAMMAD SAGHA: Yes, exactly.

AUDIENCE: --and pilgrimage if you can, and zakat, which is the charity.

MOHAMMAD SAGHA: Yes, good. So in the Sunni-- in the mainstream Sunni, which Shias accept this, too, but they just categorize it in a different way, pray five times a day, fasting all throughout Ramadan, go on Hajj, and then the main doctrinal thing is the shahada, as Ross mentioned, so as an announcing the unity of God and accepting the Prophet Muhammad.

Shias will say they're more doctrinal. They're a bit more doctrinal in how they define it. Usul ad-Din is nubuwwah. It's prophethood, imamate, mahat, the Day of Judgment, and-- what are the other ones? But in the Furu' al-Din, the ancillaries of faith, they'll put fasting, prayer, zakat, and all of those. So the Usul is the doctrine.

So you see, I just want to give you an example of different ways that Muslims even understand what is the entry of being a Muslim, what do you have to do to actually be Muslim. Yes.

AUDIENCE: In Sunni Islam, there is also like the final parts that we call Arkan Ul Iman, the pillars of our faith. And it basically focuses on believing in God and his prophets, and the angels and his books, and then the [INAUDIBLE] in it's good, and it's God. So there is that aspect, I think--

MOHAMMAD SAGHA: Yes, definitely. So that's a good point. Those doctrinal aspects are also central to Sunni Islam. So really, Shia and Sunni, they're not all that actually different in how they understand what orthodox is. I think I'll skip this. So this, just mentioned very briefly, there's a main-- the main academic camps, and just to provide-- I know a lot of you are studying this, so just to provide some academic context, there's two main camps that understand in the field of religious studies.

One is the substantivists. So these are people/scholars, who believe in religion with a big R-- excuse me, as in there's Islam, there's Judaism, there's Christianity. This is how most people in the world probably will think about it as well. However, within academia, the second camp are the functionalists that give religion a broader definition.

So for them, communism is a type of religion. American civic religion is a religion, liberalism. If you're a sports fanatic and that's all you do with your time and life and all you think about, that's a type of religion. So all of these are types of religion.

There's a third camp, though, that looks at-- that questions the category of religion altogether. And one of the main proponents of this was a scholar by the name of Wilfred Cantwell Smith, who was actually here at Harvard. He was a Canadian scholar of Islam and one of the most influential scholars of religious studies as well. He's one of the few Islamic studies scholars that made a huge impact in the religious field overall.

Just one of the problems or one of the challenges, I should say, of religious studies is that usually tend to stick within your own religion. And then the theories are internal, or the theories that you will use will usually be Eurocentric theories because that's where the most of the theoretical work happened. So in religious studies, you really have to catch up in a lot of these debates.

So this camp, Wilfred Cantwell Smith, as I mentioned, is a Islamic studies professor at Harvard. He died in the year 2000, questioned the very category of religion as a recent European invention that was often tied in with empire building and colonialism. It's true that we can find concepts relating to the worship of-- worshiping God or divinity in pre-modern or pre-Eurocentric colonialism across the world.

But these scholars argue that the hegemony of Eurocentric definitions of religion dominated basic assumptions of how to even approach the concept of religion and how to divide religion from non-religion. So a scholar who ascribes to this camp, Cavanaugh, who we'll look at, makes this argument regarding Hinduism. Hinduism is one of the rich case studies in religious studies because most scholars argue that before the British invasion and colonization of what's India or the Indian subcontinent today, you didn't have a category of Hinduism as a religion.

Of course, people today can ascribe to that. And that's not to discount that, but from a historical perspective, looking at how these categories were defined. "There was a time"-- this is a quote from Cavanaugh. "There was a time when no one in India thought he or she had a religion named Hinduism. A change occurred only after more than a century of British rule. Might there be a connection?"

The history of the concept of religion in India shows how problematic and ideological is a religion as a transcultural and transhistorical phenomenon. Smith finds-- Wilfred Cantwell Smith finds no religion named Hinduism until 1829. And even the term Hindu was unknown in classical India. Hindu was a Persian term used to refer to those on the far side of the Sindhu River.

Muslim invaders use the term Hindu, but it referred to all non-Muslim natives of India, including those we presently divide into Hindus, Jains, Buddhists, Sikhs, and animists. In 1941, the British census gave up the attempt to number Hindus because although they were able to distinguish them from Muslims and Christians, they were unable to distinguish them from animists. It's very messy.

And so this is also implication when we're looking at the Hindu-Dvaita movement in India today. There are serious limits in the idea of being able to bring all of the diversity that we call Hinduism today into one nationalist ethnic movement.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

MOHAMMAD SAGHA: Which is what--

AUDIENCE: --basically encourages that.

MOHAMMAD SAGHA: Yes, exactly, which is so-- these are the debates inside India today. But just looking at it from a theoretical perspective and a historical perspective, it'll be very difficult to do that. And so we can do-- using examples like this, we can have a thought experiment. If the Middle East and Europe was conquered by an outside force that had little understanding of the types of religions in the region, would it be possible that they lump Judaism and Islam as one monotheistic religion and Christianity as a related but separate monotheistic-trinitarian religion?

It's similar to how the British understood Hinduism, you could argue. So if you're coming in from the outside and you don't know anything about the differences between Islam, Judaism, and Christianity, you talk to a Muslim, and half the things he's talking about is Jesus and Moses. And so-- then you go talk to Jews, they talk about Moses.

It's like, it will confuse you a lot if you don't have-- then, you can say, OK, well, all of this are-- this is basically-- these are different strands of monotheistic-- this prophetic, Abrahamic, or Adamic prophetic traditions, you could argue. It's the center of all of these religions arguably are prophets and revealed religions. So you can say, OK, these are monotheistic revealed texts religions or monotheistic revealed prophetic traditions.

And you can also-- so similar types of things that Buddhism and Hinduism, how are these constructed and then divided. You can find similar intellectual and theological lineages there as well. So what's Buddhist and Hindu as well can also be related here.

Similarly, differences among-- this is continuing with Cavanaugh. Similarly, differences among Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists, Sikhs, Jains, animists, and others are poorly served by the term religion. For some purposes, Westerners consider it to be other religions are included under the rubric of Hinduism. In its clause on the freedom of religion, the Indian Constitution says that reference to Hindus shall be constructed as including a reference to persons professing Sikh, Jain, and Buddhist religions.

Well, guess who is a Hindu according to this? Sikhs, Jains, Buddhists, and Hindus. The 1955 Hindu Marriage Act goes further defining Hindu-- defining as Hindus all Buddhists. Buddhists are also Hindu. Jains, Sikhs, and anyone who is not a Christian, Muslim, Parsi, or Jew, so then Hindu can then categorize everything as long as you're not Christian, Muslim, Jew, or Zoroastrian-- Parsi, referring to the Zoroastrian community.

Where differences of these groups-- among these groups become important is often not purely religious differences that are informative. Determining differences among the above groups are religious criteria about belief of gods that are usually inadequate. Caste position, for example, is far more determined than beliefs.

And Muslims and Hindus in India worship at each other's shrines. So if you go to South Asia, your whole concept of your religion will generally break down very fast because it'll be very confusing. You see Muslims commemorating the martyrdom of Imam Husayn. Also, you have Hindus commemorating the martyrdom of Imam Husayn. For example, you see Muslims and Hindus worshipping at each other's places of worship and really a spectrum of religious beliefs and identities that aren't-- that don't create in-and-out categories the same way that we think religions do.

And let me give one more example of case in Kenya. Derek Peterson-- this is continuing from Cavanaugh's discussion. Derek Peterson and Darren Walhof's study of colonial government among the Gikuyu people of Kenya similarly shows that the term religion artificially separated out certain aspects of the Gikuyu culture. Naming a certain practice or disposition religious render it something other than real.

Gikuyu life centered on a megaona-- I'm probably mispronouncing this, but practices that protect the living from the uncharitable dead. There is very little use of Ngai, a term imported from the Masai that the missionaries translated as God. Presbyterian missionaries tried to convert the highly material experiential nature of megongona-- I'm sorry, into a systematic set of propositions that they identified as religion.

They wanted to establish Gikuyu practices on the same footing as Christianity so they could convince Kikuyu of the superiority of the latter. So then-- so, you see missionaries coming in trying to tell them that look, you have to really believe in God. And they're like, what? What are you talking about? So then they say, oh, you guys believe in this concept of God in the same way that we do. But our version has these differences.

So in order to make a religious argument, you have to then give the other side a religion in the same way that your religion and hierarchy is established. So it's the influence of power and imperial expansion and colonialism that are mixing together to create a construct of religion that then has become very embedded in our intellectual understanding of what religion is today.

And this is really the-- you can really see the influence of empire and power is where does empire and power-- where is it able to make category neutral and universally acceptable, and where does it make something controversial or political or weird or outside of the norms. And this is really a difficult challenge that scholars have to have and hopefully you as students will continue in your own studies in exploring this.

But to really see what's normative, what's mainstream, is that truly the case? Should that truly be the case? What Cantwell Smith and others have demonstrated is the necessity to explore internal thoughts, hierarchies, and knowledge of power, and the content of each particular thought system. So you can see, of course, that there might be challenges. No one theory can really necessarily fully solve everything for us.

So there could be shortcomings in what Cantwell Smith and others are doing, of course. But creating one set of definitions that pertains to a subregion of the world and then exporting that for everything can be problematic. So what Cantwell Smith and others have shown is-- and this is what I think is important to do in the case of Islam, is to look at each Islam-- look at each religion or what we define on its own terms, see what it is saying for itself, and then also look at the social and political context of these debates.

Any questions or comments before we move to the next section? There's some coffee in the back if you guys want to refresh.

AUDIENCE: In the dichotomy that the colonialists created, [INAUDIBLE] they do it in a lot of different contexts. But in the Shia and Sunni context, they actually make them confrontational in order to create a political stance of confrontation, which justifies their type of mediation process.

MOHAMMAD SAGHA: I think that's absolutely correct in many cases. So the point that was made is that Shia and Sunni divisions are sometimes emphasized and even used by historical European colonialism to divide and rule, basically, to divide Shia and Sunnis and put more emphasis on the differences in order to then mediate-- to be the mediating power.

So you oftentimes see this that outside power will create controversy and sectarianism in a certain case in order for that power to be above sectarianism. Why? Because the British or the French, they're not Muslims. They don't have a stake in who succeeded the Prophet Muhammad. They don't really care about Abu Bakr versus Ali. So then they can be arbiters that then are able to solve the Shias and Sunnis who have been killing themselves-- killing each other for 1,000 years as the narrative goes. Yes.

AUDIENCE: I mean, looking across the Muslim world right now, do you see any kind of success stories of where people are being educated fairly about Sunnis and Shias because it feels like every country is just sidestepping that. Do you see any examples of where it's being done well?

MOHAMMAD SAGHA: That's a great question. Unfortunately, I don't think so. I think you find good-- you find useful examples in places actually in South Asia. So you do see sectarianism in places like Pakistan or India. But they operate on different levels-- different ways than they tend to do in the Arab Middle East or even in the Middle East proper, where you do have this very common phenomenon of Twelver Sunnis, for example.

It's like, for me, I never knew growing up here in the United States, it was Shias have 12 imams. Sunnis have four caliphs. Sunnis don't really like that debates. Shias don't like that debate. When I started studying it, I understood that this was so wrong in the sense that you can clearly have Sunnis that accept the 12 imams and the four caliphs, or they don't-- they respect all these religious figures in different ways.

So I think you can actually find some of that larger acceptance today because the state building project in the Middle East was different than what happened in South Asia. But in terms of academic discussions, I think, unfortunately, largely, the people that are advocating for more pluralistic and I think, accurate understandings of Islam are largely sidelined.

You do find a lot of Muslim scholars-- and we'll look at some of them today if we can get to it, that are trying to put messages like this of challenging our definitions of sectarianism. But if you go turn on Al Jazeera, if you turn on different stations in the Middle East, Saudi, Iran, other places, they tend to have much more narrow sectarian understandings.

So I think, largely, those are-- and social media has just messed everything up a lot. So what you see right now is like a terrible in terms of just people-- usually young kids going on there and just trashing each other's religious beliefs, reading a few Hadiths here and there and then attacking another religion, just like it's turned out very bad. Instagram shares have really messed up a lot of this stuff, too, I think, just to get followers to create controversy and do this. So I think we still are a ways away. So was there a comment in the back?

AUDIENCE: So I do understand that sectarinism in religion, but we say, at times, especially with practicing Muslims, we internalize, and then we go around like labeling ourselves. I have many different ethnic-- I'm an ethnic mix. So every time I go to this different region, they ask me these weird questions. And one of the questions that I found really hard answering growing up was, what sect are you?

And then I would go back home, and I would ask my mom what sect are we in. And she would be like, we're Muslims. And then now I'll be like, what's Muslim are we in? She's say, we're Sunni. And then I'll be like, no someone asked me what type of Sunni I am. And then that'll be like a whole different discussion. And then my mom would end up saying, OK, tell them that you just follow the climb, how do you think that's it.

Like, when I look at what sect they were trying to label me as would be Ouahabi or Salafi or Hanafi, stuff like that. And it's really-- I think there is the Western divide of Sunni and Shia. But I think the white people, they don't beyond that. We divide ourselves beyond that. So how do you break that cycle of divide in there?

MOHAMMAD SAGHA: I think that's a great question because a lot of these divisions have been internalized, as you mentioned. So historically, you can see that there is a colonial influence. There is maybe Eurocentric ways of thinking about religion. But Islam also has indigenous ways of thinking about division. And that's not to say that there isn't sectarianism, or there hasn't been sectarian wars or fight that have emphasized Shia and Sunni divisions. Those also exist. And we'll go through some of the examples that have usually been used in the Safavid-Ottoman case.

But in the modern context, I think the main vehicle to take is through education. And it's through reading internal Muslim sources on their own accounts because if we look at the resources that are provided to us by our own tradition and by Muslim scholars that have been writing about these things for hundreds of years, you will usually get a very radically different understanding of yourself as an-- the general you as a Muslim subject and the contemporary context and how others try to imply or put on categories of division.

So I think one of the main things to do is largely, it's hard to do-- and today, again, with social media and all of that, silence and learning is the first step, I think. And we don't have to necessarily state our opinions at all times before we actually go and study and try to take some time to really understand and answer in sophisticated ways because otherwise, we could have more ignorant answers that might be based on an emotive response or a threat to your own identity.

But that if we actually try to-- through educational calm, long-term strategic vision, look at our resources and redefine through education, through these type of discussions, I think that's at least one way of doing. I think there are a lot of other things that could be done as well, but-- in terms of social movements, in terms of more social activism, and so on. But I think, at least in the educational sphere, I think this is-- this is an important one.

AUDIENCE: So I really like that point of getting ourselves more educated about all these matters. But I guess it's also possible in a setting where these things are not discussed on daily basis. And one group is not targeted based on just really persecuted on these basis because what I have seen with my community's case because we are Hazaras and we're Shia. So like, when we are targeted, it just creates this whole sense of even getting more radical in terms of being really proud about belonging to one group and then also getting it to some other level.

So I guess-- I mean, I'm just kind of-- I feel like it's much more difficult in a setting where it's not that calm and the whole-- you're just targeted based on that to really be calm and then get education.

MOHAMMAD SAGHA: Yes, that's an excellent point. And so we have the luxury of-- here in this context, having some distance. And I think what you're describing in terms of how groups that are persecuted are marginalized can sometimes become, in a response to that, double down on their identities and become even more proud.

So I think each thing is context-dependent. And so I would hesitate to say that there's one answer to all of those. But in terms of how we respond. I think even in terms of persecution, even in times when it's very difficult, finding ways to not fall into traps that the other side wants us to fall into.

So the sectarian flames that have been lit in the past few decades, they are generally related to larger geopolitical developments in the Middle East following the Islamic revolution of Iran and the upending of regional order in that region of the Middle East and West Asia and South Asia as well to an extent. So we can't sidestep that. We can't ignore that.

So one of the things that I think is important-- and understanding Islam as well. And this is something that I would really advocate for is can't understand Shia Islam or Islam without understanding geopolitics and understanding politics and different social theories-- social science theories. These are really important because if we don't do that, then we are defining religion through someone else's eyes, too.

Who says religion is just in these four Hadith books or these six Hadith books-- or even just in how we-- what we think the Qur'an is. The Qur'an is inclusive. The light of the Prophet Muhammad is inclusive. It includes all aspects of life, theory, and understanding. But if we just sidestep it, it becomes problematic. So in terms of-- yeah, I think each community, each case, it should be different.

But it's the responsibility, I would say, of Muslim states and Muslim actors to create safe spaces to discuss these things and to provide a haven and different models for people to follow. So those people in particularly harsh political circumstances can still look to a model outside that will provide them with counter examples of how not to fall into the traps of sectarianism as well.

So it's very difficult to call for restraint for those people who are persecuted. But to an extent, it's also an opportunity to, I think, teach both our own communities and the larger Muslim world without creating these divisions. So I the main thing really is to challenge divisions. So that's different-- I'll try to get to this later. But that's different, still have sectarian identities, so identify as proud Shia and Sunni Muslims.

And without it, necessarily being exclusionary towards the other and looking at the ummah as a more complete overall package. But thank you. Thank you for the question. I think-- was there another hand?

AUDIENCE: I would stay, but I have to go.

MOHAMMAD SAGHA: Sure. Thank you. The Shia in the contemporary world-- or actually, let me skip this portion, I'm just going to skip that portion for the sake of time and move now to academic theories of the emergence of this. This area is going to be a little bit dense. But I want to provide resources for students interested in the study-- academic study of sectarianism in Islam.

So I have three portions, the next three subsections, one be theories on the emergence of Islam, theories on the emergence of Shiasm, and theories on the emergence of Sunnism. So starting with Islam, the main debate in the field of the emergence of Islam, saying that OK, how can we actually define what early Muslims are? We have Muslim narratives that the Prophet-- with the revelation of the Qur'an and the Prophet Muhammad's mission.

You have a distinct separate community that calls themselves Muslims, creates Islamic empire, and then know the history of the story after that. Scholars, though, largely have focused on a limited set of questions. They don't necessarily accept this narrative, which is, what was Islam's relationship with other religions in the ancient Near East? How much was it influenced by other religions of the region around it, so how much was influenced by Zoroastrianism, by Judaism, by Christianity.

And as you can see, these can oftentimes take on highly polemical contexts, meaning that Islam isn't a new-- you don't have your own religion. Everything, you just took it from the Jewish stories, the Isra'iliyyat, or the biblical stories. So this becomes a huge debate about [ARABIC] the unlettered prophet, maybe the prophet schooled or not schooled where did he get his knowledge from, which I won't get into right now.

But the issue here is that every scholar that usually talks about the emergence of early Islam will talk about influence in a different way. There's no one standard definition of how you define what influence is and how is Islam influenced or how do communities get influenced by each other. The idea of influence is not well-defined. And there is a rich theoretical discussion of what influence can mean, or actually, I would say that there's not even a rich theoretical discussion. There's just different ways that people use it. And you have to figure out for yourself what do they actually mean by influence.

If you're looking at cave-- if you're looking at rock inscriptions, architecture, if you're looking at scriptural studies, all of these are different ways that scholars will use or emphasize. Usually, the assumption here is that for influence, if an idea precedes another in a historical timeline, that idea is largely taken as a criteria for influence.

So the main ways that these arguments go out is to say that, let's look at the earliest instance that we can find of a monotheistic God. If we can find it in a rock inscription in Saudi Arabia, can we find it in Judaic temples in the Levant? Can we find it-- and then because if that's the earliest instance that we can find, then that's where the core idea comes in. And this becomes very influential in strands of Germanic scholarship, the or Ur texts.

It's the holy grail of the original texts of which all different manuscripts of an idea come. So it's this search for origins and one starting point. That starting point then influencing everything else around it. So as you can see, that can be unrealistic in terms of actually establishing that, how could you ever show that is very difficult. And secondly, also unrealistic in terms of how human communities and ideas tend to work as well.

And so the discussion really becomes, is Islam a new religion or break-off movement, or is Islam authentic and split off of established religions? So maybe I can open up for a discussion here as well, which is that, was Islam a new religion in the seventh century? You guys think Islam is new, or it's another iteration of what came before it? Yeah.

AUDIENCE: Its very claim is that it's coming to return the religion of the prophets. So that is its claim at least.

MOHAMMAD SAGHA: Good. Thank you. Any other points? Yeah.

AUDIENCE: I think it's difficult to define whether something-- I'm also-- I'm at the Div School. So I've been talking all about the definition of religions and stuff like that. But I think it's difficult to say-- I think it's difficult to use the claim that just because something influences something else, that means it is or isn't a new religion because the reality is that even now, lived religion is often influenced by other religions. And there's always an exchange of cultural ideas

MOHAMMAD SAGHA: Excellent. I think that's a great point, good. So in the sense that even if you, let's say, have a break-off of a new religion, does that mean that religion is just closed off into a package, it's airtight, and then nothing else comes into it, or as you mentioned, is it ongoing?

AUDIENCE: I mean, you can even use the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Hebrew Bible. There's so many stories taken from the Epic of Gilgamesh. Does that mean that Judaism doesn't get to be defined as a religion?

MOHAMMAD SAGHA: Exactly, yeah. And so what a lot of scholars have done and said, oh, well, we see the first flood narratives in Gilgamesh or other places. Gilgamesh is authentic origin texts because it's the earliest one that we can find, which even then, of course, the things that we assume that these scholars are using can-- they often times change.

So these things are not set in stone literally-- or literally, sometimes they are, but metaphorically. Good. So Islam itself talks about, as [INAUDIBLE] mentioned, it's a continuation of what came from-- what came before. So the revelation of the Prophet Muhammad is a completion of a cycle of prophecy according to many theories indigenous to Islam, meaning that was the prophet Moses a Muslim?

In the Qur'an, prophet Abraham, prophet-- all the prophets generally are a lot of them-- explicitly and not explicitly as well, they're all considered Muslims. Prophet Adam was a Muslim to Noah to Moses to Jesus, all Muslims. Why? Because the idea of time itself is different in the Qur'an and in Islamic cosmology.

Pre-creation of the Prophet Muhammad and the light of the Prophet Muhammad penetrates all historical timelines and time periods. So the idea of Islam being new or old, within its own understanding, there's only Islam. There can only be Islam. Why? Because Islam is big T Truth. Big T Truth has to do with the heart of all of human beings and humanity. And all of those are central to the Islamic message of redemption, the Day of Judgment, the afterlife, and so on.

So those discussions aren't usually centered that much in these camps, where you generally, instead, what you have in the methodological camps that look at early Islam, you'll have three general camps, I would say. You have uncritical traditionalists. This is in Western academia.

Muslims don't talk about it in this way, usually, which is, basically, you take the mainstream quote, unquote "traditional" understanding of Islam that the Prophet Muhammad was given revelation, maybe in the cave of Hira or maybe in different places depending on the Hadith that you accept or don't. Then you have Qur'an, Hadith, the Islamic sources. And you don't think about issues of back projection that much necessarily.

So this is what a lot of-- so the whole Western academic field generally, largely in the last few decades emerged out of very strong critique of this camp saying that these are uncritical traditionalists. There are some excellent work that has been done by scholars of this camp that have critiqued in the Western academia. But generally, they, I would say, tend to miscategorize how Muslims themselves look at their own history.

Muslims don't just accept any Hadith. So when Western scholars came in, they said, oh, look, all these Muslims have these Hadiths. These Hadiths are all contradictory. We're the ones that we'll determine what's historically accurate or not. That's problematic because Muslims were doing that for centuries. There's a whole field of Hadith criticism and biographical-- in [ARABIC], in the Hadith, they look at whether it's a Hadith Hassan, is it mutawatir, or is it Hassan, is it Taif?

And so Muslims have been doing this. They don't just look at-- like any other humans, they'll look at the evidence that's before them and then try to figure out what they can sift through and not. On the other hand, you have these skeptics or hyperskeptics that emerge in Islamic studies that will really say that we can't-- there was a time in academia in the West that some scholars said, we can't accept any Arabic sources.

Why? Because Arabs are liars, basically. And that they're lying about their religion. And so you had to work hagarism, which was penned by Patricia Crone's very famous work. It's a very fascinating read because what they do is they don't accept any Muslim or Arab sources. They only accept non-Muslim sources. So they'll center these works that are written in the mountains of Georgia that completely botch basic understanding of Islam-- early Islamic history, the names, and so on.

And so the result of that was this very wacky narrative of the second caliph Omar was a high Jewish priest who split off, many, many things that are historically are just like very, very hard to talk about. But it was a methodological challenge. And so it did actually push ahead some of the debates in the methodology.

And then you have, finally, the middle ground criticism, which is scholars that try to take-- that don't want to reject everything. They want to have a middle ground approach and then just be critical, which is, I would say, the mainstream of scholars in the Muslim world and probably in academia today as well. Within academia as well, most scholarship on internal sectarian splits within Islam are at the level of general histories or early Islamic survey studies.

We don't have too many specialized work on Sunni and Shia split in Islam. There aren't that many-- there are some, but they're quite rare. There's work that focuses on early Shi'ism that tends to focus on law ritual and esotericism. And I'll go through those shortly. However, much of the other scholarship covered in Islamic studies, the field is fairly fragmented and specialized, which is one of the other difficulties of the field is that scholars will choose a particular time period that is very difficult to understand by people outside of that time period.

So these studies tend to be somewhat in isolation from each other, even within Shia studies. There is, however, general consensus among scholars who generally frame the split as having its origin in leadership disputes. And so that's generally widely accepted, which is that after the passing of the Prophet Muhammad in the year 632 CE or 10 of the Hijri, the majority of the early Muslim community pledged allegiance to Abu Bakr. And a small minority resisted and passionate proclaimed Ali as the rightful caliph, who would later become-- and at that time and later would become the Shia.

This is true and an important insight. However, what's less explored is exactly what these sectarian differences meant and what are the boundaries. So you have Shia and Sunni. But what does that actually mean? So for example, you can have-- at Harvard, you can say, we have students that come that are Muslims. We have students that come from South America.

Scholars later, say, 100, 200 years later will go and look at these, bring up these histories and say, look at how different these people were, how do they live. Someone came from South Africa. Someone came from Colombia. Someone came from-- then you had Muslims and Jews and everyone mixed together. And then they will start to then look and emphasize these differences as the main means of which there is division and culture wars inside the US or at Harvard.

But for us that are living here, how important is it that someone is coming from these places, it's like, you know where your colleagues come from or your classmates come from. But does that mean you guys don't enter into the same clubs together, social clubs at Harvard? Do you not participate in the same classes? Do you not get graded? Do you not compete for the same jobs afterwards?

So these divisions, yes, they're there. But how salient are they? How salient are they, or how important are they in actually defining different communities and different divisions between them? So this is the whole issue of why salience becomes very important in understanding Shia and Sunni. So even when you establish it, how central or important is it?

Sorry, in this next section, I'll look at-- so a little bit on early Islam. Again, just doing a quick survey. I know there's a lot of information here. But in the next section, we're looking at theories on the emergence of early Shi'ism. What are the different-- again, welcome to academia in part 2. There's no agreed theory on what-- more on Shi'ism, how much.

Most books on early Shi'ism do not explicitly theorize its emergence or origins even as a research question. So when we point to studies of when did Shi'ism emerge? Generally, there's no one-- there's no one consensus position. Different scholars have theorized different origin or emergence points.

So what are some of the ones that we generally think of or even scholars have focus on? One of the main ways people look at the emergence of Shi'ism is the legal school, so the legal school meaning the madhhab. Even here, you have divisions. One is the original. But we've probably heard two different things. One camp says, Imam Ja'far al-Sadiq, who is the sixth imam in Twelver Shi'ism.

And then the other that would put it-- in here, I'm talking about Twelver Shi'ism that will put it in the area of Shaykh Mufid and especially Shaykh al-Tai'fa Tusi. Shayk al-Ta'if, we're referring to him as the founder of the legal madhhab of Twelver Shi'ism. These time periods are hundreds of years apart. So even in terms of legal orthodoxy, we don't actually know when legal-- there's different definitions of when legal orthodoxy emerged as a definition of who Shi'is are.

And this is a good book by Devin Stewart, Islamic Legal Orthodoxy, that actually look at what the subsection Twelver Shia responses to Sunni legal system. This is an excellent book in showing how interconnected the Shia and Sunni definitions of madhhab were. So even if you use madhhab, meaning legal school as a division between Shia and Sunni, it's actually quite problematic because they're really part of one web, dense interconnected web of scholars and jurists. yes.

AUDIENCE: So on this, would you say that in an attempt-- with this intertwined give and take that scholars attempted to emphasize the differentiation process because it seems that the formation of sects actually is a product of the intertwining. It's simultaneously happening because even the sectarianization of usul that we spoke there are essentially the same. Over time, usul is a project to actually emphasize what is different.

We all agree on tawhid, but my tawhid is not anthropomorphism. Your tawhid is we can't describe God. It's like a totally different description of a God. Do you think that's an accurate-- do you think that this intertwining process was a process of similarization or differentiation?

MOHAMMAD SAGHA: That's a great question. So the question is, one way people can-- scholars can look at this when you see the emergence of Hanafi, Shafi'i, Ja'fari schools is to then look at these, look, there's these different methods. But I think, as you mentioned, another way is that that differentiation is defining itself through similarity and through a shared soul or shared group.

So I think that, in my opinion, that's a much closer reading that-- I forget how did you phrase it. It's differentiation through--

AUDIENCE: Differentiation through-- the intertwining process leads to the differentiation as opposed to similarization and that's making everything.

MOHAMMAD SAGHA: Good. Yeah, exactly, so I think that's a great way of framing it. So it's a process of similarization rather than differentiation. That's another way that you could actually look at what's happening. And I think that-- that's what Devin Stewart is-- I don't know if he explicitly frames it like that. But that was one of the takeaways I got when reading his work, which is that you're only different through a shared assumption of what different means.

And you accept what the other side is saying because you can easily pick up a Hanafi text if you're trained in a Twelver madhhab and just understand everything that's happening in it because it's like, using the same methodology, the same-- so it's similar-- you can say, for example, how different is anthropology from sociology? You're only different because you're all-- one's down the block from the other. They're in the same university. They have slightly different means. But they can pretty much understand a lot of times what the other side is saying, so.

And so I thank you for that point. I think that's an excellent point of understanding. There's other-- that's a legal madhhab theory. There's another theory when it comes to early Shi'ism saying that what differentiates Shi'is is ritual practice. So this is-- this type of work is linked somewhat to the first school, but it focuses on how Shia communities in-- Kufa is in Iraq, start to practice Islam in public ways, that differentiated them from others.

So it works in such-- for example, we'll look at qunut, when did Shi'is openly start to pray slightly differently. So if you go to Muslim communities today, you can-- sometimes you can tell if someone folds their hand when they're praying versus they put down. But Maliki Sunnis can pray with their hands down. Zaydi Shi'is sometimes can fold or sometimes can put down.

So it actually then-- that also breaks down. Any one thing that you try to put-- I mean, this is what makes it very difficult as a scholar of sectarianism to try to look at these differences is that anything that you just assume is a normative difference, you can find easily just counterexamples everywhere. So what does that tell you? Again, it tells you that really, it's one interconnected body.

The Muslim ummah is one interconnected body. Another camp of early Shi'ism-- so we looked legal studies, ritual studies. Another camp that was relatively very influential is the esoteric versus esoteric dimensions of early Shi'ism. So you had a debate emerge in basically the '90s between-- I mean, it indirectly but also directly to an extent between scholars, such as Mohammad Ali Amir-Moezzi, who wrote a very influential work on early Shi'ism, The Divine Guide in Early Shi'ism, originally written in French and translated then into English. It's a very central work that pushed back on legal orthodox definitions of Shi'ism.

And that was including some of the works of Seyyed Hossein Modarressi at Princeton, who defined through an influential work on crisis and consolidation, dismissed the-- or challenge, I should say, the legal-- challenge the esoteric dimensions of Shia Islam as outside influences that corrupted the legal orthodoxy inside Shi'ism.

What I mean was what Professor Amir-Moezzi did is that he went and showed all of the Hadiths and centrality of esoteric understandings, as in the imam as a light form, the universe in the heart of individuals. The imam is esoteric guy that leads us back to the Nabi Muhammad and others. So this became a major area of debate.

There's another work that-- or another strand of work that's done by people such as Amir-Moezzi as well as Marissa Dakake, who got her PhD at Princeton, that looked at the early origins of Shi'ism and linked it to the person of Imam Ali and loyalty or Walaya to Ali as a successor to Muhammad. So the main thing is Alid piety, Alid that here being an adjective describing those people who love and follow Imam Ali.

So what she argued was that early Shias are-- what she argued and also Amir-Moezzi in a very influential article on Din Ali, how this-- it's an early term that you can see in the Muslim-- in early Islamic history, really focus on the uniqueness of the quality of Ali himself as a person and as the father of the imams that followed.

And you can see a lot of work in early Islamic history doesn't-- focuses more on Talibuts, so as an descendants of Abu Talib, the father of Ali and their group because Ali himself, even outside of his marriage with Fatima and the bloodline of the Prophet Muhammad, which followed through that, even outside of that was still an important figure on his own terms.

You also have a set of studies done by French orientalists and others on the Mukhamissa and al-Kisa. The Mukhamissa, as some scholars have argued, were those Muslims who situated the five members of the ahl al-bayt centrally in their view of the correct practice of Islam. So they're looking at the sources and seeing that look, there's a-- where does this idea of the five-- the ahl al-bayt come?

And so you have-- just for the sake of time, I won't go into debates of the al-bayt, But ahl al-bayt is universal, meaning the family of the prophet. It's a universally beloved and accepted concept in Islam across Shia and Sunni divisions. But the idea of the five is special, too. So Sunnis have many Hadiths also pointing to this as well.

Where does this come from? This group of Mukhamissa, these scholars argue is the ahl al-bayt are not just a political role or continuation of the political station of the prophet. But it's also central in the cosmology. So Louis Massignon in Passion of al-Hallaj talks about this. Henry Corbin, who succeeded in that line of scholarship also discusses this.

So these are debates that emerge between the priority or status of the five Panj Tan as we call them in Persian. Orthodox understandings generally look at Muhammad-- the Prophet Muhammad as the highest creation. And that is the mainstream Shia understanding until today. But historically, you will have different Shia groups, for example, they wouldn't say otherwise today or what we call them that might put Ali above Muhammad, for example, or these-- and some of these are leftover debates from this early period.

And so the ahl [INAUDIBLE] is referring to a famous Hadith of Khazar, the cloak-- the Yemeni cloak of the Prophet Muhammad under which the five members were situated and received special blessing and privilege and purity from Allah through al-Jibril. And al-Jibril being sometimes called a member of the halibut as well.

The Shi'ite school-- this is from Massignon. The Shi'ite school of Mukhamassa was interested in interpreting in all of its symbolism the mubahala scene. At the cemetery in Medina, at the bottom of Baqi, on the red dune, we see the five standing under the mantle, illuminated with a thunderbolts lightning flashes. Before them, together with the other initiated mawali, stands Salman pointing out the five for the veneration of the amazed Najranian Christians.

At the call of the initiator, they recognized the five and their glorious transfiguration, tajalli their halo of light flashes-- their halo of lightning flashes signifies their authority as a divine right, inducing them to affirm that their bodies are shadows, azilla, azlal, cast by Divine Light, silhouettes, ashbah, temporarily outlined in the divine emanation, exempted from the generation and corruption of suffering and death.

It is the call, nida, of the Initiator that animates and sets the scene, the instrument of the divine spirit, which discerns and reveals the divine secret, the seal of the prophetic mission that marks the five, which raises Salman above the prophet and the Imams, like Khidir above Moses in Sura. So this is not-- this last line, especially in some of the things that preceded it, it's not mainstream Shi'ism today.

But some of the Shia groups that were called Kulu are extreme-- they took the extreme doctrinal positions. So Massignon brings out some of these debates, which then influenced the rest of the Muslim world, talking about the hierarchy of figures here. To end this portion of it, what-- so my own research focuses on-- in my dissertation, undertook a different approach that built on previous scholarship but produces a different analytical lens.

So what I did in my dissertation-- I'll try to be somewhat brief here, is that I conducted a political history of Shi'ism that focused on underground political institutions of Shi'ism. What I argued is that these esoteric-exoteric debates can be a means of actually differentiating between different Shia groups because you find exoteric-esoteric debates in all of the Shia sects, and 'Isma'ilis and Twelvers, and then-- and Zaydism as well or proto-Zaydism what we call.

The issue driving Shia sectarian emergence is the establishment of political order and the waning of Abbasid repressive capacity after the anarchists. So what I argue is that it's only after the Abbasid imperial power is sapped starting in 250 Hijri or 864 CE that the repressive capacity of the Abbasids is no longer able to fully suppress rival state organizations or empires that emerge.

And that is the first time that we also see in the historical record more fully defined sects that emerge as well within Shi'ism. So the differentiation between 'Isma'ilis and Twelvers is not really clear until after 874, about 10 years afterwards. The establishment of the 'Isma'ili da'wa, in its own internal record, coincides with the same year of the occultation of the 12th Imam in Twelver Shia context.

And you can see many different go through much of the historical evidence inside the dissertation. But the main argument is that it's-- because the Abbasids were able-- and before them, the Umayyads were able to put down any rebellions and suppress any rival state organizations, that prevented sectarian differentiation and emergence among the Shias.

It's only after they can express themselves as states that you see this. And that you see the first states established in Tabaristan, in Mazandaran in the north that were Alawi in orientation. In Basra and in South Iraq, you have Sahaba Zanj. And the same thing, you have the Rassid dynasty in Yemen. All of these emerge in short order-- and the Fatimid empire, short order after this period, not before.

So I would say that the internal histories of Shias tend to say, look at the splits after the sixth Imam or the seventh Imam. And there can be some truth to that. But they don't actually-- they're not able to express themselves because they're underground until that moment. So it's what defines this and why I call this hidden empires is that the way that sectarian organization happened was in an underground repressive environment.

It's only when it can come above ground and actually establish states that you can then get leadership differentiation and different lines of imams that emerge. The Fatimi line is different from this line from-- I think you [INAUDIBLE]

AUDIENCE: Quick question, how about the Idrisid state in al-Magreb? So la ilaha Mahmoud Said Mamdouh, he's a scholar in Egypt. He has a historical study called [SPEAKING ARABIC]

 

And so he does a study-- he comes from a Sunni background. He does a study particularly on the madhhab of Idris bin Idris bin Abdullah bin Al Hassan Al Hassan. And his conclusion is that he was Zaydi. But what's really weird is we see very little clear Zaydi representation in that civilization.

MOHAMMAD SAGHA: Yes.

AUDIENCE: So you have to really look between the lines to figure out that this was a Zaydi state. But it was a state that was established 100 years before the anarchy.

MOHAMMAD SAGHA: Yes, correct. Yes, so the Idrisid state is, I think, there definitely needs to be more study of this. And I think it'll be interesting to go into. But I agree that I think that because the debate about the Zaydi character of it is disputed, it's hard to-- it's hard to say that it's a formal Zaydi state. I think it's a disputed area.

And what I would also say is that we could potentially call it proto-Zaydi, in a sense. But there were many other dynasties also that were established. But they weren't necessarily that long-lasting. The Idrisids are probably the main exception to that. But if you look at Mokhtar, for example, established a state in Kufa. If you look at Nafs al-Zakiyya, for a short period, and his brother, they all-- so you do have these short states.

But they usually don't last more than a year or two. And they're repressed. And then in the case of the Idrisids, again, the evidence isn't so clear that I've seen at least that we can say that definitively that this is a separate thing rather than a generic pro-Alid disposition.

And so that's one of the things that a lot of states are called Zaydi because it's a convenient way of categorizing rebellion against-- because that's the stereotype about Zaydism is that-- which is a problematic stereotype, I think, and that's then applied to other Shia groups. But I think that's--

AUDIENCE: Especially generic Shi'ism, that doesn't have the, I guess, imamate context.

MOHAMMAD SAGHA: Exactly.

AUDIENCE: It doesn't have the imamate, the numbered colors, the Isaidis and the Twelvers are automatically categorized--

MOHAMMAD SAGHA: As a-- yeah, exactly.

AUDIENCE: --and then some.

MOHAMMAD SAGHA: The station of the Imam is a bit different in contemporary or mainstream Zaydism that emerged later. But these whole things of what's Zaydi and what's Sunni and what's Shia, again, I think that there's so much of a spectrum happening that you can easily read Sunni texts that will have very similar understanding of the caliph and Shia texts from other sects as well, but-- great. Thank you. Thank you for that.

Finally, I'll go to theories of emergence of early Sunnism. Now, were there any questions on the Shia discussion? With the emergence of early Sunnism, in many ways, the work on early Sunnism is less focused than the already unfocused and the studies on early Shi'ism. In part, this is due to the fact that Sunnism is taken as normative or normal Islam.

It just is it's natural, which in the history of Islamic studies, especially in the West, you can see has, I think, really it's one of the legacies of our study there. It's just normal Islam. Shi'ism is taught as one week in a 12-week syllabus or something like this, if it's taught at all. And that's very problematic for how we understand because it's reproducing the central orthodoxy, this church that is supposed to be Sunnism.

So then the emergence of Sunnism for a lot of scholars isn't even a question. It's just what normal Islam was from the very beginning. And this is problematic for Sunnis, too, themselves because if you go and look at the diversity within Sunnism and how they understand the early period, it can be very surprising.

I remember a sort of anecdote that one of the graduate students had mentioned that he was raised in Turkey. And he had in one of the graduate classes or one of the classes on Islam taught here at Harvard, they were reading portions of a text that were Sunni texts critical of the third caliph Uthman, saying that there was a classical Sunni discussions of Uthman tend to put the first six years as good years, the second six years as more challenging years, where you find a lot of corruption.

So for him, he's raised in a Hanafi-Sunni context in Turkey. It was just normal for him to read that. But some of the Sunni students that were raised in the United States that then read that text got very-- they were upset of what they were reading because they perceived it as a critique or an attack on their Sunni identity. So I'm just using that as an example to show that what things-- what some things could be controversial or may be seen as potentially offensive for some Sunnis, for others, not really so.

This is a huge spectrum of Sunnism that's very inclusive. It includes so many different readings of Islam among itself. And that's one of the problems of actually theoretically defining Sunnism because almost by its nature, it strives to be inclusive and define strict boundaries. And that's one of the powers of Islam overall.

And Sunnism, you could argue in particular because it really tries to utilize this idea of ahl al-Sunna wa-l Jama'a, the people of tradition or precedents and unity or consensus. Jama'a here referring to unity. So the idea of the four rightly-guided caliphs, you have in succession Abu Bakr, Umar, Uthman, and Ali, is something that most scholars have studied and said, this is a later position that was created to categorize and periodize Islamic history.

One of the implicit sort of things of the Khulafa Rashidun, the four rightly-guided caliphs, is that it disassociates from the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates. So it doesn't consider those to be fully legitimate. Although you do have some Sunni scholars that would argue that they were, especially with the Abbasids, probably more so than the Umayyads.

And it can be also read as a critique of Muawiyah as well because there's a problem that emerges that most Sunni scholars probably believed that Ali was closer to the truth than Muawiyah and this is a mainstream Sunni position. But Muawiyah is also a companion of the Prophet, so then it becomes one of the positions that emerges amongst Sunnism is try to tamper down on divisions and try to then create unity by not critiquing different sides in a fractious civil war.

And that's the idea of adalat al-sahaba. So there's another idea-- so then-- so one way of defining Sunnism is those who accept the first four caliphs, again, how central is that and how relevant, I think, is-- I think it generally tends to be overemphasized.

The second way of defining Sunnis is the doctrine of adalat al-sahaba, which is all the companions were just. If they saw the Prophet and they died as a Muslim, they're just in the sense-- but among Sunnis, what does just mean? What does adalat mean?

Some would say it's only that you accept them in Hadith chains. You can't accept them in Hadith chains. Others would say, no that you can't critique them or talk about maybe mistakes that they made. And that you should avoid-- so there's different kinds of ways of understanding what adalat al-sahaba is.

Again, I think it's one of these very amorphous categories that doesn't actually always help in defining who a Sunni is as well. And then the idea of Jama'a, your ahl al-Sunaa wa-l Jama'a, which is linked. So when we say today Sunni is usually, it's part of-- it's taken from this ahl al-Sunna wa-l Jama'a context, meaning that it's the majority or it's the consensus position of the Muslim world.

The problem with that is, though, that Jama'a is a doctrine that's pushed by all Muslim groups. There's a famous Qur'anic verse [ARABIC] Adhere to the rope, the handle of Allah and do not split. So the idea of tafriq al-Jama'a, which means splitting the Muslim community, is frowned upon by all Shia and Sunni schools.

So how would you define Sunnism in this sense, too, is also one of the central components of the Imami-Shi'i understandings. The notion of preserving consensus, togetherness, Jama'a-- this is a direct quote from a portion of my dissertation. Jama'a, as absence of political opposition, is articulated by the Umayyad caliph, al-Walid Ibn al-Malik.

It's in a supposed dialogue with Ali ibn Husayn, the fourth Imam in the Twelver Shia tradition and in other Shia lines as well. According to a narration found in [ARABIC]. This is a pro-Abbasid text. But you'll find-- you can find this elsewhere as well. Ali ibn Husayn had traveled to Damascus to intercede on the behalf of his cousin, a son of Imam Ali through a different branch, Abu Hashim.

And the imam-- for some of the Ksenia or another subsect of Shia, who had been imprisoned by the Umayyad caliph al-Walid, so you have Imam Zayn al-Abidin traveling to Damascus to advocate to the Umayyad caliph to not imprison his cousin, who was a revered figure for another Shia sect or another group, I should say. In this dialogue, al-Walid related that Hasan ibn Zayd accused Abu Hashim of striving to divide the united body politic.

And then another Hashemite, Zayd ibn Hassan is-- the Umayyad caliph is saying that why are you coming to me and asking to release this person. Another one of your cousins is saying that Abu Hashim is promoting tafriq al-Jama'a. He's promoting splitting the Muslim body and notably making himself an imam upon which obedience is necessary, Imam and Muqtada obligatory to follow him and who had gathered around himself Iraqi Shias.

The veracity of the report-- so, here-- so what's interesting here is this whole notion of ahl al-Sunaa al-Jama's, it's used by everyone. Everyone basically is saying that you should follow whoever the political leader is, the sultan is, the caliph is because he is the one that is preserving unity in the body politic of Islam. And rebelling and against him is promoting tafriq al-Jama'a, the cracking of the united body politic of Islam.

I think-- so I'll probably skip through these. There's other-- there's so much to cover that-- there's also theological trends. But one thing that maybe I will-- that I want to focus on is briefly, the Safavid-Ottoman rivalry. Safavid-Ottoman rivalry is oftentimes discussed as the origins of Shia and Sunni divisions in the Middle East today. Why? Because you had a Sunni caliph and a Sunni sultan or caliph in Istanbul or Constantinople.

And then you had a Shi'i Shah in Safavid, Iran. And because each side was sent by a different sectarian group, they differentiated and launched wars on the basis of sectarian divisions. The problem is that if you look at the origins of the early Safavids and early Ottomans, they are basically exact mirror images of each other.

The praise of the Ottoman caliphs to the Safavids as the origins-- the heads of the Safavid order is very heavy because the Safavids, many in the Ottoman Empire, including among the Janissary army, which was the main elite army of the Ottomans, really revered and respected Shah Ismail and his ancestor Shaykh Junayd and Sheikh Haydar, who were very popular leaders accepted by many of the Turkish or Turkic tribes that had formed a power base in Eastern Anatolia and the Ottoman Empire.

So you have letter exchanges between Bayezid and other Ottoman figures with the Shah highly praising him and asking him to reform many of his policies. Also, both the Ottomans and the Safavids, if you look at their origin, are confessionally ambiguous, meaning that it is very hard to actually define them as Shia and Sunni.

You had a phenomenon that was mainstream in Sunni Islam-- in Islam in the medieval period in which you couldn't you had people that accepted the 12 imams and the four caliphs. You had people that were easily, you could not categorize them in the same ways that we categorize Shia and Sunni divisions today. Back then, otherwise, you would have to say they're both Shia and Sunni or maybe even neither or something like this.

And so you have, for example, in the Timurid coins-- so the Timurids were a major Turkic Muslim empire. You have coins-- you have coins that are on the one side for Muslim caliphs, for Rafa Rashidun. On the other side, 12 imams. So literally two sides of the same coin. How do you deal with something like that? So that's a good metaphor for the confessional ambiguity that was very common at that day.

And so today, when you look at the main Persian poets, Mawlana, Rumi, Hafez, Shiraz Saadi, and others, are they Shia, or are they Sunni? Every side will try to claim them for their own because they-- you can't categorize them in either one of those places.

You'd find both sectarian and ethnic differences are challenged, too. In a letter-- in a letter to Ismail, Selim-- so Ismail is the Safavid Shah in Iran, Selim being the Sunni Ottoman caliph. Selim identifies himself with Fereydoun and Darius, civilized imperial Persians. So this is what who we would call a Turk in Istanbul, who's writing poetry in Persian and saying that he's the Persian king and then Shah Ismail in Iran is a Turk in a bad way, so as in Turks were representing backward country bumpkin or whatever, like, uncivilized, evil tribal Turks.

So Selim composed the Divans, collections of poetry in Persian, inspired by Hafiz and Jami. Shah Ismail composed in Azeri Turkish. Also, Shah Ismail also wrote in Persian as well. So how is the Sunni Ottoman caliph and/or the sultan and the Turk calling the other guy a Turk? So what's going on? It just completely breaks down all of our ethnic and sectarian understandings.

Also, if you look at political theology in the Safavid-Ottoman rivalry, an influential scholar in the Ottoman domains, Lutfi Pasha, he was a Sadr al-A'zam in Persia during the time of Suleyman Shah, "the Lawgiver," so we really one of the heights of Ottoman imperial strength. He Ahmad-- this individual, Lutfi Pasha, was ethnically Albanian and served as a governor of Syria and Rumelia, the Balkans.

He was a close figure to Sultan Selim I. He wrote a treatise about political theory. Let's read the opening lines that's translated by Gibb. "Everlasting praise to him whom it belongs and blessing and praise upon his prophet and prayer for the Imam of the Age upon His earth, O God be pleased with him and those who follow him. After praise to God and the blessing upon the apostle of God, I have begun and set forth the substances of the concepts together with the attributes and prayer for the Imam of the Age.

And he who stands in the place of the apostle of God, the defender of the core of Islam-- the core of Islam, strong to the aid the faith of God, who is in no need of description and titles. He in whom all nobilities and titles find their highest boast." So what's interesting about this? The title-- it's Imam-- so in contemporary Shia discussions, the Imam of the Age is a very ubiquitous Sahaba Zaman.

Here, he uses the title Imam al-Waqt, meaning it has a similar sort of thing, so the Imam of the Time, who's standing in the place of the prophet of God. But classical Sunni theory is not supposed to continue the charisma of the Prophet Muhammad, how are we seeing this in the origin-- in the early periods of the Ottoman Empire? The Ottoman caliph is a representative of God on earth and successor to the Prophet Muhammad, and he's the Imam of the Time. And we have to obey him through which-- so if you look, this is the Arabic here.

So you can see at the-- it's here, so Imam had walked out of there. [ARABIC] And the station-- so this is the Arabic, if you see it, it's actually-- it's quite explicit. And it's at the station of the Prophet. So when you see that, that sounds-- when I first read this, I was very confused. I thought this was a Shia text. And I was thinking, why is there such an explicitly Shi'i understanding so close to Shah Suleyman?

Later on, in this treatise-- he's very critical of the Shias and the Safavids. But the words that he's using, just switch the name and then put it in Shah of Iran, literally almost exactly the same thing. So what does this mean? It's about the person. It's about the figure. And that's pretty much it. It's about the figure. Everything else usually is about the same.

So if I can grab-- put my discussion today about sectarianism. It's all about the person. It's all about the individual. I'm just going through different historical examples here. You have-- in the first, if we jump ahead now, a few hundred years to the First World War. The most notable case of Arab support for the Ottomans did not come from the Sunni majority Levant or this type of later was a British propaganda of the Great arab Revolt, which was really much more limited than how they made it seem.

You had this-- a lot of the Sunni leadership collaborating with the British to split up the Ottoman Empire into different domains. So the Jordan, Iraq, Syria all came to different Sunni rulers, although even there's Sunni-Shia [INAUDIBLE]. They tried to be more universal than that. But in terms of the mainstream opposition, it came from Shia Iraq. That was the main area that imposed the highest cost on the British.

So you have a large-- and one of the reasons that they spread this is that you have a whole genre called jihadiyya. So from 1800, in the Qajar, Iran, the first book that's published is Risala Jihadia, which is a book of fighting the Russians and the British influence-- mainly the Russians but also the Ouahabi incursions that are happening.

So these are fatwas of Jihad that are coming from Persian and Shia Arab mujtahids that are uniformly lining behind the Sunni caliph in Istanbul to defend Ottoman Iraq from British invasion. So the most-- the highest-- some of the highest cost of the British experience in all of World War I was in Iraq. There are famous battles of Kut Al Amara. Amara today is a large city in Iraq. And some of the largest losses of the British empire happened there.

Why? Because you had-- in part, you had the Ottomans working with Shia paramilitaries that are supported by Shia mujtahids. Does that sound familiar, basically with a-- very similar to the PMF or the Hasd al-Sha'bi that you see in Iraq today. And so, how do we deal with-- how do we deal with this? What does it mean that these Shia mujtahids are backing a Sunni Ottoman caliph?

And they're really-- and if you go-- and actually, this book is published by the sponsored, I think, by the Iranian culture-- one of the culture ministries or so on. It compiles-- it's a very useful resource. It compiles a list of all of the fatwas that were given in the First World War. And the way that they praised the Sunni-- the caliph says, everyone, go rally behind the caliph at the time, defend Iraq. The British are coming.

And this is notable because the Iraq-- the Shias of Iraq had experienced a lot of marginalization and repression from the Ottoman sultan. So they had-- you could see it would have been easy for them to say, OK, look, these Sunnis are oppressing us. Let's go work with the British. But you don't have that. You have the exact opposite.

Jumping ahead-- again, I know I'm jumping across different things. I'm trying to just provide a large survey and different resources that maybe we can look at and think about. Maybe the last part that we'll look at is the taqrib movement and sectarianism. So the movement-- and this is one of the readings that I sent out, if you guys have received the email.

It's initially established as a joint project between secular rulers of the two most important states-- two of the most important states in the Middle East, Iran and-- so Gamal Abdel Nasser's pan-Arabist Egypt, which was very harsh against the Muslim brotherhood Islamists inside. And the Shah of Iran, again, who was secular and did not want to see Shia Islamism rise inside Iran. These two secular rulers are setting up taqrib movement for Islamic ecumenicism and bringing the Shia and Sunni readings to get closer together.

And what broke the taqrib movement-- thank you for coming. What broke the taqrib movement at that time was not a theological dispute between Shia and Sunni, it was one-- the Shah of Iran announced support for Israel, which sent shock waves through Egypt and Nasr. And they basically broke off the project. So it was clearly just a political project-- or not just a political project in the sense that they didn't take theology seriously, is that their theology is politics, politics is theology. They didn't see these as different domains.

So today, you have many-- you have some scholars who critique the taqrib movement as a political project saying that this is just a Trojan Horse for state interests. What the Muslims will say is, so what? So what if it's a Trojan Horse, or what if-- so what if it a horse for a state interest? The state should define what justice is. The state should define what a Shia and Sunni inclusivity. The state defines laws of who is persecuted or not.

It should-- it provides-- so what if the state is a sectarian in nature and wants to bring sectarian things together? In fact, that's what should be happening. So this is one of the problems with Islamic studies as well is that the category of Islam and politics becomes controversial. So the things that the Islamic State in Iran does or that the Islamic movements advocate for in the rest of the Muslim world, such as, for example, that the ruler of the Muslim world can raise armies. It can regulate taxes. It can fight wars and all these. This has become highly controversial in the literature because they're using religion to corrupt-- to corrupt the religion and help the politics.

But in the United States and other places, what can the state not do? That's a better question to ask. Does the state regulate our biometric data from the day that we're born until we die? It takes our birth certificate. And it gives us the right to where to live and not, gives us passports. It gives us-- all the political domains are here in the State here. But is it controversial here? For some libertarians, maybe here and there. But largely, it's not controversial. It's just normal politics.

Then in the Muslim world, it's controversial when Islam has something to say about any of these areas. So this is the power of normativity, the power of being the neutral thing that then makes it controversial for other groups or other states and parts of the Muslim world to enact politics or justice because politics-- if politics is justice, why wouldn't you want the Prophet Muhammad to influence your stay in society?

Let's just see. I think I know we're running short on time. Maybe I just want to quickly maybe go through this and I-- and then we can end maybe with some final comments and discussions. But one of the-- let me just-- one of the things also that we tend to see within Sunni Islam-- and Islam in general is you have more of an emphasis on orthopraxy rather than orthodoxy, meaning that orthodoxy is about a list of beliefs that makes you adherent to a particular religion.

So in the Catholic Church, there's a list of these points or how you believe Jesus is as a central node of salvation and so on. In Islam, that list is quite short. It's about-- it can be as little as one to two things to 10 to 15 things, belief in angels, the Day of Judgment, and so on. And different Muslim scholars will categorize it differently.

The main way that Islam has been able to actually also make sure that sectarian divisions don't become too divisive is through orthopraxy, meaning how you practice your rituals and your communal affairs, so the five daily prayers, a month of fasting in the month of Ramadan, hajj, shahada, the two big Eid prayers, or more. So orthopraxy becomes one of the main institutions for sectarian normativity in Islam.

And this is something special to Islam that you would have to study Islam on its own terms to really understand what this is and what it means. And so you can talk to a lot-- I'm sure if many of you go talk to your grandparents and ask them what it was like with Shia and Sunni divisions, especially many of you come from areas of the world that you had mixed Shia and Sunni. Iran is a rare exception, where its vast majority of Shia.

But in Lebanon and Syria and Pakistan-- what became Pakistan, go talk to your grandparents, hopefully if they're still alive or with your parents and ask them. They'll get a blank stare on their face a lot of times. I say, what's Shia and Sunni? We didn't-- sometimes we went into a mosque. We might have prayed on a tauba. Sometimes we would have fold our hands. Sometimes we wouldn't. We didn't really-- it was just that was just how we practiced Islam.

And then how we understood the threats were from-- the political threats were coming from the outside. We didn't have any Shia and Sunni divisions. It's a very normal response that you'll get. And you have-- today you have mixed Shia and Sunni families. We're only calling it mixed Sunni and Shia today because we're choosing to emphasize the Shia and Sunni. Otherwise, they're just Muslim families that-- someone who had commented earlier had mentioned this as like, their parents-- a lot of-- I've had a lot of students who come in and say, I asked my parents whether I'm Shia or Sunni. And they really don't even know. They're just like, oh, we're just Muslim.

We like the Prophet Muhammad. We like the Qur'an. And that's one of the things that orthopraxy can bring in. So it's that that orthoprax community is largely defined negatively. Adherence to creeds or dogmas is not as heavily emphasized in Islam. It is very important. I don't mean to say that. But in terms of how you understand the community, that jama'a, that unity is this large umbrella on which Islam can attract and retain adherents, so communal emphasis that bonds, that ties, bonds together-- social bonds together.

And this is one of the great maybe resources that Muslim scholars have given us from the past is to have a rich intellectual and doctrinal discussion but to also emphasize the one unified body. This is why you have Shia mujtahids calling for defending the Ottoman caliphate in Iraq, telling the Shia to go up and defend. Why? It's one Muslim body.

Right now the Qajar shah is weak. He cannot defend-- the Ottoman state has more resources go fight under the Ottoman shah, the Ottoman sultan. I think maybe the last-- one last point. I know it's been a long session, but quickly a point on the caliph, the imam, the muhtasib, the wali. I want to give a few things on discussion of sectarianism within Zaydi Islam very briefly.

Common understanding of the difference between Shia and Sunni Islam is that the Sunnis are focused on the Sunnah. As we talked, the Shias are focused on the imam. What do proto-Zaydi imams have to say? So imams today are accepted within the Zaydi scholarship. But again, there's a historical discussion that discussed about whether they're generic pro-Alid imams or Zaydi.

But one of these very famous imams is influential scholar al-Imam Qasim ibn Ibrahim ar-Rassi, died in 860 CE, writes in his work, Tathbit al-Imama, that the whole project of following an imam is part of the Sunnah. This is a very fascinating discussion. If you read the section here, he shows through a Qur'anic deduction that Allah's sunna does not change, It's well-integrated in the sunna, [ARABIC]. This is a famous verse in the Qur'an.

So he says, he starts with saying that the sunna of Allah does not change. And then afterwards, he says that the sunna of Allah in the Qur'an, too, also talks about how imamate is a central component. So this is a very, very nice way of bringing out this line of reasoning. Allah places the imams to guide the Israelites, for example. So he talks about Moses's community.

Similarly, the prophet Abraham is also given the rank of Imami. So Shias of Ali-- Shia is like imam. Sunni is like sunna? Oh, wait, but isn't the imam part of the sunna? So this is what he's saying? It's a very powerful argument. The sunna of the past continues to the present. And he quote, la tathbit-- tathbit, it does not get changed according to the Qur'an. It continues to the present to the wajib-- to the necessity, to the wajib of the imam, according to Imam al-Rassi.

In Tathbit al-Imama, he argues that also continuation of the imam is necessary, so wajib, citing a famous verse of the Qur'an, [ARABIC] and the famous Hadith, [ARABIC]

 

Whoever dies without knowing-- without an imam over him or knowing, the imam dies a death of ignorance. So a very famous Hadith in Shi'i circles. I've heard this a lot growing up. I didn't know it was just as common, of course, within Sunni Islam as well or within Islam, I should say, in general. Whoever dies without an imam, dies a death of ignorance. Therefore, it is necessary, according to this Hadith, you have to have an imam at all times. You have to know who the imam is.

And you can see this in much more in Kutub wa Rasa'il. It's a two-volume work. There, the citation is there. The muhtasib-- sorry, a lot of texts there, I wanted to put in bullet point. But the muhtasib, this is also a very interesting work by Imam al-Utrush. Al-Nasir al-Utrush is buried in Amman, 20 minutes away from where my parents come from in Balbadd, Iran today.

So I've actually visited here. The signs outside actually tell you that this is a Zaydi-- that the Zaydi follow this Imam. The Twelvers also like him a lot, too. Just people who go to his tomb until today. And the Iranian state has invested to resurrect this-- the site, which had fallen out of disrepair, which tells a lot about general trends that are happening in the Middle East.

But an important legal scholar al-Nasir al-Utrush penned the treatise on the regulation of sociopolitical and economic affairs called Kitab al-Ihtisab. It's a very interesting work, short and quite easy to read. For those of you who want to practice your Arabic, it's actually very clearly written. Zaydi Shia today consider him an important imam. But of course, as I mentioned, there's a debate about the sectarian identity, especially in this early period.

And he comes from a context in which you had a series of olive states in Northern Iran, in Mazandaran and Tabaristan. The work is telling insight into the political theory and social order in the Muslim world and also the flexibility of the position of the Muslim ruler. In the opening passage, he states that there is a consensus among the scholars of the ahl al-bayt, this is one of the things that-- this is a common Zaydi position today.

It's the juma'a of the ulama of ahl al-bayt. This is a special thing that you see mainly within Zaydism. So you do see it, yep, and now I have this up, that there must be a muhtasib in all the Muslim garrison cities, the amsar. These are-- so Kufa, Basra, and then other parts were all amsar. These were Muslim cities.

And this must be a seasoned scholar, 'alim al-mujarrab. So meaning that he's not talking about imamate. He's not talking about caliphate, sultan, or the hukum. So what's notable in this work is that for it's sectarian ambiguity. It's not getting involved in any of the debates about who should have succeeded who or what did the-- saying that their social order is necessity.

You need to make sure that people are not getting taken advantage of in the markets. So the first section that he actually goes into is market regulation. The leadership is a position and a social need based Allah's rulings for humanity. The muhtasib, as he says, is he who calculates according to the pleasure of Allah. So he's muhtasib because he's calculating. He wants to calculate what Allah wants, not what the other-- not what others want.

And he uses also the term-- a very interesting term called umur hisbiyyah. And this is a generic term about social affairs in order. That's a major theme today in Muslim legal theory. If you look at the Twelver grand ayatollahs today, they talk a lot about umur hisbiyyah as a means of, basically, how the grand ayatollahs have to regulate national security and social order because you need to make sure that there's no gangster elements that are taking advantage of people.

You have to establish economic, social, political order. And if you look at the subsections of Kitab al-Ihtasib, you see the market, Friday prayers, prohibition of intoxicants, hamaj, these type of things, textile. He talks a lot about market regulation. So textile, make sure people aren't giving you low-quality shirts. I guess this was like a big practice at the time, where people would try to rip you off or something, but also has parts of military rules, security affairs as well, as part subsections that aren't as important for him in the sense of the space that he devotes to it.

But it is one of the main areas, security and military, that we tend to think about today. And here, you see that the opening sections of Kitab al-Ihtasib that you see here, this is the ahmiya, importance of the muhtasib before he then goes into the different sections.

I know we're out of time. So I think I will maybe just pause on those discussions of the myths of sectarianism and sects that it's important not to fall into what outsiders or what others, whether it's intentional or unintentional a lot of times as well, how they define dividing rule between Shia and Sunni Muslims and even the categories of Shia and Sunni Islam.

What I try to do today through this presentation is to provide a series of counter examples in both theories and methodologies and also hard historical examples that challenge at the very core root are definitions of divisions between Shia and Sunni Islam. Basically, so the more I study sectarianism as a scholar of sectarian Islam, the more I'm convinced that we don't have sects in Islam.

We have different leadership pathways. And that's an issue of salience about contextual-- centering salience in terms of how we understand the priorities that the Muslim rulers or the elite of that day understand in terms of their social and political order. These divisions that we think are between Shia and Sunnis are largely-- I didn't get into this here, but largely I think part of national-- the establishment of nationalism and fragmentation of political borders in the Middle East.

So the national-- basically, racist national projects, nation state projects are largely, I think, responsible for the growth of sectarian rhetoric today. They're not separate areas. And so I think I would really encourage all students that are interested in this to really keep an open mind when it comes to these issues, not also fall into debates that can be harmful for Muslim unity and humanity and-- unity among humanity in general.

So we'll have other symposium-- not symposium, but workshops like this as well next semester. Any suggestions from you guys as students what you're interested in. We're always very open. The project on Shi'ism is a resource for everyone here. So we want to make sure that we can really provide resources to students that are interested in these areas.

And so we're open-- we're open to any suggestions or needs. So I hope that there was found the workshop of interest. If are there any final comments, questions, I know--

AUDIENCE: You can go ahead, sorry.

AUDIENCE: Just on a personal level, what drew you to this topic because, I mean, it's a very interesting one and when I think about how I've seen people approach Islam, they start with that assumption that the sects are there. And then they start studying it. But you're going in the opposite direction. I'm just curious what drew you to this.

MOHAMMAD SAGHA: Yes, thank you. So I started with the same idea as like, I want to study Twelver Shi'ism. And I was interested in the minor ghayba [occultation]  period, when the 12th imam went to occultation. So I read all of these Twelver [Shi’a] works. And I found it very interesting. They're talking about the imams are going underground. You can't say the name of the imam. You can't-- and the way that they talked about their own organization and the imam, I found very fascinating.

Then I started to read other texts. And they sounded the exact same. So that really challenged me in my understanding of what Shi'ism is. I was raised in a post-9/11 environment in the US. So I was in elementary school when the 9/11 attacks happened. And then the Iraq war happened in 2003 right afterwards. That event really sectarianized discussion because there was mass targeting of Shia Muslims and sectarian warfare between Shia and Sunni in Iraq.

So it became much more aware of my own Shia background as my family comes from Iran. So really, I was just interested in trying to figure out where does this Shi'ism come from. And all these other Shia groups outside of Iran also were very fascinating to me because it challenged my normativity about Shia Islam being just in Iran.

So when I just read all of these counterexamples, I read what the 'Isma'ilis said about their imams. They're like, oh, yeah, they're also underground. You can't say their name. I read what Abbasids said about their imams. Oh, they're also underground. You can't say what their name is. So I started reading all of these things and realizing that they're all giving very similar narratives about who the imam is, what their strategies were.

And through that angle, I really started to challenge a lot of my own core assumptions of sectarian divisions and that led me into where I am today, which is that, as you mentioned, I have a completely different understanding of Islam and-- of sectarian division in Islam. And I really think that it's focusing on these aspects that I talked about, leadership. Interconnectedness is much more of a useful way.

And just on the last point, that modern sectarianism that has exploded in recent years with the Iraq war, with the growth of ISIS in Iraq and Syria really provided a shocking moment, as was mentioned earlier, really felt on the defensive as Shi'is, that our identity is being attacked by ISIS, that there are all these mess. And that can create a back to know where Shia is. Are we against Sunni?

But then, again, when I started to research this, it's like there are thousands-- there are tens of thousands-- Sunnis were hit more by ISIS than Shias were in many areas. The ISIS is-- the idea of Wahhabism, the way that it spread was really targeting, trying to capture the Sunni normativity in the center. And the biggest opponents of ISIS, theologically, and the origins are Hanbali Sunnis in the Arabian, so just-- everything is--

Not accepting what others are-- the narratives that are coming from the outside, it's very easy. I think today a lot of Sunnis and Muslims overall, they think Salafi or Wahabi-influenced Sunni Islam is a normative Islam, which is really not the case, generally speaking. And they're much more of a marginal group. And relatively a newer innovation, especially the Wahabi branch, that I didn't have time to go into the five minutes-- the five minutes article, I think, we try to talk about this a lot as well. But thank you. Thank you for the question.

AUDIENCE: So first, Thank you for this excellent presentation. I learned a lot, and I'm very grateful for your effort presenting this.

MOHAMMAD SAGHA: Thank you.

AUDIENCE: I have a comment. I'm interested in what you have to say about it. I guess this is me attempting to take this presentation and interpret it from a political economy lens. It seems that confessional ambiguity can be seen as a potential resource for political mobilization. And then when a weak state sees that it's beneficial to further utilize this potential resource in order to clearly create boundaries, it does so.

So for example, Nizam al-Mulk, technically, I mean, you can say that he creates [ARABIC] as equals before schools because before that, I mean, you had plenty of inter-- the Union, even really call themselves, [ARABIC] everyone claimed that. But the Hanafis were killing the Shafis in Ray and Isfahan. And even Abu Hadid records this very well.

And actually, he says that that's one of the reasons it was so easy for the Mongols to take over a lot of these Sunni Persian cities because Ahd al-Wahi and Ahd al-Sunni were fighting a lot, meaning the Hanafis and the Shafis in the area. But then in a critical-- Nizam al-Mulk finds it, OK, we have this confessional ambiguity. And we can create this common identity and form this super identity, which is quite powerful in that particular time.

For Zaydis, because their third element, they have periods where they're trying to merge themselves in a larger identity with sometimes Shia and other times with Sunnis. And because of their third identity, they're capable of [INAUDIBLE] bin Hamza does that with Sunnis. And he actually creates a lot of books very, very similar to al-Ghazali's. You see a lot of similarities between [INAUDIBLE] and Hayat Alumidin, and so on and so forth.

So it's seen as a potential resource to utilize depending on geopolitical need in a sense. And how do we deal with-- this sounds like a pretty nefarious interpretation of sectarianization. How do we deal with that? First of all, do you think that's true? And maybe you can challenge my current interpretation. And how do we deal with this kind of functionalist explanation of sectarianization?

MOHAMMAD SAGHA: I think-- that's a great question. And I think it really goes to the core of the intersection of religion and politics or state and politics. I think what I would say is that the utilization of different sectarian rhetoric, either as a means of creating division or unity is intrinsically tied in with the state, historically, in Islam. All historical examples we can see I think heavily point to that.

And we don't have the church sect dichotomy that we talked about or even church state. These things are much thicker. These things emerged historically for Muslim political organizations. I think what I would say is that I think it's important to look at-- I don't think-- I don't think we can offhand just dismiss all political state use of religion as necessarily illegitimate or as legitimate.

What I would say is that each case is independent and should be studied on its own terms. So what Nizam al-Mulk was trying to do? We should just go look keep an open mind and say, OK, did he actually-- was he able to achieve some of the objectives that were in his interest or in the interests of the Muslims at that time or in the interest of-- whose interests?

So what I would say is that because the core of sectarian disputes are about leadership that we have to judge each leader on his own credentials and what they were trying to do. I think these larger theories about just offhand dismissing or accepting everything, they don't necessarily-- they don't really work and they can create a lot of misperceptions that we can just outright just dismiss without even approaching.

And I would say that for across sectarian boundaries as well for Shias that are looking at so many cases or Sunnis that are looking at Shi'i cases. They might be surprised at how much similarity actually exists and how similar the objectives really are. And so one of the articles that I sent on the taqrib, Shia and Sunni scholars today are largely, I would say, structurally quite similar, what they want.

They want to regulate orthodoxy within the Muslim world, especially within their own particular sects. They're trying to wade off challenges to clerical hierarchy. They use each other as well, Sunnis and Shias, across the dividing line. They will use their ecumenical dialogue as a means to boost their own legitimacy internationally and within their own contexts.

So I think those was those-- the things that we think are divisive also should be also I think reestablished. So I think it's a broad answer that I gave that--

AUDIENCE: I think that's important. It should not be seen as nefarious. Everything should be judged on.

MOHAMMAD SAGHA: And it could be potentially nefarious or not. But I think just it depends on each case and really looking at it. And so, as you mentioned, one of the very interesting things about Nizam al-Mulk is that it really challenged a lot of my perceptions about political order, too. Nizam al-Mulk is going-- I would assume that he would wanted to de-emphasize Sunni divisions.

But you see in places, when he goes in Iraq, he intentionally is stirring the pot. And he's bringing up one Sunni madhhab leader across another, which causes riots to happen in that city. But then he's using that as a means to actually extend his authority. So it's really hard to judge some of these things historically. I think it's a really central question.

AUDIENCE: So this is really interesting, just putting it in the context of I'm taking Teren Sevea's class, "What Is Lived Islam?" And even though in that class, it's focused on the historiography of Islam and just spanning across the Muslim world beyond just the Arab world-- the Arab-Persian world. The class discussions-- it's a 2.5 hour class. So we could have a lot of discussions.

It often ends up into a giant debate between orthodoxy and heterodoxy. What's the theology versus what's actually lived Islam? Do people actually see the distinct-- do people even care about the distinctions, like, let's say, in South Asia between Hinduism and Muslim and Sufism.

I just-- it's a very different picture that's painted than what we're talking about here, which is a lot more unified and a lot-- the vibe is a little bit more kumbaya, to put it in simplistic terms versus what we've been reading. And I just-- I wanted to get your take on that.

MOHAMMAD SAGHA: Think it's a very central question, especially in religious studies, where there's as works by [INAUDIBLE] like, what is Islam really emphasizing. But I'm sure it's been a larger-- in the field of Islamic studies, it's been a large jumping point for debate. So I think that there are certain presumptions about what-- the opposition between lived Islam and then Orthodox Islam. So-- take care. Bye.

There's a tension namely between Orthodox Islam, which in this discourse generally is referred to as legalistic Islam or it's like the Islam of the jurists that are making these stricter rules of do's and don'ts versus lived Islam, which is, as you mentioned, might be seen as heterodox or non-normative, drinking of wine. Well, how do you deal with Muslims that are drinking wine or doing-- take care. Bye, or doing things that are legally forbidden?

I'm not sure that that debate is fully-- it's always useful when trying to understand sectarian differences. Sorry, what's that? We're just finishing up the discussion right now, so thank you. So the discussion that is-- it can be useful, I think, for how many Muslims might understand themselves. But it also might-- it also seems to say that legitimate Islam is how Muslims act. So it's how they live in their day-to-day, that's authentic, pure Islam. And it's orthodox for those people.

Many Muslims wouldn't necessarily agree with that, even those Muslims that are breaking the Sharia. So they would say that-- we know some-- again, it's very diverse. But some would say, yes, we know that we're not supposed to drink, or we're not supposed to do XYZ. We hope for God's forgiveness, but this is just our lifestyle, or they don't necessarily-- they don't have a-- they're not necessarily legitimizing it as a counter power move.

So these are some of the implicit means of that is that Muslims are breaking free of the shackles that are placed on them by the legal orthodoxy. And they're showing their defiance through the breaking of the law. That could be true for some people. For others, it just might be not a political discussion for them. It's more of a lifestyle comfortability that they are engaging in.

And people change throughout their lives as well. So some periods, they can have this lived Islam that might break Sharia. And other times, they lived Islam might be much more pious. For that same person, they might not see-- they see that as their own personal internal journey and idea of understanding what it means to be a human and how to connect back to God.

So the main thing that I would say is that as long as I think we should be careful about the theoretical presumptions about what lived Islam versus orthodox Islam are, and not over project that beyond spaces, where it might be more accurate, and then just take that-- universalize it as, OK, just Muslims, just they-- just want to be free and have fun.

And then these legal orthodoxies are just trying to constrain that. It could be true for some people. But for others. I think that's-- I think that dichotomy is not really necessarily that central of a dichotomy. There's other things that are more central or salient, I would say. I know that's a generic or a general answer. But it's a general theoretical point, too.

AUDIENCE: No, I appreciate it. It's a constant theme that comes up in class all the time. So I just want to get your take. I know you said that it's not necessarily useful in the conversation about sectarianism. But sectarianism often does actually come into those conversations in our class.

MOHAMMAD SAGHA: Definitely. And that's not to dismiss the usefulness of some of those distinctions. And it is a contribution to the scholarship overall. But I think-- there definitely does need to be more-- a lot of the scholarship in general, it is more elite-focused. So it will focus on learned scholars, and it requires specialization in Arabic, Persian, and these type of things that sometimes create barriers to entry to understanding Muslim societies that definitely, we do need more works on looking beyond this and looking into everyday lived realities.

So I think that is a very, very necessary part of the scholarship. And I think this-- but the way that it's been defined in Islamic studies, so far, is just one narrow definition of lived everyday Islam that focuses on wine poetry, and these type of things that are very important. But it's just-- it's just one branch of a very large endeavor, I would say.

AUDIENCE: You've definitely have read a lot of wine poetry. We've also watched documentaries about [INAUDIBLE] and just exploring different texts from Indonesia to different parts of Africa.

MOHAMMAD SAGHA: I mean, that's fascinating. I think that's great. Showing the diversity is wonderful. And we really need more of that to challenge what we think is normative Islam. It's difficult to do because like who knows Indonesian and Bengali and Bosniak. And it's like, it's very difficult to do all of that. But it's an important area. Thank you. Thank you.

Any final questions? I know it's been a long workshop. But hopefully, it was of interest. And please be in touch. Again, the project is very eager to keep in touch and hopefully continue these discussions. So there aren't any final questions, comments. Wonderful Thank you so much.

AUDIENCE: Thank you.

MOHAMMAD SAGHA: Appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]

NARRATOR: Copyright 2023, the President and fellows of Harvard College.