Buku After the Prophet

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Terbitan tahun 2009

At the beginning of the book, in the endorsement page, the publishers have included an excerpt from a review. One among many. It would have made for amusing reading had it not pointed to a devastating miscalculation: “Whether or not George Bush even knew there were such things as Shias and Sunnis before invading Iraq, after reading Lesley Hazleton’s gripping book no one will be able to plead ignorance about why the split between them happened and what it all means.”

Whether the American President knew it or not, I cannot tell! But I have a feeling that for most people in the non-Muslim world, even if they know, their knowledge is at best sketchy.

And that’s why we have reasons to thank Lesley Hazleton for After the Prophet: The Epic Story of the Shia-Sunni Split (Anchor Books, 2009). For putting together a historical saga, fourteen centuries-old, that continues to reverberate even today.

Prophet Muhammad had passed away leaving no succession plan behind. Ali, his son-in-law, might have been an ideal candidate, but was passed over. Relationship between Aisha, Muhammad’s youngest wife and Ali, had deteriorated sharply. After twenty-five years – after three Caliphs – Ali’s turn finally came. For a brief five years. Much had changed by then and rifts in the rank of the faithfuls had grown wider. And finally, with the killing of Hussein, Muhammad’s last grandson, in the field of Karbala, the rift became unbridgeable.

The rest, as they say, is history.

And the cliché-ridden expression was never more apposite.

Hazleton’s language is almost lyrical. As she puts it, “As with the death of Christ, the death of Hussein soars beyond history into metahistory. It enters the realm of faith and inspiration, of passion both emotional and religious.” (pp. 191 – 192)     

With the skill of a master story-teller, she takes us from the seventh century to the twenty-first with consummate ease. “As the centuries passed, Muslim power would center in Iraq, in Syria, in Persia, in Egypt, in India, in Spain, in Turkey, anywhere but Arabia, which became increasingly cut off, saved from reverting back to its pre-Islamic isolation only by the pull of the annual hajj pilgrimage. Arabia would not exert political power again for more than a thousand years, until the fundamentalist Wahhabi sect emerged from the central highlands in the eighteenth century to carry out violent raids against Shia shrines in Iraq and even against the holy places of Mecca and Medina. In alliance with the Saud family, the Wahhabi influence would spread worldwide in the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. Financed by oil wealth, Arabia – now Saudi Arabia – would regain the preeminence it had once held in Islam, aided and abetted by the Western thirst for oil even as it nurtured the Sunni extremists who would turn so violently against the West.” (pp. 132 – 133)

Whether or not Donald Trump even knew …!!

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