This book provides a narrative account of the life of Ali ibn Abi Talib, a central figure in early Islamic history. Ali is not as well known to Western audiences as Muhammad, but he played a critical role: the Muslim tradition sometimes likens his relation to Muhammad to that of Aaron to Moses. Ali was Muhammad’s cousin and, by virtue of his marriage to the Prophet’s daughter Fatima, his son-in-law. Ali was close to Muhammad from a young age, and is generally credited as being the second individual (after Muhammad’s first wife, Khadija) to embrace the new religious message contained in the revelations which became the Quran. After Muhammad’s death, Ali was recognized by most Muslims as the fourth leader of the nascent Muslim state, following the rule of three other close companions of the Prophet, and as the last of what Sunni Muslims eventually identified as the four “rightly-guided caliphs.”
For Shi`i Muslims, however, Ali is a figure of transcendent historical importance, the first of a series of divinely-inspired “Imams” endowed with knowledge making them authoritative guides for Muhammad’s community on all matters religious or political--although, other than Ali, none of those recognized by Shi`is as Imams (after Ali there were different claimants, around whom the competing Shi`is sects crystallized) ever wielded anything close to effective political authority. Consequently the difference between a Sunni and a Shi`i can be summarized as a disagreement over Ali’s historical role, and that of his (and, through Fatima, Muhammad’s) descendants after him. In the Shi`i view, the community’s failure to recognize Ali and his offspring as Imams constitutes the fundamental tragedy of Muslim history, when the community deviated from God’s plan for it. Abbas uses the life of Ali to tell the story of early Islam from a Shi`i perspective, walking the reader through Ali’s relationship to the Prophet, his contributions to the establishment of a Muslim community, his tortuous relations with the first three caliphs, the murder of the third caliph (Uthman) and subsequent civil war, the caliph Ali’s struggles with the first Islamic sectarian group (the Kharijis), his assassination by a Khariji in 661 CE, his descendants’ tense relations with the caliphs of the Umayyad family who followed the “rightly-guided” caliphs, and ultimately the brutal killing of Ali’s son al-Husayn, along with most members of his family, by an Umayyad army at Karbala in Iraq in 680 CE. It was the latter event, or rather the response to it of the partisans of Ali (shi`at `ali), which marked the emergence of a distinctive Shi`i sect.
Sunni Muslims may disagree with Shi`is over Ali’s cosmological role, but they nonetheless hold him in great esteem--he was, after all, by all accounts close to the Prophet and a major contributor to the Muslim community’s success in the years following Muhammad’s death. Consequently Abbas bends over backwards not to base his narrative exclusively on Shi`i accounts, but to cite Sunni sources, such as Muhammad ibn Idris al-Shafi`i (d. 820), founder of one of the four major schools of Sunni jurisprudence, and the traditionist Ahmad ibn Hanbal (d. 855). This is part of a larger goal of emphasizing points of commonality between Sunni and Shi`i Islam. In the chapter on “The Legacy of Ali,” for example, Abbas rightly points to the reverence for Ali which lies at the core of Sufi mysticism, which since the medieval period has played an important, even dominant role in Sunni expressions of piety and spirituality. Behind this one can detect a contemporary political objective, directed against the politicized revivalist movements commonly identified as “Salafism.” The Salafis’ dismissal of Shi`ism as a corruption of “true” Islam lies at the foundation of the oppression of the sizable Shi`i population in Saudi Arabia, and of the horrifically violent campaign of Sunni jihadists against the Shi`i community in Iraq in the years following the American invasion in 2003.
It is certainly understandable that the author would want to undermine the Salafis’ construction of Islamic history and identity. But the effort is sometimes stretched a little thin. It is true that Wahhabism, the “fundamentalist” movement founded by Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab in eighteenth-century Arabia and allied today with the Saudi state, has energized anti-Shi`i sentiment among Sunnis in the modern world. But it is a mistake to dismiss Ibn Taymiyya, a fourteenth-century theologian and jurist whose writings inspired Ibn Abd al-Wahhab, as “of little significance in his own time” (182). Sunni hostility to Shi`ism is not set in stone--it is not a constant feature of Sunni Islam--but it has manifested itself repeatedly across the centuries, and not simply as a product of modern Salafism. On the other hand, to cast ISIS’s hostility to Alid partisanship and devotion as a modern-day manifestation of the policies of Mu`awiya, the member of the Umayyad family who challenged Ali for leadership of the community and replaced him as caliph (166), is historically reductionist.
Nonetheless, there is a specifically Shi`i slant to the narrative, which manifests itself in various ways. The author follows a standard Shi`i exegetical approach to the Quran, understanding otherwise obscure verses of the holy book to refer to Ali and to affirm his status as God’s intended heir of the Prophet (although, where possible, he cites Sunni sources to support his claims). He naturally devotes considerable attention to the Prophet’s address to his followers at Ghadir Khumm, shortly before his death. His account follows the Shi`i narrative, according to which Muhammad used the occasion to identify Ali as his intended heir. To be sure, he acknowledges that “the Shia and Sunni have very different accounts” (97) of all that transpired just before and after Muhammad’s death and the tensions that erupted within the community over the question of leadership. Still, he takes it as settled fact that Muhammad “had declared Ali’s superiority over all other companions and referred to him as his heir and successor on many other occasions, especially at Ghadir Khumm” (95). To say that the book takes a Shi`i approach is not by any means a criticism: the Shi`i account of the question of leadership in early Islam--that is, of the role of Ali and his descendants--is not inherently any less plausible than the Sunni one. But readers who are not familiar with the differences in the Sunni and Shi`i narratives should bear in mind that the account in The Prophet’s Heir is not the only Muslim one.
The Prophet’s Heir is likely to be a very popular book. It is lively and well-written, which will make it accessible to the broad reading public. Non-specialist Western audiences will acquire a detailed and compelling narrative of the events of early Islam. That said, the book is not, strictly speaking, a work of history. The book does not engage with the exciting scholarship of the last four decades which explores the problematic nature of the sources on which the standard Muslim narratives rely (resulting from the fact that virtually all of the sources in which those narratives are embedded were composed long after the events they purport to describe), and which attempts to reconstruct the story of the origins of Islam in more convincing if less seamless ways. Some of the scholarship the author does cite is out-of-date: for example, Charles Cutler Torrey, DeLacy O’Leary, Sir John Bagot Glubb, and--oddly, as a source for Ali’s reaction to the murder of the caliph Uthman--Will Durant. (One important recent work on which he does rely heavily is Wilferd Madelung’s magisterial 1997 book The Succession to Muhammad: A Study of the Early Caliphate, a work which, not incidentally, is itself widely recognized as having a pronounced pro-Shi`i orientation.) Similarly, it is now widely accepted among historians that, whatever the contributions of a single individual such as Ali, the emergence of Islam cannot be explained outside the context of broader religious developments in the late antique Near East. In Abbas’s account, however, we learn little about that context, and Islam’s origins are treated as a self-contained development.
In a way, The Prophet’s Heir is more hagiographical than biographical. The account is full of dramatic but essentially speculative comments about Ali: for example, that “his touch allowed dead plants to blossom back to life, the scent he carried lingered in spaces even after his departure--so sweet, it put even the loveliest of flowers to shame. He was walking poetry, a breathing melody, an embodiment of elegance and grace: all a man could ever aspire to be” (30). This is perfectly fine, for hagiography, but the approach affects the book’s judgment concerning important historical questions. So, for example, Abbas repeatedly insists that Ali was a “unifier,” that he had an “undying commitment” to the unity of the community (129), and that “the idea of fighting for political power was beneath his spiritual status” (95)--despite the fact that, as the author’s own narrative makes clear, Ali refused to acknowledge the authority of Abu Bakr, whom the community had chosen (I use the term loosely) as Muhammad’s initial successor; that he played a fraught and confusing role in the whirlwind of events which resulted in the murder of Uthman (an event which resulted in his own elevation to the caliphate); and that he was, after all, the central figure in the community’s first fitna, or civil war. None of this is to disparage Ali, who is indeed a fascinating and compelling historical figure, or really, to criticize this book. For believers, hagiography plays an important role, and The Prophet’s Heir brings vividly to life the figure who sits at the center of the grand tradition of Shi`i Islam.