What if Shia Islam is the majority?

[guyverman1990]

Greetings once again my good sirs.

As we all know, within the Muslim world there are two main sects. These two are of course Sunni and Shia. The majority worldwide is Sunni, whereas Shia Islam is mostly confined to Iran, southern Iraq and the coastal range of the Levant. The key differences between the two sects is that Sunnis believe that anyone is eligible to hold authority as long as they hold the skill and experience, unlike Shias who only believe blood relatives of the Prophet Mohammed have legitimacy.

What if in an alternate history, Shia Islam becomes the majority instead of Sunnism? My idea for such a turning point is if Caliph Ali, the first cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet manages to avoid assassination in 661 AD. If this was the case, how would've Islamic history gone differently and how would this affect the present? One guess of mine is that judging how Shia-majority nations today such as Iran just so happen to be more secular than most of their Sunni counterparts, perhaps secularism would be marginally less restrained in developing in our timeline's Muslim world. Or maybe if Ali survives, maybe the would-be founders of the Sunni sect would be put down along with their followers and any major divide within Islam would be postponed. Rather than the onslaught of Sunni-Shia bickering that plagues the world today, maybe it would be between Shia Islam and Sufi Islam (assuming it still exists).

Do any of you care to explore what other differences this world could potentially have to offer? If so fill me in.

[MinnesotaNationalist]

I don't think you have to go that far back to have Shia in the majority among Muslims. I think all you need for A. The influential missionaries to be of the Shia sect and B. A couple more successful Shia uprisings like when the Safavids and Fatimids rose (even better, just have Fatimids hold on to power long enough to covert most of North Africa to Shia)

I'm not quite sure how much would really be different, honestly. Maybe someone who knows more about it can talk more

[guyverman1990]

In the present day, would the world's Sunni/Shia proportions of the total Muslim population be reversed? For example, Iran and The Levant being Sunni whereas everywhere else is Shia?

[gesar]

Alright, hold up. I think a couple things are being misrepresented here, and it's difficult to extrapolate on what the effect of a larger/dominant Shia population would have on Dar al-Islam without getting them in order first. Let's go down the list, yeah?

(Fair warning, this is about to be exhausting.)

The key differences between the two sects is that Sunnis believe that anyone is eligible to hold authority as long as they hold the skill and experience, unlike Shias who only believe blood relatives of the Prophet Mohammed have legitimacy.

Yes, this is the perfect answer: it's technically true without telling anything about what this actually means. First off, your definition is a little off: the Ayatollahs, etc. are still legitimate under the Shia school of thinking as authorities, and that they are (as the Twelve Imams were, and the Sunni conception of the Rightly Guided Caliphs) required to hold the same/similar skills and experience as would their Sunni counterparts. There is little different, functionally, in the hadiths involved as to what constitutes an appropriate leader, merely the original succession and the theology associated with that. Consider, this because...

One guess of mine is that judging how Shia-majority nations today such as Iran just so happen to be more secular than most of their Sunni counterparts, perhaps secularism would be marginally less restrained in developing in our timeline's Muslim world.

This is wrong on multiple levels, and the reasons you're wrong are important here. First off, "just so happen to be more secular" is inaccurate, when you consider the majority Shia nations of: Iran, with a state ideology that explicitly denies liberal democracy, Iraq, for whom secular leadership was only a plausible reality under a Ba'athist or other national-bourgeois government (and even that was a sham based on Sadaam's own protection to the Shia), Bahrain with its Sunni-based sharia law ruling over a (relatively radical) Shia population, and the plurality they have/had in Lebanon. Which is uh. Where Hezbollah and the Amal movement are from.

There are reasons for this.

Like I said, the early Shia (including the Zaidi, who will no longer be referred to as such unless it becomes relevant) were largely similar to the Sunni when it came to political and religious leadership, differing more aesthetically than anything. But as this progressed in the Abbasid revolts and under the influence of Ja'far al-Sadiq, Imamah as a principle began to be clearly defined as the Iman's total, infallible leadership of the religious and political spheres.

This might not seem like a big deal, as it is functionally the same thing in Sunni Islam. But here's the kicker: Islam has always had a political element, and that political element was (for better and worse) inseparable from the definition of what Islam is about. The very concept was of a global community, united under the word of the Prophet. I can't emphasize this enough. I just can't. The ulema defined, for all practical purposes, what it was to be a Muslim: it was from their rulings on the hadith and everything following them that Islamic law was derived, and even in the case of invading powers (i.e. the Turks) and the increasing proto-secularization in Sunni Islam (with the rise of the military and bureaucracy), where political power came from.

Point: Sunni Islam was already, by the time of al-Sadiq, the establishment. Every class of influence was tied to the Sunni ulema, and this was where we begin to see the prototype system of checks and balances that existed, one between the religious elite, the military elite, and the political elite (which is, sidenote, where the ultimate curiosity of the Abbasids later shows, when you could have quite potentially a Turkish Sultan, Arab scholars, and a Persian vizier all nominally cooperating).

The Shia had very little of this. By now, their interpretation of the word of the Prophet differed quite substantially from the Sunni and Abbasids, and where the Imamate would have had to step in with their own jurors, and so on.

So what would this mean for a world where the Shia became dominant? There's a couple answers here, although honestly, answering them is about as (if not more, considering the extra centuries one would have to cover) convoluted and speculative as guessing what would happen if the Protestant Reformation was weaker. So we'll take what minnesotanationalist said, answer it, and go from there:

It would have to be sooner rather than later, because it's after the death of Ja'far al-Sadiq that the Abbasids start to get their act together, and authority becomes centralized to the point where the real movers and shakers (the Buyids and Seljuks, whose military class becomes an utterly crucial role in the expansion and defense of Islam further west and east) had little trouble taking over the entire structure and guaranteeing the existence of the Islamic political class as we know it. But say it is in Ja'far's time, if not earlier, that the Shia gain the upper hand (in which case I would advise the First Fitna and the Kharijites as a point of deviation). The first, most important, and in some respects last difference is simple: the Shia now have the authority to make the Imam the true guide of the community, as according to their principles.

al-Sadiq was against this historically, being rather quiet politically, but he was also in no position to be making threats and demands of the Abbasids. But if he and his peers are the ruling elite of a large Islamic nation, you could expect there to be drastic changes in what was quickly an emerging bureaucracy. The nature of his position would demand no less, and that emerging proto-secular divide that was just beginning to make itself known would be reversed. There'd have to be, or you'd never reach your conclusion that Shia Islam would spread over Sunni Islam: instead, you'd see what happened with the Fatimids (highly, highly secular, due to the nature of its demographics, and ultimately a way of weakening the Caliphate itself), and Islam would take a route so divergent from history as to be predictable.

So to reach our long-winded conclusion, if the rise of the Shia was a gradual affair at first, only to supplant the Abbasids' own rise to power, you would have an immediate conflict that would depend largely on how quickly the state-military apparatus of the Sunni could be ground into submission. My own prediction? The Ummayads et al would hold on where they can, in the border regions (as they did in the west) and perhaps to Iran (where Shia Islam is a newer thing, and tied very much into Persian vs. Arab/Turkic identity). The territories the Shia do control become much more tied to the religious classes, and will stay that way until the Buyids and Turks invade, at which point the two would either have to be much more forceful in their subjugation (rather than integration) of the Arab conquerors, perhaps leading the way into what we could call a Fatimid-esque regime, or integrate so thoroughly as to avoid the pitfalls of the Seljuk/Abbasid/whoever else conflict.

This, of course, will coincide with the influence of the Sufis, which is more akin to a religious order or the practice of the Kabbalah, not a sect on its own. You could hardly expect to see it becoming a true rival to Shia domination, but conflict could arise from its mysticism (just as in real life)...or they could simply adopt more practices of each sect (just as real life). Maybe one would see more Shia schools than Sunni. Maybe the Ismailis would gain more influence. Hard to say.

What happens next, I guess, is dependent on all of the above. This is what happens when your question leads to more questions.

[abdulhadipasha]

Taking for granted that not many people will read Gesar's excellent essay, in a nutshell, Sunnis have a direct relationship with God, Shiites have the clergy as an intermediary. An analogy would be Protestantism vs. Catholicism, although there was no religious/secular divide, so there's no way to separate political and religious authority, so the ulema are always going to be a huge influence in the polity.

I think maybe that's where a lot of misunderstanding of the Sharia comes from - Westerners think religious law = Ten Commandments and all the stuff about not masturbating. While the Sharia has that too, that's canon law, which is a teeny element of it. The Sharia is mostly a framework for the generation of practical legislation employing case study, precedent, and analogy much like Common Law. That's why the last real Sharia-run state was... Israel, which didn't drop the Ottoman legal code until the 1980s. The nature of the Sharia is dependent on time and place. In the 19th c Ottoman Empire, it was considerably more liberal than Western law. English women had zero control over their own resources until the 1880s, for example, whereas Muslim women have had it since day one. In the revolutionary states that swept across the Islamic world c. 1800 (one of which evolved into - or perhaps more accurately degenerating into - Saudi Arabia.) the Sharia was something else entirely.

I think if the "Shiites" are victorious at the very beginning it won't make much difference because centuries haven't passed to cause differences to develop between Shiism & Sunnism, so wouldn't Shiism essentially just be Sunnism? Maybe there would be a greater emphasis on dynastic continuity, but it's hard to imagine one family maintaining control over the entire Islamic world for long under the circumstances of the early spread of Islam. Maybe the Caliph ends up being sidelined as a religious figure much like under the Mamelukes or the Japanese emperors before the Meiji Era - and I suppose that would give the Caliph colossal moral authority... but I'm not sure you can truly separate temporal and spiritual power in the Islamic world until the 19th c. when this was more or less unintentionally done by Abdul Hamid II.

Anyway, here are plenty of later times Shiism could have overtaken Sunnism - if Selim I had gone after Persia instead of the Mamelukes, the impetus to be champions of Sunni Orthodoxy would have been removed and the Ottomans would likely have continued to be Shia-ish. Even after that Sufi orders were extremely important. That would mean the Ottoman world would have been Shiite(ish?) and thus in the Mid East, at least, Shiism would predominate. On the other hand, if Selim went after Persia and won, you'd have a totally different Iran, which wasn't Shiite at the time. And in any case, I don't see the older parts of the Sunni world switching - just Anatolia and the Balkans, and there will be some legitimacy issues for Shiite rulers of Sunni lands, just as Sunni states have fared over Shiite populations.

[guyverman1990]

Feb 5, 2016 2:29:30 GMT abdulhadipasha said:

Maybe there would be a greater emphasis on dynastic continuity, but it's hard to imagine one family maintaining control over the entire Islamic world for long under the circumstances of the early spread of Islam.

Given the polygamous nature of Islam, One family could EASILY diversify into multiple sub-branches over the centuries. 

[guyverman1990]

Sorry for the double post, but anither idea came to mind. Since I'v noticed a frequency of comparisons to Shia Islam and Catholic Christianity, if the present day had a Shia majority, there would be a figure equivalent of a Pope claiming universal authority over all Shi'ites. Maybe this figure would possibly even be a Caliph.

In addition, maybe there might be an Islamic equivalent of a Protestant reformation, where people start challenging the Caliph's authority due to many people's desire to have a more direct relationship with God. Yes, I know Sunnism does it that way, but I'm talking about a radical change directly from within Shia Islam.