Who Are the Shia? The Full History, From 632 CE to Today

The Version You Have Probably Heard

Here is how the Sunni and Shia split usually gets explained.

The Prophet Muhammad (SAW) died. Some people wanted one person to lead, some wanted another. They have been arguing ever since.

That version is short, tidy, and misleading in almost every part.

It makes the split sound like a squabble that happened on a single afternoon. In reality it took roughly three hundred years for the two traditions to become what they are now.

It also skips the parts that are genuinely interesting, and the parts where the two sides agree far more than you would expect.

So let us do the real version.

One note before we start. (SAW) is short for sallallahu alayhi wa sallam — pronounced "sal-lal-LAA-hu a-LAY-hi wa sal-LAM". It means "may Allah's peace and blessings be upon him."

Muslims do not just write it after the Prophet's name. They say it out loud, every single time, as a small act of love that has been repeated for over fourteen hundred years.

If you are not Muslim, you are warmly invited to read it aloud too. No pressure at all.

You will also see (RA) after some names. That is radiyallahu anhu — "may Allah be pleased with him" — used for the Prophet's companions and family.

How This Article Handles the Hard Parts

This history contains real disagreements between Muslims. Pretending otherwise would waste your time.

So here is the approach. Where Sunnis and Shia tell the same story, you get one story.

Where they genuinely differ, you get both readings, each explained using its own scholars and its own strongest arguments. This article does not tell you which one won.

That is not dodging. On several of these questions, fourteen centuries of extremely clever people have failed to agree. It would be a bit odd for a beginner's article to settle that in a paragraph.

The rest of NoorIlm is written from a Sunni frame, and you should know that going in.

First, the Thing Nobody Mentions

The split did not start over God.

Both traditions believe in one God with no partners. Both believe Muhammad (SAW) is the final Prophet. Both pray toward the same Kaaba, fast in Ramadan, and read the same Quran.

The argument was about who should lead the community after the Prophet died. It was, at the beginning, a political question.

The theology came later — and understanding that it came later is the single most useful thing in this whole article.

632 CE: The Room at Saqifah

The Prophet (SAW) died in Medina in 632 CE, after a short illness.

He had not, as far as the Sunni tradition holds, named a successor out loud in a way everyone accepted. Within hours, that became a crisis.

A group of the Ansar — the Muslims of Medina who had taken the Prophet in when he migrated there — gathered in a roofed courtyard belonging to the Banu Sa'ida clan. The Arabic word for that courtyard is saqifah, and it gives the meeting its name.

They were meeting to choose a leader from among themselves.

Three men from the Muhajirun — the Muslims who had migrated with the Prophet from Mecca — heard about it and went straight there. They were Abu Bakr, Umar, and Abu Ubaydah ibn al-Jarrah (RA).

Abu Bakr (RA) argued that the Arabs would not accept a ruler from outside Quraysh, the Prophet's own tribe.

One of the Ansar, Habbab ibn al-Mundhir, proposed a compromise: two leaders, one from each group. It went nowhere.

Then Umar (RA) pledged allegiance to Abu Bakr, and others followed. Abu Bakr became the first caliph.

It Was Not a Calm Meeting

Scuffling broke out. One report preserves someone shouting "You have killed Sa'd ibn Ubada!" — the Ansar's own candidate, who was ill that day.

He had not been killed. But he never pledged allegiance to Abu Bakr, and he eventually left Medina for Syria.

What tipped the room was tribal. The Ansar were made up of two clans, the Aws and the Khazraj, who had a long rivalry. Sa'd was a Khazraj chief.

When Usayd ibn Hudayr brought the Aws over to Abu Bakr, it was partly because the Aws preferred a Qurayshi ruler to a Khazraji one.

The Detail That Changes Everything

Ali ibn Abi Talib (RA) was not in the room.

Ali was the Prophet's cousin, his son-in-law, and one of the first people to accept Islam. While the meeting at Saqifah was happening, he was washing and preparing the Prophet's body for burial, along with the rest of the Prophet's family.

Neither tradition disputes this. Sunni and Shia sources agree on where Ali was.

What they disagree about is what his absence means.

And a Detail From Umar Himself

Here is something that surprises people who assume the "it was rushed" complaint is a Shia invention.

Umar (RA) himself later called the pledge to Abu Bakr a falta — an Arabic word for something rushed, done in a hurry, not thought through. He added that God protected the community from the harm of it.

That is preserved in Sunni sources. So "it happened fast, under pressure" is not a Shia talking point. It is what one of the men in the room said about it afterwards.

The Two Readings

The Sunni reading. The community had no leader and the Prophet was not yet buried. A decision could not wait. Abu Bakr was the obvious man: the Prophet's closest friend, the one he had asked to lead the prayers during his final illness, and among the very first to accept Islam. The meeting was people consulting each other in an emergency, and the whole community confirmed it the next day with a public pledge in the mosque.

The Shia reading. A decision this big was made while the Prophet's own family was busy burying him. And it ignored an appointment that had already been made three months earlier (we will get to that next). Not everyone who pledged afterwards did so freely.

What historians say. Wilferd Madelung, whose The Succession to Muhammad is the standard academic book on this, argues that Abu Bakr's move looks planned rather than made up on the spot, and that the scuffling shows the Ansar really did resist. S. H. M. Jafri describes it as a small group's decision pushed onto everyone else, which worked because the Aws and Khazraj could not stand each other.

What Happened Next Is Also Not Disputed

Members of the Prophet's clan, Banu Hashim, gathered in protest at Ali's house.

Both Sunni and Shia sources record that Umar came with a crowd to compel their pledge, and that a threat was made to burn the house.

Here the accounts split hard. Shia sources hold that an assault on the house caused the Prophet's daughter Fatimah (RA) to miscarry, and contributed to her death. Sunni sources reject this.

This is one of the sharpest disagreements in all of Islamic history, and there is no version of it that both sides accept. This article is not going to pretend there is.

Ghadir Khumm, and One Contested Word

Just under three months before he died, the Prophet (SAW) was travelling back from the Farewell Pilgrimage.

The date was 18 Dhul-Hijjah, 10 AH — around 16 March 632 CE. The caravan stopped at a pool in a valley called Khumm, near al-Juhfa. The Arabic for pool is ghadir, which gives the event its name.

This spot mattered because it was a junction. It was where the pilgrim caravans separated to head for Egypt, Medina, and Iraq. If you wanted to say something to everyone before they scattered, this was the place.

The Prophet (SAW) halted the caravan, gathered the people, took Ali by the hand, and spoke.

Both Traditions Accept This Happened

This is worth pausing on, because it cuts against how these arguments usually go.

Whether Ghadir Khumm happened is essentially not in dispute between Sunnis and Shia. It is one of the most widely reported events in all of classical Islamic literature — what scholars call mutawatir, meaning so many separate people passed it on, through so many separate chains, that they could not all have agreed on a lie.

Ibn Kathir, a major Sunni scholar, confirms it as mutawatir and authentic.

The core wording is in the Sunni collections:

Hadith

“For whomever I am his Mawla, then Ali is his Mawla.”

— Jami' at-Tirmidhi 3713 — graded hasan gharib by al-Tirmidhi

So the event is agreed. The words are agreed. The argument is about what one word means.

What Mawla Actually Means

This is where articles usually cheat, in one direction or the other. So let us be precise.

Mawla comes from the Arabic root w-l-y, which is all about closeness. From it comes waliya, which means both "to be close to" and "to be in charge of."

And here is the problem. The word can point in either direction. It can mean the one who has the power — a master, a protector. It can also mean the one who is under that power — a servant, a freed slave, someone being looked after.

Ibn Manzur's Lisan al-Arab, the great classical Arabic dictionary put together around 1290 CE, lists over two dozen meanings for it. Among them: lord, master, chief, benefactor, freed slave, servant, ally, neighbour, cousin, in-law, follower, beloved, and helper.

That spread is genuinely there in the language. Neither side invented it to win an argument.

So if anyone tells you the word obviously means only one thing, in either direction, they are misrepresenting the Arabic.

The Shia Reading

Mawla here means master, leader, the one holding authority.

The method is elimination. Go through the possible meanings and cross off the ones that make no sense here — he is obviously not calling Ali a freed slave, a neighbour, or an in-law — and what is left is authority.

The strongest argument is about what comes immediately before the famous line. The Prophet first asks the crowd a question:

"Am I not awla — having more right, closer — to the believers than their own selves?"

They answer yes. Only then does he say "whoever I am his mawla, Ali is his mawla."

The Shia argument is that the first word fixes the meaning of the second. The authority just affirmed for the Prophet is what is being extended to Ali.

Scholars who argue this include al-Shaykh al-Mufid (d. 1022), al-Tusi (d. 1067), and in modern times Abd al-Husayn al-Amini, whose multi-volume al-Ghadir gathered the chains of transmission from Sunni collections as well as Shia ones.

Shia scholars also point to a report, carried in Sunni sources, that Umar congratulated Ali afterwards: "You have become the mawla of every believing man and woman." You only congratulate someone, they argue, if they have just been given something.

The Sunni Reading

Mawla here means friend, ally, one who is loved and supported.

The argument from context is specific and well supported. Shortly before this, Ali had led a military expedition to Yemen and had been strict about how the spoils were shared out. Some of the soldiers came back complaining about him.

Ibn Kathir ties the speech directly to those complaints. On this reading, the Prophet was publicly and unmistakably standing up for Ali in front of everyone, and shutting the grumbling down.

The theologian al-Baqillani (d. 1013) argued against the Shia conclusion directly, rejecting the idea that the awla in the question has to lock in the meaning of the mawla in the answer.

There is one more argument, and it is the one Sunni scholars actually lean on hardest. If a clear, binding, public appointment had been made in front of an enormous crowd less than three months earlier, why did the entire community — including Ali's own supporters — behave at Saqifah as though it had never happened?

The Shia answer is that they did not fail to hear it. They chose politics over it.

One More Honest Detail

There is a famous extra line that usually gets quoted alongside it — "O Allah, be a friend to whoever is a friend to him, and an enemy to whoever is an enemy to him."

That extra line is on weaker ground than the main sentence. In Musnad Ahmad, the person passing the report on says in his own words that the people added it afterwards.

That is not a Sunni attack on the phrase. It is a note sitting inside the report itself, preserved by the people who transmitted it.

So: the main sentence is solid. The extension is shakier.

Where This Leaves You

The event is agreed. The words are agreed. The meaning of one genuinely ambiguous word is contested, and classical Arabic does not settle it either way.

Anyone who tells you this is simple is selling something.

The Twenty-Five Years

Here is the cartoon version: Ali spent the next twenty-five years pushed aside, bitter, refusing to have anything to do with three caliphs he thought were frauds.

The sources do not support that. The real picture is more interesting.

He Did Not Pledge Immediately

This is the part that most surprises people, because it is not a Shia claim. It is in Sahih al-Bukhari, the most authoritative hadith collection in Sunni Islam.

The narration, from the Prophet's wife Aisha (RA), states plainly that Fatimah lived six months after her father's death, and that:

Hadith

“So Ali sought reconciliation with Abu Bakr and gave him an oath of allegiance. Ali had not given the oath of allegiance during those months.”

— Sahih al-Bukhari 4240-4241

The same narration records what Ali said to Abu Bakr's face when he finally did pledge:

Hadith

“We know well your superiority and what Allah has given you, and we are not jealous of the good what Allah has bestowed upon you, but you did not consult us in the question of the rule and we thought that we have got a right in it because of our near relationship to Allah's Messenger.”

— Sahih al-Bukhari 4240-4241

Abu Bakr wept, and replied that keeping good relations with the Prophet's relatives mattered more to him than with his own. Ali pledged publicly after the noon prayer, and Abu Bakr excused him from the pulpit.

Sunnis read this as a personal hurt about not being asked, settled honourably — not as Ali saying Abu Bakr had no right to rule. Some Sunni scholars also point to reports of an earlier pledge, and treat this one as a renewal of it.

Shia read this as confirmation of their whole case, in the other side's most trusted book.

One honest note: the Sunni sources are not fully consistent here. Reports of both an early pledge and a late one exist. Bukhari's is the strongest chain, and it says late.

Fadak

Fadak was a fertile oasis village about 150 kilometres north of Medina, known for its date palms.

To follow the dispute you need one piece of law, and it decides everything.

Khaybar was taken by force in 628 CE. Fadak surrendered without a fight the following year. Under the Quran's rule at 59:6-7, land that comes in without fighting — called fay' — was the Prophet's to direct personally, instead of being split up among soldiers the way battle spoils are.

So when the Prophet died, what happened to Fadak was a real legal question with no obvious answer.

Fatimah (RA) went to Abu Bakr. The sources actually record two separate claims here, and people mix them up constantly: that she should inherit her father's estate, and — the one Shia tradition stresses — that Fadak had already been given to her as a gift while he was alive, which would mean it was never part of the estate at all.

Abu Bakr's answer was a hadith he said he had heard from the Prophet directly:

Hadith

“Our property is not inherited. Whatever we leave, is Sadaqa, but the family of (the Prophet) Muhammad can eat of this property.”

— Sahih al-Bukhari 4240-4241

Do not skip the second half of that sentence. What it says is not "the family gets nothing." It says the estate does not get handed down as private property — but the family is still supported out of it.

The Sunni reading. Abu Bakr was applying a ruling from the Prophet that he had no authority to overrule, and it comes down through several companions rather than resting on one man's word. He also said he would not change anything about the Prophet's charity from how it had stood in his lifetime.

The Shia reading. One report cannot cancel the Quran's general rules about inheritance — and the Quran elsewhere talks about prophets inheriting, as at 27:16, where Solomon inherits from David. And if Fadak was a gift given during the Prophet's life, then the inheritance rule never applied to it in the first place.

The Part Sunni Sources Record Themselves

The same Bukhari narration says that Fatimah became angry with Abu Bakr, kept away from him, and did not speak to him until she died.

It adds that when she died, Ali buried her at night without informing Abu Bakr, and prayed over her himself.

That is in the Sunni tradition's own most trusted collection. This article is not going to soften it, and it is not going to take a side either — Abu Bakr was not a thief, and Fatimah was not confused. Two people the tradition holds in the highest possible regard ended up on opposite sides of a painful legal dispute.

One later detail worth knowing: Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz (ruled 717-720), an Umayyad caliph deeply respected in Sunni tradition, gave Fadak back to Fatimah's descendants to put the matter right.

So What Did Ali Actually Do for Twenty-Five Years?

Not boycott. Not govern either.

Under Abu Bakr and Umar he held no government post and did not lead armies in the conquests. But they came to him for advice, over and over, on legal questions and court cases.

He is credited with proposing that the Islamic calendar should count from the Hijra, the migration to Medina. That proposal was adopted, and it is the calendar Muslims use today.

His political advice was often not taken. And when Umar was dying, he put Ali on the six-man council that picked the next caliph — so Ali was a recognised candidate for the job, not someone pushed to the edges.

Under Uthman (RA) he criticised the government openly, especially the posts handed to Uthman's Umayyad relatives. That criticism is recorded in Sunni sources too.

But he refused to lead the rebels. He worked as a go-between, and personally stood behind the deal that ended the first siege of Uthman's house.

And here is the detail that finishes off the cartoon version: when the siege started again, Ali's son Hasan was wounded defending Uthman's home.

Ali also named three of his sons Abu Bakr, Umar, and Uthman.

The honest summary is that Ali was a respected senior figure outside the government whose advice was sought constantly. He was neither bought off nor in rebellion.

The First Civil War

In June 656 CE, rebels from Egypt and Iraq killed Uthman (RA) in his own house in Medina. They were angry about how he handed out governorships to his relatives, and about who controlled the money coming in from the conquests.

Ali was recognised as caliph the next day. He had hesitated before accepting.

And then everything came apart — over one question that sounds small and was not.

The Question Nobody Could Answer

Uthman had been murdered. In Islamic law that is not only a tragedy. It is a case, and there is a procedure for it.

The Quran gives the dead man's family a specific right:

Quran

“And do not kill the soul which Allah has forbidden, except by right. And whoever is killed unjustly, We have given his heir authority, but let him not exceed limits in taking life. Indeed, he has been supported.”

— Surah Al-Isra 17:33

The word translated "heir" is wali — the closest surviving relative, the person with the standing to demand justice for the death.

So on paper the path was obvious. Find the killers. Try them. Let Uthman's family claim what the law allows.

Nobody could manage the first step.

The rebels had arrived as a crowd, from three different provinces. The specific men who struck Uthman were never reliably identified.

The ones people suspected were shielded by their own tribes. In seventh-century Arabia, handing a man over to be executed meant war with everyone related to him.

And there was a worse problem. Those same rebels were still in Medina, still armed, and they were part of the group that had just made Ali caliph.

Ali's position was that he could not execute men he could not name, and that no court existed anywhere that could name them for him. Whether that was principle or weakness, Muslims have argued about ever since.

What is not arguable is the effect. An unpunished killing left a door standing open, and anyone who wanted power could now walk through it while sincerely believing they only wanted justice.

Two different groups walked through it. That is the whole civil war.

The Battle of the Camel, 656 CE

The first group was led by Aisha (RA), the Prophet's widow, together with Talhah and Zubayr (RA), two senior companions.

All three demanded that Ali punish Uthman's killers immediately. When he did not, they left for Basra in Iraq and took the city, intending to raise an army and do it themselves.

Awkwardly, Talhah and Zubayr had already pledged allegiance to Ali. So this was not a rival claim to the caliphate. It was a demand that the caliph enforce a law he said he could not yet enforce.

Ali marched to Basra and the two sides met in December 656.

The battle is named for Aisha's camel, because her forces gathered around it and kept fighting as long as it stood.

Ali won. Zubayr left the field before the fighting and was killed anyway. Talhah was killed by an arrow reportedly shot from his own side, by Marwan ibn al-Hakam.

Afterwards Ali pardoned everyone, freed the prisoners, and sent Aisha back to Medina under escort and with honour.

This was the first full battle of Muslims against Muslims, with companions of the Prophet on both sides. It is hard to overstate what that did to the community.

Siffin, 657 CE

The second group was one man with an army.

Mu'awiya ibn Abi Sufyan was the governor of Syria, and he was Uthman's relative. Ali dismissed him from the post. He refused to go.

His argument was the legal one above, and this is the part usually skipped. Mu'awiya publicly declared himself Uthman's wali — the next of kin with the right to demand blood for blood — and quoted that exact verse to the Syrians. They pledged allegiance to him on that basis.

So he was not, at this stage, claiming to be caliph. He was claiming that the caliph was sheltering murderers, and that the law gave him the right to say so.

The two armies met at Siffin, on the Euphrates, in July 657. The fighting was heavy and settled nothing.

Then Mu'awiya's men did something clever. They fixed copies of the Quran onto the tips of their spears and called out for the Book of God to judge between the two sides.

It was a brilliant move, and here is why it worked. Ali's soldiers were being asked to keep killing fellow Muslims who were holding up the Quran and asking for arbitration. Many of them simply stopped.

Ali saw through it and said so. His own army forced him to accept anyway, against his judgement.

What "Arbitration" Actually Meant

The word does a lot of work here, so it is worth slowing down.

Arbitration means each side picks one man to represent it, the two men sit down together, and both sides agree in advance to accept whatever the two decide.

Ali's army chose Abu Musa al-Ash'ari — not Ali's own preference, but the Kufans insisted. Mu'awiya chose Amr ibn al-As, his sharpest political operator.

The agreement was signed in August 657. The two men were to settle the conflict by the Quran and the Sunnah, and stop the community tearing itself apart.

They met at a desert oasis called Dumat al-Jandal around March 658.

The Verdict, and Why It Was a Disaster

Amr opened with a narrow question rather than the big one: was Uthman killed wrongfully, or not?

Abu Musa agreed that he was. He seems to have meant it as a goodwill gesture — give a little, get a little, and then settle the real question of who leads.

He got nothing back. Amr then blocked every proposal about the leadership, and the meeting broke up with nothing agreed.

Now look at what Abu Musa had actually signed away.

Mu'awiya's entire case rested on two claims: that Uthman was killed unjustly, and that he himself was the next of kin entitled to act on it. An official ruling had just handed him the first one, and the second followed from it.

He had walked in as a governor refusing to resign. He walked out with a legal finding that his war was justified.

Madelung's assessment is blunt — the verdict "was a political deal, not based on a judicial investigation," and Abu Musa was naive enough to think Amr was negotiating in good faith. (The Succession to Muhammad, Cambridge University Press, 1997, pp. 255–56.)

When the Kufans present understood what had happened, they turned on Amr physically. One of them, Shurayh ibn Hani, went at him with a whip, and said afterwards that his only regret was not using his sword.

Abu Musa fled to Mecca in disgrace. Ali declared the ceasefire dead and disowned him.

The Famous Scene That Happened Later

You will often read a dramatic version of this: the two judges agree privately to remove both Ali and Mu'awiya, Abu Musa announces it first as agreed, and then Amr stands up and confirms Mu'awiya instead, tricking him in public.

That scene is real, but it belongs to a second meeting, at Adhruh in Jordan, around January 659 — and by then the arbitration was already dead.

Ali had walked away months earlier and no longer recognised Abu Musa as his representative at all. The second meeting was called by Mu'awiya, on his own territory, with him present.

Madelung reads the whole scene as staged in advance, and argues its target was not Ali — who had already denounced the process — but the respected neutral figures from Medina who had been promised a genuine council and were being shown, publicly, that they would not get one.

So the popular telling gets the drama right and the meaning wrong. Ali did not lose the caliphate to a clever trick in a tent. He lost ground steadily, over a year, starting with a single sentence about Uthman that his own representative agreed to give away.

The Third Group

Meanwhile something else had happened, and it is the strangest turn in the whole story.

The men who had forced Ali to accept arbitration turned on him for accepting it.

Around twelve thousand of them walked out of his army and camped at a place called Harura, outside Kufa.

Their reasoning was religious and very short. Judgement belongs to God, and God had already spoken. Handing His case to two men to decide was itself a sin, and Ali had committed it.

Their slogan was la hukma illa li-llah — "judgement belongs to God alone."

They became known as the Kharijites, from the Arabic khawarij, "those who go out."

And their position hardened into something with no brakes. Any Muslim who commits a major sin, they held, stops being a Muslim. Ali had sinned, so Ali was no longer a Muslim. Neither was Mu'awiya. Neither was anyone who disagreed.

And the blood of a non-Muslim in rebellion, on their reading, was lawful. They began killing people, including civilians.

Ali defeated them at Nahrawan in May 658. It did not end them. It gave them martyrs.

This is the part most summaries miss entirely. The first civil war did not produce two groups. It produced three: what became Sunni Islam, what became Shia Islam, and the Kharijites.

661 CE

In January 661, a Kharijite named Abd al-Rahman ibn Muljam struck Ali with a poisoned sword in the Great Mosque of Kufa, during the morning prayer, in revenge for Nahrawan.

Ali died of the wound two days later.

He had been caliph for four and a half years and had spent nearly all of it fighting other Muslims.

Mu'awiya took the caliphate, moved the capital to Damascus, and founded the Umayyad dynasty.

Hasan, and a Treaty With One Crucial Clause

Ali's son Hasan (RA) was declared caliph in Kufa and ruled for roughly seven months.

His position fell apart for three reasons, all of them recorded: a Kharijite tried to kill him and left him badly wounded, his soldiers deserted in huge numbers, and his own army commander was bought off by Mu'awiya for a million dirhams.

So in 661 he stepped down, and signed a treaty instead.

The terms, as reported by Jafri: Mu'awiya would rule by the Quran and the Sunnah, Hasan's supporters would be left alone, and — this is the one that matters — after Mu'awiya died, the next leader would be chosen by a council, not handpicked by him.

Remember that last condition. Everything that follows comes from it being broken.

The Prophet (SAW) had, years earlier, said something about Hasan from the pulpit that reads remarkably in hindsight:

Hadith

“This son of mine is a Sayyid (i.e. chief), and I hope that Allah will help him bring about reconciliation between two Muslim groups.”

— Sahih al-Bukhari 3746

Hasan died around 670 CE. The sources give dates ranging across more than a decade, so the year is genuinely uncertain.

Most early sources say he was poisoned, and Madelung notes they are nearly unanimous about it. The argument is over who arranged it, not really over whether it happened. Shia tradition holds Mu'awiya responsible, and Madelung finds that believable, since Hasan being alive stood in the way of Yazid taking over. Some early Sunni sources mention only illness. It cannot be settled for certain.

Karbala, 680 CE

In 676 CE, Mu'awiya named his son Yazid as the next ruler.

That was the first time in Islamic history power passed from father to son, and it broke the treaty Hasan had signed.

Mu'awiya died in April 680. Yazid demanded pledges of allegiance. Husayn (RA) — Ali's younger son, the Prophet's grandson — refused, and left Medina for Mecca.

The Invitation

Letters began arriving from Kufa in Iraq, inviting Husayn to come and lead them.

He sent his cousin Muslim ibn Aqil ahead to find out whether the support was real. At first it looked like it was — large numbers pledged themselves to him.

Then Yazid sent in a new governor, Ubaydullah ibn Ziyad, who broke the whole movement with a mix of threats and bribes. Muslim was pushed into rising too early, abandoned by nearly everyone who had pledged to him, and executed.

The news reached Husayn when he was already on the road.

He Left the Hajj Unfinished

Husayn departed Mecca in September 680 with around fifty men plus his family.

He left before completing the Hajj, converting his pilgrimage to the shorter umrah — reportedly because he feared being assassinated inside the sanctuary itself.

That detail tells you how the situation felt to him.

Surrounded

Near al-Qadisiyya, about a thousand cavalry under al-Hurr ibn Yazid cut him off.

Husayn showed them the letters from Kufa. It changed nothing. He was blocked from reaching Kufa and blocked from turning back, and was steered out onto flat open country.

He arrived at Karbala on 2 October 680. Access to the Euphrates was cut off in the days that followed.

The battle was on 10 Muharram, 61 AH — 10 October 680 CE. That day, Ashura, is why the date matters to this day.

What Happened

The Umayyad force was commanded by Umar ibn Sa'd, under Ibn Ziyad's authority. Umar ibn Sa'd is reported to have been reluctant; Shimr ibn Dhi'l-Jawshan pressed for the assault and forced the issue.

Husayn's half-brother Abbas carried the standard.

Husayn was killed and beheaded.

About the numbers. The traditional figure for Husayn's party is 72 fighting men, and it stays the same across the sources. But notice that the same number is also given for how many were killed — which suggests it is a remembered list of named martyrs rather than an actual headcount. The Umayyad force is usually reported at 4,000, and in some Shia sources as high as 30,000. None of these figures can be checked. What nobody disputes is that one side massively outnumbered the other.

Historians do not even agree on how long it took. Henri Lammens thought it was over inside an hour; Madelung and Wellhausen hold that the fighting ran from sunrise to sunset.

The Survivor Everything Depends On

Husayn's son Ali ibn Husayn survived, because he was too ill to fight.

He was twenty-three, not a child — that is the detail people get wrong most often.

Shimr wanted him killed. Umar ibn Sa'd stopped it. Later, in Kufa, Ibn Ziyad ordered him executed and then backed down when his aunt Zaynab begged for his life.

He is known as Zayn al-Abidin, and in Shia reckoning he is the fourth Imam. Every Imam after him descends from one sick young man who was spared twice in the same week.

Husayn's sister Zaynab also survived. Taken prisoner to Kufa and then to Yazid's court in Damascus, she is remembered for the speeches she gave publicly in both cities — speeches that turned a crushing military defeat into a moral accusation that has never stopped being repeated.

Her part in getting the story out is a large reason Karbala became what it became, rather than fading into the long list of seventh-century massacres.

What Sunni Scholarship Actually Says About This

Many readers assume Sunnis defend Yazid. They do not.

Sunni scholarship condemns the killing of Husayn. It is treated as an atrocity across Sunni literature. The internal Sunni argument is narrower than people think: it is about whether Yazid may be individually cursed by name.

Some say yes. The Hanafi school allows it. Ibn al-Jawzi, a Hanbali scholar who died in 1201, actively encouraged it and wrote a whole book defending the practice — the title translates roughly as "Refutation of the Stubborn Fanatic Who Forbids Criticising Yazid."

Others say no, and their reason is narrow. Al-Ghazali held that cursing Yazid is not allowed because he was a Muslim and it cannot be proven he personally ordered the killing. Look at the shape of that argument: it is a rule about when you may curse a named Muslim. It is not a defence of Karbala.

Ibn Taymiyyah gets misquoted here in both directions. He held that Yazid was "a king among kings" — not to be loved the way righteous people are loved, and not to be cursed either — and he put the decision down to Ibn Ziyad. But he also blamed Yazid for never punishing the killers. He was arguing about how far condemnation should go, not letting anyone off.

And the early Sunni historian al-Baladhuri called Yazid amir al-fasiqin — "commander of the sinners." That is a deliberate insult, twisting the caliph's actual title, amir al-mu'minin, commander of the faithful.

What came next finished Yazid's reputation off completely. In 683 his troops crushed the people of Medina and looted the city, and during his siege of Mecca the Kaaba caught fire.

What Is in Bukhari

There is no hadith in Bukhari or Muslim that foretells Karbala. Reports of that kind exist elsewhere, and their gradings are contested, so this article leaves them alone.

What is in Bukhari is the aftermath, and it is more powerful anyway.

Ibn Umar (RA) was asked a trivial question about ritual purity by a man from Iraq — whether the blood of a gnat invalidates it. His response was not about gnats:

Hadith

“They killed the grandson of the Prophet (SAW), and I heard the Prophet (SAW) saying, They (i.e. Hasan and Husain) are my two sweet basils in this world.”

— Sahih al-Bukhari 3753

The Prophet's love for these two grandsons is recorded plainly in the Sunni collections. He carried Hasan on his shoulder and said "O Allah, I love him, so love him" (Sahih al-Bukhari 3749). Of Husayn he said, in a report graded hasan by al-Tirmidhi, "Husayn is from me and I am from Husayn" (Jami' at-Tirmidhi 3775).

That is what makes Karbala land the way it does. It was not an anonymous political killing.

From a Party to a Religion

Karbala did not create Shia Islam in a single afternoon. What it created was a martyr, a grave people visited, a date on the calendar, and a way of talking about right and wrong.

Everything else — the organisations, the rituals, the doctrine — took centuries. And you can actually watch it happen, step by step.

The Penitents

The people of Kufa had invited Husayn and then failed to show up for him. Some of them could not live with it.

A group formed under Sulayman ibn Surad al-Khuza'i, a companion of the Prophet. The first meeting, around 680 CE, was roughly a hundred Kufans — all of them aged sixty or over.

They called themselves the Tawwabun, the Penitents. Their slogan was "Rise to avenge the blood of Husayn."

They stayed hidden for years, then marched out in 685 with about three thousand men against an Umayyad army of twenty thousand. They were wiped out at Ayn al-Warda. Sulayman was killed.

Here is what matters about them. Their plan made no military sense and barely any political sense. They marched expecting to die, because dying was the point. They were trying to pay for having failed him.

Jafri calls them the first properly organised Shia group. They also gathered at Husayn's grave on the first anniversary to mourn and recite poems for the dead — the earliest recorded version of both the pilgrimage and the yearly mourning.

That is the exact moment a political faction turns into something religious. Guilt, grief, and paying a debt you can never fully pay.

The Avenger

In 685, al-Mukhtar al-Thaqafi seized Kufa in the name of Muhammad ibn al-Hanafiyya, another son of Ali, whom he proclaimed as the Mahdi — the guided one, a promised future deliverer.

Mukhtar hunted down and executed the men responsible for Karbala, including Umar ibn Sa'd and Shimr. Ibn Ziyad was killed in battle in 686. Mukhtar himself died fighting in 687.

His followers, the Kaysaniyya, came up with two ideas that would matter enormously later: that a leader could go into hiding instead of dying, and that he would come back.

Historians disagree sharply about Mukhtar. Wellhausen called him one of the greatest men in Islamic history; Sachedina calls him an ambitious politician who played on people's religious feelings.

The Rituals Came Much Later

This surprises people, so it is worth being precise about the dates.

In the beginning, mourning was private — gatherings in houses, led by the women who had survived, above all Zaynab.

Through the Umayyad period it stayed small and was actively shut down. Under the Abbasids, books about the killing spread and more people made the journey to Karbala — but the caliph al-Mutawakkil knocked Husayn's shrine down and made visiting the grave punishable by death.

The first documented public Ashura procession was in Baghdad in 963 CE, under the Buyid ruler Mu'izz al-Dawla. Markets closed and black-clad mourners filled the streets.

That is roughly 280 years after the event itself.

The passion plays known as ta'ziya are later still, developing in the Safavid period from the sixteenth century onward.

So when you see Ashura observed today, you are not looking at something that started in 680. You are looking at something that took three centuries to find its public form.

So What Is a Twelver?

Most Shia Muslims in the world today are Twelvers, or in Arabic Ithna Ashari.

The name is simple. They recognise a line of twelve Imams, beginning with Ali and ending with a twelfth who they believe is still alive and hidden.

Here is the line, briefly.

Ali (d. 661), then his sons Hasan (d. around 670) and Husayn (killed at Karbala, 680). Then Husayn's son Zayn al-Abidin, the Karbala survivor, who died around 712-714 and is remembered for a famous collection of supplications.

Then Muhammad al-Baqir (d. around 735), whose title means "the one who splits open knowledge." A nice detail: his mother was a daughter of Hasan, so he descends from both of the Prophet's grandsons.

Then Ja'far al-Sadiq (d. 765), who matters more than any of the others for everyday religious life.

Ja'far al-Sadiq Deserves His Own Paragraph

He is the reason Shia law is called the Ja'fari school.

He lived his whole life in Medina and stayed out of politics, turning down three separate rebellions. What he did instead was teach, and most of Shia law and theology traces back to him.

Two things about him complicate the tidy sectarian story.

First, on his mother's side he was a descendant of Abu Bakr — the very caliph at the centre of the original dispute.

Second, the great Sunni legal scholar Malik ibn Anas passes on hadith from him. That is not something borrowed from Shia sources — you can find the chains in Malik's own Muwatta, mostly about the rituals of Hajj.

You will often read that Abu Hanifa and Malik "studied under" him. Be a little careful with that one. Malik passing on hadith from him is solid and checkable. The claim about Abu Hanifa being his student rests on much less, and the famous quote about it only turns up in a book from the nineteenth century — so treat it as a later compliment rather than something anyone recorded at the time.

One more warning. There was no organised "Ja'fari school" while he was alive. The name got attached later to a body of teaching that came from him — and he is actually reported as rejecting the kind of systematic legal reasoning a Sunni-style school is built on.

The Rest of the Line

After Ja'far's death in 765 the community split, and we will come back to that split shortly.

Most followed Musa al-Kazim (d. 799), whose title comes from a phrase in the Quran meaning "those who hold their anger in." He quietly ran a network of money collectors across the empire while the Abbasid government leaned on him, and died in prison in Baghdad.

Then Ali al-Rida (d. 818), the only Imam ever named as heir to the caliphate — the Abbasid caliph al-Ma'mun picked him in 817, an extraordinary experiment that did not last. He is buried at Mashhad in Iran, and a city grew up around his shrine.

Then Muhammad al-Jawad (d. 835), Ali al-Hadi (d. 868), and Hasan al-Askari (d. 874).

The last two are called al-Askari because the government made them live at Askar Samarra, an army town, where they could be watched. People often call this house arrest, which is too strong — they moved around the town freely, kept their networks running, and bought property there.

The Crisis That Made Everything Else Possible

When Ali al-Rida died in 818, his son al-Jawad was seven years old.

This was the first time Shia Islam had no grown man available to be Imam, and it caused what the sources call hayra — mass confusion. People gave up and left.

How it got resolved is specific and datable. Around eighty of the leading supporters met in Baghdad, at the house of Abd al-Rahman ibn al-Hajjaj, and decided the boy was qualified after all.

Their argument came from the Quran — that Jesus (AS) spoke while he was still a baby:

Quran

“So she pointed to him. They said, How can we speak to one who is in the cradle a child? He said, Indeed, I am the servant of Allah. He has given me the Scripture and made me a prophet.”

— Surah Maryam 19:29-30

The view that won was that a child Imam and an adult Imam are exactly equal, because the knowledge is given by God rather than picked up through study.

Hold onto that, because it is what makes the next part possible to survive.

The Occultation

First, the word, because it is an odd one and nobody explains it.

Occultation just means hiding. It comes from the same root as "occult," meaning hidden or concealed. When you read that an Imam "went into occultation," it means he disappeared from public view and has stayed hidden ever since.

Now the story.

Hasan al-Askari, the eleventh Imam, died in Samarra on 1 January 874. He was about twenty-eight.

The Twelver tradition holds that he had a son, Muhammad, born a few years earlier and kept out of sight for his own safety — deliberately given the same name and title as the Prophet.

That son did not die. He went into hiding, and he is alive right now. He is called al-Mahdi, al-Qa'im, and sahib al-zaman, the master of the age. At the end of time he will return and fill the earth with justice.

How the Hiding Is Described

Shia tradition splits it into two stages.

The Lesser Occultation, 874 to 941, when the Hidden Imam could still be reached — through four deputies, one after another, who passed messages and money back and forth. The first was Uthman ibn Sa'id, known as "the butter dealer," who is said to have smuggled the community's funds out hidden inside bags of butter.

The fourth deputy died in 941. Six days before his death he produced a final message telling him to appoint nobody after him. That is where the Greater Occultation begins, and it has run ever since.

The theology behind all this was worked out over the following century by al-Mufid (d. 1022), al-Sharif al-Murtada (d. 1044), and al-Tusi (d. 1067).

What Historians Say

Academic historians read this differently, and it would be dishonest to leave that out.

There is no outside record from the time saying the eleventh Imam had a son. Etan Kohlberg has shown that the two earliest Shia accounts of the period — both written by insiders within about forty years — never say the Imams number twelve, never mention two stages of hiding, and cannot even agree on a name for the twelfth. They also contradict each other about whether the child was a toddler or a grown man.

So the historians' picture is of a belief that came together slowly over the decades after 874, rather than one that existed fully formed on the day.

There is a striking piece of support for that from inside the tradition itself. Ibn Babawayh, one of the two great classical writers on the subject, says in his own introduction that he wrote his book because he was being flooded with questions from the Shia of Khorasan who did not know who the Hidden Imam was.

And there is an earlier example worth knowing. When the seventh Imam died in prison in 799, some of his own agents denied he was dead, held onto the community's money, and said he would come back as the Mahdi. The idea of a hidden leader who returns already existed, and had already been tried once.

Sunnis Are Waiting for a Mahdi Too

This surprises almost everyone, so it is worth saying clearly.

Sunnis also believe a Mahdi will come. The difference is what kind of person he is.

For Twelver Shia, the Mahdi is a specific historical individual, born in the ninth century, alive now, in hiding. This belief is not a side issue — it is close to the centre of the whole theology.

For Sunnis, the Mahdi is a future figure not yet born, expected to be a descendant of the Prophet through Fatimah and Ali. And it sits much lighter: the Mahdi is not mentioned in the Quran, nor in Bukhari or Muslim, and appears in only three of the six main Sunni hadith collections. Some Sunni scholars, including Ibn Khaldun, questioned the idea of a separate Mahdi figure altogether.

So both traditions await a deliverer. One is waiting for someone to return. The other is waiting for someone to be born.

The Other Branches

Not all Shia are Twelvers. Two other branches survived, and each split at a specific succession.

Zaydis, the Fivers

After the fourth Imam, his son Zayd ibn Ali went a different way from his brother al-Baqir. He refused to quietly live with Umayyad rule, rebelled, and was killed — Madelung dates his death to January 739, though you will often see 740.

The people who followed him are the Zaydis, sometimes called Fivers because their line of Imams branches off at the fifth.

What they believe is strikingly different from Twelver Shiism, and much closer to Sunni Islam.

They do not believe the Imams are sinless or incapable of error. They reject the whole idea of a hidden Imam. And any qualified descendant of Hasan or Husayn can be Imam — there is no fixed, pre-appointed line.

Most importantly, a real Imam has to actually rise up in arms against unjust rule. An Imam who sits quietly is not an Imam at all. That is close to the opposite of the Twelver position, where most of the Imams deliberately stayed out of politics.

Zaydi law looks so much like the Hanafi school that some people have called Zaydism a fifth Sunni school. Zaydis generally do not practise taqiyya — hiding what you believe when you are in danger, which Twelver Shiism permits. Zayd himself is reported to have spoken well of Abu Bakr and Umar.

They founded a state in northern Yemen around 893 CE, which in one form or another lasted until the imamate was abolished in 1962. Zaydis today number roughly 15 to 20 million, concentrated in northwestern Yemen.

Ismailis, the Seveners

When Ja'far al-Sadiq died in 765, he had already named his son Isma'il as the next Imam — but Isma'il seems to have died before him, around 755.

Most followers switched to Musa al-Kazim, and became the Twelvers. Others held that the line ran through Isma'il anyway, and passed to his son Muhammad. They became the Ismailis, sometimes called Seveners.

The Ismailis then did something no other Shia branch ever managed: they built an empire.

The Fatimid Caliphate, founded in 909-910, eventually ruled North Africa, Egypt, Sicily, parts of Syria, and western Arabia. The Fatimids founded Cairo as their capital, and built al-Azhar between 970 and 972.

Sit with that for a second. Al-Azhar is today the most respected centre of Sunni learning in the world — and it was founded as a Shia Ismaili institution. Fatimid rule ended when Saladin took Egypt in 1169.

In 1094 the Ismailis split again, this time over which of the caliph al-Mustansir's sons should follow him: Nizar or al-Musta'li.

The Nizari line still exists today. Their Imam is the Aga Khan — currently Rahim al-Hussaini, Aga Khan V, the fiftieth Imam, who took over from his father Karim al-Husseini on 4 February 2025. Nizaris are the largest Ismaili group, spread across South Asia, Central Asia, East Africa, and the West.

The Musta'li line went a different way. They hold that their twenty-first Imam went into hiding, so they are led instead by a Da'i al-Mutlaq, a chief missionary who stands in for him. The biggest such community today is the Dawoodi Bohras, roughly a million people, mostly in India and Pakistan.

About the "Assassins"

The Nizaris held a network of mountain fortresses, most famously Alamut in Iran, taken by Hasan-i Sabbah in the late eleventh century. Mongol forces destroyed it in 1256.

Badly outnumbered by much stronger enemies, they killed individual commanders instead of fighting open battles. That part is history.

Almost everything else you have heard is not. The wild stories about drugged recruits and a secret garden come mostly from their enemies, above all the historian Juwayni — who personally burned the Ismaili libraries, so the other side of the story no longer exists for anyone to check him against. Even the popular claim that "assassin" comes from hashish is argued over by scholars, not settled.

Two Groups Often Miscounted

You will sometimes see Alawites and Druze listed as Shia branches. Both are more complicated than that, and getting it wrong is unfair to everyone involved.

Alawites started in ninth-century Iraq with Ibn Nusayr, a student of the tenth and eleventh Imams. But Alawite belief includes souls being reborn into new bodies, a view of Ali as God appearing in human form, and no five daily prayers. Twelver Shia scholars historically did not count them as Shia, and Alawite scholars themselves say their religion is its own thing. The rulings that do recognise them as Twelver Shia — most famously one by Musa al-Sadr in the 1970s — were made for particular political reasons at particular moments. In 2016 Alawite leaders put out a statement placing themselves within Islam while flatly refusing to be folded into Twelver Shiism. There are around three to four million of them, mostly in Syria.

Druze grew out of Fatimid Ismailism in Cairo around 1017, then closed the door to new members in 1043 — for nearly a thousand years, nobody has been able to join or leave. The Druze do not call themselves Muslims. They call themselves al-Muwahhidun, those who declare God's oneness. Scholars generally treat the Druze faith as its own religion in the Abrahamic family, with Ismaili roots. Around a million people, mostly in Lebanon, Syria, and Israel.

The fair and accurate thing to say is that both came out of Shia Islam historically, and that neither is simply a branch of it today.

1501: How Iran Became Shia

Here is a question worth sitting with. If Shia Islam began in Arabia and Iraq, why is Iran the country everyone associates with it?

The answer is a single dynasty, and it is much later than you would guess.

Before 1501, Iran was mostly Sunni. The Shafi'i school was everywhere, with Shia communities clustered in a few particular towns like Qom, Kashan, and Sabzevar.

Then Shah Ismail I founded the Safavid dynasty and declared Twelver Shiism the state religion.

It Was Not Gentle

This is not a story of people being slowly won over, and Shia historians do not pretend it is.

Ismail ordered the Shia call to prayer used in every mosque he controlled, and required people to curse the first three caliphs in public. The punishment for refusing was written down plainly: beheading.

Thousands of Sunnis were killed in Tabriz. Sunni judges and preachers were executed in Shiraz and Isfahan.

The Part That Reveals the Most

Here is the detail that shows just how much this came from the top down.

The Safavids did not have enough Shia scholars to actually run a Shia state. A Safavid historian writing at the time recorded that even the basics of Shia law were not known in Iran.

So they brought scholars in from outside — Arabs from Jabal Amil in southern Lebanon, and from Bahrain, placed deliberately into religious and government posts. Al-Muhaqqiq al-Karaki, who died in 1533, is the best known.

Think about what that means. In 1501, Persian-speaking Iran had to import Arabic-speaking Lebanese clerics to teach it the religion it had just adopted.

The change took generations. By the end of the sixteenth century most Iranians were Shia, and Sunni Islam had largely vanished from the central provinces while hanging on at the edges — Kurdistan, Baluchistan, and what is now Afghanistan.

So Iran being Shia is a political fact from 1501, not something ancient or built into being Persian. Once you know that, a lot of confused commentary about the modern Middle East stops making sense — which is the correct reaction to it.

The Map Today

The numbers everyone quotes come from the Pew Research Center's 2009 report Mapping the Global Muslim Population. They are getting old now, and Pew itself warns that most countries rarely or never count Sunnis and Shia separately. So treat all of this as rough.

Shia Muslims are roughly 10 to 13 percent of the world's Muslims — somewhere between 154 and 200 million people at the time of that report.

The largest populations by number are Iran (66-70 million, around 90-95 percent of its Muslims), Iraq (19-22 million, 65-70 percent), Pakistan (17-26 million), India (16-24 million), Turkey (7-11 million), and Yemen (8-10 million).

Countries where Shia are the majority are few: Iran, Iraq, and Azerbaijan (65-75 percent). Lebanon is close to evenly split at 45-55 percent of its Muslims.

Two things worth noticing.

Most Shia are not Arabs, and most do not live in the Middle East. The two largest Shia populations after Iran and Iraq are in South Asia.

Saudi Arabia has a substantial Shia minority of its own — 2 to 4 million, around 10-15 percent, concentrated in the oil-rich Eastern Province.

Who Leads Them Now

With the twelfth Imam hidden, religious authority in Twelver Shiism sits with scholars.

Ordinary believers pick a marja' — literally a "source to copy," a senior legal scholar whose rulings they follow in day-to-day practice. This is a genuine structural difference from Sunni Islam, which has nothing like this ranked system.

The great centres of learning are Najaf in Iraq and Qom in Iran. The most widely followed marja' of recent decades has been Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani in Najaf.

And here is a distinction the news almost always misses.

Ayatollah Khomeini's idea of wilayat al-faqih — that a religious scholar should actually run the government — has been the constitutional basis of the Islamic Republic of Iran since 1979. It is easy to assume this is just what Shia Muslims believe.

It is not. In its full form it is a minority view among Shia clerics, and nearly every senior grand ayatollah alive at the time of the revolution rejected it. Grand Ayatollah al-Khoei held that a scholar's authority covers things like orphans and charitable trusts — not running a country. The Najaf tradition, which Sistani represents, still mostly keeps clerics out of government.

So "Shia" and "the Iranian government's political theory" are not the same thing. Treating them as interchangeable gets most Shia Muslims in the world wrong.

What to Take Away

If you remember five things, make it these.

The split started as a political argument about who leads, not a religious one about God. The theology piled up over centuries afterwards.

Both traditions accept that Ghadir Khumm happened. They read one genuinely ambiguous Arabic word differently, and classical Arabic does not settle it either way.

The civil war ran on one unanswered question: who killed Uthman, and what happens to them. Nobody could answer it, so everyone else got to use it.

Sunni scholarship condemns Karbala. Anyone telling you Sunnis defend Yazid has not read the Sunni sources.

The institutions came late. The first public Ashura procession was 280 years after the event. Iran became Shia in 1501, by state decree.

And the differences, while real, sit on top of an enormous shared foundation — one God, one Prophet, one Quran, one Kaaba.

If you want the companion question — whether these differences put anyone outside Islam, and what the major scholarly bodies formally ruled — that is answered in detail in Are Shia Muslims? What Islamic Scholars Actually Say.

And if you want to see how Muslims have historically disagreed substantially while remaining one community, the story of how the four Sunni schools of law formed is the natural next read.

Quran

“And hold firmly to the rope of Allah all together and do not become divided.”

— Surah Ali Imran 3:103