Radio: A Split After Muhammad’s Death That Still Resonates

Reporters, writers, chatterers and everyone else these days seem to be flaunting their knowledge of Shiite and Sunni Islam. If youve fallen behind, now is your chance to catch up in the privacy of your home or car, where you can pretend its all review. All this week NPRs Morning Edition is presenting a five-part primer on Shiism called The Partisans of Ali: A History of Shia Faith and Politics, with Mike Shuster as host. The series is an attempt, by the nations most popular radio news broadcast, to explain the sect of 150 million to 200 million of the worlds 1.3 billion Muslims.

Mondays episode moved rapidly through the problems of succession after the death of the prophet Muhammad in 632. Should Islam become a community matter and be overseen by the Arabian monarchy, the caliphate? Or should it stay in Muhammads family and pass to his son-in-law, Ali?

The Shia, partisans of Ali, maintained that it belonged in the family. The Sunnis held that the caliphate should run it. When you believe that your political leaders should also be your religious leaders, you win favor with those in power. Perhaps for this reason the Sunnis still dominate the Middle East. Yesterdays episode was devoted to Shiism in the 20th century, beginning with what political scientists call the practice of quietism — of creating a degree of Western-style separation between mosque and state.

To the extent that theres any conscious system of beliefs to Shiite quietism, NPR suggests, its that politics are seen as inevitably imperfect, and the Shia were willing to accept Sunni rule and keep their religion to themselves so long as politicians didnt violate Shiite law.

Mr. Shuster and his experts make this sound like a disinterested religious development rather than a strategy of an oppressed people. The reason for this angle — the idea that Shia and Sunnis, unmolested by Western interference, have an active set of beliefs that allows them to live in harmony — wasnt made entirely clear.

Lightning-fast, the narrative moves to the rise of the shahs in Iran, the monarchy whose secret police drove dissidents to the mosque, which managed to function beyond their control. There Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini would later establish his following, founded in part on compelling theological revisions to Shiism, and eventually bring about the Iranian revolution. His creation of an Islamic republic spawned activist Shiism, including Hezbollah in Lebanon.

The episode ended with a cliff-hanger: Saddam Husseins rage at the growing power of Shiite Iran.

Today we learn about Ayatollah Khomeinis enemies. Poor people liked him because he was a firebrand revolutionary, but powerful Sunnis, especially in Saudi Arabia, considered him a pretender with no authority over them. In response, they sought to sharpen the difference between Sunni and Shia, as Mr. Shuster puts it, to acquire some radical glamour for themselves.

Mr. Husseins animus against Iranians was more secular, with racial overtones: in the Iran-Iraq war, he represented himself as the bastion of Arab nationalism resisting Persian hordes, says Ray Takeyh, a historian of Iran and the author of Hidden Iran: Paradox and Power in the Islamic Republic. After the war ended in 1988, and through two American invasions, Mr. Hussein, himself a Sunni, continued to regard the Shia in Iraq as enemy Persians — a position he reiterated at his hanging.

Mr. Shuster, a longtime NPR reporter, is an agreeable teacher of social studies who spends most of his time introducing opinions from well-known experts. And attentive listeners will come away from Partisans of Ali with a conveniently memorizable fact sheet on Shiism.

But a bright, incongruous moment during yesterdays episode makes clear what the rest of the series lacks. Its the audio from a getta-

loada-this American newsreel from 1953.

Death to the shah! an unnamed news announcer cries in a voice of such unbridled awe at world events that February 2007, too, seems to wake up. Statues of the ruler and his father are pelted and desecrated by the fanatic followers of the aged premier Mohammad Mossadegh!

The unnamed reporter-hysteric goes on, In a brazen act of defiance, the statue of the shahs father is toppled from its pedestal!

Wowee! I imagine these two lines of news-poetry playing for my teenage mother in 1953, in a West Virginia movie theater, maybe before How to Marry a Millionaire. What did she, or any American of the 50s, make of the religious politics of Iran? Did their hearts pound at the thought of the desecration and defiance? Were they driven to the Islam entry in their Britannicas?

Mr. Shuster calls the words of the newsreel moving. O.K. But what stands out is how different they are from his own sober reports.

The Partisans of Ali doesnt lack the lessons necessary to bring you up to speed on the matters of the day. Theyre all there. Whats missing from the presentation is a reason to care.

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