In part, our understanding of contemporary sectarianism in the Middle East is based on a misunderstanding of the origins and development of Muslim sectarian identities. We tend to view Sunni Islam as the original or orthodox Islam while we portray all other Islams, such as Shiʿism, as heterodox deviations from the original. This book aims to dispel this misconception. While Sunni Islam eventually became politically and numerically dominant, Sunni and Shiʿi identities took centuries to develop as independent communities with fully articulated theologies and practices. Rather than seeing Sunnis and Shiʿis as having split and never come back together, it is more accurate to view the early Muslim community as espousing a diversity of formulations of Islam that eventually, over centuries, narrowed into the sectarian identities that we can recognize today.

Further, due to modern sectarian conflicts, we tend to assume that enmity and violence have been a constant feature of the Sunni–Shiʿi relationship. On the contrary, this book will reveal how the idea of Muslim sectarian hostility developed relatively late in Islamic history by analysing two tenth-century Shiʿi dynasties, the Fatimids (909–1171) of North Africa and the Buyids (945–1055) of Iraq and Iran, investigating how they articulated their power, and how local Sunnis reacted to them.

Islamic sectarianism has received a great deal of attention recently due to contemporary events in the Middle East: the collapse of Iraq following the U.S. invasion in 2003, the ongoing Syrian civil war, protests led by Shiʿi groups in Yemen and the Gulf States, the tension between Sunni Saudi Arabia and Shiʿi Iran, and the rise of extremist Sunni organizations like Daesh/ISIS and al-Qaeda that violently target Shiʿi Muslims. These current conflicts in the Middle East, with their empha-sis on sectarian identities, have led historians and political scientists to coin the term “sectarianization” as the process by which political actors use aspects of sectarian identity to exacerbate existing conflicts for their own benefit.

It can be easy to blame sectarianism for contemporary and historical conflicts in the Middle East, especially when the causes seem hard to explain.

It took centuries for a coherent and unified concept of Sunni Islam to develop and even longer for the creation and promulgation of mechanisms to spread and enforce those ideas. During this time, other interpretations of Islam—other Islams—remained popular. Many of these religious movements were linked with political opposition to either the ʾUmayyad or ʿAbbasid dynasty, both of which were seen by some Muslims as having usurped power from more legitimate leaders.

While, to some extent, we could consider Sunni Islam to be politically dominant before the tenth century and the rise of the Fatimids and the Buyids, these two dynasties did not arise in a vacuum. They developed out of a myriad of political and religious opposition movements popular across the Muslim world. Sunni Islam was also far from unified: it only appears so in retrospect.

This chapter surveys the many forms of Islam popular before the tenth century, focusing on movements that seemed to view themselves as existing outside any kind of developing Sunni consensus. Furthermore, this chapter will argue that, although proto-Shiʿism/Shiʿism was a significant part of political and religious opposition to the ʾUmayyads and ʿAbbasids, reducing the Islams of this era to a simple binary between Sunni and Shiʿi Islam is too simplistic. Sunni and Shiʿi Islam developed in tandem, incorporating ideas from other types of non-Sunni and non-Shiʿi movements. In addition to proto-Shiʿism and its development into different forms of Shiʿism, this chapter will address two other major types of Muslim religious movements before the tenth century: Kharijism and Khurramism.

The Twelve Imams and Proto-Shi‘ism

I have been referring to Shiʿism and Sunnism from before the ninth century as “proto-Shiʿism” and “proto-Sunnism,” respectively, because it took quite some time for these beliefs to be defined and communities of believers to coalesce. When we learn about both Sunnism and Shiʿism, we tend to view it from the modern perspective, from which the process by which these communities formed seems much more straightforward than it was at the time.

For example, we tend to define different forms of Shiʿism based on who they consider to be the true Imam. The Imamate is one of the most significant beliefs separating Sunnis and Shiʿis.

Like the Fatimids, the Buyids did not make Shiʿi claims to authority but modelled themselves on the expectations of a medieval Muslim audience. They rose to power within a generation of the Fatimids, taking control over ʿAbbasid Baghdad in 945. Like the Fatimids, the Buyids identified as Shiʿi. However, the Buyids did not come to power out of a Shiʿi revolutionary movement. The Buyids served as mercenaries for local Muslim dynasties in the mountains of northern Iran where many people had been converted to Islam by Zaydi missionaries. The Buyids tend to be best known in history for conquering the ʿAbbasid capital of Baghdad and holding the caliph hostage. Despite this fact, when we analyse Buyid rhetoric about their own legitimacy, they did not prioritize their Shiʿism. As non-Arab converts to Islam, they could not claim the caliphate nor the Imamate. Thus, they made diverse claims to legitimacy that do not fit neatly into conceptual categories that we typically use to define ethnic and religious identity in this era. Instead, we can see the Buyids as examples of the shifting nature of Muslim identity during this pivotal period in Islamic history when more of the peoples of the Middle East were converting to Islam.

The Buyids held power in Baghdad from 945–1055 and the most famous and powerful Buyid ruler, ʿAdud al-Dawla (d. 983), took over Baghdad in 979 and was proclaimed the Amir al-Umara, prince of princes, by the ʿAbbasid caliph. If we wanted a figure who embodied the tenth-century Islamic world—one which was only just becoming predominately Muslim and dealing with the influx of converts with a motley assortment of pre-Islamic identities—ʿAdud al-Dawla was it. He was a second-generation Muslim from a Persianate background. He was from a region of northern Iran called the Daylam. While part of Iran today, the Daylamites had a reputation as backward but skilled mercenaries; the proper Persians of the cities would not have considered the Daylamites to be Persian. While ʿAdud al-Dawla's father was a powerful but uneducated military leader who probably did not read or speak Arabic, ʿAdud al-Dawla was educated in both Persian and Arabic by the skilled advisors of his father and uncle.

At the height of Buyid power, they ruled large portions of what is now Iraq and western Iran.

Our understanding of contemporary sectarianism in the Middle East is based on a misunderstanding of the origins and development of Muslim sectarian identities. In part, the misperception that we can reduce modern conflicts between Sunnis and Shiʿis to the seventh century derives from how we tell the story of the Sunni–Shiʿi split. This narrative derives from the fact that modern Sunnis and Shiʿis do trace the origins of their communities back to a seventh-century disagreement over who should succeed the Prophet Muhammad, but that's not the end of the story of the development of Muslim sectarian identities.

In this chapter, we will discuss how our understanding of Sunni orthodoxy has changed over time. Scholars differ fairly significantly in how they date the emergence and dominance of Sunni orthodoxy. This difference derives from the types of sources that they use. Scholars who rely predominately on sources composed by religious scholars date the dominance of Sunni orthodoxy to the late eighth or ninth centuries. On the other hand, scholars who focus on the institutions that would have helped spread and police ideas of Sunni ortho-doxy argue that this process was not yet complete before the twelfth or thirteenth century. I tend to agree with the more institution-minded approach; while ideas of Sunni orthodoxy may have been established amongst religious scholars, we have little evidence that these ideas were important to a broader swath of society until institutions were in place that helped spread and enforce these ideas.

The word orthodoxy comes from the Greek roots ortho, meaning straight, and doxa, meaning doctrine. Thus, orthodoxy can be understood as the attempt to define what is the proper (or straight) doctrine for a particular faith. From a scholarly perspective (that is, not necessarily the perspective of believers), however, practitioners and followers of a faith construct notions of orthodoxy. While we may believe that religious texts came directly from God or prophets, people must still interpret those texts and apply them in their lives. Believers will always have questions about how to best practise their faith that are not directly answered in religious texts; thus, there is a need for interpretation. In many religions, one official form of a faith often comes to be portrayed as orthodox and all the rest depicted as heterodox (from the Greek heteros, meaning other, and doxa, meaning doctrine).

To a large extent, we have been discussing something that historians call historical memory, which refers to how groups or societies remember past events and how that memory can change over time. Historical memory includes how we remember the past as well as how we interpret representations of the past. Mainly, it means that we need to remember that histories are written within specific contexts and often serve specific purposes. Even if past historians aimed to be objective, they had their own biases that informed their writing. Thus, rather than viewing history as some kind of truth that we can discover about the past, historians more often view historical sources as a lens through which we can interpret how past peoples saw themselves and their world. Historical memory is not fiction, but it has been constructed by a society, usually to emphasize something that the society values.

These kinds of analyses have been done on other periods in Islamic history, but not for the Fatimids and Buyids. For example, Jacob Lassner, in Islamic Revolution and Historical Memory, analysed how the ʿAbbasids wrote early Islamic history after they overthrew the ʾUmayyads. He demonstrated how these histories were not intended to preserve the truth of past events but, rather, to argue that the ʾUmayyads were illegitimate and the ʿAbbasids represented a return to the tradition of the Prophet. Scholars of historical memory, such as Patrick Geary in Phantoms of Remembrance, argue that reconstructing historical memory allows us to understand what was important to the people who constructed it in the first place. Much of this book has focused on Fatimid and Buyid historical memory: how did they want to be remembered? How did they link themselves with the past in ways that made them seem legitimate to the people they ruled? Were those claims inherently sectarian?

During the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the political fortunes of the Middle East changed dramatically. This period saw the influx of new groups of Turkic peoples who took over political control of the region. In 1055, the Seljuks, a Turkic dynasty, conquered Baghdad and ousted the Buyids. The Fatimids lasted more than another century; they lost power in 1171 when one of their viziers, Salah al-Din al-Ayyubi (often better known as Saladin), ousted a weak Fatimid caliph and declared himself the ruler of Fatimid territory, establishing the rule of the Ayyubid dynasty.

The Fatimid caliphate arose out of an underground missionary movement which preached a proto-Ismaʿili message. This movement culminated in the military conquest of North Africa in the tenth century. While details about the origins of the early Fatimid movement remain obscure, there was clear competition between different strands of proto-Ismaʿilism. Scholars trace the portion of movement that founded the Fatimid caliphate to ʿAbd Allah al-Mahdi (d. 934). Before the advent of the caliphate, the Fatimid Ismaʿilis spent ten years engaged in armed rebellion against the ʿAbbasid caliphate in parts of Iran, Iraq, Syria, Bahrain, Yemen, and North Africa. During this time, al-Mahdi made his way from Syria to North Africa. In 909, when al-Mahdi's forces conquered Qayrawan, the seat of the Aghlabid dynasty (r. 800–909), which ruled in the name of the ʿAbbasids, al-Mahdi declared himself to be the first Fatimid caliph.

The Fatimids in North Africa sought to expand their rule with the eventual goal of overthrowing the ʿAbbasid caliphate in Baghdad. During the caliphate of al-Mahdi and his son and successor al-Qaʾim (d. 946), they attempted to conquer Egypt several times without success. During al-Qaʾim's reign, the Fatimids also faced a prolonged rebellion by local Ibadi Khariji Berbers, which lasted from 943 to 947. The third Fatimid caliph, al-Mansur (d. 953), defeated this rebellion. His son and successor, al-Muʿizz (d. 975), successfully conquered Egypt and founded the new Fatimid imperial capital of Cairo to commemorate their success.

The Fatimids claimed descent from ʿAli and Fatima. But, despite taking Fatima as their namesake, they did not make their descent from ʿAli a central argument in their claim to authority. While later heresiographies accused the Fatimids of cursing the first three caliphs (Abu Bakr, ʿUmar, and ʿUthman, remembered by Sunnis as the Rashidun) for usurping ʿAli's power, none of the tenth-century sources reported that any of the first four Fatimid caliphs publicly cursed the Rashidun.

What might constitute Shiʿi claims to authority would have still been in flux in the tenth century. After all, this period is the era when Shiʿi identity was beginning to crystalize into distinct forms. But we would expect those claims to focus on the Imamate, descent from ʿAli and Fatima, and attacks on the Rashidun caliphs. Strikingly, these elements are not emphasized in Fatimid claims to authority.