Video: Exploring Sectarian Identity in Islam

Although the sectarian labels of Sunni and Shi’a are widely used today to cover a range of identities and beliefs held by Muslims across the Islamic World, there are many foundational questions remaining over the origins of sectarian identity in Islam as well as its implications across time. The field has largely understudied theories of sectarianism and the precise applications of Sunni and Shi’a labels, including the content of their beliefs and the boundaries between them, largely remain an open debate to historians, political scientists, and others alike.

This discussion covered some of the main theoretical, methodological, and thematic issues relating to the study of sectarianism, Shi’a and Sunni identities, and the challenges in understanding what these labels mean over time and in the larger field of Islamic and Middle Eastern studies.

Speakers: Dr. Ahmed El Shamsy, Professor of Islamic Thought, University of Chicago Dr. Mohammad Sagha, Lecturer in the Modern Middle East, Harvard University. Moderator: Dr. Mohsen Goudarzi, Assistant Professor of Islamic Studies, Harvard Divinity School.

This event took place on November 14, 2024.

SPEAKER 1: Harvard Divinity School. 

SPEAKER 2: Exploring sectarian identity in Islam, November 14, 2024. 

MOHSEN GOUDARZI: Thank you for being here. My name is Mohsen Goudarzi, and I teach here at the Harvard Divinity School. And it's my pleasure to welcome our panelists. Want to thank our sponsors for the event, the Alwaleed Program in Islamic Studies and the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations. 

So Ahmed El Shamsy is professor of Islamic thought and department chair at the University of Chicago's Department of Middle Eastern Studies. And he is, in fact, a graduate of Harvard University's Department of History and the Center for Middle Eastern Studies. So we welcome him back. 

He studies the intellectual history of Islam, focusing on the evolution of the classical Islamic disciplines and scholarly culture within their broader historical context. His research addresses themes, such as orality and literacy, the history of the book, and the theory and practice of Islamic law. 

El Shamsy's first book, The Canonization of Islamic Law, A Social and Intellectual History, traces the transformation of Islamic law from a primarily oral tradition to a systematic written discipline in the 8th and 9th centuries. 

In his second book, Rediscovering the Islamic Classics, How Editors and Print Culture Transformed an Intellectual Tradition, he shows how Arab editors and intellectuals in the 19th and early 20th centuries used the newly adopted medium of printing to rescue classical Arabic texts from oblivion and to popularize them as the classics of Islamic thought. 

Other recent research projects investigate the interplay of Islam with other religious and philosophical traditions, for example by exploring the influence of the Greek sage Galen on Islamic thought and the construction of a distinct self-identity among early Muslims. 

Mohammad Sagha is a lecturer in the Modern Middle East at the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University. He is also a faculty affiliate and research director on Islamic History and Identity at the Project on Shi'ism and Global Affairs at the Harvard Divinity School. 

Dr. Sagha received his PhD in Islamic History and Civilization from the University of Chicago's Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations. Sagha's scholarship addresses sectarianism in Islam and the emergence and flexibility of sectarian identity throughout Islamic history from the early Islamic period to the contemporary Middle East. In addition, his research focuses on imperial political order and resistance, theologies of leadership, and underground revolutionary networks in early Islam. 

Sagha is currently working on two book manuscripts on the intersection of political order and sectarian identity, spanning the early Islamic period and the contemporary Middle East, entitled Power and Belonging, Shi'a Religious Nationalism, Sacred Space, and Hybrid Politics in the Middle East. This co-authored book covers how Shi'a revivalist actors have utilized modern technologies, mass movements, and Shi'a transcendent political theology, to mobilize and lead anti-status quo politics in the region. 

His other book manuscripts, Hidden Empires, The Politics of Underground Shi'i Revolutionary Networks and Sectarian Emergence in Early Islam, examines sectarian emergence and political order, debates on orthodoxy and heterodoxy, and Islamic political institutions from before the Abbasid Revolution until the capture of Baghdad by the Northern Iranian Buyid dynasty and the high period of the Shi'i Centuries. 

So, first of all, please welcome-- join me in welcoming our panelists. 

[APPLAUSE] 

I want to begin the conversation by asking a very basic question, which is when we speak about sectarianism, which will be the main theme of the conversation today, what exactly do we mean? How do we define sect, and what do we mean exactly by sectarianism? 

MOHAMMAD SAGHA: OK, well, thank you so much, Mohsen. Can you guys hear me OK on this mic? OK. Thank you so much, Dr. Goudarzi and Prof. El Shamsy for taking time to come today and to share their wisdom and their knowledge with us. And it's very good to see all of you here, a lot of familiar faces. 

And hopefully this discussion will be beneficial. I think I will definitely benefit perhaps most of all, hearing from the panelists and from all of you. The question of what is a sect is one of the very interesting and foundational questions in the study of Islam, in the sense that any book that you read on the history of Islam or Islamic civilization will have to address the notion of the origins of Islam and the early sectarian identity that emerged. 

So any sort of book that you read, whether it's Hodgson or any of the other surveys, will have to devote time to this question. And it's a question of, how early is Shi'ism, how early is Sunnism or other types of sectarian movements? It's a question that can intersect with many other issues within Islamic studies. 

So we have a lot of assumptions when it comes to who is a Shi'a and who is a Sunni, and how that can affect the literature that they produce, or the thought that they have, or assumptions that their sectarian identity can influence their politics, their thought and so on. 

But when it comes to the field of Islamic studies, it's one of the issues that I think has generally been undertheorized in the sense that you do have works on early Shi'ism, for example. You don't have that many works on early Sunnism, as far as I know, which is a bit of a disparity. And there's a question why that's the case. 

In part, it could be because there's an assumption that normative Islam is Sunni Islam. But I think when you actually go and look at the history, it's much more complicated and much more diverse in how orthodoxy or orthopraxy are discussed. And we'll talk about, I think, some of these terms later in the discussion. 

But the question-- there's generally, I think, two ways of approaching, what is a sect? One is a question of how have Muslims themselves defined diversity within the Muslim body politic, and how does that-- is that similar to how outsiders or in the modern Islamic studies, how they have discussed what sects are? 

And two, the question is, how have-- that's one issue. And then the second is, how does that-- how does our understanding of what a sect is then color how Muslims themselves in the contemporary period understand Islam? So when we look at early Islam, I think, generally, in the state of the field, I think we have a little bit better scholarship or more scholarship, I should say, on the early Islamic period. 

But I think most of the works are fairly diverse and scattered. They don't necessarily-- they're not necessarily in conversation with each other. So generally, you have a few themes or theories about who early Sunnis are and who early Shi'as are. 

So for Sunnis, you have these ideas of-- and Prof. El Shamsy will talk on this more on, let's say, early [INAUDIBLE] or the Adalat Al-Sahaba, these issues of the companions, or the Four Rightly Guided Caliphs. But these are not necessarily always in conversation with each other. And they put different start points on when early Sunnism emerged. 

For Shi'ism, you have a similar type of question in terms of does Shi'ism start with the succession to the Prophet Muhammad and the dispute between Ali and Abu Bakr? Does it start with the martyrdom of Imam Husayn? Or is it a later period of legal school formation? Is it Imam Ja'far al-Sadiq? So these are all-- these have centuries of difference between them. 

So I think one of the major things is I think it would be generally useful for many of the scholars that are focusing on, especially the early period, to be in more in conversation with each other and to think about how all these different disparate theories, which are kind of mentioned by different scholars in the field, how they intersect and don't. 

And then second is to also spend-- and this is just the last point I'll make on this question-- is to discuss how Islam, what is a sect itself? It tends to be undertheorized. So how do Muslims themselves discuss what different groups represent? 

And are different groups mutually exclusive from each other in the sense that if you're a different group in Islam, are you outside of the fold of Islam? So do Shi'as and Sunnis, for example, excommunicate each other, or do they not? This is a very interesting question, I think, that oftentimes-- and again, this is just the last point I'll make on this. 

Oftentimes, we think what a sect is defined through excommunication or takfir in the Arabic. But that's not necessarily the case. When Muslims are discussing what a sect is, they all use other types of terms, whether it's like a madhab, so a path, a tariqa, again, kind of path. 

And so in my own research, I think it's oftentimes much more useful to discuss pathways within Islam, and leadership hierarchies, rather than maybe using some of the assumptions that we have about excommunication or differences or the church sect dichotomy, which I, hopefully, will talk about a little bit more. But yeah, thank you. 

MOHSEN GOUDARZI: Excellent. Sr. El Shamsy, what are your thoughts about how to define a sect and what does sectarianism mean. 

AHMED EL SHAMSY: All right. So first of all, thank you, all of you, for coming. That's remarkable that so many of you have turned up. It's been almost 20 years since I was a student here. And on the topic of sectarianism, this is something I'm struggling myself with. 

I'm writing a book on early Sunnism at the moment. And there are a lot of conventions in the field that might be slightly out of sync with methodological developments in other fields in, in other fields that study other religious traditions. So first of all, I want to problematize the term "sect." 

There are other words that one can use for "groups." One can talk about denominations, for example. If you are somewhere living and there's a, whatever, an Anglican church and there's a Lutheran church, you're not going to say, oh, well, I see the people from the Lutheran sect coming out of their church, and how are they going to interact with the wild Anglicans? Obviously not. 

But I think the idea of sect is very much tied to the idea of orthodoxy. So the idea there's some sort of a main thing, an original thing, and then a sect breaks off from that. It breaks off. Very often, the idea of sectarianism, it's almost like-- yeah, it's an attitude of coming up with deviant ideas and then splitting away from, somehow, a more representative mainstream. 

And this is-- I mean, it's easier to maintain such an idea if you operate in a tradition that is very much a hierarchical, that has a very clear sense of authority, that has something like a church structure, a church structure, particularly in close connection to a state, in which you can have a creed, the Nicene Creed, for example, that can become the measuring stick against which you measure people's orthodoxy. 

Or if they collectively violate that creed, then-- ideally, if they kind of separate themselves in some way, then you can brand them a sect. Now, is that the case in Islam? That's a question. We do have creeds, that is-- I recently read a book by a Christian historian, or a historian of Christianity, about creeds, in which he denied that Muslims had creeds, which is a very strange, a very bad communication across lines of study. 

There are such things. They're called Aqidah. They are not exclusively, but in terms of the major or the majority of these creeds that we have today, were written by Sunnis, starting in the second century. But they were very different. They worked very differently. They worked in the-- they were creeds of somebody. They are creeds that were particularly formulated by a teacher. 

And the way that Josephine [INAUDIBLE] thinks about this is that this is something like-- the kind of thing that you put at the top of your syllabus. It's a kind of, oh, you want to study with me? Here's a little, I don't know, the thing you put on your website, kind of a self-identification that people know who they come to study with. 

So it is not-- there is like this. The Qadariyyah Creed, maybe the one example, maybe the [SPEAKING ARABIC], there were a few moments in history in which a particular creed was taken up by political authority in a specific time and place and effectively or ineffectively used as a sign of orthodoxy against which other people were measured. 

But it is much less simple to identify this very easy identification of orthodoxy versus sect. In Western study of Islam going at least back to d'Herbelot in the 17th century in his Bibliotheque Oriental, for him, it's very clear. 

So the Sunnis are the orthodoxy, and then the Shiites are the breakaway group from the orthodoxy. And in fact, if you look at the entry in the Encyclopedia of Islam II on Sunnism, [ARABIC], the entry reads, i.e. the orthodoxy of Islam. That's the entire entry. 

And so there have been recently books written in which Sunism is discussed as the orthodoxy. And then the question is, well, do we just-- in a certain sense, you can use the word Orthodox. 

You just mean the correct, the correct Islam or the correct Christianity, the correct Judaism, or something like this, at least, if you want to academically study something that's not a particularly useful category because nobody is going to grant the other side the orthodoxy then. 

You can try to do it numerically. You have to self identify on a census. It's actually much more problematic than you might actually think. There are I-- don't know. Are there any Egyptians here, any Egyptians in the room? 

MOHAMMAD SAGHA: Alone, you're the lone Egyptian, I think. 

AHMED EL SHAMSY: What happened to this place? 

[LAUGHTER] 

If you go to Egypt, you ask people, what are you? If you give me a list of 100 attributes, would they say Sunni at any point? I'm not sure. It's a specific-- sometimes it's even something that we impose from the outside. 

We draw these strange maps. You see these maps with dark green, light green, whatever-- one is Sunni. One is Shiite-- maps of the world. There are obviously places in which that becomes an issue. 

But if you look at, let's say, Iraq after 2003, after the US invasion of Iraq, people say things like-- people say things like, we used to be all Iraqis, and now it's Sunnis versus Shias. 

And obviously, that's not 100% true. People still knew this. But it wasn't a big deal. It didn't become a fault line of political action or very strong political identity, except in parts of the south, of course. 

Even the question of using terms is really important to keep in mind, that we can't just impose these terms simply onto something. I don't want to keep rambling for too long, but there are still other things I want to say. But maybe we can come into this one. 

MOHSEN GOUDARZI: That's wonderful. Thank you both. It reminds me, your discussion, of how do we define a center or orthodoxy against which we then measure something as heresy or a sect or a deviance. 

And similar conversations in the fields of early Christianity and ancient Judaism have also been really interesting. And some of them are relevant. I'm reminded of Walter Bauer's orthodoxy and heresy in earliest Christianity, which also destabilized the notion of, always, there is a clear orthodoxy against which we can clearly measure. 

And as you say, well, people on the ground, how did they define themselves and their identity? Did they really think of themselves as being in the Sunni camp or in the other camp? So that's a great point. 

So not unrelated to this question, could you speak about the state of the field when it comes to the study of the emergence of different identities, whether we want to call them different sects or different pathways in early Islam, or in medieval Islam, or in the modern period? What do you think are some of the urgencies in the field, some of the desiderata? And what are some strengths of the field? 

MOHAMMAD SAGHA: So thank you for the question, Dr. Goudarzi. But before discussing that, I just want to make-- responding a little bit to what Professor El Shamsy had mentioned, I think you raised a very excellent point in that we assume a lot of the ways that we interpret what orthodoxy is or how we define those terms are oftentimes-- we can be using different metrics that we might take from, like the case of Christianity or other studies from other religions, and impose it on Islam. 

But I think one of the things is-- and I would love to hear what the other panelists have to say about this-- is that I'm increasingly beginning to question the relationship between whether it's [ARABIC] or even legal canon that's referred to, and leadership hierarchies within Islam. 

As in oftentimes, there are so many cases within Islamic history where you see a quote, unquote, "Sunni leader" that is backed by Shi'is and vice versa. And you can see this even as-- one example that comes to mind is in the First World War. And this is an example sometimes I mention in class. 

But in the First World War, when the British invaded Iraq, going back to the case of Iraq, the Shia mujtahids there, the ulama there, issued a fatwa saying that it is obligatory for all Muslims to defend Amir al-mu'minin. And that's the term that they use for the Ottoman caliph, which usually for Shi'is is a term that's referred to Imam Ali. So it's a very reverential term. 

But they rallied around the leader, the Islamic leader of that time, that they saw as defending the lands of Islam or defending a Muslim majority, that even if they had some tensions or issues in the local context, they still found that the leader that they had over them was a legitimate leader, even if he drew from Sunni law. 

So the caliphs, the Sufi leaders, and so on, these different leaders that we have, were they bound to a certain either creed or legal orthodoxy, for lack of a better term? 

And you can see this also in the Safavid case, for example. The Safavids obviously, for those who have studied Iranian history, are those that are oftentimes attributed to making Iran into the Twelver Shia state that we see today. 

But even well into the Safavid reign, you see many of the Shahs saying that we should switch back, or we should have Sunni legal orthodoxy within the domains. And you question, OK, how is that working, that the leader, that the quote, unquote "Shiite leader," wants to then bring Sunnism back into the state? 

So I think one of the interesting relationships-- I think maybe it comes from the assumptions that we have about how the Catholic Church works, where the hierarchy very much defines itself through a list of doctrines or creeds or papal bulls or whatever, lists of beliefs that they tend to rely on. 

So that's just one point that came to mind that I think I think could be fruitful and understanding how sectarianism can become more fluid. So that's understanding leadership hierarchy and authority versus what we understand to be doctrines or creeds. 

And just a quick note on the question on the state of the field. I think, in general-- this is my sense, and I don't know, Professor El Shamsy, what you would think about this as well. 

Generally, we say-- most studies, when they talk about the origins, will discuss the succession dispute and then say this is the origins of Shia and Sunni Islam, that Shi'is chose Ali, Sunnis chose Abu Bakr and the four caliphs, three caliphs after that. 

And then it moves on, and then that's the question of origin. So I think outside of that, there aren't too many works explicitly-- there are some. There are useful works definitely out there. 

But in general, I haven't seen too much theorization, both in terms of what the origins are and how they change over time, because even the issue of the succession dispute is highly disputed. 

And can we really say that that's-- you can say this its origins in the sense that it's a very important founding moment. But how later Sunnis then define their relationship to what happened earlier can be flexible and can change. 

And it's not necessarily-- it's not necessarily what defines a Sunni, and there can be more and more discussions on that. I don't want to go too far on from that, but those are just some initial-- 

MOHSEN GOUDARZI: Thanks so much. So I want to ask that question of you and also maybe use that as an opportunity. You mentioned you're working on a book about this early identity. And how do you think your book contributes to or maybe intervenes in the field of early Islamic history and the development of identity? 

AHMED EL SHAMSY: Yeah, as I've said in my last answer, there are different terms for subsets of Muslims. And different scholars in different fields use different terms. 

So there's one genre of literature. In Western scholarship, generally, it's called historiographies-- sorry, heresiographies. See, I'm already messing it up, so Maqalat works, Maqalat al Islamiyyin, Al Ash'ari, Maqalat al-Balkhi, recently published [ARABIC] for example, or [ARABIC]. 

These kind of works, basically, these people's job is to identify subgroups. And they say, when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. If you're a heresiographer, every difference of opinion looks like a different sect. 

And sometimes you look at this like, is this really a sect, or it's just a guy and his wife that hold like opinions that are slightly different from what other people hold? 

And so it is difficult to really see, is this really a different group? Living in the real world, would you actually see that there is a difference? Or is this just somebody who is really pedantic with regards to ideas, and then reifies these ideas into a [ARABIC]? 

Now, what is interesting about the word [ARABIC] is it's connected to the word [ARABIC], which means "schism." That's the literally trauma, the thing when something breaks, when something fractures. 

And that's definitely a negative thing. And as Professor Sagha said, there is actually a difference of opinion among Muslims. When did that actually happen? 

So you read [ARABIC]. And he actually says, after the death of the prophet, when the Ansar first thought they would elect one of their own, thereby they became [ARABIC]. 

So it's like literally they were [ARABIC] for 90 minutes until Abu Bakr was elected. So that's not what we would think is a sect. A sect doesn't form in 15 minutes and then dissolves again. 

So it's a projection on history with regards to certain positions people take. You can see on the very other end of the spectrum, when you look at historians or geographers, they barely talk about [ARABIC]. 

They normally talk about madhhab or even taifa. So there's a lovely sentence in the history of Ibil, which is written in the fourth century, in which you have Abbasid. The Abbasid state is significantly weakening, so there's weakening of actual centralized government. 

And so what happens is you have the formation of neighborhoods, and people form collectives that replace government functions. So the historian there says the Sunnis became a [ARABIC] and the Shiites became a [ARABIC] at this moment. 

What does that mean? It's like they got together and said, OK, we have-- they became a political actor on the scene. They had leaders. They had actions. They had a policy on self defense, on economics, or whatever.

And so you can have an identity. You can have a theological formation that in a specific moment becomes a political actor. And so you can't just take a word like "Sunnis" and "Shi'is" and say, OK, at a certain point, it forms, and then it remains unchanging for whatever it is, 1,000 years, 1,200 years, 1,400 years. 

So you both have developments within the theoretical, theological ideas of these groups, but then also what that even means on the ground. One example, fascinating example, Muhammad al-Baqir, the fifth imam, his private life, he marries a woman, seemingly very much in love with her. But she keeps cursing his ancestor Abi Talib. 

Why? She is khariji in theology. And you think, how did that happen? How did the imam marry a woman? He must have known. This is not something that-- today, you would expect Sistani has marriage problems because it turns out his wife is a rabidly anti-Shiite. 

So there's an idea that this is clearly not-- these are not formed communities in the sense of we just marry within our community, clearly not. So you really have to look at very specific moments in time in order to decide what this specific term means. 

And so the reason why I started writing this book on Sunnism is that, at the University of Chicago, we have this Shiite studies-- what is it? 

MOHAMMAD SAGHA: Group, I think. It's a group. 

AHMED EL SHAMSY: Shiite Studies group. And they meet every two years, and they have fascinating conferences. And I was sitting there, and I was saying, maybe we should have that for Sunnism too. 

And the people were like, oh, come on, man. This has been done to death. And it's like, no, you have a place here where you can talk about this, and you can actually think about this topic. While if you think of socialism as that's just everything else, then you never think about what it actually is. 

If you just say Sunnism is the orthodoxy of Islam, then OK, we all know what it is. We don't even have to talk about it. But that's actually not true. And there are so many fields, so many subfields, that have barely been touched. And so I want to make this a topic of actual theoretical study. 

And just as a parallel example to what you said of Shiite scholars during the First World War, if you read [ARABIC]-- I actually don't know whether it's the [ARABIC] or the [ARABIC] Islam. He says Ja'far al-Sadiq would have been a better qualified caliph than al-Mansur. So it's-- anyway. 

MOHSEN GOUDARZI: That's really fascinating. If I may press this point further, because you just touched on it, when it comes to the development of Sunnism, and if it's not really just everything else, then what is it? 

Then different ways have been proposed for defining, what did it mean to be part of [SPEAKING ARABIC]? Is it your approach to the caliphs? Is it your adherence to a methodology of determining law? So which one do you think is more valid? 

AHMED EL SHAMSY: So there is a very early text, I think the earliest one that explicitly discusses what happened after the assassination of the third caliph, Uthman ibn Affan. And this is a text by a man called Maymun ibn Mihran, who died in 115 of the Hijrah. And he was asked about what happened after the assassination of Uthman. 

So just to put my cards on the table, I think, in terms of on the ground schism, it's the assassination of Uthman that is the schism. After the death of the Prophet, there is not-- whether you believe that-- whether you believe that it's correct that Abu Bakr became caliph or that Ali should have become caliph, there is no communal split happening. 

It's not that Ali and the people who like him move somewhere else and establish their counter caliph. There is no split happening. After the assassination of Uthman, a real split is happening, and that's the beginning of civil war, et cetera, et cetera. 

And so my Maymun ibn Mihran talks about this. And he says, after the assassination of Uthman, there were four groups. He says, the first group, they declared their allegiance to Uthman, and they disassociated from Ali. 

So it's like, OK, our allegiance is to Uthman and the people who now want to avenge him. And Ali and his people, they're outside. And then there's the second group. They're the people who associated with Ali, and they disassociated from the followers of Uthman, of Uthman and his followers. 

So this, in Arabic, [SPEAKING ARABIC] There was a third group that said, we don't have enough information. That's why we don't want to commit ourselves. And then he said, then there was the fourth group that says, we do [ARABIC] of both, and we don't do [ARABIC] of either. 

And he said, this is the [ARABIC]. He doesn't say [SPEAKING ARABIC], but there is a certain self understanding here. So in my last answer, what you could take away from this is that we can't talk about orthodoxy in Islam. 

Now, the counterpoint, maybe you can talk about an orthodoxy in Islam in the sense that there is a self-- the self understanding he has in the year 115 of the Hijrah is that if we were to call these people [SPEAKING ARABIC], these people who not exclude either party from the body, not body politics only, but the body of religion of Islam, that they are the majority, and that the correct path is the path of the majority. 

And so in that sense, if you say that's what orthodoxy is as a self understanding-- so you don't have to count heads, but the self understanding of this being the majority, then you can also you could also identify, not just among Shiites, but among [ARABIC] as well, a self understanding of being a minority and a cultivation of an idea of there is an elite status of a minority. 

So in imami discourse, the [ARABIC] and [ARABIC]. So majority are the common people, while the elect are the few, and they're the ones who are with the imam. 

So in that sense of different identities as minority versus majority, self understandings, and that's the only way in which I would say orthodoxy versus sectarianism can have any meaning. 

MOHSEN GOUDARZI: That's very helpful. And it reminds me of the Hadith attributed to the prophet, [SPEAKING ARABIC], God's hand is with the [ARABIC] and what that might mean in that context. Is it an endorsement of the majority view as something that's perhaps closer to truth than the minority view? Or at least as it's perceived to be minority? 

So moving on to the parallel case of Shi'ism, question for Dr. Sagha, you could define the Shiite movement in a variety of ways as maybe beginning with the dispute over succeeding the prophet and the [ARABIC] of Banu Sa'idah. 

So those who are Shia to Ali, the partisans of Ali, or you could see that as arising rising as a protest movement to the Umayyads after the killing of and the martyrdom of Imam Husayn, or a legal school around the teachings of Imam Ja'far al-Sadiq, or even a theological, theologically delineated movement. 

Najam Haider, I think, very consciously in his book, Introduction to Shia Islam, begins with and leads with discussion of theological matters because he wants to say this is a serious intellectual disagreement that we're talking about. 

It's not just sectarianism or trying to be just difficult, as to maybe put it closer to the terms that Dr. El Shamsy used. So how do you think what do you think about these different definitions? Which ones do you think are helpful or less helpful? 

MOHAMMAD SAGHA: Thank you. Thank you very much for the question. 

So when it comes to defining early Shi'ism, as you mentioned, there are many different ways or inflection points or origin points that you could refer to. But I think one of the very interesting things that-- just kind of coming off of what Professor El Shamsy had mentioned. 

One of the interesting things about this notion of [ARABIC], Shi'is, how do they self identify or recognize themselves as part of the body politic? They also, interestingly, really try to also-- well, on the one hand, they do see themselves as a select or elite spiritual minority. 

They also do see themselves as part of the [ARABIC], usually. Of course, you can have some variation there. But generally, the references to the notions of the verse of the Quran, [SPEAKING ARABIC] references to this as-- which is the verse from the Quran saying, everyone, you should adhere to the rope of Allah and not split, [SPEAKING ARABIC]. 

So there is a sense that should be-- that's the notion of what that consensus should be around. The role of the family of the prophet becomes very salient in the Shia understanding of that. But it's an appeal to create a concord or some kind of peace. So here [ARABIC] also referring to-- it can be majority, of course. 

But it seems the way that it's used or utilized oftentimes can be a sense of preventing schisms or rebellions or discord or instability that can harm communities and people over time, which is something that many early Muslims and throughout time had to deal with, whether it was the early Khariji revolts or different types of revolts that happened later. 

So the ways that Shi'is also identify themselves-- again, you do see periods of time when there is a sense of, OK, there's a differentiation from a majority or an orthodoxy. But there are other times when, no, there's a really conscious effort for promoting concord and unity. 

And that's something that I think you can even see today in the world. As a response to some of the political upheavals since the Iraq War and some of the other geopolitical events in the Middle East, many Shi'is doubled down and said, OK, we have to defend our group, and then we're defining ourselves against Sunnis. 

But you also had many others saying that there is no difference between Shi'is and Sunnis. We're one Muslim body politic. So you always have that variation within the Shia world, and I think also within the Sunni world too. So it's really an issue of context of which side has more influence or another. 

Within Shi'ism as well, the dissertation that-- Professor El Shamsy actually was on the supervising committee of at Chicago-- that I wrote, I was on this question. And the argument that I made there when it came to Shi'ism is that the main institution that had been ignored when we look at the origins of Shi'ism and the origins of Shia sects, or confessions or denominations, were political institutions. 

We had discussions of theology, of law, schools, of doctrines. And those were very enriching and necessary. But we oftentimes, within the field, did not talk about the relationship between rebellion and the caliphate and how Shi'is themselves understood their political institutions and whether they should have those or not. 

And so the main argument that I made there to contribute to the different theories in the field or discussions of what a Shi'is is and how can we understand internal Shi'i diversity and denominations was to say that, really, up until the weakening of the Abbasid Caliphate in the middle of the ninth century, all Shi'i politics were generally underground. 

Because of the threat of repression or jailing and the coercive power of the state, Shi'i movements were all underground and the imams had hidden identities. So many Twelver Shi'is are familiar with the idea of the hidden imam, that there's an imam who is alive, but access to him is not open, and that his name even was secret or hidden as well. 

But one of the interesting things that I found when I was reading into this case was that it wasn't just the Twelver Shi'is that had this. It was basically almost every group that you read had the same discourse.

We had [SPEAKING ARABIC], covered or hidden imams, or we had imams that were-- it's forbidden to say what their name is because if the authorities knew who it was, he could be jailed or executed. 

And so really, it wasn't until the imperial power weakened that you had a genesis of Shi'i states and imams emerge roughly simultaneously. So starting with the Alids in northern Iran, and then you have the Fatimids, and some of the Zaydi imams. 

So we don't have Zaydism, Twelver Shi'ism, and so on in more distinct forms until after that period. So I think really, for me, it was very fascinating to see this because if you look at the internal histories-- and this is one of the challenges of maybe looking just at internal history. 

They'll back project and say, well, first of all, we're the true interpretation of the Prophet Muhammad and onwards. But they'll oftentimes choose imam splits like. After Imam Ja'far al-Sadiq, there was a split. Then you have Isma'ilis and then the proto-Twelver Shias. 

And of course, that's not to say that those internal narratives are necessarily wrong, but there are value to those. But from a historical academic perspective, then, it gives a broader understanding of the intersection of politics and how empire and power can also influence sectarian developments. 

MOHSEN GOUDARZI: Excellent. Thank you. So building off of all of these conversations, one of the questions that arises, what is at stake when we're discussing this identity, sectarian identity, or however you want to define and characterize it? 

What is at stake? And in particular, when it comes to the study of a specific figure or writer, oftentimes, our students are interested in studying a so-and-so commentator on the Quran or a philosopher or a theologian. 

How important is it to be cognizant of that sectarian identity when we are studying a scholar's body of writings? I remember al-Yaqoubi, for example, an early historian. There's a debate, was he Shia? To what extent? What kind of Shia was he? 

Ibn Hisham, himself the biographer of the prophet, was characterized as Shi'I by some scholars of his own time. But so what is at stake? Is it really important to-- how much attention should we pay to this question? 

And also a related question is, when we go back in time, were people really reading only scholars of their own community? Or do we have a situation when you are very much reading the work of scholars outside of your own legal school, outside of your own Sunni or Shia identity, or outside of your [ARABIC] identity? So how does the situation look like on the ground for the people who want to study? 

AHMED EL SHAMSY: Yeah, there's this lovely English phrase, "A card carrying," and then you have a name. And always drives me mad when people use this in the Islamic tradition because, obviously, nobody was carrying any cards. There's no card carrying. 

So a way of-- to give you an example, we had a visitor in Chicago who gave a talk on the change between the Umayyad period and the Abbasid period. 

And he says, well, the Abbasid period historians, they're just very different from Umayyad historians. And he was just making this very simple division. 

And I said, would you call yourself a Trump-era historian? To just say that just because you happen to be a historian in the era of Trump, you are therefore-- in a sense, obviously, that's also true. But you can't reduce yourself to being this. 

And let's say we look at ibn Sina, and his family were Isma'ilis. Does this mean Sina-- from his account, he was not an Isma'ili. He got to know the Isma'ili doctrine. He rejected it. 

But there were-- today, we would not-- if you study somebody, and their parents were communists, it doesn't mean that they're naturally communists. They might be super anti-communists because their parents were communists. 

We understand that today we're dealing with individuals, and you have to figure out how their relationship is to their background, to their family background, to the place they grew up. And did they totally imbibe the spirit of their time and their educational institution? Or did they rebel and go not 180 degrees against it. 

And people in the pre-modern period were like that too. They were not robots or whatever. They were also individuals, so you really have to study them. You can't just-- there is this-- I think, in a sense, it's a first step-- I'm sure both of this feeling. 

Somebody asks you to write an encyclopedia entry on somebody. And then you look at their biography like, OK, they came from a Shiite family. So let's just say they're Shiites. But were they? 

You have to read them. You have to understand them. So I think, in a sense, we have to also take people at their own-- make classifications not into these Procrustean beds in which people either fit or don't fit, but to understand that it can affect all kind of ways in which you see the world, but not necessarily. 

And there are some people who are very well read, and they read across groups. They read into other religious traditions. And some people who are not like this, the same way as we see today around us, people who are engaged in everything or some people just within the niche in which they study and research. 

So it is not-- I cannot-- as a caveat-- you see, I'm a very conflicted person. It's always one thing and the opposite also. There is a tendency of Shiites being more familiar with Sunni works than Sunnis being interested in Shiite works. 

But again, that's also has something to do about how you see yourself. I think you can be a top scholar of Christianity while never having read a book about Islam. 

If you want to be a top scholar of Islam, at least in the West, and you've never read a book on any other religious traditions, you come off like an idiot sometimes, I think. So anyway. 

MOHSEN GOUDARZI: Excellent. Dr. Sagha, do you want to comment on that? 

MOHAMMAD SAGHA: Yeah, definitely. No, I think the question of sectarian salience, and to frame it slightly differently or along the same lines, I think is an important aspect because, as Professor El Shamsy mentioned, during times of, say, political crisis or instability, sometimes sectarian identities can become more salient as group identities or relevant in political disputes and tensions. 

But in other times, when you have maybe more peaceful relations or ecumenical policies by the state, you can have these issues of sectarian identity, or cannons become less relevant. 

So I think one of the very interesting things to look at is, once scholars are writing how salient is-- there sectarian identity at that time? Many times it could not be very relevant at all. 

This term is, of course problematic, historically speaking. But if you think of some of the golden age, , so to speak, what we associate with the golden age of Ibn Sina and al-Farabi and al-Mutanabbi and so on, oftentimes, yes, you will find praise of the family of the Prophet or even explicitly Shi'i-inspired poetry and references. 

But other times, really, the global debates at that time that were very cutting edge and important had to do with the reception of Greek works that were translated into either Syriac or Arabic, and then questions later on about [SPEAKING ARABIC], what we oftentimes call philosophy, Islamic philosophy, became much more important and salient in the context of that time.

Even in the American context, let's say, if you discuss Shia and Sunni issues, that might not be as relevant as the election results or something. So it really depends on the salience of the political and cultural salience of that time. 

The other quick point that I wanted to mention is that when we think of how to define what a denomination or a sect is, I wholly agree with Professor El Shamsy in that oftentimes sect can have more of a derogatory meaning or exclusionary meaning as well. 

But what are some of the terms? How do Muslims themselves talk about these terms? It's a bit of a puzzle or a struggle sometimes to think of, OK, what's the term for orthodoxy? 

Could we use maybe a term like [ARABIC] as orthodoxy in that 99% of Muslims agree that the five pillars are what it is, or [SPEAKING ARABIC] These are some of the things that Vanessa's talked about. 

You have a very surprising consistency throughout time of ability to have the very minimal orthodoxy in a sense. I remember from your classes at Chicago, you would always mention that one of the successes of the early Islamic empire or movement was that the entry was so low and non-exclusive if you were to compare it to the British Empire, where it was like ethnic supremacy or whatever. 

Within Islam, no, once you're in, it's such an inclusive category. And then how do you keep those boundaries there? Is [ARABIC] a good word for sect? Sometimes it can be, but other times, some people use [ARABIC] instead of that, so path. But the etymology of sect itself, the English etymology, it tends to refer to path. So if you go down to the etymology, it could work. 

But if you think about it in terms of church and sect dichotomy, and the things that historians of sociology, like Max Weber, have discussed as the church sect typology, then it becomes, I think, very problematic because we can't have a sect in Islam if we don't have a church. So then, in some sense, I think we don't have sects in Islam. 

MOHSEN GOUDARZI: Excellent. So thank you so much, everyone, for your time. And please, let us thank our panelists as well. 

[APPLAUSE] 

SPEAKER 2: Sponsors, Alwaleed Islamic Studies Program, Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations. 

SPEAKER 1: Copyright 2024, the President and Fellows of Harvard College.