While this bloody piece of theatre ensured the Umayyads’ survival, it also cemented a schism within Islam that has survived for more than thirteen hundred years. The sects and factions that formed during the first and second fitnas gave birth to what we now know as the Sunni–Shia divide.k Shia Muslims refused to accept the legitimacy of the Umayyad caliphate, or indeed the legitimacy of Abu Bakr, Umar and Uthman’s regimes. Instead, they insisted that Ali was Muhammad’s rightful successor: the first Imam. This in turn implied an alternative succession, through Hasan and Husayn, then a bloodline
...more
