After the Prophet Quotes

“Assassination creates an instant hero of its target. Any past sins are not just forgiven but utterly forgotten.”
― Lesley Hazleton, After the Prophet: The Epic Story of the Shia-Sunni Split in Islam

“Man journeys in darkness, and his destiny journeys toward him,” he said, and traveled on.”
― Lesley Hazleton, After the Prophet: The Epic Story of the Shia-Sunni Split in Islam

“If there was a single moment it all began, it was that of Muhammad's death. Even the Prophet was mortal. That was the problem. It was as though nobody had considered the possibility that he might die, not even Muhammad himself.”
― Lesley Hazleton, After the Prophet: The Epic Story of the Shia-Sunni Split in Islam

“In Shia lore, Fatima lives on in another dimension to witness her sons’ suffering and to weep for them. She is the Holy Mother, whose younger son would sacrifice himself to redeem humanity just as had the son of that other great mother, Mary. Like her, Fatima is often called the Virgin as a sign of her spiritual purity. Like her, she will mourn her offspring until the Day of Judgment,”
― Lesley Hazleton, After the Prophet: The Epic Story of the Shia-Sunni Split in Islam

“Arabic is a subtle and sinuous language. Like all Semitic languages, it plays on words, taking a three-consonant root and building on it to create what sometimes seems an infinite number of meanings. Even the exact same word can have different connotations, depending on the context. Perhaps the best-known example is jihad, struggle, which can be either the inner striving to live the Islamic life and attain a higher level of spiritual consciousness, or the external armed confrontation with those seen as enemies of Islam.”
― Lesley Hazleton, After the Prophet: The Epic Story of the Shia-Sunni Split in Islam

“Arabia would not exert political power again for more than a thousand years, until the fundamentalist Wahhabi sect emerged from the central highlands in the eighteenth century to carry out violent raids against Shia shrines in Iraq and even against the holy places of Mecca and Medina.”
― Lesley Hazleton, After the Prophet: The Epic Story of the Shia-Sunni Split in Islam

“Al-Tabari understood that human truth is always flawed—that realities are multiple and that everyone has some degree of bias. The closest one might come to objectivity would be in the aggregate, which is why he so often concludes a disputed episode with that time-honored phrase “Only God knows for sure.”
― Lesley Hazleton, After the Prophet: The Epic Story of the Shia-Sunni Split in Islam

“But raw numbers can be misleading. In the Middle East heartland of Islam, the Shia are closer to fifty percent, and wherever oil reserves are richest—Iran, Iraq, and the Persian Gulf coast, including eastern Saudi Arabia—they are in the majority.”
― Lesley Hazleton, After the Prophet: The Epic Story of the Shia-Sunni Split in Islam

“This time the divide would be between the Sunni Ottoman empire based in Turkey and the powerful Safavid dynasty in Persia—today’s Iran—which made Shiism the state religion”
― Lesley Hazleton, After the Prophet: The Epic Story of the Shia-Sunni Split in Islam

“It knelt some six miles east of Kufa, atop a barren, sandy rise—najaf in Arabic—and there his sons buried the man who would ever after be revered by all Muslims, but by two very different titles: the first Imam of Shia Islam, and the last of the four rashidun, the Rightly Guided Caliphs of Sunni Islam.”
― Lesley Hazleton, After the Prophet: The Epic Story of the Shia-Sunni Split in Islam

“Among Iraqi Shia today, the word “Wahhabi” still serves as shorthand for all forms of Sunni extremism,”
― Lesley Hazleton, After the Prophet: The Epic Story of the Shia-Sunni Split in Islam

“The call went out quickly, but only among the native Medinans, the ones known as the Helpers. The Meccans, those known as the Emigrants, were not invited.”
― Lesley Hazleton, After the Prophet: The Epic Story of the Shia-Sunni Split in Islam

“That advice he had given the Prophet would rankle throughout her life. Indeed, it rankles still today. Al-Mubra’a, the Exonerated, Sunnis still call her, but some Shia would use a different title for her, one that by no coincidence rhymes with her name: Al-Fahisha, the Whore.”
― Lesley Hazleton, After the Prophet: The Epic Story of the Shia-Sunni Split in Islam

“Yet Aisha and Ali, the two people closest of all to Muhammad on a daily basis, had barely been able to speak a civil word to each other for years, even in his presence.”
― Lesley Hazleton, After the Prophet: The Epic Story of the Shia-Sunni Split in Islam

“Finally, a group of leading Meccans, one from every major clan of the Quraysh, banded together in the dark outside Muhammad’s house, knives at the ready, waiting for him to emerge for dawn prayers. Warned of the plot just in time, he fled Mecca under cover of night along with a single companion and headed for the oasis city of Medina to the north, where he was welcomed first as a peacemaker between feuding tribes, then as a leader. The year of his nighttime flight for refuge—the hijra, or emigration—would become the foundation year of the Islamic calendar: 622 A.D., or the year One A.H., After the Hijra.”
― Lesley Hazleton, After the Prophet: The Epic Story of the Shia-Sunni Split in Islam

“Quraysh, the urban elite of Mecca.”
― Lesley Hazleton, After the Prophet: The Epic Story of the Shia-Sunni Split in Islam

“The Quran was the last and final word of God, they said. There could be no more prophets after Muhammad, no male kin who could assert special insight or closeness to the divine will, as the Shia would claim.”
― Lesley Hazleton, After the Prophet: The Epic Story of the Shia-Sunni Split in Islam

“Perhaps only Khadija could be the matriarch, and only her eldest daughter, Fatima, could be the mother of Muhammad’s treasured grandsons, Hasan and Hussein.”
― Lesley Hazleton, After the Prophet: The Epic Story of the Shia-Sunni Split in Islam

“But though Muhammad’s first wife, Khadija, had given birth to two sons alongside four daughters, both had died in infancy, and though Muhammad had married nine more wives after her death, not one had become pregnant.”
― Lesley Hazleton, After the Prophet: The Epic Story of the Shia-Sunni Split in Islam

“The destruction of the Askariya shrine was an attack not just on the past, or even the present, but on the future.”
― Lesley Hazleton, After the Prophet: The Epic Story of the Shia-Sunni Split in Islam

“The twelfth Imam’s name is Muhammad al-Mahdi:”
― Lesley Hazleton, After the Prophet: The Epic Story of the Shia-Sunni Split in Islam

“The sight of her riding into Medina on Safwan’s camel had branded itself into the collective memory of the oasis, and that was the last thing Muhammad needed. In due course, another Quranic revelation dictated that from now on, his wives were to be protected by a thin muslin curtain from the prying eyes of any men not their kin. And since curtains could work only indoors, they would soon shrink into a kind of minicurtain for outdoors: the veil.”
― Lesley Hazleton, After the Prophet: The Epic Story of the Shia-Sunni Split in Islam

“The wording of his revelation would apply not only when adultery was suspected but also when there had been an accusation of rape. Unless a woman could produce four witnesses to her rape—a virtual impossibility—she would be considered guilty of slander and adultery, and punished accordingly. Aisha’s exoneration was destined to become the basis for the silencing, humiliation, and even execution of countless women after her.”
― Lesley Hazleton, After the Prophet: The Epic Story of the Shia-Sunni Split in Islam

“As if Ali were not close enough by virtue of being Muhammad’s paternal first cousin and his adoptive son, Muhammad handpicked him to marry Fatima, his eldest daughter, even though others had already asked for her hand. Those others were the two men who would lead the challenge to Ali’s succession after Muhammad’s death: Aisha’s father, Abu Bakr, who had been Muhammad’s companion on the flight to Medina, and the famed warrior Omar, the man who was to lead Islam out of the Arabian Peninsula and into the whole of the Middle East. But whereas Abu Bakr and Omar had given Muhammad their daughters in marriage, he had refused each of them when they asked for the hand of Fatima.”
― Lesley Hazleton, After the Prophet: The Epic Story of the Shia-Sunni Split in Islam

“After his father’s death, the orphaned Muhammad had been raised in his uncle Abu Talib’s household, long before Ali was even born, and years later, when Abu Talib fell on hard times financially, Muhammad, by then married to Khadija and running the merchant business she had inherited from her first husband, had taken in his uncle’s youngest son as part of his own household. Ali grew up alongside Muhammad’s four daughters and became the son Muhammad and Khadija never had. The Prophet became a second father to him, and Khadija a second mother.”
― Lesley Hazleton, After the Prophet: The Epic Story of the Shia-Sunni Split in Islam

“Affair of the Necklace,”
― Lesley Hazleton, After the Prophet: The Epic Story of the Shia-Sunni Split in Islam

“But Shia scholars would maintain that Muhammad had long before made the divinely guided choice of his closest male relative—his son-in-law Ali”
― Lesley Hazleton, After the Prophet: The Epic Story of the Shia-Sunni Split in Islam

“The men included two of his fathers-in-law, two of his sons-in-law, and a brother-in-law, and indeed all five would eventually succeed him, claiming the title of Caliph—the khalifa, or successor, of Muhammad.”
― Lesley Hazleton, After the Prophet: The Epic Story of the Shia-Sunni Split in Islam

“but those three assassination attempts must have made him more aware than most that his life could be cut short.”
― Lesley Hazleton, After the Prophet: The Epic Story of the Shia-Sunni Split in Islam

“Aisha, the first wife he had married after the death of Khadija.”
― Lesley Hazleton, After the Prophet: The Epic Story of the Shia-Sunni Split in Islam