Thanks for the comments on last night's blog posting. It's interesting that, thanks to "Networked Blogs" comments can appear in different places rather than just on the blog, for example, underneath the Facebook notice. I was expecting or maybe hoping for a one particular comment. I had accidentally left out a specific observation that I had intended to make, and then when I realized my omission, rather than add it to the entry, I figured that maybe someone else would make it as a part of the feedback. I'm referring to my observation that there are times when representatives of a particular religion may stretch their claims a little bit further than is warranted because they know that they can get away with it. The observation screaming to be added is that Christians are not exempt from employing such strategic ambiguity themselves. We are not guaranteed a happy, carefree, and prosperous life, and so we should not create the impression for non-Christians that if they receive Christ as their Savior, they will automatically qualify for a happy, carefree, and prosperous life. I suspect plenty of people were having that very thought as they were reading my comments, but just want to leave such meddling to me.

Jared raised the question of whether succession in Islam is an issue of authority or theology, presumably because I had made a rather blanket statement to the effect that the largest division was purely based on the question of who would be successor to Muhammad, which could be a theological issue just as much as an authority one. That's a good point, but in this case theology was initially put to the side in favor of fitness to lead.

Clearly, it is naïve ever to think that the formation of one group or one division within a larger group has only one cause; there is always going to be a confluence of a number of causes. Take the Protestant Reformation as an example. Humanly speaking, Luther would not have had the success that he did, had he not enjoyed the support of the German princes who were really tired of having all of their good money drained southward to Rome where it was spent on artists who helped the popes live in greater luxury. Furthermore, the emergence of a middle class and the growth of cities, not to mention the invention of the printing press with movable type by Gutenberg all contributed to the Reformation. Nevertheless, it would be silly (at least in my view) to deny that the religious element was at the center of the Reformation. On the other hand, whatever other factors may have been present, it is pretty clear that the initial designation of a successor to Muhammad was a matter of authority and political power and not theology. It would become theological very quickly when similar decisions needed to be made, but not the first time around.

Muhammad had been both the spiritual and temporal leader of his people. When he escaped from Mecca (the hijra in A.D. 610), the people of Medina established him as their ruler. Consequently, the growth of Islam and the growth of territory under Muhammad's government were coterminous. To become a Muslim is never just an individual matter of adopting a personal faith, but you also join the community (the Umma), which is a political entity. So, by the time that Muhammad died, there were many people who had converted to Islam, and Muhammad was ruling politically over the majority of the Arabian peninsula already. Therefore, his death was a religious matter because the prophet was now gone, but it also was a matter of someone having to take over the political leadership of the Umma.

The theological questions on the sideline were 1) should Muhammad be worshiped as deity now that he was departed from the earth? And 2) should his successor be a prophet as well or just a political figure. Abu Bakr, one of Muhammad's several fathers-in-law and long-term friend, quickly disposed of the first question by declaring that Muhammad was dead and Allah was alive, and that Allah should be worshiped, but not Muhammad. The second question was not quite as easy to deal with because Muhammad's son-in-law, Ali ben Talib, was claiming that he had beendesignated by Muhammad as his successor, and also that he had inherited the same spiritual powers that Muhammad had. Additionally, this same Ali was the closest one could get to a male descendent of the prophet. He was only a son-in-law, but there were no sons that survived into adulthood.

Here, then, is my point. When the short period of turmoil was over, the decision had been made on basically pragmatic grounds. Despite of all of his claims (or maybe maybe even specifically because of them), the majority of people thought that he would not make a good leader. Instead, the consensus was that it should be Abu Bakr who would be the caliph (successor). This meant that the choice had gone in the direction of finding a new political leader and notlooking for another prophet. Muhammad was supposed to have been the very last and final prophet, and so Abu Bakr was viewed as caliph but not asprophet. That choice should not be construed along the lines that Abu Bakr would be a purely secular leader; he was a companion of Muhammad's and he was considered to be "rightly guided." Nevertheless, the bottom line is that Abu Bakr was chosen on the basis of a kind of informal democracy, based on leadership quality, and Aliwas bypassed not because he did not have outstanding credentials as a Muslim, but because he was not perceived as a good leader. Now, the word for "consensus" in Arabic is Sunna, and the dissenting party, those who thought that Ali should become the caliph, became known as the Shi'a.

I mentioned last night that I believe that Americans today are certainly familiar with the fact that there are at least two main groups of Islam, Sunnis and the Shiites. And now you can see that this division really was based on the question of successorship to Muhammad. It so happened that when the United States first came into violent conflict with Muslims in the post-Teddy-Roosevelt era(taking over the American Embassy in Tehran in 1979, bombings and skirmishes in Lebanon in the mid-80s), those Muslims were Shi'ites, and so some people have reasoned that Shi'ites are militant Muslims and Sunnis are more moderate Muslims, but this is not at all true. Sunnis are the ones who were part of the larger consensus to go with Abu Bakr as the head of the Islamic society, and Shi'ites are the ones who believed that Ali should have become the successor to Muhammad immediately. There are violent and intolerant groups on both sides, and you cannot distinguish between the two on the basis of how extreme, radical, or prone to violence the groups are. More on the difference between the two groups next time.

KINGS AND KINGDOMS
	Bible Reading: 1 Kings 12:25- 33
V. 26:  Jeroboam said to himself, “The way things are going now, the kingdom might return to the house of David." (HCSB)