Like most of
my readers, I suspect, I found myself somewhere between surprised and unnerved
by the sudden crisis in Saudi-Iranian relations, but mostly I felt confused.
Both regimes are, after all, run by radical Islamicists who would appear—at
least from this distance—to be each other’s natural allies. Both nations, each
in its own way, are police states that feature as part of their national
culture what the vast majority of Americans would consider to be a severely
deficient understanding of the basic human rights that animate our own culture.
Both are surely united in their hostility towards Israel—despite the occasional
rumors that the Saudis might be softening their stance—and even if their
relationship towards our own country is not at all the same, that hardly seems
to constitute a good enough reason for them to dislike each other so intensely.
Must the friends of our enemies also be our enemies? Is this somehow all
about us? Or is it primarily about them?
Obviously,
and leaving out for the moment what this possibly could have to with our
own nation, the whole thing has to do—at least in large part—with the
apparently unbridgeable chasm between Sunnis and Shiites, the Saudis belonging
to the former group and the Iranians to the latter. But that too is confusing
to me because the basic distinction between the two groups is rooted in a
dispute anchored in distant times that, even if never truly resolved, by
all rights ought to have vanished long ago into the swirling mists of forgotten
history.
The story
itself is somehow complicated and simple at the same time. The prophet Muhammad
died in 632 C.E. without formally passing along the mantle of spiritual leadership
to a worthy successor and thus leaving Islam—then a small but growing sect made
up primarily of the Prophet’s personal followers—without a leader who could
claim the ultimate authority to lead Muslims in his stead. In retrospect, this
was a huge error. At first, one of Muhammad’s aides, one Abu Bakr, succeeded
him as leader, but others felt the Prophet had indeed designated a successor in
his own son-in-law, a man named Ali. Eventually, Ali did become caliph (which
means “replacement” and specifically denotes the individual replacing Muhammad)
and, after he was assassinated (he was stabbed to death in a mosque in present-day
Iraq), his sons, Hussein and Hasan, stepped up to take their father’s position
in the Muslim world. Both were eventually murdered as well, however, and so their
supporters became known as Shiites, the anglicized version of the Arabic words
that mean “followers of Ali.” And their position was relatively clear: the
earliest Shiites promulgated the opinion that the Muslim world should only be
led by someone physically descended from Muhammad. The rest of the Muslim
world, devoted to the Sunnah (which is the Arabic word for “tradition,”
in this case denoting specifically the Prophet’s tradition) adopted the alternate
opinion that their leader should be someone characterized by piety and
learning, i.e., by devotion to the Sunnah, but not necessarily a blood
relation of the Prophet or one of such a relation’s descendants.
And so began
the schism that continues to fuel the fires of the Middle East. Nor do the sides
stack up evenly: more than eighty-five percent of the world’s billion and a
half Muslims are Sunni, as is the leadership and royal house of Saudi Arabia.
The Iranians are Shiites, as are their leaders and client groups across the
Middle East. The only Shiite-majority countries in the Muslim world, in fact,
are Iran, Iraq, Azerbaijan, and Bahrein. All the other major Muslim countries
have Sunni majorities, including Turkey, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh,
Indonesia, and Malaysia. (The numbers for our own country are slightly
confusing because, although a large majority of American Muslims are Sunni,
most Arab Americans are Christians, not Muslims at all.)
That whole
story hardly seems enough to warrant the level of intense vituperation we have
been witnessing over the last week—the Sunni Saudis beheading a Shiite sheikh
who militated for the rights of Shiites in the Eastern Province of the kingdom
and the Shiite Iranians launching a violent attack on the Saudi embassy in
Tehran. Nor do Shiites and Sunni Muslims
differ too dramatically in terms of their beliefs—they both revere Muhammed,
consider the Quran to be a book of divine revelation, and they both follow the
five tenets of Islam: prayer, charity, faith, fasting during Ramadan, and the
obligation to undertake a pilgrimage to Mecca in the course of one’s lifetime.
From outside the tent, they don’t seem particularly different at all! And yet
the animus is so real as to be in the process of altering the whole tableau of
Middle Eastern politics almost before our eyes.
Maybe the
whole issue of succession seems so odd to become so angry about precisely
because, in our American meritocracy, it goes without saying that leaders are
correctly chosen because of their moral worth and because of the positions they
espouse. Indeed, in our American republic, only two sons of presidents have
gone on themselves to become president, and neither inherited the position from
his father. Even in the modern monarchies of Western Europe, in fact, the
notion that the crown passes from the sitting monarch to that monarch’s heirs
is only tolerated because the monarchs in question have no real political power.
It all
sounds so foreign and odd. But that’s only because we forgotten to remember
much of our own history—and thus to know that the course of Jewish history too
was altered by a violent war of succession…and it too was characterized by
multiple assassinations, ferocious street demonstrations, and civil unrest so
violent that it set in motion the events that eventually cost the Jewish people
their sovereignty. It’s a story worth telling!
We think of
the Maccabees as heroes, as the guerilla warriors that defeated the far more powerful
armies of Antiochus IV to create an independent Jewish state in the Land of
Israel, as worthy role models for the kind of principled opposition to tyranny
that we all consider not merely praiseworthy but supremely so. All of the above is true, more or less, but
there’s another part of the story, a never-told part that we’ve chosen to
ignore and to forget.
The
Maccabees entered history, as noted, in the context of the famous Chanukah
story. But history didn’t stop when the miracle had run its course and a new
cruse of oil was finally prepared. Nor did the war against the Seleucid Empire
end. The fighting continued for years. Judah
the Maccabee was killed in battle in the year 160 B.C.E., in fact, four years
after the rededication of the Temple. He was succeeded by his brother Jonathan,
but Jonathan was murdered (along with a full 1,000 of his soldiers) in 142
B.C.E. by a pretender to the Seleucid throne who had lured him to a meeting at
which they were supposed to discuss an alliance. He was succeeded by another
one of the brothers, Simon. Simon did a
lot of good—it was during his years of leadership that the Roman Republic
formally recognized the Jewish State in 139 B.C.E. But in the winter of 135 B.C.E., Simon and
two of his three sons were murdered by his own son-in-law, an ambitious churl who
hoped personally to succeed his father-in-law as national leader.
In fact, Simon
was succeeded by his remaining son, John Hyrcanus, who ruled from 134 to 104
B.C.E. and who was the first (and almost only) Maccabean leader to die in bed.
He was followed by his son, Judah Aristobulus, who took the title of king and
who is remembered, among other things, for murdering his own mother by
imprisoning her until she starved to death and for conspiring with his wife to
murder his brother, whom he suspected of conspiring to murder him and seize the
throne.
One thing
led to another. Judah Aristobulus was succeeded on the throne by his brother,
Alexander Yannai, who died in battle and was succeeded by his own wife, Queen
Salome Alexandra. (Alexander Yannai is remembered, among other things, for
crucifying eight hundred of his enemies in Jerusalem.) And then things got really
bad. King Yannai and Queen Salome had two sons, Hyrcanus and Aristobulus.
No clear heir was apparent…and so the sons went to war with each other.
Eventually, the entire country erupted into a civil war as bloody as they come
and became so weakened by the fighting that the door opened to the Roman
general Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus, known to history as Pompey and already
acclaimed as “Conqueror of Asia” by his countrymen. He came onto the scene,
promised to restore order and bring peace to a war-ravaged land. The people
were thrilled. And so, in 63 B.C.E., the independent Jewish kingdom established
by the Maccabees a century earlier became a Roman protectorate. And so ended
Jewish independence in the Land of Israel for more than two thousand years.
Who ever
heard of any of these people? Historians of antiquity, obviously, know their names.
But how many “regular” Jewish people, all of whom could retell the story of the
Chanukah miracle easily, could move forward into the rest of the second century
BCE and the first third of the first to see how the question of succession led
to violence and eventual disaster?
So the
question asks itself: are we the wise ones to have moved on and no longer to
consider any of these live issues…or are the Muslims right to struggle with
unresolved issues even after all this time? I suppose it would depend whom you
ask! There is surely something to be said for moving on, for leaving the past
behind, for allowing the past to morph into the present without constantly
undermining it with unresolved issues from centuries (let alone millennia)
ago. And yet…it hardly sounds like a
good idea to consider history a kind of burden to be set down as quickly as
possible, as a prison from which escape is only possible by those who choose to
leave their cells behind and move into the future unencumbered by ancient
instances of friction, violence, and bloodshed. I suppose that the correct
answer is neither of the above: to feel unable to step away from an ancient
dispute and to risk the lives of countless civilians as it is adjudicated not
in the courtroom or the study hall but on the battle field and in the
street—that surely sounds like a loser’s proposition. But to have gone to the
extreme that we ourselves have gone in making our own history unfamiliar even
to the relatively well educated among us—that also seems like a poor plan if we
wish to live in a present that authentically replicates the best of the past.
Iran and
Saudi Arabia are fighting an ancient battle. There are, obviously, a thousand
side issues (some of which directly concern our own country) that are fueling this
particular fire. But the basic principle is that both sides of the dispute are
unwilling to step away from the past to create a finer, better present. In our Jewish
world, we have solved our version of that problem by making our own history a
closed book to most…and that too cannot be a rational way to move forward into
future if we wish the future to be a meaningful extension of the past that
replicates its finest accomplishments and makes of the world we will bequeath
to our children a satisfying, intelligently constructed midrash on the
world our ancestors bequeathed to us.
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