Khomeini’s family are Musavi seyyeds; that is they claim descent from the Prophet through his daughter’s line and the line of the seventh Imam of the Shi`a, Musa al-Kazem. They are believed to have come originally from Neishabur, a town near to Mashhad in north-eastern Iran. In the early eighteenth century the family migrated to India where they settled in the small town of Kintur near Lucknow in the Kingdom of Oudh whose rulers were Twelver Shi`a — the branch of Islam which became the official state religion in Iran under the Safavids and to which the majority of Iranians adhere today. Ruhollah’s grandfather, Seyyed Ahmad Musavi Hindi, was born in Kintur and was a contemporary and relative of the famous scholar Mir Hamed Hossein Hindi Neishaburi whose voluminous history of the religion, the Abaqat al-Anwar, is sometimes described as the pride of Indian Shi`ism.

Juan Cole, btw, wrote his first book/diss. on Indian Shia, and it’s quite interesting – Avadh/Oudh was a major Shia centre and the Nawabs of Avadh had close ties with Najaf and Karbala, and were patrons of religious establishments in those Shia centres of learning (I think some members of the Avadh royal clan even used to go there to die). There are streets named after the Nawab of Avadh in either Najaf or Karbala, I forget.

If you go to Lucknow even today, you’ll see the classic taziyas that are shiny colourful reproductions of the mosque of Imam Ali in Karbala. Indian Shia are not crazy about the Sunnis (esp of the Deobandi variety) and have set up their own Personal Law Board, and a few years ago even allied temporarily with the BJP in Lucknow, IIRC, to piss off the Sunnis. Shia in general have a stronger clerical structure and give more importance to a marja’ (or exemplary person/cleric, rather like a guru) so in a sense are more concrete-community-driven and maybe that’s why they haven’t been drawn to the kind of radical idealism that some Sunnis have been….

Ali is regarded by many as the “father of Sufism”, which of course has some overlaps with Sikhism too.

Guru Gobind Singh owned one of Ali’s swords, which I believe is presently housed at a gurdwara in Punjab (Anandpur Sahib, I think — someone please confirm). It is also rumoured that Ali’s sword was used by the Guru during the Khalsa baptism ceremony at the first Vaisakhi in 1699 — he used it to stir the “amrit” mixture which was then given to inductees to drink as part of the ceremony.

I’m not sure if this means that the Guru was indirectly supporting Ali’s claim as the rightful heir to the leadership of the Ummah, but it’s an interesting idea.

The theology and history is happening here because some of us are interested in deepening our understanding, and others are willing to share…

If you have studied policy for long enough (and I hope against hope that the pols have), then I highly doubt that knowing the differences would come in the way of making good policy. I think this post should viewed in the larger context in which it is placed, that is, that this government has never had the slightest clue what they were trying to do in Iraq. The WMD debacle, the deBaathification fiasco and the ostensible link between 9/11 and Saddam were not aberrations. It is symptomatic of a series of clueless decisions.

Ya Ali Madad!