Shia Islam: The Historical Record

A Space for Introspection

A simple question cuts through the noise of sectarian discourse: who built the Muslim ummah's great achievements, and who stood against them?

Who opened the Levant and Iraq? Umar ibn al-Khattab: Sunni. Who completed the conquest of Persia, building on what Umar began? Uthman ibn Affan: Sunni. Who opened the Indian subcontinent? Muhammad ibn al-Qasim: Sunni. Who opened Transoxiana and Central Asia? Qutayba ibn Muslim: Sunni. Who opened North Africa and then Andalusia? Uqba ibn Nafi, Hassan ibn al-Nu'man, Tariq ibn Ziyad, and Musa ibn Nusayr: all Sunni. Who conquered Constantinople? Muhammad al-Fatih: Sunni. Who led the Muslims at Hattin? Salah al-Din al-Ayyubi: Sunni. Who led the Muslims at Ain Jalut and turned back the Mongol tide? Sayf al-Din Qutuz and al-Zahir Baybars: both Sunni. Who broke Spanish colonial power in the Rif? Muhammad ibn Abd al-Karim al-Khattabi: Sunni. Who resisted Italian occupation in Libya until his execution? Umar al-Mukhtar: Sunni.

Then the harder question: what does the other ledger look like?

Who enabled the Mongols to enter Baghdad and brought about the fall of the Abbasid Caliphate? Ibn al-Alqami: Shia. Who aided the Mongols in their assault on the Levant? Shia factions who saw the Mongol advance as an opportunity rather than a catastrophe. Who betrayed the Seljuk Sultan Tughril to his enemies? Al-Basasiri, a Buyid-affiliated commander who leveraged Fatimid support to temporarily seize Baghdad and had the Friday sermon read in the Fatimid caliph's name, a stunning act of political betrayal against the Sunni order.

As for the Fatimids themselves: when the Crusaders arrived at the gates of the Levant, the Fatimid response was not resistance but calculation. They had recently seized Jerusalem from the Seljuk Turks and saw the Crusaders not as an existential threat but as a potential buffer against their Sunni rivals in Syria and Iraq. They opened diplomatic channels and cooperated tactically, preferring Latin armies on their doorstep to Sunni political consolidation. Jerusalem fell in 1099. The Fatimids (Shia) had chosen the Crusaders over their Muslim neighbours.

Who stole the Black Stone from the Kaaba and massacred pilgrims in the sacred precinct? Abu Tahir al-Qarmati, a figure so extreme that mainstream Shia scholarship has historically condemned and disowned him, yet one whose movement emerged from the same fractured landscape of anti-Sunni militancy.

And in the modern era, the pattern did not disappear. When the United States invaded Afghanistan, Iran provided logistical cooperation with the campaign, framing it as pragmatic hostility toward the Taliban, but functionally lending support to a Western military intervention in Muslim lands. When the United States invaded Iraq, voices of Shia political and clerical authority again accommodated, welcomed, or actively facilitated the post-invasion order, lending it a legitimacy it would not otherwise have had among the Iraqi population.

The argument is not that every Shia individual or community shares this record, nor that Sunni history is without its own failures. The argument is narrower and more uncomfortable: that at the hinge moments of Islamic history (when Baghdad fell, when Jerusalem was taken, when Muslim lands were invaded) the pattern of who resisted and who accommodated is not random. It follows a line.

The Pattern in Context

These are not isolated incidents. They form a pattern: when the Muslim ummah faced an existential threat (the Crusades, the Mongol invasions, European colonialism) Shia political actors and dynasties repeatedly calculated that their communal interest lay in alliance with the external threat rather than with the Sunni Muslim community.

The Fatimids and the Crusades: The Fatimid caliphate of Egypt, an Ismaili Shia dynasty, was so hostile to the Abbasid Sunni caliphate that it calculated the Crusaders as potential allies against the Sunni order. When the First Crusade was approaching Jerusalem, the Fatimids made no serious effort to defend it, having themselves taken it from the Seljuks shortly before. The liberation of Jerusalem required first the dismantling of the Fatimid caliphate, which Salah al-Din accomplished before turning to the Crusaders.

The Fatimid-Crusader relationship is documented in primary sources including Ibn al-Qalanisi's Damascus Chronicle and the letters preserved by William of Tyre. The Fatimids signed a treaty with the Crusaders in 1108 and maintained commercial and diplomatic relations with Crusader states at various points, including during periods when the Crusaders held Muslim territories. This is the classical Sunni narrative as presented in Ibn Kathir and others; some modern historians debate whether this constitutes active collaboration or pragmatic accommodation under weakness. The documentation is real; the interpretation is contested.

Ibn al-Alqami and the Fall of Baghdad: When Hulagu Khan's Mongol armies approached Baghdad in 1258, the Abbasid Caliph's Shia minister Ibn al-Alqami secretly communicated with Hulagu and undermined the city's defences. The destruction of Baghdad (the burning of the House of Wisdom, the killing of the Caliph, the deaths of hundreds of thousands) was facilitated by treachery from within.

The Qarmatians: Abu Tahir al-Qarmati and the Qarmatian movement (an Ismaili Shia offshoot) attacked the Hajj caravan in 930 CE, killing thousands of pilgrims in the vicinity of the Haram and stealing the Black Stone, which they held for over twenty years. This is among the most sacrilegious acts in Islamic history.

The Contemporary Pattern

The contemporary pattern (Iran's alliance with the United States against the Taliban in Afghanistan, the Shia militias' collaboration with the American occupation of Iraq, Hezbollah's role in sustaining the Assad regime during the Syrian civil war, and Iran's decades of inaction on Palestine followed by limited retaliation only when Iranian sovereignty was threatened) is consistent with the historical pattern documented above.

The conclusion is not that every Shia Muslim is a traitor to the ummah. The conclusion is that the political leadership and theological framework of mainstream Twelver Shia Islam has historically prioritised sectarian interest over Islamic solidarity, and that Sunni Muslims who ignore this pattern do so at their own risk.

Historiographical Note

This account draws primarily on the classical Sunni historical tradition: Ibn Kathir, Ibn al-Athir, and related sources. Readers should be aware that some modern historians, including those without a Shia perspective, have questioned aspects of this narrative and assess some sources as relying on hostile reporting. The core documented facts (treaties, commercial relations, military non-cooperation) are less contested than the interpretation of intent.