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FROM THE PHONE BOOTH: The Smallest Space in  Hollywood

	FINEFROCK

“High Noon” in Karbala
Caliph Ali Meets Will Kane
by Steve Finefrock - Hollywood Forum [scriptwriter] 6/17/08

Remember these names: Ali, Fatima, Abu Bakr, Aisha, Khadija, Muawiya, Husayn, Kerbala, Omar, Uthman and, of course: Muhammad the Prophet of Islam.  You need a program and a list of characters to follow this story of why the Shia and the Sunni hate each other so fervently. Think of the tale as one of Hadleyville and Sheriff Will Kane, without the Quaker wife.
 
It’s a tortuous story, worthy of your time and effort. Islam and Energy are the prime numbers in the enumerated subjects for which there are many readings you must engorge into you brain, and they are connected. In this tale on the Islam half of that required-reading mandate, the split begins less than fifty years after the Prophet’s death, whose cousin and son-in-law tends to his burial as others plot to take power, as the First Caliph, elsewhere in Medina. The ‘near shrine’ of the Ka’aba in Mecca’s center is burned to the ground at that half-century mark, and the split continues as those who believe Ali should have been chosen instead of Abu Bakr are thus the Party of Ali, e.g., Shi’at Ali – thus, Shia members, or Shiites.

Ali was reared in Muhammad’s home, amidst the Prophet’s four daughters who were Ali’s own age, he being the last, belated son of the very man who’d reared Muhammad from age eight to adulthood: Abu Talib, who protected the Prophet from hostile Meccans without himself ever converting to Islam. This is how powerful was the tribal bond of that time, and within a clan as well [many clans equal a tribe], which tribe, the Hashim, was headed by Talib. Ultimately Ali wed Fatima, the youngest and most serious of the four daughters of Muhammad and his first wife, Khadija. Ali had found Allah as a boy, before learning any of the many pagan religions of Mecca, so was the first ‘pure’ Muslim, and the most pious of pious – sort of a combination of Dudley DoRight with Wally Cleaver and Richie Cunningham. Or, the knightiest knight of this Muslim roundtable, Lancelot crossed with Percival.
 
This first family of the Prophet was his only family, begat by twice-widowed Khadija, a businesswoman fifteen years his senior who proposed to him when he had completed a trial as a new caravan manager for her father’s business she’d inherited. This is an enormous contrast, ya think, with the image of Islam regarding women, which continues to present day?
 
A modern-woman of sorts, who proposes to an employee, bears six more children after two prior marriages that each left her a widow.  But, alas there is wee tiny twinkie tart named Aisha, the famed child-bride who was betrothed by her loyal father, Abu Bakr, to the bereaving Prophet after Khadija’s death – first as a househelper, then later when the all but banished Muslims had relocated to Medina, nine year old Aisha was wedded, then bedded. Not unusual for young brides – an Arabic dictum to fathers is: Do not let your daughter see her first blood while she is under your roof.  Thus, wed her before her first menses, e.g., menstrual event.
 
Aisha apparently grew into quite a hottie, and exploited that trait as all hotties thru history have proven adept at achieving. She had a falling out with Ali, who doubted her fidelity during a long controversy – which she never forgot, or forgave. The Prophet himself was unsure of the dilemma, until a Revelation informed him his young tartish bride was innocent. Essentially, Allah was saying to Muhammad: Man Up Fellah and stand by your woman.
 
Upon the Prophet dying on Aisha’s bosom, when she was eighteen, the Muslim community, or the ‘umma’ festered and faltered as Ali tended to burying Muhammad where he’d died, in Aisha’s tent, beneath the bed where he’d expired. And elsewhere: Omar nominated Abu Bakr [a later title, meaning Father of the Virgin Bride, that being Aisha] as first Caliph, to the crowd’s assent, with pious and dutiful Ali nowhere in sight.
 
Thus the first slight to the partisans of Ali, a bite in the tuckus to those who felt then and since that Ali, the ‘Gate to True Islam’ as proclaimed publicly by the Prophet, should have become the first Caliph. Ali the pious stood loyally with the umma’s hurried choice, and two years later Abu Baker died, naming his nominator; thus, Omar [or Umar in some spellings] rose to be the Second Rightly-guided Caliph. Omar was what today we’d call a Calvinist tight-ass. Jerry Falwell appears as one wild and crazy guy, a religious John Belushi, compared to the stern demeanor and expectations demanded by Omar.
 
After some years which produced the first Qu’ran [or Koran], Omar was assassinated by a disgruntled POW-slave who’d thought he’d get a favorable judgment. Fearing that Ali might be as strict as had been Omar, all turned to Uthman, himself later assassinated by Aisha’s half-brother as the ‘fitna’ began, that being a disintegration of the empire started by Muhammad and expanded dramatically by Abu Bakr, then Omar, and consolidated by Uthman.
 
But Uthman had accelerated a disturbing trend: PORKBARREL POLITICS, and of course traditional Arab nepotism, much to the dissatisfaction of most pious Muslims. Empire had led to wealth, and that to the abuses which the pious often absorb, as proven recently by GOPsters more concerned with earmarks than budget constraints. His family, the Umayyids, had filled key posts in the new empire, though many such as Muawiya were quite competent, if nasty and brutish and less Muslim than power-mad.
 
On Uthman’s death amidst military units descending on Medina, Ali was finally proclaimed the Fourth Caliph, but things were not so well in the kingdom.  Uthman’s assassination was amidst a military challenge, the assassin being Muhammad bin Abu Bakr, a man then given governership of Egypt by Ali!  This began the split, and Ali tried to challenge Muawiya and others who were hunkering down in their regional HQs.  Soon, Ali agreed to negotiate, and there he got the screwing of the millennia.


Suffice it to say his negotiation skills were as puny as his warrior talents were ginormous. He was left with little power, conceding the Caliph post to Muawiya. This shortly after first defeating Aisha and her co-conspirators in the Battle of the Camel: she’d commanded her portion of the battle from the back of a camel, her howda looking like a hedgehog from the arrows embedded in its wooden covering.  Aisha was pensioned back to Medina, her fellows killed in the battle, and she became a major oral source of many legends, living longer than any of the Prophet’s wives.  History’s record of the true facts left to the recall and elaboration by a tart – ain’t it another chapter to the Book of Job!
 
Her half-brother [and assassin of Uthman] was killed trying to take his command in Egypt, and disgruntled Ali supporters felt betrayed by their leader for his wimpiness in negotiating with hypocrites.  This band of not-so-merry men of the Faith felt they could put it all back together by simultaneously assassinating Ali, and his two opponents, Amr in Egypt and Muawiya in Syria. Wee little problem: Plan went wrong in two places, but very well in killing Ali. Then, suddenly, this group – the Kharijites – as well as other Muslims realized what they’d loss. Too late, Humpty Dumpty is dead and buried.
 
But not to be totally bereft of hope, there was Husayn, Ali’s son and the Prophet’s grandson, who took up the standard and was called to rescue the good Muslims oppressed by Muawiya in Karbala.  Husayn raised a meager force, and like the sheriff in “High Noon” he found few willing to join his banner.  Arriving near Karbala, the Prophet’s grandson found none in the town willing to risk angering Muawiya’s secret police, including those who had issued the mayday call to Husayn in the first place, and soon the Caliph’s forces surrounded Husayn’s family and small troop.
 
And Husayn’s group was slaughtered, their heads brought in leather bags to Muawiya for his personal examination, the headless bodies buried anonymously in the desert sand near Karbala.  That site is blessed with a Shiite shrine – the very shrine blown up in Iraq by Sunni extremists. Thus, you get the context of how the internal strife was hyper-accelerated by that gruesome, tawdry act.
 
This “High Noon” event varies from the film in one key respect: this sharif [the Arabic word from which we derive ‘sheriff’] did not throw his badge to the ground and leave alive with his wife, with disgust lingering in the dust for his townspeople. Unlike Sheriff Will Kane, Husayn and family and allies were slaughtered in particularly bloody manner.  As in Hadleyville, the townspeople of Karbala wimped out, the only parallel that lasts to the end of each legend.
 
As simple as this tawdry tale can be made, there you have it – High Noon in Karbala is the climactic event that explains a bit of the Shia-Sunni split. It’s far more complicated, of course, and this bit o’ history comes from a year’s examination of many books, and more to come. A religion whose First Muslim was adult businesswoman Khadija, but whose longest-living ‘source’ of the story of the tradition set by the Prophet was his tartish child bride, forever proud that of his dozen-plus wives, she was the only one who was sexually pure to his marriage bed [the later wives also were widows, often war widows, or political marriages akin to medieval Europe].
 
Aisha’s resentments play a big role, including her armed revolt against Ali, and having played a role at the initial selection of her own father as the First Caliph [thus manipulating Ali from ascension], and her half-brother the assassin of the Third Caliph. Ali as a warrior would best be described as a combination of Conan, Rambo and Sgt. Rock, but as incompetent at politics of leadership amidst predatory, ruthless wolves as was Chamberlain at Munich.
 
Being the most pious, and married to the equally pious Fatima, wasn’t enough for Ali to acquire power, much less implement it. Though dubbed by Muhammad as the ‘gate to Islam’ the Prophet’s presumed heir did not possess the shrewdness and political cynicism required to minister a growing, aggressive empire.
 
Ali expected all true, faithful Muslims to merely dub him the leader, but unlike mythical Arthur who also thought merely drawing the sword from the stone was enough to make him king, Ali did not have Merlin to teach him the tougher lessons of leadership.
 
But, like Arthur’s beloved, hard-won Camelot, it did all come crashing down around Ali, and Husayn. The near-mosque of Ka’aba, with its holy stone, was set afire during this turmoil, the stone heated by consuming firestorm until it shattered into three pieces, held together since by silver brazing. This symbolic rupture of Islam, in the stone’s shattering, came a mere fifty years after Muhammad’s death.  Its three pieces can symbolize Sunni, Shiite and Kharijite beliefs, though other later offshoots include Fatimids in Egypt [ended by the conquest by Saladin].
 
And ya thought the Democrats irritation, as expressed in HBO’s “Recount” was an intense emotional and political attitude. “Recount” is but a grain of sand amidst the Brazilian beach of “Noon in Karbala” – not yet to be seen in a theatre near you. Who wants a fatwa for writing such a script? Or directing, or producing, or playing even a minor role?
 
I may be in trouble for calling the virgin Mother of the Faith a “tart”!  Maybe Madonna is the perfect casting here, with Michael Moore as Muawiya, and Meg Ryan as Khadija. Anyone for Ali? Muhammad? Omar?  We’ll give it a secret-code name: The “Arabic All-in-the-Family Project”…. ExileStreet

copyright 2008 Steve Finefrock

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