The civil wars raised many crucial questions. How could a society
that killed its devout leaders (imams) claim to be guided
by God? What kind of man should lead the ummah? Should
the caliph be the most pious Muslim (as the Kharajites believed),
a direct descendant of the Prophet (as the Shiis contended),
or should the faithful accept the Umayyads, with all
their failings, in the interests of peace and unity? Had Ali or
Muawiyyah been right during the first fitnah? And how Islamic
was the Umayyad state? Could rulers who lived in such
luxury and condoned the poverty of the vast majority of the
people be true Muslims? And what about the position of non-
Arab converts to Islam, who had to become "clients" (mawali)
of one of the Arab tribes? Did this not suggest a chauvinism
and inequity that was quite incompatible with the Quran?
It was from these political discussions that the religion and
piety of Islam, as we know it, began to emerge. Quran reciters
and other concerned people asked what it really meant to be a
Muslim. They wanted their society to be Islamic first and Arab
second. The Quran spoke of the unification (tawhid) of the
whole of human life, which meant that all the actions of the
individual and all the institutions of the state should express a
fundamental submission to God's will. At an equally formative
stage of their history, Christians had held frequently vituperative
discussions about the nature and person of Jesus, which
helped them to evolve their distinctive view of God, salvation
and the human condition. These intense Muslim debates
about the political leadership of the u m m a h after the civil wars
played a role in Islam that was similar to the great Christological
debates of the fourth and fifth centuries in Christianity.
The prototype and supreme exemplar of this new Muslim
piety was Hasan al-Basri (d. 728).
