Shia, or Shiites. In 680, Ali's son Hussein, the Propet's grandson, led Shiite forces against the Umayyads in a second round of the civil war, this time at Karbala in Iraq, where he and almost his entire family were slaughtered. To this day, Shiites mourn the "martyrdom" of the Prophet's descendant Hussein ibn Ali in a day of atonement called Ashura. And to this day, Shiites, who make up less than 10 percent of Middle Eastern Muslims, are a persecuted minority in several Arab states, including Saudi Arabia. This historic division in Islam into Sunnis -- those who stood with Muwaiyah and followed the Sunna, Muhammad's teaching -- and Shiites -- the partisans of Ali -- would never be healed. Another group of dissidents were the Kharijites, or secessionists -- literally, "those who go out." Originally, Kharijites were Shiites, partisans of Ali, but they rejected him, too, when Ali submitted to arbitration: Men, they argued, had no right to decide what Allah had already resolved in Ali's favor and what could be determined on earth only through battle. In their fanataical idealism, they became anarchists, opposing both Muawiyah and Ali, Sunni and Shia, alike. Though the Kjarijites shared the Shia's sense of historical injustice at Ali's loss in Islam's historic power struggle, the sect was ultimately rejected by all Muslims, including the Shia. For it was a Khaijite who murdered Ali. For Kharijites, jihad, or spreading Islam by the sword, was their faith's sixth pillar. Islam became decidely pragmatic in the mid-seventh century under Umayyad rule, reverting more or less to a secular kingship. Muawiyah, the gifted fifth caliph who ruled not from Arabia but from Damascus, introduced a dynastic element to Islamic rule and institutionalized practices that most modern Islamic militants reject as secularism, the effective separation of religion and state. But when the Umayyads weakened, another branch of Muhammad's family, the Abbasids, launched Islam's third civil war against the Umayyads. Named for Muhammad's uncle Abbas, the Abbasids triumphantly relocated Islam's capital from Syria to Iraq in 750, thus intensifying a regional struggle between Damascus and Baghdad that has endured until today. While historians often describe the Abbasid caliphate (750-1258) as Islam's golden era, it was even more autocratic than its predecessors. It was also less stable. A fourth civil war occurred in 809. Modern Islamists argue that by the eleventh century Islam was in decline "From then on,"until the sixteenth century and the "pax Ottomanica," the last and greatest Islamic Empire and caliphate in Istanbul, restored "calm and order to the troubled Muslim realm." Given this history, it was easy to understand why, despite, or perhaps because of, their endless power struggles, most Muslims feared civil strife and unwarranted challenges to a ruler's authority. By the eleventh century, in fact, Sunni Islamic jurists had pronounced it sinful for Muslims to rebel against their leader -- however cruel, corrupt, or unjust -- as long as he was a Muslim who imposed sharia, the holy law. It was harder to understand, however, the militants' reverence for the "Rightly Guided Caliphs," that is the first four successors to Muhammad -- what they viewed as Islams true "golden" age. For women, surely, the Rightly Guided Caliphs were a disaster. The limited freedom that women had enjoyed in Medina was quickly denied them by the Prophet's "righeous" successors. Moreover, the repeated power struggles after Muhammed's death exposed major weaknesses of Islamic government that have endured to this day: the lack of a system of succession; the vagueness of what was meant by shura, or consultation with the community; the lack of guidance as to how the community is supposed to determine ijma, or what constitutes consensus; and how it should depose a leader who fails to live up to the Prophet's high standards. The Prophet himself seemed untroubled by such key questions of governance. "My community will not agree on an error." Yet in the bloody epoch now glorified by today's Islamists, three of the first four Rightly Guided Caliphs had died violent deaths, two of them at the hands of fellow Muslims. Under them the Islamic world had split in two. Less than two hundred years after the Prophet's death, the Islamic community had suffered four civil wars, and rival factions and tribes were feuding over power, giving rise to and justified by, disagreements over religious dogma. From then on Muslims fought bitterly about the laws that governed them. Interpretation of the law was key in Islam, since for Muslims, God made law; man was left simply to interpret and enforce it.Modern Islmists insist that no society can be "Islamic" unless it is ruled by sharia, the holy law based on the divinely granted Qur'an and Sunna, the Prophet's traditions, or the secondhand account of what the Prophet supposedly said.But the holy law was systematized only after Muhammad's death. The fuqaha (legal scholars) and ulema (the guardians of doctrine) used reasoning by analogy and personal judgment to interpet law until the ninth century, when they decided that all the major questions had been answered and that the gate of itihad, as the process was known, should be closed. Shia, the minority branch, rejected this, although both Shia and Sunni jurists in practice were conservative, relying increasingly on precedent and shunning innovation and interpetation, a development that would have devastating intellectual consequences for Islamic thought. The Rightly Guided Caliphs did not produce paradise on earth, but rather a powerful state with even more powerful rulers. This is the heart of their attraction to modern Islamic militants. For all the chaos, bloodshed, murder, improvisation, and absolutism, the Rightly Guided Caliphs were a precedent for the type of Islamic regime -- the autocratically "virtuous" state -- that contemporary Islamists have sought to create. They seem impervious to the apparently inverse correlation between power and Muslim virtue. The more powerful the state (and its caliph) became, the further the polity moved from the ideals that Muhammad preached. But the longing for this ostensibly blissful past and a community ruled by the oxymornic "just despot", an ideal that could be reestablished only by returning to the precepts established by the Messenger and his original companions, has proved remarkably durable. Eleven centuries later this impulse would create the first Islamic militant reform movement in modern times to forge a state in -- whre else? -- Arabia. Modern Saudi Arabia is actually the third Saudi kingdom. Since the dominant branch of Islam believes that Muhammad left no instructions about succession, Islam's first crisis, and an enduring problem in the Muslim Middle East, was not over religious dogma but over who should lead the state after his death. The Medinese wanted Muhammad's successor to come from among them. But the men of Mecca installed Abu Bakr as Kalifa, meaning "successor" and "deputy." To avoid future uncertainty over succession, Abu Bakr designated Umar the next caliph. But Umar was murdered in 644 by a disgruntled non-Muslim. The third caliph, Uthman, who won an apparent power struggle among six men whom Umar had named worthy of succession, came from a great aristocratic clan of Mecca, the Umayyads. So many Muslims resented the choice, preferring the more humble Ali, the Prophet's cousin and husband of his daughter Fatima. Opposition to Uthman grew, aggravated by his nepotism, his show of favoritism toward the leading Meccan clans, and his determination to standardize religious dogma by tolerating only his authorised version of the Qur'an. Uthman's murder in 656 by Muslim dissidents, the first assassination of a Muslim caliph by Muslims, was a "turning point" in Islamic history, which not only created what one scholar called "an ominous precedent" but also "gravely weakened the religious and moral prestige of the office as a bond of unity in Islam." The new caliph, Ali, was soon challenged by, among others, the Prophet's widow Aisha. In 656 Aisha herself led a battle against Ali, the beginning of the split of the Muslim realm into rival camps. At the Battle of the Camel, Ali defeated her. But in 657, Muawiyah, the late caliph Uthman's cousin, a fellow Umayyad and then governer of Syria, challenged Ali's forces at Siffen, Islam's first fitna (full-fledged civil war). The battle was inconclusive, and Ali agreed to arbitration. Muawiyah ultimately prevailed, and in 661, Ali was murdered. The war, the compromise over arbitration, and Ali's subsequent assassination were the events associated with the great division of Islam into rival camps and the beginning of the political fragmentation that Muhammad had always feared. For although Muawiyah and his Umayyad successors proved able rulers, expanding the empire from their new capital, Damascus, into Europe and to the borders of India and China, Ali's followers denounced the Umayyad caliphatae as illegitimate. Henceforth, these partisans of Ali became known as Shia, or Shiites. In 680, Ali's son Hussein, the Propet's grandson, led Shiite forces against the Umayyads in a second round of the civil war, this time at Karbala in Iraq, where he and almost his entire family were slaughtered. To this day, Shiites mourn the "martyrdom" of the Prophet's descendant Hussein ibn Ali in a day of atonement called Ashura. And to this day, Shiites, who make up less than 10 percent of Middle Eastern Muslims, are a persecuted minority in several Arab states, including Saudi Arabia. This historic division in Islam into Sunnis -- those who stood with Muwaiyah and followed the Sunna, Muhammad's teaching -- and Shiites -- the partisans of Ali -- would never be healed. Another group of dissidents were the Kharijites, or secessionists -- literally, "those who go out." Originally, Kharijites were Shiites, partisans of Ali, but they rejected him, too, when Ali submitted to arbitration: Men, they argued, had no right to decide what Allah had already resolved in Ali's favor and what could be determined on earth only through battle. In their fanataical idealism, they became anarchists, opposing both Muawiyah and Ali, Sunni and Shia, alike. Though the Kjarijites shared the Shia's sense of historical injustice at Ali's loss in Islam's historic power struggle, the sect was ultimately rejected by all Muslims, including the Shia. For it was a Khaijite who murdered Ali. For Kharijites, jihad, or spreading Islam by the sword, was their faith's sixth pillar. Islam became decidely pragmatic in the mid-seventh century under Umayyad rule, reverting more or less to a secular kingship. Muawiyah, the gifted fifth caliph who ruled not from Arabia but from Damascus, introduced a dynastic element to Islamic rule and institutionalized practices that most modern Islamic militants reject as secularism, the effective separation of religion and state. But when the Umayyads weakened, another branch of Muhammad's family, the Abbasids, launched Islam's third civil war against the Umayyads. Named for Muhammad's uncle Abbas, the Abbasids triumphantly relocated Islam's capital from Syria to Iraq in 750, thus intensifying a regional struggle between Damascus and Baghdad that has endured until today. While historians often describe the Abbasid caliphate (750-1258) as Islam's golden era, it was even more autocratic than its predecessors. It was also less stable. A fourth civil war occurred in 809. Modern Islamists argue that by the eleventh century Islam was in decline "From then on,"until the sixteenth century and the "pax Ottomanica," the last and greatest Islamic Empire and caliphate in Istanbul, restored "calm and order to the troubled Muslim realm." Given this history, it was easy to understand why, despite, or perhaps because of, their endless power struggles, most Muslims feared civil strife and unwarranted challenges to a ruler's authority. By the eleventh century, in fact, Sunni Islamic jurists had pronounced it sinful for Muslims to rebel against their leader -- however cruel, corrupt, or unjust -- as long as he was a Muslim who imposed sharia, the holy law. It was harder to understand, however, the militants' reverence for the "Rightly Guided Caliphs," that is the first four successors to Muhammad -- what they viewed as Islams true "golden" age. For women, surely, the Rightly Guided Caliphs were a disaster. The limited freedom that women had enjoyed in Medina was quickly denied them by the Prophet's "righeous" successors. Moreover, the repeated power struggles after Muhammed's death exposed major weaknesses of Islamic government that have endured to this day: the lack of a system of succession; the vagueness of what was meant by shura, or consultation with the community; the lack of guidance as to how the community is supposed to determine ijma, or what constitutes consensus; and how it should depose a leader who fails to live up to the Prophet's high standards. The Prophet himself seemed untroubled by such key questions of governance. "My community will not agree on an error." Yet in the bloody epoch now glorified by today's Islamists, three of the first four Rightly Guided Caliphs had died violent deaths, two of them at the hands of fellow Muslims. Under them the Islamic world had split in two. Less than two hundred years after the Prophet's death, the Islamic community had suffered four civil wars, and rival factions and tribes were feuding over power, giving rise to and justified by, disagreements over religious dogma. From then on Muslims fought bitterly about the laws that governed them. Interpretation of the law was key in Islam, since for Muslims, God made law; man was left simply to interpret and enforce it.Modern Islmists insist that no society can be "Islamic" unless it is ruled by sharia, the holy law based on the divinely granted Qur'an and Sunna, the Prophet's traditions, or the secondhand account of what the Prophet supposedly said.But the holy law was systematized only after Muhammad's death. The fuqaha (legal scholars) and ulema (the guardians of doctrine) used reasoning by analogy and personal judgment to interpet law until the ninth century, when they decided that all the major questions had been answered and that the gate of itihad, as the process was known, should be closed. Shia, the minority branch, rejected this, although both Shia and Sunni jurists in practice were conservative, relying increasingly on precedent and shunning innovation and interpetation, a development that would have devastating intellectual consequences for Islamic thought. The Rightly Guided Caliphs did not produce paradise on earth, but rather a powerful state with even more powerful rulers. This is the heart of their attraction to modern Islamic militants. For all the chaos, bloodshed, murder, improvisation, and absolutism, the Rightly Guided Caliphs were a precedent for the type of Islamic regime -- the autocratically "virtuous" state -- that contemporary Islamists have sought to create. They seem impervious to the apparently inverse correlation between power and Muslim virtue. The more powerful the state (and its caliph) became, the further the polity moved from the ideals that Muhammad preached. But the longing for this ostensibly blissful past and a community ruled by the oxymornic "just despot", an ideal that could be reestablished only by returning to the precepts established by the Messenger and his original companions, has proved remarkably durable. Eleven centuries later this impulse would create the first Islamic militant reform movement in modern times to forge a state in -- whre else? -- Arabia. Modern Saudi Arabia is actually the third Saudi kingdom.