The Shīʿīs in Palestine: From the Medieval Golden Age Until the Present by Yaron Friedman (review)

In a shady corner of a car park for Ashkelon’s Barzilai Hospital stands a somewhat incongruous structure. A low wall surrounds a raised rectangular platform built solely of cool, white marble. The building, if it can even be called that, bears few features: it has a gap in the centre of one of its long sides for an entrance; the wall opposite bears the lower half of a mihrab. The site, as it can now be seen, was constructed in the 1990s through the patronage of the Dawoodi Bohra community and it was established to mark the putative location of the burial of the head of Ḥusayn (Ar.: raʾs al-Ḥusayn).

In the aftermath of the Battle of Karbalāʾ (60AH/680AD), the head of Ḥusayn b. ʿAlī is said to have been cut from his body. In the years which followed, multiple traditions associated with the head and its final resting place took shape. Some claim that it is now in Damascus, buried close to that other much-fabled head – that of John the Baptist – in the Great Mosque of Damascus. Others have argued that it was taken to Medina, to rest with Ḥusayn’s mother in the Baqīʿ Cemetery. Many believe that its final place of burial can now be found in Cairo, in the place marked by the large mosque devoted to Ḥusayn on the edge of the sprawling Khān al-Khalīlī. At various moments in history it is also said to have been taken to Raqqa, Aleppo, Najaf, and even Merv (in today’s Turkmenistan). There is one tradition, however, which situates Ḥusayn’s head in Palestine and, more specifically, in Ashkelon (historic ʿAsqalān).

In his recent work, The Shīʿīs in Palestine, Yaron Friedman traces the vicissitudes of the Shi‘i population of Palestine, as vividly reflected in the state of the shrine of the Head of Ḥusayn in Ashkelon. Just as with all the sites mentioned above, the proposed presence of the head in Palestine can be connected to the formation of a Shi‘i sacred landscape. The initial patronage of the shrine reflects the rise and fall of the Fāṭimid dynasty – having taken Palestine but being unable to incorporate Karbalāʾ itself into their domains, they were compelled to bring a sense of the sacred site closer to home. The initial construction of the shrine in Ashkelon was completed at the end of the fifth/eleventh century by al-Afḍal (1066–1121), son of and successor to the Fāṭimid vizier, Badr al-Jamālī (d.1094), who had initiated construction. Knowledge of Badr al-Jamali’s role is carved on a remarkable wooden minbar, still preserved in Hebron, inscribed with the story of the discovery of the head and the vizier’s good deeds in building a shrine to house it. The later removal of the head from Ashkelon to Cairo marks the reversal of fortunes for the Fāṭimids in the Levant. The region would first fall into Crusader hands in 1153 before it was captured by (the Sunni) Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn al-Ayyūbī later in the century.

The Shīʿīs in Palestine addresses this shrine, and a number of others, alongside a wealth of textual sources to produce a very welcome history of the Shi‘i community in Palestine from its inception to the present. As the first monograph on the subject, the book provides a much-needed corrective to a significant gap in the scholarship on the religious communities of the Eastern Mediterranean. While it is widely accepted that there is no longer a significant, or even a small, Shi‘i population in Palestine today, this work explores both the distant and more recent history of this group.

Friedman identifies two main ages in the history of the Shi‘a in Palestine. The first – the subject of chapter...