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incidentally, the great historical institution of the Caliphate.
From the first days of the Caliphate there was a group of people who felt that Ali, the cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet, had a stronger claim to his succession than Abu Bakr or the Caliphs who followed him. In part no doubt their support for Ali was due to the conviction that his personal qualities made him the best man for the job - in part perhaps also to a legitimist belief in the rights of the house of the Prophet. This group came to be known as the Shi `atu `Ali, the party of Ali, and then simply as the Shia. In the course of time it gave rise to the most important religious conflict in Islam.
At first, the Shia was primarily a political faction - the supporters of a candidate for power, with no distinctive religious doctrines and no greater religious content than was inherent in the very nature of Islamic political authority. But soon important changes occurred both in the composition of its following and the nature of its teachings. To many Muslims it seemed that the Islamic community and state had taken a wrong turning; instead of the ideal society envisaged by the Prophet and his first, pious Companions, an Empire had come into being, ruled by a greedy and unscrupulous aristocracy; instead of justice and equality, there was inequality, privilege and domination. To many who saw events in this light, it seemed that a return to the kin of the Prophet might bring a restoration of the true, original message of Islam.

In the year 656, after the murder by Muslim mutineers of the third Caliph Uthman, Ali finally became Caliph - but his reign was brief, and marred by dissension and civil war. When he in turn was murdered in 66x, the Caliphate passed into the hands of his rival Mu`awiya, whose family, the house of Umayya, retained it for nearly a century.
The Shia of Ali did not disappear with his death. Significant groups of Muslims continued to give their allegiance to the kin of the Prophet, in whom they saw the rightful leaders of the Muslim community. Increasingly, these claims, and the support which they evoked, acquired a religious, even a messianic character. The Muslim state, ideally conceived, is a religious polity, established and maintained under divine law. Its sovereignty derives from God; its sovereign, the Caliph, is entrusted with the duties of upholding Islam and of enabling Muslims to live the good Muslim life. In this society the distinction between secular and religious is unknown - in law, in jurisdiction, or in authority. Church and state are one and the same, with the Caliph as head. Where the basis of identity and cohesion in society, the bonds of loyalty and duty in the state, are all conceived and expressed in religious terms, the familiar Western distinction between religion and politics - between religious and political attitudes and activities - becomes irrelevant and unreal. Political dissatisfaction - itself perhaps socially determined - finds religious expression; religious dissent acquires political implications. When a group of Muslims offered more than purely local or personal opposition to the men in power - when they formulated a challenge to the existing order and formed an organization to change it, their challenge was a theology and their organization a sect. In the theocratically conceived Islamic order of the Caliphate, there was no other way for them to forge an instrument or formulate a doctrine going beyond their personal actions and their immediate aims.

In the first century of Islamic expansion there were many tensions that gave rise to grievances, many grievances and aspirations that found expression in sectarian dissent and revolt. The spread of Islam by conversion brought into the Islamic community large numbers of new believers, who carried with them, from their Christian, Jewish and Iranian backgrounds, religious concepts and attitudes unknown to the early Arab Muslims. These new converts, though Muslims,