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sophistication and ultimately corruption, or the Islam of purity,
self-denial, and attention to the poor.  But on another level the struggle
was something else: it was the grappling of two superorganisms to see
which could swallow the other, a wrestling match between two
massive subcultural divisions  among the followers of Islam.  It was a
contest between the people of the country and the merchants of the
city, a fight between rich and poor.  While the Umayyad followers
were city dwellers obsessed with trade, the adherents of Ali, the
Shiites, were  uneducated, accustomed to living at the subsistence
level, and dedicated to the notion that bloodshed was the only source
of a man's nobility.  The Shiites identified with the poverty of Ali
himself, a man so penniless he'd been forced to turn to relatives to
obtain the money he needed to raise his children.  These illiterate
wilderness dwellers felt that the Spartan way of life which had fallen
upon them as a necessity was holy, but the customs of the city were
not.
The Shiite followers of Ali overlooked the fact that though
Mohammed had preached generosity toward the impoverished, he
himself had been a city dweller, a man of wealth, and--like the Banu
Umayya--a merchant.
The battle was more than a contest between abstract ideas.  The
Shiites were fighting for the right to install members of their own
group as the governors of the just-conquered cities of Cairo and
Damascus and as the rulers of Mecca and Medina.  They were out to
guarantee that when the treasures of battle flowed back from the
conquered capitals of distant lands, a Shiite would divvy them up, and
Shiites would receive the jewels, tapestries and slaves.
Ultimately, the Shiites lost, and the Umayyads became the rulers
of an empire that would someday extend as far west as Spain and as
far east as India.  But the battle between subcultures in the Arab world
did not simply end.  In fact, it became a semi-permanent feature of
Islamic society.  In later ages, new reformers sprang up, inveighing
against the wealth and luxuries that had corrupted the old leaders.
  as an argument about which is the true Islam--the Islam of wealth,
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