Fitna (Islam)

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Islamic expression Fitna denotes difficult times in which one can increasingly reckon with a division of faith and apostasy .

The Arabic word فتنة / fitna (pl. fitan ) appears several times in the Koran in the meaning of "difficult trial" or "temptation by God". What is meant is a test or temptation that is so difficult that the faith (especially the "weak believers") is endangered.

Another meaning that appears in numerous hadiths can be described as “revolt against the divine order”, in the sense of division and apostasy. As Fitna par excellence (or "big Fitna") as are the first Fitna enlisted events surrounding the Battle of Siffin 657 and the rule of Mu'awiya I , in particular the spin-offs of the Shiites and Kharijites . Since then, Fitna has also referred to unrest, strife or uprising in the Islamic community, mostly in connection with sects that have fallen away from the majority of believers ( al-dschumla ).

Historical

First Fitna

656–661: First Islamic Civil War . Long struggle for the caliphate after the murder of caliph Uthman ibn Affan (656).

Second Fitna

680–692: The second Islamic civil war falls in the early phase of the Umayyad caliphates and begins with the death of the first Umayyad caliph Muʿāwiya I in 680. In this civil war, the Umayyad caliphs fight against Husain ibn ʿAlī, the grandson of the Prophet and Abdallāh dem Son of the Prophet's companion az-Zubair . The civil war between Damascus (Umayyads) and Mecca (Zubairites) ends with the conquest of Mecca by the caliph Abd al-Malik or his general al-Hajjaj ibn Yusuf in 692.

Third Fitna

744–750: The third civil war broke out among the Umayyad princes, which initially led to Marwan II's accession to the throne . The unrest of the civil war enabled the outbreak of the so-called "Abbasid Revolution", which defeated the Umayyads in 750 and replaced them as the ruling house of the caliphate by the Abbasids .

Fourth Fitna

809–827: Civil war between the Abbasids over the succession to the throne of Hārūn ar-Raschīd . Al-Ma'mun was based in Khorasan , while his brother al-Amin resided in Baghdad and was supported by the capital's aristocracy. Ma'mun was finally able to assert himself as caliph in 819, but it was not until 827 that the western parts of the empire were brought back under government control.

The uproar of the fourth Fitna raised apocalyptic expectations among Muslims . Their predictions of the future of the caliphate, coming wars, and the end of the world were clothed in the form of hadiths . They survived in the extensive collection entitled Kitāb al-Fitan ("Book of Disputes"), which the traditionist Nuʿaim ibn Hammād (d. 844) created in the 830s. The hadiths collected here have had a lasting impact on Islamic thought.

Fitna in al-Andalus

A period of bloody palace revolts and civil wars in al-Andalus of the Umayyads is also referred to as Fitna. This period began in August 1009 with a rebellion of the Umayyad Muhammad II al-Mahdi against the caliph Hisham II and ended with the fall of the Caliphate of Cordoba in November 1031.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Cf. Jorge Aguadé: Messianism at the time of the early Abbasids: The Kitâb al-Fitan of Nuʿaim ibn Hammâd . Tuebingen 1979.
  2. ^ Georg Bossong : The Moorish Spain. Munich 2007, p. 28ff