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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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