Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes

by Tamim Ansary

  But how could Ali arrest the assassins? No one knew exactly who in that mob had dealt the actual blows. In any real sense, the whole mob was “the assassin.” To meet Mu’awiya’s demands, Ali would have had to arrest and punish the whole mob. This would never have been practical, but in the circumstances, it was utterly impossible: the mob still ruled the streets of Medina. Ali simply did not have the power to do as Mu’awiya demanded, and the governor knew it.

  Besides, the rioters who murdered Othman had started out as victims of injustice and oppression. They had come to Medina with legitimate grievances, but in killing the khalifa, they had handed the higher moral ground to their oppressors. Now, Ali was forced to choose between aligning himself with the oppressors or the murderers—a heartbreaking choice!

  He decided he would start by attacking the corruption rotting the empire. Win or lose, it was his only hope: by reversing Othman’s policies and restoring rectitude, he might still pull the community back onto the Path, thereby acquiring the credibility and stature he needed to do all the other things that needed doing.

  But a whole new class of nouveau riche had sprung out of the compost of the Muslim conquests, and this elite was not interested in Ali’s idea of purity or his reforms. To them, Ali looked like a revolutionary threat, and Mu’awiya looked like the guardian of their wealth and safety, the new status quo.

  Ali fired all the governors Othman had appointed and sent out new men to replace them, but none of the fired governors agreed to step down, except the one in Yemen, and he fled with all the money in the treasury, leaving a bankrupt province for Ali’s appointee to take over.

  Meanwhile, trouble cropped up in another quarter. The Prophet’s youngest wife Ayesha happened to be in Mecca when Othman was assassinated. When Mu’awiya began his ruckus, Ayesha threw in with him, in part because there had always been bad blood between her and Ali. She announced her alignment with a fiery speech in Mecca. “O ye people! Rebels . . . have murdered the innocent Othman. . . . They violated the sanctity of the city of the Holy Prophet in the sacred month of hajj. They plundered and looted the citizens of Medina. By God, a single finger of Othman was more precious than the lives of all the assassins. The mischief has not been crushed, and the murderers of Othman have not been brought to book. . . . Seek satisfaction on these murderers. Only vengeance for the blood of Othman can vindicate the honor of Islam.”

  Capitalizing on the passion she aroused, she assembled an army, convened a war council, and mapped out a campaign. The ousted governor of Yemen pledged all his stolen treasure to her cause. Flush with funds, Ayesha led her troops north and stormed Basra, a key city in southern Iraq. She dispatched Ali’s loyalists quickly and took over.

  At this point, someone started a whispering campaign charging Ali himself with complicity in the assassination of Othman. Poor honest Ali admitted that he bore some responsibility for the crime because when Othman was pleading for protection, Ali had withheld his sword arm. The thought that he might have saved Othman tormented the fourth khalifa of Islam, and his honesty only fueled the rumors that undermined him.

  Ali tried to raise an army to fight Ayesha, preaching that this was a jihad and that people should rally to defend Islam as they had in days of yore. But Muslims were confused, because Ayesha was calling for jihad too, against Ali. Both sides claimed to be fighting for truth, justice, and the Islamic way, yet each was calling on Muslims to fight other Muslims. This wasn’t what they called jihad back in the good old days!

  Curiously, Ayesha’s cohorts included two men, Talha and Zubayd, companions of the Prophet, who may have been part of the mob that attacked Othman’s palace that day. If not themselves assassins, they were certainly associated with the assassins—yet here they were, leading members of a force vowing to avenge the assassination of Othman by toppling Ali!

  Ali marched out of Medina with the few troops he could muster, but various tribal warriors joined him on his way north, and his army grew to imposing size. When he reached Basra, he sent a trusted comrade into the city to negotiate with Ayesha. Remarkably, the spokesman’s arguments got through to the fierce young woman. First, she admitted that she didn’t really think Ali had anything to do with Othman’s murder. What she blamed him for was failing to arrest the criminals responsible. Then, she agreed that the criminals were part of a mob, and that the mob, which was still in charge, drew its strength from chaos. Next, she admitted that by fighting Ali, she was promoting chaos and so, yes, in a sense she herself was helping the assassins escape justice. By the end of the day, she had agreed to lay down her weapons, disband her army, and join forces with Ali. She would meet with him in the morning to discuss terms.

  The interaction reflected credit on both leaders: on Ali for seeking negotiation before battle, on Ayesha for the intellectual honesty that enabled her, even in the heat of anger, even while surrounded by the smell of war and the threat of death, to listen to Ali’s case and admit the validity of points that eroded her position—just because they were true. In this, there was heroism.

  The envoy returned to Ali’s camp to give him the good news, and that night celebration rang out on both sides. There would be peace! There was just one problem that no one took into account: both armies contained members of the very mob that had killed Othman and would be brought to book if Ali and Ayesha made common cause. These men obviously could not afford to give peace a chance.

  Early the next morning, a gang of them crept out of Ali’s camp and launched a surprise attack on Ayesha’s sleeping forces. By the time Ali woke up, Ayesha’s men were striking back. Both Ali and Ayesha thought the other had double-crossed them, and thus began the Battle of the Camel, so-called because Ayesha rode a camel right into the battlefield and directed her troops from its back; the battle ended only when her camel was cut down and she was captured. Ali won the day, but what a bitter victory! It’s difficult to imagine how the two of them must have felt, meeting after the carnage ended, the Prophet’s adored wife and the Prophet’s beloved son-in-law, face to face on a blood-soaked field littered with ten thousand Muslim dead, many of them close companions of the Messenger of God.

  As they pieced together how people and events had betrayed them both, these two survivors made some sort of peace with one another. Perhaps they found their way to a friendship, even. Perhaps, in some strange way, the tragedy that engulfed them both, and the horrors that neither could have wanted, drew them together. In any case, they never fought again. After the Battle of the Camel, Ayesha retired to Medina, and spent the rest of her life recording the sayings of the Prophet and writing commentaries on them. She ended her days as one of the most respected early scholars of Islam.

  Ali never went back to Medina. He made the city of Kufa, in modern-day Iraq, his seat of government to reward the people of that city for supporting him, and he tried to piece together the remains of his khalifate, but the heartbreaking war with Ayesha only marked the beginning of his troubles. The master troublemaker still loomed in the wings, sharpening his scimitar and drilling his troops. Mu’awiya was getting ready for his final push.

  By this time, Mu’awiya had formally refused allegiance to Ali and declared that the khalifate belonged to him. Both sides led armies into the field. In the year 36 AH, (657 CE), Ali confronted Mu’awiya at the battle of Siffin. It started when Mu’awiya’s army tried to block Ali’s access to water. A brief battle burst out, but Ali’s men gained the river bank, and the fighting subsided into a stalemate that lasted for months, interrupted only by sporadic skirmishes. Both sides were holding back, looking for a way to win without brutality, because each side stood to lose religious authority by spilling Muslim blood.

  The standoff ended with a four-day outburst of violence in which some sources reckon that sixty-five thousand people died. The slaughter led to calls that both armies pull back and let the two leaders settle the dispute with hand-to-hand combat. Ali, who was fifty-eight years old but still a fearsome physical specimen, eagerly accepted the challenge. M
u’awiya, who was about the same age as Ali, but dissipated and fat, said no.

  Ali’s troops renewed the attack, this time felling Mu’awiya’s soldiers like weeds, but Mu’awiya devised a stratagem to give them pause: he had his soldiers attach pages of the Qur’an to their lance tips and march behind recitation experts who chanted Qur’anic verses and exhorted Ali to negotiate in the name of peace among Muslims. Ali’s troops quailed at the prospect of defiling the Qur’an and Ali agreed to negotiations.

  He probably didn’t think of himself as giving into anything, since he had been calling for negotiation from the start; but no doubt he was thinking of talks that would end with Mu’awiya acknowledging his right to rule in exchange for some concession such as a guarantee to let him stay on as governor of Syria. Instead, when the representatives of the two leaders met, they agreed that the two men were equals, and that each should remain in charge of his own territories, Mu’awiya ruling Syria and Egypt, Ali ruling everything else.

  This wasn’t what Ali had been looking for, and it certainly infuriated his partisans, his shi’i, to use the Arabic word—a word that became the name of the sect that grew out of this rift. But Ali could not now reject the results without seeming to show bad faith. Mu’awiya had snookered him!

  Besides, Ali was operating with a handicap. For twenty-six years Ali’s shi’i had been declaring that he possessed God-given powers of leadership, powers that could save the Muslim community from its ills. Originally, this claim referred to his blood relationship with the Prophet, but over the decades, as the first three khalifas were shaping a new social order, Ali had been delivering mystical sermons that held forth rapturously on the nature of Allah’s omnipotence, immensity, oneness, and beyondness. In short, while the other khalifas had made themselves the guardians of Mohammed’s communitarian vision, Ali had established himself as the keeper of the inner flame. So his partisans’ proposition came to be that unlike all other claimants to the khalifate, Ali had some mystical personal access to Allah’s guidance. His whole case rested on this image.

  Now he was . . . negotiating? With Mu’awiya, the utter embodiment of anti-Muslim materialism? What kind of God-gifted avatar of Allah-guided truth was he?

  Compromising with the enemy disappointed a faction of Ali’s most committed followers, and these younger, more radical of his partisans split away. They came to be known as Kharijites, “ones who departed.” This splinter group reformulated the ideals of Ali’s followers into a revolutionary new doctrine: blood and genealogy meant nothing, they said. Even a slave had the right to lead the community. The only qualification was character. No one was born to leadership, and mere election could not transform someone into the khalifa. Whoever exhibited the greatest authentic devotion to Muslim values simply was the khalifa, no election needed. He was, however, accountable to the people. If he ever fell a hair short of complete moral excellence, he forfeited his right to high office and someone else became khalifa. Through what actual machinery all this demotion and promotion was to occur, the Kharijites didn’t say. Not their problem. They only knew that Ali had squandered his entitlement and needed to step down; and since he didn’t step down, one young Kharijite took matters into his own hands. In the year 40 AH, this hothead assassinated Ali.

  Ali’s partisans immediately looked to his son Hassan as his successor, but Mu’awiya swept this challenge aside by offering Hassan a sum of money to renounce all claim to the khalifate. Mohammed’s older grandson, heartbroken and war-weary at this point, stepped aside. He had no stomach for continuing the fight, and under the circumstances now prevailing, claiming the khalifate could only constitute a power grab, and what good was that? And so the Umayyad dynasty began.

  Ali’s death ended the first era of Islamic history. Muslim historians came to call the first four post-Mohammed leaders the Rightly Guided Khalifas. Life in their time was certainly not undiluted sweetness and wonder, but in calling them the Rightly Guided Ones, I don’t think responsible Muslim historians mean to suggest such perfection. Rather, they’re saying that the evolution of the community from the time of the Hijra to the assassination of Ali was a religious drama. Yes there was bloodshed and heartache, but the turmoil didn’t stem from petty people vying for power, money, or ego gratification. The four khalifas and Mohammed’s close companions who formed the core of the Umma in this period were honestly striving to make the revelations work. Each of them had a handle on some essential aspect of the project, but no one of them was big enough to grasp the whole of it, as Mohammed had done. The Prophet’s immediate successors were like the six blind men trying to discern whether the elephant was more like a rope, a wall, a pillar, or what. All the struggles over the khalifate in the period of the Rightly Guided Ones had theological meaning because the issues they struggled with were essentially theological. After Ali’s death, the khalifate was just an empire.

  5

  Empire of the Umayyads

  40-120 AH

  661-737 CE

  OF COURSE, MU’AWIYA did not present himself as the man who ended the religious era. He titled himself khalifa and said he was continuing the same great mission as his predecessors. Toward the end of his life, however, he convened a council of Arab tribal leaders to discuss who his successor would be, a meeting that had the outward form of a shura, a consultative committee like the one Omar established. The chieftains thought their opinions were sincerely being solicited and began discussing the merits of this and that candidate. Suddenly one of the khalifa’s henchmen jumped to his feet and glowered around the circle. “Right now,” he scowled, “this is the commander of the faithful.” He pointed to Mu’awiya. “After he dies, it’s this one.” He pointed to Yazid, the emperor’s eldest son. “And if any of you object, it’s this one!” He pulled out his sword.”1

  The chiefs got the point. They went on through all the proper Muslim-democratic forms and made all the appropriate noises and gestures, but in the end they dutifully chose Yazid to be their next khalifa, and when they went home that night, they all knew the principle of succession would never come up for discussion again.

  When Yazid succeeded to the throne, however, he knew his father had not eliminated but merely suppressed rebellious elements. Yazid therefore kept close tabs on all who might challenge his power, especially Ali’s relatives and descendents. Hassan had passed away by this time, but his brother Hussein was still alive, and just to be on the safe side, the emperor decided to have this man assassinated on his next pilgrimage to Mecca.

  Hussein was now in his forties. He knew his father’s partisans considered him to be the true khalifa; he knew that zealous Muslims looked to him to keep the spiritual revolution alive; but no one man could shoulder such a heavy mantle. Hussein had opted out of politics and lived a quiet life of prayer and contemplation all these years, meditating on his grandfather’s mission.

  But when he learned of the plot to have him killed, and that Yazid’s assassins planned to murder him in the Ka’ba itself, Hussein could take no more. He had no troops and no military experience. Yazid had a network of spies, a treasury, and an army. Even so, in the year 60 AH (680 by the common calendar), Hussein announced that he was going to challenge Yazid and left Medina with a force of seventy-two people.

  Actually, calling it a “force” goes too far: the seventy-two included Hussein’s wife, his children, and some doddering elderly relatives. Only a handful of the company were fighting-age males. What was the man thinking? Did he really imagine he could topple the Umayyad monarch with this tiny band? Was he perhaps thinking that if he just started marching, he would ignite a firestorm of revolt and inspire the tribes to join him?

  Probably not. In a final sermon before his departure, Hussein told his followers that he was sure to be slain but was not afraid, because death “surrounds Adam’s offspring as a necklace surrounds a young girl’s neck.”2 He noted a Qur’anic verse that told people to stand up to unjust rulers like Yazid. If the son of Ali and Fatima, the grandson of the Prophet
himself, did not stand up to tyranny, who would? As portrayed in traditional accounts, therefore, Hussein was determined to make an example of his own life: right from the start, he saw himself as embarking on a pilgrimage with ritual significance. In a sense, he was committing noble suicide.

  IMAM HUSSEIN’S ROUTE TO KARBALA

  When Yazid heard that the Prophet’s younger grandson was on the move, he sent an army to swat him down. Hussein posed no real threat to the empire, but Yazid wanted to crush him with overwhelming force as a warning to other radicals who might be tempted to play the God-chose-me card. The army he sent outnumbered Hussein’s little group by enough to make it no contest. Legends put that number at anywhere from four hundred to forty thousand.

  Whatever its size, this imperial army caught up with Hussein in the desert just south of Karbala, a city near the southern border of Iraq. If you glance at weather reports for that part of the world on any summer day, you’ll see temperatures ranging upward of 115 degrees. On just such a sweltering day, the emperor’s army trapped Hussein’s little band within smelling distance of the Euphrates River but cut off from the water. Hussein, however, did what his father had failed to do. He refused to settle, compromise, or bargain. God had chosen him to lead the community of virtue, he said, and he would not disavow that truth.