by Hugh Kennedy
A version of the treaty he made at this time still survives in the Arabic texts, allowing the Rūm (Romans, that is, Byzantines) to leave peacefully with their possessions and guaranteeing the population who remained their dhimmi status. He prayed on the Temple Mount, the site of the old Jewish temple. This seems to have been covered with ruins at the time, and Umar ordered it to be cleared and cleaned. According to an ancient Jewish tradition, he also allowed Jews, who had been rigorously excluded from the city by the Byzantines, to return. He refused, however, to accept the invitation of the Patriarch to pray in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, arguing that if he did, the Muslims would take possession of it and make it into a mosque. Instead he prayed outside at a site which is now marked by the much later mosque still called the Mosque of Umar. Much of this, perhaps legendary, detail survives in Arabic Christian narratives, which stress that the greatest caliph of them all had accepted the holiness of the church and the rights of the Christians.
It was probably as a result of this expedition that Umar acquired the title of Fārūq, by which he was sometimes known. This is an Aramaic, not an Arabic term, which means the Redeemer. Exactly what the early Muslims understood by Redeemer is not clear, but it has been suggested that it was part of an eschatological discourse which saw the Muslim conquest of Jerusalem as marking the end of days and the beginning of the Last Judgement. The exact significance of the word is lost beyond recovery, and the Muslim tradition does not discuss it in any detail, but it is evidence that the caliph had made a deep impression on Muslim and non-Muslim alike.
UTHMĀN AND THE FIRST CRISIS OF THE CALIPHA
As Umar lay dying, he turned his attention to the arrangements for the choosing of his successor. The choices of Abū Bakr and Umar himself had been, to say the least, informal. Essentially Abū Bakr had been chosen by Umar and others of the muhājirūn while Umar in turn seems to have been nominated by Abū Bakr. There were no precedents here to which the community could turn. Umar, however, determined that there should be a shūra, an advisory council, which should select the next leader. He nominated six men: all of them were from Quraysh. The ansār of Medina and the rest of the Muslims were excluded, but Alī, who had not been able to participate in the choice of Abū Bakr, was among their number. After some deliberation the shūra settled on the old and distinguished merchant Uthmān, a Qurashi, of course, and one of Muhammad’s first followers. He was duly offered allegiance by the leaders of the Muslim community.
The establishment of the shūra as a way of choosing the caliphs has had profound resonances in Muslim political thought ever since. Here was a system which seemed to offer legitimacy to what had previously been an ad hoc process. At the same time, the concept was very flexible and could be subject to a wide range of interpretations. The root Arabic shawara, from which the word shūra derives, is not about election in the sense of democratic choice but about advice and consultation. The shūra which chose Uthmān was the only open and properly constituted body in the history of the caliphate. The idea, however, remained alive and a source of inspiration to many through the ages who felt that some element of community engagement would give legitimacy to a process which often seemed obscure and arbitrary. The term was also used as a legitimizing discourse for processes of choice which were very far from open. After all, there was no law to lay down how many people should make up a shūra, that they should be in any sense representative of the wider Muslim community or that they should meet in open deliberation. It could be argued that a shūra of one, meeting in haste and secret, was, following the model laid down by Umar, a valid and acceptable way of choosing a new leader. The whole idea of shūra was, in turn, complete anathema to the Shia, for whom choosing the leader of the Muslims was usurping a function properly belonging to God alone.
Uthmān has a very varied reputation among Muslim historians and commentators. The events of his reign are not generally disputed. The traditional narrative says that he enjoyed six successful years, but at the end of these he dropped the Prophet’s signet ring down a well and this meant the end of both his good fortune and his good governance. This period also saw the expansion of Muslim armies into Iran and the death of the last Sasanian shah, Yazdgard III, in 651. After that, military expansion largely came to a halt (though it was to resume again in the early eighth century) and the revenue from booty must have dried up. It was at this time too that resentment against Uthmān’s rule began to grow among groups who felt that the elite in the community were becoming too rich and arrogant. This culminated in 656 when there were active revolts in both Iraq and Egypt. Armed groups set out from both these areas for Medina to make their demands forcefully. Arriving at the capital, they found the old man effectively defenceless, having been abandoned by all the leading members of the Muslim elite, including, crucially, Alī. He was murdered as he sat alone in his house reading the Qur’ān and his blood dripped on the open pages of the Holy Book.
The murder of Uthmān was a major trauma for the early Islamic community and continues to reverberate down to the twenty-first century. We can see the events which led to his assassination in strictly historical terms. Uthmān was trying to manage a huge and recently created empire. The conquests had stalled and resources were under pressure and many of the Muslims felt excluded and impoverished while they observed others living in the lap of luxury. Most conspicuous of these were the group of Qurashis who surrounded the caliph, many of them young men with no experience of the hard struggles of the early days of Islam. It was said, bitterly, that the rich lands of Iraq had become the ‘Garden of Quraysh’. Uthmān, of course, would have seen it differently. Faced with the task of administering a vast and increasingly chaotic caliphate, he turned to the people he could most rely on, his family and kinsmen from Quraysh and the Umayyad clan.
The murder gave rise to an anguished debate. It was deeply shocking. The caliph chosen by the community, a man who had known and supported the Prophet of God from the beginnings of his ministry and who put his ample resources in the service of Islam, a man whose piety and conduct could hardly be impugned, had been killed by his fellow Muslims. What had gone wrong?
The answer depended on your point of view. For the supporters of Uthmān, who belonged to what comes in later centuries to be the Sunni tradition, the rights and wrongs were crystal clear: the caliph of God had been murdered by people who claimed to be Muslims. It was a crime against God and man alike. Even if Uthmān had not been the most perfect ruler, perhaps not up to the standards of Abū Bakr and Umar before him, Muslims had no right to rebel against him, still less to take his life. His blood should be avenged and his murderers punished.
Other people were not so sure. Supposing Uthmān had not behaved like God’s caliph but rather as a tyrannical pharaoh seizing the wealth that rightly belonged to pious and humble Muslims and giving it to his friends and family, how should pious Muslims respond? There were two approaches here. One could simply accept that things were problematic but agree too that Muslims should not rebel against a properly constituted authority. It was not always easy to determine God’s will and perhaps Uthmān was, for all his sins, serving God’s purpose and it was up to God to remove him or punish him if He saw proper. Yet others were clear that Uthmān was not fit to rule the community.
He was so bad and had strayed so far from the ways of piety and justice that he could longer be considered an appropriate imam for Muslims: it was the duty of pious and God-fearing men to remove and punish him and, hopefully, replace him with someone who could lead the community in the correct fashion.
The discussion of tyrannicide is as lively a theme in Islam as it is in western political thought. There is a widespread belief that the killing of a leader, however bad or inadequate he is seen to be, is always wrong, for it will lead to something worse, to fitna, that violence, division and destruction which imperils the lives of Muslims and makes the proper performance of true religion impossible.
Then there was the issue of the Qur’ān. The Musli
m tradition describes how the Qur’ān was revealed by the Angel Gabriel to Muhammad, who in turn passed it on by word of mouth, for he himself was illiterate, to the Muslims. As it was revealed, it was written down on any materials which lay to hand: papyrus, leather, palm leaves and even the flat shoulder bones of sheep. It was Uthmān who decided to edit and arrange this material into a book, the book we now know as the Qur’ān. It seems that versions were already in circulation, but the caliph ordered that they should all be destroyed in favour of his authorized version. Not everyone was happy with this. Some objected to the destruction of other versions that might have preserved elements of divine revelation which were now lost. Others objected that the caliph was exceeding his power and had no authority to do this. Yet others argued that only the members of the Family of the Prophet, with their unique understanding of the divine will and purpose, were able to undertake this successfully. History has been kind to Uthmān’s edition of the Holy Book. It is generally accepted by Sunnis and, with some reservations, by Shiis as the authentic record of the revelation, but at the time it seems to have provoked an opposition which fed into the general dissatisfaction with Uthmān’s rule.
It was symbolic, then, that he was killed reading the Holy Book. The Qur’ān of Uthmān became a sacred object, sealed with the martyred caliph’s blood, the nearest thing the Islamic tradition would allow as a legitimizing relic. The Abbasid caliphs would later display the ‘Qur’ān of Uthmān’ on ceremonial occasions. We hear of ‘Qur’āns of Uthmān’ that were used by the Umayyads of Córdoba and later by their Almohad successors, there are such Qur’āns in libraries in Cairo and in the collections of the Ottoman sultans (and caliphs) in the Topkapi palace in Istanbul. A magnificent and undoubtedly very ancient one can still be seen, copiously spattered with what are alleged to be drops of caliphal blood, displayed with all due pomp in Tashkent, where it serves the present rulers of Uzbekistan as evidence of their real or feigned piety and commitment to Islam.
ALĪ AND THE END OF THE ORTHODOX CALIPHATE
The murder of Uthmān unleashed a complex series of events which revealed the many and varied views of what the caliphate should be and how the new caliph should be chosen. At first, authority passed to Alī. He and many others may have thought that his time had come, but there seems to have been no formal arrangement for the succession, and certainly no shūra. This lack of a clear mandate was one of the factors which undermined his rule from the beginning.
The first challenge came from within the elite of Quraysh. Alī was, of course, himself a member of the tribe, but he had been slow to accept Abū Bakr. He also had a considerable following among the ansār and perhaps his political loyalties were to them. He had converted to Islam early and had been close to the Prophet, but he was not the only one. Although it was a quarter of a century since Muhammad’s death, there were other men who felt that their status within the tribe and early commitment to Islam entitled them to a leading role in the community. Among them was Zubayr b. al-Awwām. A prominent Qurashi, he had been one of a small group of Muslims who had emigrated to Ethiopia to escape the persecution that Muhammad and his followers had endured in Mecca before the Hijra to Medina in 622. He had returned and joined the Muslim community in Medina and had been one of the six prominent Muslims who had been chosen by Umar to make up the shūra which chose Uthmān. He and a companion of his from a very similar background, Talha b. Ubayd Allah, objected to the appointment of Alī and decided to challenge it. They were joined by a third person, the Prophet’s wife Aisha, who some said was his favourite wife. Aisha was probably motivated by a long-standing personal antipathy to Alī, but she was also the daughter of Abū Bakr; she knew Zubayr and Talha well and would naturally be attracted to the Qurashi cause.
Alī faced a much bigger challenge to his credibility as caliph: his role, or rather his lack of role, in Uthmān’s murder. There is no evidence that he had participated in the old man’s death, or even that he had encouraged the attackers, but, on the other hand, he does not seem to have offered him any protection or support at a time of need despite being in Medina and having a substantial following among the inhabitants. Uthmān was dead, but his large and powerful family, the Umayyads, demanded, as was their right, that the murderers of their kinsman should be punished. Many of the Umayyads left Medina and took refuge with one of their number, Muāwiya b. Abī Sufyān. Muāwiya, like many of his family, seems to have been a fairly late convert to Islam but he had served as one of the Prophet’s secretaries so had known him well. He had taken part in the conquest of Syria and when the country was conquered he had been appointed as governor. He had made Syria his power base, marrying into one of the most important local tribes, the Banū Kalb of the Palmyrene desert. He had come to represent the Syrian interest and command the loyalties of Syrians, both Muslims and others, like the chiefs of Kalb, who remained Christians. No other figure in the community could attract this degree of military and financial support. If Alī failed to avenge his murdered kinsman he would prove himself incapable of being a true caliph and until he fulfilled his duty Muāwiya would refuse to take the oath of allegiance.
The first military challenge to Alī’s rule began almost immediately. Zubayr, along with Aisha and Talha, left Medina, whose inhabitants mostly supported Alī, and went to the Muslim new town of Basra in southern Iraq where they hoped to attract the support of members of the tribe of Thaqīf, old allies of Quraysh from pre-Islamic times, who had settled there. Alī, in turn, realized that he would have to find allies outside the capital and travelled to Iraq to appeal to the Muslims of Kufa. The connection between Alī and the Kufans may have begun because of his support of Kufan grievances against the rule of Uthmān. He certainly had many followers at this juncture and the connection between the Family of the Prophet, Alī and his descendants with the inhabitants of this large and turbulent Iraqi city was to be a continuing feature of the political landscape of the Muslim community for the next two centuries and of fundamental importance in the early development of Shiism.
The armies of Zubayr and Alī met in December 656 near Basra in a confrontation known to history as the Battle of the Camel. Zubayr and his allies do not seem to have attracted as much support as they had hoped and his army was defeated by the more numerous troops of Alī. Zubayr and Talha were both killed and Aisha, who had played a conspicuous part in directing the battle from the howdah on her camel, was forced to retire to the Hijaz where she passed her final days in political obscurity.
The Battle of the Camel had settled the immediate challenge to Alī’s caliphate. It also meant that the idea of a Quraysh-dominated caliphate based in the Hijaz had been defeated for a generation, though it was to be revived with renewed vigour by Zubayr’s son after the death of Muāwiya in 680. The Battle of the Camel was also the first open civil war within the Muslim community. The issue of the caliphate had been decided not by discussion in a shūra or designation by a previous ruler, but by hard military power and by the ability of one party to attract more military support than another. It set a pattern for much of the future development of the office.
It also marked an important change in another way. Medina had been the residence of the Prophet and under Abū Bakr and Umar was, in a real sense, the capital of the caliphate. Umar made his visit to Palestine to accept the surrender of Jerusalem but he directed operations in the great wars of conquest from Medina and Uthmān continued to use it as the seat of government and it was here that he died. But Medina was isolated in western Arabia and, as the population grew, it became increasingly dependent on food supplies imported from Egypt and elsewhere. There were now many more Muslims living in Iraq and Syria than in Medina and no one could hope to establish himself as caliph without their support. When Alī had defeated Zubayr, he did not return to Medina but stayed to base himself in Kufa as the centre of his government. The dream of establishing a caliphate based in the city of the Prophet lingered on, but when Muhammad the Pure Soul, himself a direct descendant of Muhammad,
tried to make it a reality in the early Abbasid period in 762, it was clear that the dream was just that, and not the basis for a revived and renewed caliphate.
Zubayr was dead, his party defeated, but Muāwiya posed a much bigger challenge to Alī’s authority. Whatever his long-term ambitions, he made no effort at this stage to claim the caliphate. He simply demanded that Alī, if he wanted to be caliph, should punish his kinsman’s murderers. He must have known that he was making an impossible demand, for those who attacked Uthmān, and their relatives and friends in Kufa, were the very people on whom Alī had now come to depend for establishing his power. Kufa was not an easy town to govern and had a wild, lawless atmosphere. The new town boasted a mosque at its centre and the main sūqs surrounded it, but it was mainly a network of dusty streets and mud-brick or wooden houses, often makeshift affairs erected by newcomers from the Arabian desert and non-Arabs from the conquered areas of Iraq and Iran who wanted to throw in their lots with the Muslims and benefit from some of the privileges and opportunities which they enjoyed. It was a city riven with social tensions.
At the top of the social pyramid were the leaders of the most powerful tribes in the city, men like Ashath b. Qays al-Kindī, who enjoyed both wealth and social respect because of their family background. But many of these, like Ashath himself, had joined the Muslim cause late. This group were known as sharīf (pl. ashrāf), or nobles. They had hardly known the Prophet, if indeed they had met him at all, and some of them had joined the ridda against the rule of Abū Bakr. Pitted against them, and also claiming leadership and power, were those who had joined the Islamic cause early and who had borne the brunt of the heat and dust of the early battles against the Persians. These were men like Mālik al-Ashtar, who had been one of the leaders of the anti-Uthmān movement in Iraq and who now became one of Alī’s closest advisers. They were often from modest social backgrounds in the pre-Islamic tribal scheme of things, but they had sābiqa, precedence in Islam. Under the system set up by Umar, they had been awarded the highest ranks of payment and pensions, assets they were determined to preserve. There was plenty of reason for antagonism between these two elite groups.