by John McHugo
On one occasion, Ali called out in the square in front of the mosque in Kufa for the Companions of the Prophet to come forward and tell the crowd what the Prophet had said at the pool of Ghadir Khumm. This was a place where the Prophet’s caravan had paused for the night on its way back to Medina after the farewell pilgrimage to Mecca. Twelve or thirteen elderly men came to the front and gave their testimony as to what had happened on that day. Muhammad had asked whether he was dearer to the assembled throng than they were to themselves. The crowd had enthusiastically shouted that he was. The Prophet had then taken Ali’s hand in his own, and said that Ali was the patron of everybody who saw Muhammad as his own patron.
The truth of this testimony given by those ageing Companions of the Prophet in response to Ali’s request has generally been accepted, although the meaning and significance of it have been disputed by Muslims ever since. But the context in which Ali called for this testimony to be given is important. By telling the mass of the people about what happened on ‘the day of Ghadir Khumm’, he was making a very definite public claim: he had been entrusted with a spiritual and political authority by the Prophet that was greater than that which either Abu Bakr or Umar had held. The strong implication was that a true Muslim now had to follow Ali, just in order to be a Muslim. If he did not do so, he had left the community of believers. Ali asked for allegiance on the basis of the Book and the practice (Sunna) of the Prophet. When a warrior who had fought for him in the Battle of the Camel and at Siffin had suggested that this meant the practice of Abu Bakr and Umar, Ali had objected. If Abu Bakr or Umar had followed a practice that was not that of the Prophet on a specific issue, he warned, they would have been ‘remote from the truth’.35 This was another indication of Ali claiming a leadership status that was higher than that of the first two caliphs.
The warrior in question subsequently deserted Ali’s cause and joined the Kharijis, dying while fighting against Ali’s forces at the Battle of Nahrawan. The Kharijis saw Ali as merely asking his followers to do exactly the same as Mu‘awiya expected from his Syrians: to follow him wherever he might choose to lead. For the Kharijis, the leader of the community could lose his status by contravening the law of Islam – as had happened in the case of Uthman. Leadership was not tied up with proximity to the Prophet, whether through blood or companionship. For them, the only two true successors of Muhammad had been Abu Bakr and Umar.
When the arbitrators met, Abu Musa, whom Ali had appointed against his better judgement, was outsmarted once again – as Ali’s advisers had feared he would be. The first – and only – point on which they reached agreement was that Uthman had been wrongfully killed. The arbitrators tried to keep their agreement on this point secret until they had reached a full agreement, but the news leaked out. Mu‘awiya’s followers were ecstatic. Mu‘awiya was Uthman’s cousin, and was therefore now officially entitled to seek justice. This meant that those involved in his death, including Malik al-Ashtar and Ali’s step-son Muhammad bin Abu Bakr, should in theory be handed over to Mu‘awiya, who might extract revenge if he chose. Abu Musa probably saw agreeing to this point as a quid pro quo for subsequent acknowledgement by his counterpart Amr that Ali was the leader of the community, but Amr would not budge on that issue. Instead, Amr insisted that Mu‘awiya should remain governor of Syria while the question of leadership was resolved.36 No progress could be made on that question, and the two representatives went their separate ways. Amr returned to Damascus, where he greeted Mu‘awiya as ‘Commander of the Faithful’, a title which Mu‘awiya accepted and which implied he was the caliph. This amounted to a declaration of war on Ali. Abu Musa retired to Mecca in disgrace, while there was uproar in Kufa when the news arrived. Ali denounced him and Amr as well as the agreement they had reached from the pulpit, and pronounced a formal curse on Mu‘awiya which was to be said every day with the morning prayers. The latter retaliated, cursing not just Ali but including Ali’s two sons, Hassan and Hussein, in the curse for good measure.
Ali prepared to invade Syria once again. He tried to enlist the Kharijis in his cause, but their response was that he was not fighting Mu‘awiya for the sake of God but for his own purposes. They called on him to admit that he had committed an act of unbelief and to repent, after which they would consider the position. He tried to ignore them and to set his army in motion. He preached a rousing sermon in which he compared Mu‘awiya and the people around him to Heraclius and Chosroes, implying that, like that Byzantine emperor and Sasanian king, Mu‘awiya was a leader who had no credentials in Islam. However, news reached his army that the Kharijis had killed an envoy and his pregnant wife. This made his men afraid to go so far from home while leaving the Kharijis in their rear as a menace to their families and property. He therefore had no choice but to deal with the Kharijis first.
When he requested the surrender of the murderers of the envoy and his wife, the Khariji response was that they all shared the responsibility jointly. To them, the blood of Ali and his supporters was licit since, in their view, Ali had left the faith. Ali met them at Nahrawan on 17 July 658. He pleaded with them to return. Some did so, but a hard core said to be over 1,500 remained. Ali did not attack them, but waited. They furiously charged at his army, which vastly outnumbered them. The result was a massacre. Only a handful of Ali’s men were killed as the Kharijis impaled themselves on his battle line.
The victory, though total, left a bitter taste. The battle showed that sectarianism had now unquestionably arrived in Islam. Both Ali and his Khariji opponents were fighting over points of principle which, somewhat ironically, prevented them from combining against Mu‘awiya whom both parties viewed with equal distaste. Ali now wished to push on to Syria so as to finish off the battle that had begun at Siffin. But his soldiers pleaded the need to return to their bases and to re-equip. This may have been a diplomatic excuse. Many of them faded away, and the army dissolved. Ali had no choice but to return despondently to Kufa.
In the period after Nahrawan his position declined. Mu‘awiya began to subvert some of his support and to launch raids into the territories loyal to him. These were often raids of a pre-Islamic kind in which booty was the main objective, although they also served to soften up the areas Ali controlled. Ali’s principled stance refusing to make concessions over the financial entitlements of tribal leaders and what was now the empire’s Qurayshi nobility left important individuals and tribes vulnerable to seduction by Mu‘awiya. Mu‘awiya is even reported as saying that after the Battle of Siffin he did not need to take any military action against Ali.37 He made approaches to some of the tribes that had accompanied Ali to Siffin, and wrote them a letter in which he described the murdered Uthman in glowing terms; he was a pious Muslim who had been fasting and in the ritual state of a pilgrim at the time of his death, and who loved the weak and oppressed. Mu‘awiya then called on them to exact revenge.38 He also won back control of Egypt by sending Amr ibn al-‘As, the orginal Arab conqueror of the country, to retake it. One of Amr’s subordinates captured Ali’s governor, Muhammad bin Abu Bakr, nearly dead from thirst. Despite orders from Amr that he was to be brought to him alive, Muhammad bin Abu Bakr was killed, placed inside the skin of a donkey, and burned. As tribes drifted away from Ali, Mu‘awiya was increasingly becoming the stronger party. This enabled him to encourage or intimidate people into recognising his claim to the caliphate. The discord led others to take the view – especially when tax collectors arrived from one or other of the claimants to the caliphate – that the matter of leadership was still undecided and that they were waiting until the successor to the Prophet was confirmed.
A raid ordered by Mu‘awiya into the Hejaz and Yemen succeeded in its objective of terrifying the local population and weakening Ali’s support. It also led to a new low, since the raiders enslaved some women who were Muslims – apparently the first time this had happened since the beginning of Islam.39 The implication was that these women, and the community to which they belonged, had left the faith.
The r
aid forced Ali’s supporters to rally round him, and Ali began preparations for another push to invade Syria and dethrone Mu‘awiya. It looked as though at last he might be about to finish the war that had been interrupted after Siffin, although major factors motivating his men were fear of Syrian rule and the desire to retain their independence, as well as personal loyalty to him. But there was never to be a final trial of strength between Mu‘awiya and Ali. On 28 January 661, less than three years after the Battle of Nahrawan and a mere four-and-a-half years after the murder of Uthman, a Khariji assassin approached Ali as he was entering the mosque to perform his morning prayers. ‘The judgement belongs to God, Ali, not to you,’ he said, then struck him on the head with a poisoned sword.40 Ali died two days later.
Hassan, Ali’s eldest son by Fatima, believed that leadership was his right, and that it flowed to him as the grandson of the Prophet. As he addressed the congregation in the mosque of Kufa, choking back his grief at his father’s murder, he stated, ‘I am the shining lamp. I am of the Family of the Prophet from whom God has removed filth and whom He has purified, whose love He has made obligatory in his Book.’41 Though he was acclaimed as his father’s successor, he stood down some seven months later and acknowledged Mu‘awiya’s authority as the Commander of the Faithful. Not only does it seem that he lacked ambition to rule, but he also realised that standing up to Mu‘awiya would involve yet another bloody war within the Muslim community. Initially, he had summoned Mu‘awiya to do him homage, but the latter had replied demanding the same from him, and asserting that he was the true Commander of the Faithful. Just as Abu Bakr had been more suited to leading the Muslims after the Prophet’s death, Mu‘awiya argued, so was he now better placed to do so than the much younger and inexperienced Hassan. He also made an important concession. In return for Hassan’s allegiance during Mu‘awiya’s lifetime, Hassan would rule after the latter’s death.
Although there was some fighting, many of Hassan’s followers sensed that he was not prepared to push his rights to the full, and they deserted, some even joining the Kharijis. One fighter accused Hassan of ‘associating partners with God as your father did before you’.42 When Hassan publicly acknowledged Mu‘awiya, he told his followers, ‘You have pledged allegiance to me on the basis that you make peace with whomever I make peace. I have deemed it right to make peace with him and have pledged allegiance to him, since I considered whatever spares blood as better than whatever causes it to be shed.’43
When Hassan submitted to Mu‘awiya in 661, the supremacy of the Banu Umayya clan seemed assured. Yet rioting and discontent in the garrison cities of Basra and Kufa were portents of what was to come.
CHAPTER THREE
Of Umayyads and Abbasids
The Political Background to the Split Between Sunnis and Shi‘is
I
Something that would once have seemed unbelievable had happened. A son of Abu Sufyan and Hind had become the ruler of the empire of the Muslims. This was not just the triumph of Mu‘awiya personally, but of the tribe of Quraysh and of his own branch of that tribe, Banu Umayya, the clan of the murdered Uthman. This clan, which is now known as the Umayyads, would rule the empire for almost ninety years. As we shall see, later rulers from this dynasty would be forced to centralise the empire, but Mu‘awiya preferred methods that reflected the subtle and pragmatic ways in which a leading Qurayshi merchant would have done business before the coming of Islam. He preferred negotiation and compromise to using the army to enforce his rule outside Syria, or to ruling through his closest relatives. He would reach agreements with local governors and power brokers and exercise patronage (offering inducements such as prestigious positions), very often buying loyalty with money. Violence and assassination were also weapons in his armoury. Although he was entirely ruthless when he needed to be, these methods were a last resort. Once he had consolidated his power, Mu‘awiya was largely successful in ensuring peace within the empire during his lifetime, as well as its continued expansion.
THE ARAB CONQUESTS UNDER THE RASHIDUN AND THE UMAYYADS
But what of the family of the Prophet? Mu‘awiya had promised Hasan the right to succession to the caliphate on his own death, but Hasan died in 670, ten years before Mu‘awiya, possibly poisoned on the latter’s orders. Throughout his reign, Mu‘awiya continued the ritual cursing of Ali. When he died in 680, he ensured that the succession would go to his own son Yazid, and that there would be no Shura to consider a possible rival. But the pressures that had led to the strife during the days of Uthman and Ali had continued to build up. Among many Muslims, including disaffected sections of the Quraysh and even some of the Umayyad family itself, there was widespread hostility to this formalisation of rule of the community by a dynasty with no obvious claim to religious pre-eminence.
Mu‘awiya’s death was a moment that gave those who were discontented with the rule of the Umayyad family the opportunity to look for an alternative focus. They found two potential rallying points. The first was Hussein, the younger son of Ali and Fatima. The other was Abd Allah bin al-Zubair, the son of that same Zubair who had revolted against Ali together with Talha and Aisha, and who had been killed while fleeing from the Battle of the Camel. Both Hussein and Abd Allah bin al-Zubair were living in Medina. Each was sufficiently dangerous to the continuation of the rule of the house of Umayya to be summoned by the governor of the city as soon as news of Mu‘awiya’s death reached him. He demanded immediate pledges of loyalty to Yazid.
Hussein temporised, saying that he would need to make the pledge publicly in order for it to be valid, and escaped to Mecca. Loyalty to the house of Ali, and to the idea of rule by a member of the Prophet’s family, had survived, especially in Kufa. The closeness that the Prophet had felt to Hussein and his dead brother Hasan was well-known. Hussein was only five or six when the Prophet died, but there were many stories of their grandfather’s love for the two boys. ‘Whoever loves them loves me, and whoever hates me hates them,’ was one saying attributed to the Prophet. Another was, ‘Hasan and Hussein are the lords of the youth of Paradise.’ Muhammad had crawled around on the floor playing with the boys, and had helped to teach them how to pray. Now, Hasan was dead, but messengers from Kufa invited Hussein to their city. He sent his cousin Muslim bin Aqeel there to find out what was going on. Muslim bin Aqeel reported back that he had gathered thousands of pledges of support. Unfortunately for him and Hussein, however, news of this reached Yazid, who sent the governor of Basra, Ubaydullah bin Ziyad, to Kufa, where he terrorised anyone who might conceivably back a bid by Hussein for the caliphate.
There is a tragic inevitability about the events that followed. Hussein was warned of the dangers, but set out on the long journey across Arabia accompanied only by a small party of perhaps fifty men together with women and children. Soon after leaving Mecca, he encountered a caravan coming from Yemen carrying merchandise consisting of cloth and plants for use in dying. It belonged to the caliph, so he impounded the cargo as rightfully his. Some of those he encountered on the way across the desert joined him, but others were wary and warned him of what might lie ahead. One such was the poet al-Farazdaq, who told him bluntly that the hearts of the Iraqis were for him, but their swords were for the Umayyads. Hussein’s reply to those who tried to dissuade him was fatalistic: ‘God does as He wishes... I leave it to Him to choose what is best... He is not hostile to him who purposes the just cause.’1
Ubaydullah bin Ziyad posted men on the roads to Kufa to control those going in and out of the surrounding territory. News reached Hussein that the governor had captured Muslim bin Aqeel and executed him. He would have turned back at this point, but Muslim bin Aqeel’s sons insisted on continuing, determined either to extract revenge or to die as their father had done. Hussein decided to persevere, even though he learned shortly afterwards that other messengers he had sent ahead to announce his impending arrival had also been killed. He asked his companions to let him travel onwards by himself, but the original party that had set out with him ref
used to abandon him.
Ubaydallah sent a message to Hussein. It was entrusted to a man called al-Hurr, who caught up with Hussein and told him that he had been sent to bring him to the governor without a fight. Hussein refused, but he led al-Hurr in prayers. As Hussein’s party set off to continue the journey, al-Hurr followed at a short distance. From time to time, he would call out, ‘I remind you of God for your own sake. If there is a battle, you will be killed.’
Shortly before they reached the Euphrates, Hussein’s party encamped at a place called Karbala. Four thousand men confronted them under the orders of Umar bin Sa‘d bin Abi Waqqas, who had been sent by Ubaydullah. Umar agreed to grant Hussein one night’s respite. Hussein addressed his followers: ‘I ask you all to go away. I do not hold you back. The night will cover you. Use it as your steed [to flee].’ But only a few left.
The following fateful day, the 10th of the Muslim month of Muharram in the Muslim year 61, calculated from the date of the Hijrah and corresponding to 10 October 680, was to be Hussein’s last. He reminded his followers and the army opposing them of the words Muhammad had said about him and his brother, and the great virtue of the family of the Prophet. Then he reproached the men of Kufa for summoning him, and asked Umar to be allowed to make his way to a land that would offer him sanctuary. When the response came that he must submit to Yazid, he replied that he would never humiliate himself like a slave. He and his men hamstrung their horses to indicate that they would not be trying to escape.