The more things seemed to be clear, the less clear they had become.
What would Muhammad have written if the pen and paper had arrived? That Ali would be his khalifa, his successor, say the Shia. Who knows? say the Sunnis—a matter of no importance, blown out of all proportion by the overactive imaginations of the Shia faithful. After all, if there are any number of ways to interpret a written document, there are an infinite number of ways to interpret one that was never written at all.
There can be no resolution to such an argument. Everyone claimed to know the answer—everyone still does—but the early biographies and histories report what people did and what they said, not what they thought or intended. And the crux of the argument hinges not on what happened but on what it meant.
As always, the question is what Muhammad was thinking—a question that will be asked in turn about Ali too, and, after him, about his son Hussein. What did they intend? What did they know or not know? Unanswerable questions all, which is why the wrenching rift in Islam is so enduring. Despite all the impassioned claims, all the religious certainties and fiery oratory and ghastly massacres to come, the enduring irony is that “absolute” truth is the one thing that can never be established. It does not exist even in science; how much less so in history.
All we know for sure is that in the grip of fever, blinded by those agonizing headaches that made every sound seem as if it were piercing into his skull, Muhammad was no longer in any condition to impose his will. The pen and paper never arrived, and by dawn the next morning he was so weak he could barely move.
He knew then that the end was near because he made one last request, and this one was granted. He was to be washed with seven pails of water from seven different wells, he said, and though he did not explain it, all his wives were certainly aware that this was part of the ritual for washing a corpse. They washed him, and once he was in a state of ritual purity, he asked to be taken across the courtyard to morning prayers in the mosque.
It took two men, Ali and his uncle Abbas, to support him, one on either side of him, his arms around their necks. The few yards from Aisha’s chamber to the mosque itself must have seemed an infinite distance, and the shade of the mosque an exquisite relief from the blinding sun. When they reached it, Muhammad gestured to be seated beside the pulpit, where he could watch as his old friend Abu Bakr led the prayers in his place.
Those who were there remembered the Prophet smiling as the voice of his loyal companion sounded through the building. They said his face was radiant, though there is no knowing if it was the radiance of faith or the radiance of fever and impending death. Perhaps it was the radiance of their own faith, of their gratitude at seeing him there. They watched as he sat and listened to the chanting of the words he had first heard from the angel Gabriel, and persuaded themselves that it was not the last time. But once the prayers were over and Ali and Abbas had carried him back to Aisha’s chamber, Muhammad had only a few hours left.
Some were more clearsighted than others. “I swear by God that I saw death in the Prophet’s face,” Ali’s uncle told him after they had settled the sick man back onto his pallet and left Aisha’s chamber. Now was the last chance to clarify the matter of succession. “Let us go back and ask. If authority be with us, we shall know it, and if it be with others, we will ask him to direct them to treat us well.”
But Ali would hear nothing of it. “By God I will not,” he said. “If it is withheld from us, none after him will give it to us.” Not even Ali, it seemed, was ready for too much clarity.
By then, in any case, it was too late. Even as the two men were talking, Muhammad lapsed into unconsciousness, and this time he did not recover. By noon of that Monday, June 8 in the year 632, he was dead.
He died, Aisha would say, with his head on her breast—or, as the original Arabic has it with vivid delicacy, “between my lungs and my lips.” That is the Sunni version. But the Shia say that Muhammad’s head lay not on Aisha’s breast but on Ali’s. It was Ali’s arms that cradled the dying prophet in his last moments, they say, and Ali who heard the Prophet, with his dying breath, repeat his chilling last words three times: “Oh God, have pity on those who will succeed me.”
Who held the dying prophet matters. Whose ears heard that final breath, whose skin it touched, whose arms supported him as he passed from life to death matter with particular intensity. It is as though his last breath had carried his spirit, leaping from his body at the precise moment of death to enter the soul of the one who held him. That was the person who held not only the past but the future of Islam in his arms. Or hers.
chapter 5
NO WORDS WERE NEEDED TO CARRY THE NEWS. THE WAILING did that. First Aisha, then all the other wives broke into a terrible, piercing howl that sounded for all the world like a wounded animal hiding in the bush to die. It spoke of ultimate agony, of pain and sorrow beyond all comprehension, and it spread through the oasis at the speed of sound.
Men and women, old and young, everyone took up the wail and surrendered themselves to it. They slapped their faces with both hands, a rapid rat-a-tat on either cheek; beat their chests with clenched fists so that the sound echoed as though the whole torso were a hollow tree; raked their foreheads with their fingernails until blood streaked down over their eyes and their tears were stained red; scooped up handfuls of dust from the ground and poured it over their heads, abasing themselves in despair. These were the time-honored rituals of grief, the same public rituals still carried out every year at Ashura, when the Shia mourn the tragic death of Ali’s son Hussein. They were the outward expression of abandonment, of being abandoned and of abandoning oneself to mourning—not only for the one who had died but for themselves, leaderless, without him.
“We were like sheep on a rainy night,” one of the Emigrants was to recall—moving this way and that in panic, with nobody to guide them and no shelter to be found. How could the Prophet be dead? Hadn’t they just seen him in the mosque, his face radiant as they chanted the responses to prayer? It was so awful a thing to contemplate, so impossible to get one’s mind around, that even Omar, the bravest of warriors, could not absorb it. The man who had asserted with such authority that the Book of God, the Quran, was sufficient, now refused to accept that death had won the day.
It could not be so, Omar insisted. It was heresy even to entertain such an idea. Muhammad was gone only for the moment. There would be a resurrection, as there had been with the last great prophet, Jesus. The Messenger would return from the dead and lead his people to the Day of Judgment. And in a panic of blind grief, before anyone could stop him, this most severe of men stood up in the forecourt of the mosque and berated the fearful crowd.
“By God, he is not dead,” he declared, even as the tears ran down his face and over his beard. “He has gone to his lord as the prophet Moses went and was hidden from his people for forty days, returning to them after it was said that he had died. By God, the Messenger will return as Moses returned and will cut off the hands and feet of all men who allege that he is dead!”
But if this was intended to calm the wailing crowd, it had the opposite effect. The sight of Omar in hysterical denial only gave rise to greater panic. It took the small, elderly figure of Abu Bakr to pull Omar back. “Gently, gently,” he said, “be quiet”—and one can almost hear it, the soothing tone, urging calmness as he took the towering warrior by the arm and slowly led him aside, then took his place before the terrified throng.
His voice was startlingly strong, not at all what one would expect from such a frail body, and though the message he delivered was a terrible one, it was also oddly reassuring. “For those who worshiped Muhammad, Muhammad is dead,” he announced. “For those who worship God, God is alive, immortal.” The Messenger is dead, long live Islam.
There was a sudden silence as Abu Bakr’s words sank in, and then Omar’s knees gave way and he collapsed to the ground, bent over in agonized tears. The older man’s calm realism had subdued the terrifying giant, turned him into
a weeping child, and as Abu Bakr continued, reciting the revelation that was to become part of Sura 3 of the Quran, everyone wept along with Omar.
“Muhammad is naught but a Messenger,” Abu Bakr declaimed. “Messengers have passed away before him. Why, if he should die or be slain, should you turn back on your heels?”
And with this confirmation of mortality, as the tears flowed and the agonized wailing continued through the day and far into the night so that even the pack animals were restless in their pens and the jackals and hyenas in the mountains all around Medina could be heard raising their voices in unison, reality began to set in.
For some, however, it was to set in faster than for others.
Ali and three of his kinsmen had shut themselves in Aisha’s chamber and begun the work of the closest male relatives, preparing Muhammad for the grave. Theirs was the long, slow ritual task of washing him and rubbing herbs over him and wrapping him in his shroud. But even in grief, others were thinking of the future. The “lost sheep” were faced with the daunting task of selecting one of their own as their shepherd.
Within the hour, the lingering distrust between the native Medinans and the former Meccans had surfaced. Ibn Obada, the head of one of Medina’s two main tribes, put out the call for a shura, a traditional intertribal forum where agreements were ratified and disputes settled. It was a kind of seventh-century version of the smoke-filled back room, and like that back room, it was strictly by invitation only. The call went out quickly, but only among the native Medinans, the ones known as the Helpers. The Meccans, those known as the Emigrants, were not invited.
The Medinan Helpers had trusted Muhammad because they considered him a kinsman. Since his father’s mother had been born in Medina, they had seen him as one of their own. But the seventy-two companions who had followed him from Mecca, along with their families, were another matter. They had been welcomed, of course, but not with the most open of arms. True, all were equal in Islam. All were brothers, all family. But even between brothers—or perhaps especially between brothers—resentment and ill will flourished. The Emigrants remained Meccans in the eyes of the Helpers, tolerated in Medina rather than accepted. They were still members of that rival city’s ruling Quraysh tribe, and now, in the sudden absence of Muhammad as the unifying force, the politics of tribe and clan would reassert themselves.
The shura took time, for its success depended on consensus. That was a high ideal, but in practice it meant that the session would go on until those opposed to the general feeling of the meeting had been persuaded or worn down or simply browbeaten into going along with the majority. Such things could not be hurried. Each leader, each elder, each representative had to have his say, and at length.
Few there could read or write, but their powers of oratory were phenomenal, as was often the way in preliterate societies. Ornate rhet oric was not merely valued; its display was a pleasure in its own right. The poetry of a speech was as important as its content, its length a measure of the speaker’s worth and standing, and this now acted against the interests of the Medinans. A meeting of this importance could not be kept secret for long. Word got out, and just a few hours after the shura had begun, those not invited—the Meccan Emigrants—decided to invite themselves.
By early evening of that fateful Monday, Abu Bakr had roused Omar from his grief. There would be time enough to mourn once the succession to Muhammad had been settled, he said. The Medinans could not be allowed to break away; that would work against everything Muhammad had achieved. The new leader of Islam had to be someone who would unite, not divide, the Muslim community.
Like Abu Bakr, Omar had taken it for granted that this leader would be one of the Emigrants. They were the Prophet’s earliest companions, the men who had been with him the longest, and the most influential of them were three senior counselors besides Ali: Omar himself, Abu Bakr, and a third man—Othman, the handsome aristocrat from the Umayyads, the wealthiest clan of Mecca’s Quraysh tribe.
While most of the Umayyads had opposed Muhammad until just two years before, Othman had accepted Islam early on. He had emigrated to Medina with the Prophet, given most of his wealth to the cause, and steadfastly supported it even when it meant battle against his own kin. In gratitude, Muhammad had honored him with the hand of his second daughter in marriage and then, when she died, with that of his third. Othman thus had the unique distinction of being the double son-in-law of the Prophet. His voice would be essential if Omar and Abu Bakr were to prevail.
He had not been there in the sickroom in the final days of Muhammad’s illness; as is the way of the aristocrat, he exercised the prerogative of wealth and spent most of the midsummer months in his mountain estate outside Medina, where the air was fresher and cooler. But his presence was vital now, and word was sent to him posthaste. With or without invitation, the Emigrants were going to the shura, and Othman should join them there as quickly as he could.
Led by Omar and Abu Bakr, they turned up in force and muscled their way in. Essentially, they gate-crashed the meeting, outnumbering those already there. Only one person with a direct interest in the proceedings would remain absent, but for many, that absence would deprive the shura of all legitimacy.
Ali was the one Emigrant whom the native Medinans would have freely acknowledged as their leader. They saw him more as one of theirs than as a Meccan. Since Muhammad was their kin because of his grandmother, so too was Ali, Muhammad’s closest male relative. Yet it was precisely because he was the closest male relative that Ali would remain absent.
He must certainly have heard about the shura. His uncle Abbas—the same uncle who had pleaded with him just that morning to go back to Muhammad and clarify the succession—surely urged him to leave his vigil over the Prophet’s body, and offered to keep watch in his place. With so much at stake, it was vital that Ali assert his right to leadership.
If Abbas made the argument, though, he made it in vain. One can see Ali shaking his head—in sorrow? in disgust?—not at the idea of the shura but at its being held with such unseemly haste. Before the Prophet had even been buried? To leave the man who had been father and mentor to him before consigning him back to the earth from which he had come? However dire the circumstances, that was out of the question. Ali was above all a man of faith; he would stay with the body, in the faith that the Medinans would support him.
It would not be the last time he would suffer from misplaced faith in others.
To Sunnis, the shura would be the perfect example of the wisdom of consensus, of a community newly empowered to resolve its disputes and to find the right solution. The Prophet trusted them to find the right leader, they maintained. In fact that was precisely what he had intended all along. They would quote a later tradition in which Muhammad said, “My community will never agree in error.” The Islamic community was sacred, that is, and thus by definition free of error. But in centuries to come, this statement came to serve as a self-fulfilling argument against the Shia. It would be taken to mean that any Muslims who disagreed with the Sunni majority could only be in error; the Shia, by force of their disagreement, were not part of the true community of Islam as defined by Sunnis.
For the Shia, it was not the community but the leadership that was sacred. The Sunnis had abrogated divinely ordained power by determining it among themselves, they would argue, and this usurpation of the divine had begun right there, in the first Islamic shura. The Prophet’s will had been clear: Ali was the only true, legitimate successor to the Prophet. To acclaim anyone else as Caliph was a betrayal not only of Muhammad but of Islam itself.
It seems clear that the shura began with the best intentions, but even as unity was the one thing people most wanted, it was also the one thing that seemed impossible to achieve. The moment the crowd of Meccan Emigrants burst in, the Medinan Helpers knew that their bid to claim leadership for one of their own was doomed. In an attempt at compromise, they proposed separate leaders. “Let us Helpers have one rule and you Emigrants another,” they said. B
ut Abu Bakr and Omar insisted on one leader for the whole of Islam, and that leader, they argued, had to be an Emigrant. They had been the earliest to accept Islam. They were from Muhammad’s own tribe, the Quraysh, who had transformed Mecca into a great trading and pilgrimage center. Islam was about unity, they said, and only someone from the Quraysh could keep Mecca and Medina together as one people, the center of the community of Islam.
Inevitably, the shura dragged on, through the night and into the next day. Speech followed speech—long, ornate, impassioned orations. All had the welfare of the people in mind, as such speeches always do. There is no doubting the public concern of all those involved, nor the self-interest. Public concern and self-interest do sometimes coincide, even—especially—when the self-interest is your own.
The Emigrants began to impose their will on the Helpers. It became clear that the successor would be Quraysh, from Mecca. That much was now certain, but which one? All else being equal, the established principle of nasb, noble lineage, might have held sway. This held that nobility was in the bloodline, and in a society so entranced by lineage that later, when outright civil war had begun, warriors would stand tall and proclaim their lineage aloud before actually attacking each other, bloodlines mattered. By the principle of nasb, Ali should have been the successor.
But all else was not equal. Despite Muhammad’s personal authority, his clan—and Ali’s—was relatively powerless within the large Qur -aysh tribe. They were Hashimis, and the Quraysh were dominated by the Umayyads, who had led the opposition to Muhammad for so many years, their wealth and power threatened by his preaching of equality.
The Hashimis had been honored by having the Prophet come from their clan, the argument now went. But now that he was gone, the honor of leadership had to be extended to other clans of the Quraysh. Muhammad’s intention had always been to spread power wide, not to raise up one clan above all others. To choose Ali, another Hashimi, would be to risk turning the leadership of Islam into a form of hereditary monarchy, and that was the opposite of everything Muhammad had stood for. Leadership was not something to be inherited, like property. It had to be decided by merit, not by blood. This was what Muhammad had intended all along. This was why he had never formally declared an heir. He had faith in the people’s ability to decide for themselves, in the sanctity of the decision of the whole community.
After the Prophet Page 6