Wahb’s reply: “All of us are their killers. And all of us say: Your blood, Ali, is now halal—permitted—for us.”
It was an outright declaration of war, in words that still chill the blood of anyone who hears them in the Muslim world. They are the words of implacable righteousness, of those who kill without compulsion, in the name of God. For the third time, Ali was left no choice but to do the one thing he most abhorred: lead a Muslim army against other Muslims.
When they reached Nahrawan, it was quick and bloody. The Rejectionists hurled themselves against Ali’s vastly superior forces, seemingly regardless of any concern for their own survival. “The truth has shone forth for us!” they cried to one another. “Prepare to meet God!”
And an ominous precursor to the cry of modern suicide bombers: “Hasten to Paradise! To Paradise!”
Only four hundred Rejectionists survived, though it might have been better for Ali if there had been no survivors at all. More than two thousand martyrs were created that day, and as is the way with martyrs, their memory would inspire yet more.
The man who had sacrificed so much to avoid fitna had now fought three civil war battles. In all three, he had been victorious—or would have been if his men had kept fighting at Siffin—but he could not escape a growing feeling of self-loathing. He had waited twenty-five years for this? Not to lead Islam into a new era of unity but to kill other Muslims?
“Since I became Caliph,” he told his cousin, “things have gone continually against me and diminished me.” If it were not for the need to stand up against corruption and oppression, “I would throw off the bridle of leadership, and this world would be as distasteful to me as the dripping from the nose of a goat.”
With Muawiya working against him, however, the diminishment would only continue. As was his style, the Syrian governor continued to undermine Ali at every turn. “After Siffin,” he later said with great satisfaction, “I made war on Ali without armies and without exertion.”
The arbitration agreed on at Siffin took almost a year to set up. There were all the usual diplomatic preliminaries: the need to agree on an agenda; to determine the size and makeup of the delegations from each side; to agree on the timing of the conference, the format, and the location, a small town halfway between Kufa and Damascus. Yet when all the details were in place and the two sides finally met, it would end only in further bitterness.
Muawiya was represented by his chief of staff, Amr, who had conquered Egypt for Islam and was soon to become its governor in reward for his work. Ali would have chosen his own chief of staff, the general who had so vividly volunteered to take Muawiya to the desert “and leave him staring at the backside of things whose front side he has no idea of,” but his men insisted instead on the aging Abu Musa. This was the man who had argued so strongly that they should remove their spearheads and unstring their bows before the Battle of the Camel. “Fitna rips the community apart like an ulcer,” he had said then, and now that the ulcer was eating at them, they remembered his words. Never mind that Ali’s chief aides called Abu Musa “blunt of blade and shallow,” a man too easily manipulable by sharper minds. The rank and file countered that “he warned us of what we have fallen into.” They would accept nobody else.
The conclave lasted two weeks, and at the end, Abu Musa and Amr stepped forward to make a joint declaration. As Abu Musa understood it, they had agreed to the perfect compromise: A shura would be held to reaffirm both Ali as Caliph and Muawiya as governor of Syria. That is what he announced to the hundreds of those gathered for the concluding ceremony. Then came the double cross.
When Amr stepped up to the podium, his spin on Abu Musa’s words was not at all what the old man had in mind. He and his good friend Abu Musa had indeed agreed to a shura, he said, but its purpose was to confirm not Ali but his opponent as Caliph. “I hereby confirm Muawiya as the true Caliph,” Amr concluded, “the heir of Othman and the avenger of his blood.”
Curses hurtled through the air, fistfights broke out, and the conclave broke up in more turmoil than when it had begun. Abu Musa fled for Mecca, where he lived out his days in privacy and prayer, utterly disillusioned with public life, while Amr returned to Damascus to lead the acclamation of Muawiya as Caliph.
The year was 658, and there were now two Caliphs. A Caliph and an anti-Caliph, that is, and no agreement on which was which. The odds against Ali were stacked higher than ever, and due to his principled insistence on equalizing the revenues from Islam, they were to become higher still.
Influential estate owners and tribal leaders were accustomed to what they considered the perks of their position. Without these perks, they were open to what Muawiya called “the use of honey”—sweetening the pot. So when Ali refused to make sweetheart deals with the nobility, he paid dearly. Even one of his own half brothers, infuriated by the lack of a special pension, was bribed over to Muawiya’s side.
But there were also other uses for honey. Muawiya had his sights set on Egypt, where Ali’s stepson, Muhammad Abu Bakr—Aisha’s half brother—had proved a weak governor. Ali himself ruefully acknowledged that he was “an inexperienced young man.” So when news came that Muawiya was planning to dispatch Amr to take over Egypt, Ali sent one of his most experienced generals to shore up the province’s northern defenses. The general traveled by ship from Arabia instead of taking the land route through Palestine so that he could avoid Muawiya’s agents, but that was wishful thinking. When his boat docked, he was welcomed with a great show of hospitality by the chief customs officer, a man already well “sweetened” by Muawiya, and offered the customary honeyed drink in welcome.
The poison in it killed him within hours. As Amr would later say, “Muawiya had armies in honey.”
Poison has none of the heroics of battle. It works quietly and selectively, one might almost say discreetly. For Muawiya, it was the perfect weapon.
His personal physician, Ibn Uthal, a Christian and a noted alchemist, was an expert on poisons, as was his successor, Abu al-Hakam, also a Christian. Their records no longer exist, but Ibn Washiya’s Book on Poisons, written in ninth-century Baghdad as a guide for his son, has survived.
Equal parts biology, alchemy, and superstition, Ibn Washiya’s work constituted the state of the art for centuries to come. One section deals with poisons that work by sound. It was thought that certain sounds under certain circumstances could kill, and it may have been this belief that heightened Aisha’s terror when she heard the howling dogs at Hawab. Another section details the use of various parts of snakes, scorpions, and tarantulas, but even seemingly innocuous creatures could be effectively used. If nothing else, the Twenty-third Compound Poison, for instance, was sure to produce death by botulism. It called for “the blood of a decrepit camel” to be mixed with its gall, sprinkled with squill and sal ammoniac, and then buried in donkey manure for a month “until it is musty and covered with something that resembles a spider’s web.” Two grams of this in food or drink, and death was guaranteed within three days.
If more rapid fatality was desired, it could be induced by cyanide extracted from apricot pits, with the faint almond odor masked in a drink of date juice or goat’s milk thickened with honey. Or there were herbal poisons like henbane and deadly nightshade. A particular favorite was monkshood, specifically recommended for use on the blade of a sword or a dagger so that the slightest nick would provide effective entry into the bloodstream of the victim. And by the end of the seventh century, the alchemists of Damascus had developed “inheritance powder”—transparent arsenic, odorless and tasteless, which could be slipped into a drink by anyone seeking to speed up the process of inheritance.
With such an arsenal at his disposal, one can see how Muawiya could boast that he made war on Ali without armies. Honey worked for him and would continue to do so, whether in bribes or in a cooling, fatal drink.
The Syrian army took Egypt with ease. Muhammad Abu Bakr had sent a small force to the border, but they were completely outnumbered, and routed. Disma
yed by such ineffective leadership, the rest of his army either fled or switched sides to join forces with the Syrians, and when Abu Bakr himself was hunted down, alone and half dead of thirst in the desert, the Syrian soldiers carried out their revenge for Othman on the man who had led his assassins. Ignoring orders to take Abu Bakr alive, they sewed him into the rotting carcass of a donkey, then set it on fire. Some accounts have it that he was already dead by then; others, that he was still alive and burned to death.
Ali was distraught at the news, and Aisha even more so. As though she had never been alienated from her young half brother, she mourned him at dramatic length—so much so that she provoked one of her fellow Mothers of the Faithful, Muawiya’s sister Umm Habiba, into sending her a “condolence gift” of a freshly roasted leg of lamb, dripping with bloody juices. The accompanying message read: “So was your brother cooked.” Aisha was violently sick at the sight of it, and, at least by her own report, refused to touch meat again for the rest of her life.
Ali had lost Egypt, and still the attacks kept coming from every quarter. The khariji Rejectionists had reorganized and attracted thousands of new recruits not only in Iraq but throughout Persia, where whole cities now ousted Ali’s governors and refused to send taxes to Kufa. Syrian units began a long series of harassment raids into Iraqi territory, terrorizing the population and reinforcing the feeling that Ali could not provide even the most basic security. Arabia itself came under attack, yet even after Muawiya had sent a punitive force to Mecca and Medina and on into the Yemen, where thousands of Ali loyalists were summarily executed, Ali could not rouse his once-invincible army to action. Demoralized by the seemingly endless civil war, his men refused to move. “Our arrows are exhausted,” they said. “Our swords are blunt, and our spearheads all used up.”
The man who had been so famed for eloquence was reduced to haranguing his own fighters, berating them as cowards. “You Kufans are only lions in time of peace, and sly foxes when you are called to be brave,” he complained from the pulpit. “May your mothers be bereaved of you! I call you to the aid of your brothers in Mecca and Medina and you gurgle like slack-jawed camels slurping their water. If you hear even a rumor of Syrian horsemen coming against you, each of you hides in his house and locks his door, like a lizard in his hole. Whoever places his trust in you is duped. Whoever draws you, draws a useless lot. You have filled my heart with pus and lined my breast with anger. By God, knowing you has brought in its wake nothing but grief and sorrow. If I did not desire to die in God’s cause, I would not remain with you one more day.”
And indeed, he had few days yet to come.
It happened at dawn on Friday, January 26, in the year 661, midway through the monthlong fast of Ramadan. Ali had walked to the mosque in Kufa for the first prayer of the day. He never saw the armed man lurking in the shadow of the main entrance, not until the raised sword glistened above him in the early light and he heard the Rejectionist cry coming from his attacker’s lips: “Judgment belongs to God alone, Ali! To God alone!”
The sword blow knocked him to the ground and gashed his head open. “Do not let that man escape,” he shouted as he fell, and worshipers rushed out of the mosque and caught hold of his assailant.
Ali remained lucid even as the blood ran down his face and people began to panic at the sight. There was to be no call for revenge, he said. “If I live, I shall consider what to do with this man who attacked me. If I die, then inflict on him blow for blow. But none shall be killed but him. Do not plunge into the blood of Muslims saying ‘The Commander of the Faithful has been killed!’ And do not inflict mutilation on this man, for I heard the Messenger of God say, ‘Avoid mutilation, even on a vicious dog.’ ”
The assassin was executed the next day. Ali’s wound had not been fatal, but the poison smeared on the sword had done its work.
Hasan and Hussein washed their father’s body, rubbed it with herbs and myrrh, and shrouded it in three robes. Then, as Ali had instructed them, they set his body on his favorite riding camel and gave it free rein. Forty years before, Muhammad had given his camel free rein to determine where the mosque would be built in Medina. Where it stopped, there the mosque was built. Now another sainted animal would determine where Ali would be buried. Wherever it knelt, that was where God intended Ali’s body to rest.
The camel went a half day’s journey, walking slowly as though it knew its burden and was weighed down by grief. It knelt some six miles east of Kufa, atop a barren, sandy rise—najaf in Arabic—and there his sons buried the man who would ever after be revered by all Muslims, but by two very different titles: the first Imam of Shia Islam, and the last of the four rashidun, the Rightly Guided Caliphs of Sunni Islam.
“Today, they have killed a man on the holiest day, the day the Quran was first revealed,” Ali’s elder son, Hasan, said at the graveside. “If the Prophet sent him on a raid, the angel Gabriel rode at his right hand, and the angel Michael at his left. By God, none who came before him are ahead of him, and none who come after him will overtake him.”
In time, a shrine would be built over Ali’s grave on that sandy rise, and the city of Najaf would grow up around it. Each time the shrine was rebuilt, it grew more magnificent, until the gold-leafed dome and min a rets soared above the city, shining out to pilgrims still twenty miles away. By the late twentieth century, Najaf was so large that nearby Kufa had become little more than a suburb hard by the river. All the more canny, then, of Muqtada al-Sadr, the leader of today’s Mahdi Army, when he adopted not the Najaf shrine but the main mosque of Kufa as his home pulpit. In doing so, he took on the spirit not of Ali assassinated, but of the living Imam. Preaching where Ali had preached, Muqtada assumed the role of the new champion of the oppressed.
But Najaf was to be only the first of Iraq’s twin holy cities. As the Caliph Muawiya assumed uncontested power, the second city was still just a nameless stretch of stony sand fifty miles to the north. It would be twenty years yet until Ali’s son Hussein would meet his fate here, and this stretch of desert be given the name Karbala, “the place of trial and tribulation.”
chapter 12
ON THE MORNING OF SEPTEMBER 9 IN THE YEAR 680, A SMALL caravan set out from Mecca, heading for Iraq, and at its head Hussein, Ali’s younger son. Nineteen years had passed since he and his brother had buried their father on that sandy rise outside Kufa, then made the long, dispiriting trek back across northern Arabia to the shelter of the Hijaz mountains. Hussein had waited with almost impossible patience as Muawiya consolidated his rule over the empire, but now the waiting was over. Muawiya was dead, and Hussein was intent on bringing the caliphate back where it belonged, to the Ahl al-Bayt, the House of Muhammad.
The divisiveness that had begun with Muhammad’s death and then taken shape around the figure of Ali had now reached into the third generation. And here it was to harden into a sense of the most terrible wrong—a wrong so deeply felt that it would cut through the body of Islam for centuries to come, with still no end in sight.
Hussein was by now in his mid-fifties, and it surely showed. His beard must have been at least flecked with white, his eyes and mouth etched around with deep lines. Yet the posters that today flood Iraqi and Iranian markets show an extraordinarily handsome man in his twenties. Long black hair cascades down to his shoulders. His beard is full and soft, not a gray hair to be seen. His face is unlined, glowing with youth, and his dark eyes are soft but determined, sad and yet confident, as though they were seeing all the joy and all the misery in the world, and embracing joy and misery alike.
In the West, the posters are often mistaken for somewhat more muscular images of Jesus, and indeed the resemblance is striking. If Ali was the foundation figure of Shia Islam, Hussein was to become its sacrificial icon. The story of what happened to him once he reached Iraq would become the Passion story of Shiism—its emotional and spiritual core.
Yet as Hussein’s caravan threaded its way out of the mountains and onto the high desert, a dispassionate observer might h
ave taken one look and thought that he was almost destined to fail. If his aim was to reclaim the caliphate, this small group seemed pitifully inadequate to the task. The line of camels traveled slowly, for they carried the women and children of his family, with only seventy-two armed warriors for protection and just a few horses tied to the camels by their reins. Nevertheless, the group rode with assurance, confident that once they arrived, the whole of Iraq would rise up under their banner.
At first, that confidence had seemed justified. Letter after letter had been carried across the eight hundred miles between Kufa and Mecca in the weeks since Muawiya had died and his son Yazid had succeeded to the throne in Damascus—so many letters that they filled two large saddlebags, and all of them from the Shiat Ali, the followers of Ali.
“Speed to us, Hussein,” they urged. “The people are waiting for you, and think of none but you. Claim your rightful place as the true heir of the Prophet, his grandson, his flesh and blood through Fatima, your mother. Bring power back where it belongs, to Iraq. We will drive out the Syrians under your banner. We will reclaim the soul of Islam.”
The pivotal message was the one that came from Hussein’s cousin Muslim, whom he had sent to Kufa to confirm that the Iraqis were indeed committed to his leadership. “I have twelve thousand men ready to rise up under you,” Muslim wrote. “Come now. Come to an army that has gathered for you!”
It was the call Hussein had waited nineteen years to hear, ever since his father’s death.
Ali had not been the only target the morning he was attacked, or so it was said. Word was that the khariji Rejectionists had also planned to kill Amr in Egypt and Muawiya in Syria. But Amr had been sick that day—a stomach ailment, they said—and the cloaked figure struck from behind was only a subordinate. And though the would-be Syrian assassin found the right man, he merely slashed Muawiya in the buttocks, and the newly uncontested ruler of the empire suffered only temporary discomfort.
After the Prophet Page 15