Few were so rash as to point out how convenient it was that only Ali had been killed, and by Muawiya’s favorite weapon, poison. Those few were quickly and irrevocably silenced.
There was even a story that Ali’s assassin had carried out the deed for love: to win the hand of a woman whose father and brothers had been among the Rejectionist martyrs killed at Nahrawan. “I will not marry you until you give me what I want,” the story has her saying. “Three thousand dirhams, a slave, a singing girl, and the death of Ali the son of Abu Talib.” The presence of that singing girl on her list of conditions spoke clearly of a romantic fiction, and no such romance was ever concocted about the men who purportedly attacked Muawiya and Amr. But that was no matter; it was far safer for most Muslims to blame the fanatic Rejectionists, and them alone.
Assassination creates an instant hero of its target. Any past sins are not just forgiven but utterly forgotten. Every word is reinterpreted in the light of sudden loss, and every policy once thought mistaken now seems the only right course of action. Political life is haunted by the sense of what might have been, of an ideal world that might have existed if only the assassination had never taken place. So it is today, and so it was in seventh-century Kufa. The same sword stroke that erased Ali’s life also erased all doubts about him. If they had diminished him in life, in death the Iraqis would raise him up as the ultimate authority, almost on a par with Muhammad himself.
The poisoned sword had been wielded by a Rejectionist, but as the Kufans reeled in shock, their sense of outrage was fueled by the conviction that Muawiya had somehow been behind it. Ali had been right all along, they said, and called for nothing less than what they had so stolidly refused before: all-out war on Muawiya.
They surged to the mosque to declare allegiance to Ali’s scholarly elder son, Hasan, and demanded that he lead them against Syria. But even as passions ran high all around him, Hasan remained a realist. He accepted the Kufans’ allegiance out of a sense of duty but clearly considered it more a burden than an honor. War was pointless, he knew, for the Syrian army was far better trained and equipped than the fractious Iraqi one. And besides, just the thought of a continuing civil war filled him with loathing.
He was haunted by Ali’s final bequest, spoken as the poison rapidly spread through his veins. “Do not seek this world even as it seeks you,” he had told his sons. “Do not weep for anything that is taken from you. Pursue harmony and goodness. Avoid fitna and discord.” And finally, quoting the Quran: “Do not fear the blame of any man more than you fear God.”
As sons will do, Hasan held his father to account for betraying the principles he had preached. Ali had allowed himself to be dragged into civil war, and Hasan could not forgive him for that. He had admired Othman for his abiding faith in Islam. Had been deeply shocked at the way the aging third Caliph had been so ruthlessly cut down. Had criticized his father’s declaration of amnesty for Othman’s assassins, and looked on with horror at the escalating bloodshed ever since. More war was the last thing Hasan wanted, and Muawiya, thanks to his vast network of informers, knew it.
Cannily aware that the pen can indeed be as mighty as the sword, Muawiya now sent Hasan a series of carefully reasoned letters. In them, he recognized Hasan’s spiritual right to the caliphate but argued that he, Muawiya, was better suited to the task. He was the older man, he said, the more seasoned and the more worldly-wise in an uncertain world. He was the one capable of ensuring secure borders, of repressing Rejectionist terrorism and assuring the safety and integrity of the empire. Much as he admired Hasan’s scholarship and piety, much as he honored him as the grandson of the Prophet, the times called for a strong leader—a man of experience and action, not a man of intellect.
And as was his way, he sweetened the pot. If Hasan abdicated his claim to the caliphate, Muawiya would ensure that he was amply compensated, in both the short term and the long. A large payment would be made to him from the Iraqi treasury, along with Muawiya’s oath that on his own death, he would name Hasan as the next Caliph.
Hasan was tempted. He knew he was no warrior, and longed for the peace and quiet of days spent studying in the mosque. He could also see how fickle those who supported him could be. He had watched as his father had been diminished in stature by the Iraqis, stymied at every turn. If they now held Ali up as the highest ideal, they could change their minds again just as quickly. Indeed, as he mulled Muawiya’s offer, it was the Iraqis who would decide him.
They had gathered for what they thought would be a fiery sermon calling them to war. But Hasan was not the inspirational speaker his father had been. A mild speech defect forced him to speak in a slow monotone, with each word given equal weight. He had gravitas but lacked fire, and this was clear as he took the pulpit to preach not what the people wanted but what he believed: the supremacy of the greater jihad—the lifelong struggle within oneself to become the ideal Muslim—over the lesser jihad, or armed struggle. If the Kufans counted it shameful to turn away from war, he said, then “shame is better than hellfire.” He would seek not war with Muawiya but an honorable peace, and a general amnesty for all past bloodshed.
They were brave words, instantly taken for cowardice. “He is weak and confused,” the Kufan warriors shouted to one another. “He intends to surrender. We have to stop him.” And the man who wanted nothing more than to prevent further violence suddenly became the object of it. His own men turned on him in a mutinous free-for-all, manhandling him and pulling the robe off his back. A knife appeared—nobody was ever sure whose knife it was—and cut into his thigh. It was not a deep wound, but enough to draw a flow of blood, and that fact probably saved Hasan’s life. As he fell to the ground, the sight of the blood sobered the mutineers, and they realized how dangerously close they had come to yet another assassination.
If there had been any doubt in Hasan’s mind as to what he should do, it was now resolved. Even if he wanted, he could not lead an army capable of turning on him in this way. Abdication was the only option, and Muawiya’s terms seemed reasonable enough. He had sworn that Hasan would succeed him as Caliph. Hasan must have reasoned that if his father, Ali, had waited through the reigns of three Caliphs before taking his rightful place, citing the need for unity, then he himself could surely wait through just this one.
Hussein pleaded with him to reconsider. “I beg you, heed the words of Ali,” he said, “not the words of Muawiya.” Deception was Muawiya’s modus operandi, he argued. Nothing good could come of negotiating with such a man, no matter what he had promised. But a younger brother rarely holds much sway over an older one, and besides, the wound in his leg had already persuaded Hasan.
He was still limping as he mounted the pulpit to address the Kufans for the last time. “People of Iraq, you have pledged allegiance to me, swearing that any friend of mine is a friend of yours,” he said. Now he called on them to follow through on that pledge. “I have deemed it right to make peace with Muawiya and to pledge allegiance to him, since whatever spares blood is better than whatever causes it to be shed.”
There was utter silence by the time he finished speaking, a silence that held as he descended from the pulpit and left the mosque. He told his brother to prepare for the long ride back to Medina and to do so as quickly as possible. He would be thankful, he said, to see the last of Kufa.
Who could blame him? The Shia certainly do not. In Shia Islam, Hasan is revered as the second Imam, the rightful heir to Ali and so to Muhammad. He had given up the leadership of the empire, but the far more important authority of spiritual power was indisputably his. Hasan, they would say, had placed his faith not in worldly power but in faith itself. Though there were also those who would say that the money certainly helped.
There is no firm record of how much he was given from the Iraqi treasury. There never is in such situations. Some say it was five million silver dirhams, enough for him to return to Medina a wealthy man. But Hussein was to be proved right in warning his brother against Muawiya. Hasan would not have lon
g to enjoy his newfound wealth.
Muawiya, now the undisputed fifth Caliph, entered Kufa with all due pomp and circumstance. He gave the Kufans three days to swear allegiance to him, and did not need to spell out what would happen if they refused. Swear they did on the first day, and with loud enthusiasm.
If their hearts were not his, their self-interest definitely was. And if some would accuse them of being fickle, others would say they were pragmatic. Here at last was the “strongman” they had been yearning for. For all Ali’s talk of unity, Muawiya was the one who could actually achieve it—not by the power of faith and principle, as Ali had hoped, but by far more down-to-earth methods.
After five years of civil war, law and order would prevail. The empire that had teetered on the brink of disintegration would be rescued. Muawiya was to rule for nineteen years, and on his death—of natural causes, itself a sign of political stability—his eulogist would call him “the rod and the blade of the Arabs, by means of whom God cut off strife.” Whatever part he had taken in creating that strife was not the stuff of eulogies.
With Kufa newly submissive, the man who had mused that “I like nothing better than a bubbling spring in an easy land” now went about assuring himself of just that. He took great delight in the rewards of power, tempered only by a certain ironic sensibility—in many ways a very modern one. It’s said that one time, as he watched the arrival in Damascus of a caravan full of Arabian horses and Caucasian slave girls, he sighed with satisfaction at how good the caliphate had been to him. “May God have pity on Abu Bakr, for he did not want this world, nor the world him,” he said. “Then the world wanted Omar, but he did not want the world. And then Othman used up this world, and it used up him. But me—I revel in it!”
He did not even mention Ali, editing him out of thought as if he could edit him out of history. But at that point in time, history surely seemed his to write. His was the subtle political mind that had gone up against Ali’s elevated spiritual one, and it had been clear to Muawiya from the beginning which of them would prevail, at least in terms of worldly success. One was destined to eat dust and thorns; the other to contemplate his slave girls and thoroughbred horses.
The Iraqis might still have posed a problem. They had sworn allegiance, but Muawiya had no intention of relying on their oaths. These were the people who had pledged themselves to Ali yet disobeyed him, then pledged again to Hasan and turned on him. Muawiya was determined to ensure not their loyalty—he was hardly so foolish as to expect that—but their continued submission. All that was needed was the right man for the job. If the Kufans had been as glad to see Hasan go as he had been to leave them, they would soon change their minds.
Ziyad, the veteran general appointed by Muawiya as the new governor of Iraq, was also one of the toughest. He had once been known as Ibn Abihi—the “Son of His Father”—and the identity of that father had been a matter of both dispute and entertainment. The most consistent rumors had it that Ziyad was a bastard son of Muawiya’s father, Abu Sufyan. Some said that his mother had been a concubine of Abu Sufyan’s; others swore that she had been a prostitute; yet others that worse still, she had been a Christian, and Ziyad was “the son of a blue-eyed mother.” But nobody called him Ibn Abihi any longer, not unless they wanted to be burned alive or crucified or slowly hacked to pieces, limb by limb. Ziyad had a way of making himself understood, even with the most unruly populace.
“Spare me your hands and your tongues,” he told the Kufans on taking office, “and I shall spare you my hand and my arm. I swear by God I have many potential victims among you, so let every man of you beware lest he be among them.”
The Kufans responded at first with a certain cowed respect. After the civil unrest of Ali’s rule, Ziyad at least provided security. In fact he enforced it. “He compelled the people to obey,” one Kufan remembered. “If a man or a woman dropped something, none would touch it until its owner came back and picked it up. Women spent the night without locking their doors. And if so much as a rope should be stolen in his realm, he would know who had taken it.” Just as Italians reconciled themselves to Mussolini’s dictatorship in the 1930s by saying that he “made the trains run on time,” so the seventh-century Iraqis accommodated themselves to Ziyad’s regime. Even the Rejectionists hunkered down, wary of retaliation.
The price of such security was dread. Ziyad established a secret police network to keep track not only of stolen ropes but also of any emergent opposition. He was as uncompromising as he had promised in response. Collective punishment—uprooting orchards, confiscating land, demolishing houses of relatives of those he suspected—was as effective as it was ruthless. So too was his demand that people spy on one another and name names.
“Let each man save himself,” he ordered. “Inform me of troublemakers sought by the Caliph Muawiya. Make lists of them, and you will be free from harm. Anyone who refuses will be denied protection, and his blood and property will be halal”—Ziyad’s to take at will.
With his secret police, his network of informants, his brutal reprisals, Ziyad ran Iraq much as another dictator was to run it fourteen hundred years later. Like Saddam Hussein, he was a Sunni ruling a majority Shia population. If they pined for Ali, that was their problem. He could not control their hearts, but he could, and did, control their every action. He was every bit as ruthless as Saddam would be, and seemingly as immovable.
Given his purpose, Muawiya had chosen his man in Iraq well, all the more since he had no fear of Ziyad’s turning against him. He ensured his new governor’s absolute loyalty with the least expensive yet most generous of gestures: the public recognition of Ziyad as a legal son of Abu Sufyan and thus as Muawiya’s own half brother. Family ties replaced the stigma of bastardy; nobility dispelled dishonor. So when Ziyad died, victim to one of the seventh century’s many localized outbreaks of the plague, it was perfectly natural that his son Ubaydallah, now Muawiya’s legal nephew, take his place as governor of Iraq. And just as natural that Ubaydallah prove himself very much his father’s son.
With Iraq thoroughly subdued and all overt signs of Shia sympathy quashed, with the trade routes safe and secure, and taxes coming in from as far away as Algeria to the west and Pakistan to the east, life was good for Muawiya. Only one cloud threatened his horizon: his commitment to appoint Hasan his successor as Caliph. It had been necessary at the time, one of those concessions a wise politician makes, but always in the awareness that things change with time. A great leader’s worth, after all, was measured by his legacy, and history made it clear that such a legacy was best ensured by founding a dynasty. An Umayyad dynasty, that is, with Muawiya’s son Yazid to become Caliph after him.
Muawiya’s dynastic ambition was to utterly change the caliphate. On this, both Sunnis and Shia are in agreement. The protodemocratic impulse that had driven the earliest years of Islam—the messy business of the shura, with the principle, if not quite the practice, of consensus—would become a thing of the past. As Byzantine despotism had appropriated Christianity, so now Umayyad despotism would appropriate Islam.
Muawiya had already had himself crowned Caliph in a coup de théâtre staged in Jerusalem, where he assumed the former role of the Byzantine emperor as guardian of the Christian holy places. Many of his most senior officials were Christians, including Ibn Uthal, his physician, and Al-Mansur ibn Sarjun, the grandfather of Saint John of Damascus. The Byzantine influence was all too clear. The caliphate was to become a hereditary monarchy in what would be seen as the degenerate Persian and Byzantine mold, and Yazid seemed to fit that mold perfectly.
He was the image of a spoiled scion given to drink and dissipation, the antithesis of the Islamic ideal. “A silk-wearing drunkard,” Hasan once called him. Even Ziyad, angling perhaps for his own selection as Muawiya’s successor, warned that Yazid was “easy-going and neglectful, devoted only to hunting.” Muawiya’s son seemed to be a kind of seventh-century version of a good old boy from Texas, succeeding his father to the highest office in the land.
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But that was to underestimate him, let alone his father. Muawiya would never have appointed a dissipated roué to carry on his legacy. Yazid may have liked his drink, but he had also proved himself an effective administrator and a capable commander in the field. If he was not the Islamic ideal, that was no matter. Muawiya had no intention of making his son heir to the pulpit; he wanted him heir to the throne.
And, Muawiya might have argued, why not? What was so different about the claim of the Ahl al-Bayt to the caliphate? Wasn’t its claim based on the same principle of blood inheritance, as though matters of the spirit could be passed on by birth along with facial features and the family name? Wasn’t the son of the fifth Caliph as entitled to the throne as the son of the fourth? More so, in fact, if the stability Muawiya had achieved was to be maintained?
Besides, it was not as though he would be taking the caliphate away from the family of Muhammad. From the Ahl al-Bayt, yes, but wasn’t family a larger thing than that? Wasn’t he himself the Prophet’s brother-in-law? And weren’t the Umayyads also the family of the Prophet? Muawiya’s grandfather Umayya had been a first cousin of Muhammad’s grandfather, making both Muawiya and Yazid distant cousins of the Prophet. They were in a different line of the family, true, but family all the same.
As it happened, Muawiya had no need to make his case. It could simply be considered a matter of perfect timing for him when Hasan died at the age of forty-six, just nine years after returning to Medina. He died of natural causes, Sunnis would say, but the Shia would tell a different story. Muawiya, they charged, had ensured Hasan’s early demise by means of his favorite weapon—a honeyed drink laced with poison.
Muawiya had found the vulnerable link, they said. The hand that slipped the fatal powder into the cup was the least expected—one of Hasan’s wives, Jaada. She had married the man she thought would inherit the caliphate after his father, Ali, and hoped to be the mother of his sons, the heirs to power. But though Hasan had many sons by other wives, the sons Jaada hoped for never materialized. Neither did the status of marriage to the leader of an empire. After Hasan’s abdication, Jaada had found herself part of the household of a revered but powerless scholar in what had become the backwater of Medina. So perhaps she thought that if this husband would not be Caliph, another one could be. Perhaps that was why she had been open to Muawiya’s offer.
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