Schism

24-40 AH

644-661 CE

THE THIRD KHALIFA (22-36 AH, 644-656 CE)

Othman was Mohammed’s fifth cousin once removed, and he took office as Islams third khalifa at the age of sixty-eight.

Othman’s father had been one of the richest men in Mecca, and Oth­man inherited his father’s millions when he was twenty. With a deft touch for business, he managed to multiply that wealth many times over before he was even in his thirties, earning the nickname of Othman Ghani, “Oth­man the wealthy.”

Chaste and modest even before his conversion, Othman never drank, smoked, or chased women. Around Mecca, he was famous for his good looks—people even went so far as to call him “beautiful”—yet an air of anxious melancholy always surrounded this austere, soft-spoken man.

He converted to Islam about a year after Mohammed began his preach­ing and nine years before the Hijra. His conversion story begins one evening when he was on his way home from a successful business trip.

Reputedly, Othman had stopped someplace for the night and was lying under the stars, looking up at the black dome of the sky, when the immen­sity of the universe suddenly overwhelmed him. Along with a crushing sense of his own insignificance came a conviction that somebody was in con­trol, that this universe had a master, and what a master He must be! At that moment, even though he was alone, Othman heard a penetrating voice an­nounce out loud that the Messenger of God was in the world. As soon as he got home, the story goes, Othman went to his friend Abu Bakr, who told him the curious tale of Mohammed and his message about a single, om­nipotent God. Othman immediately announced himself a believer.

His conversion enraged his family.

The Muslims were no doubt glad to have a rich man in their ranks, and Othman was glad to help his fellow Muslims any way he could, but the main way he could think of was to provide money. Once, when abuse of Muslims was peaking in Mecca, Mohammed decided that a group of his followers should emigrate to Abyssinia, and Othman helped finance that. He himself emigrated with the group as well and in Abyssinia forged fruit­ful business connections that made him even richer than before. A few years later he returned to Mecca, where his Abyssinian connections— yes—served him so well he grew even richer.

For most Muslims, the Hijra meant losing everything they owned. They knew nothing about farming, the main occupation in Medina, so the move impoverished them. But not Othman. Although he emigrated with the oth­ers, he never quite severed his ties to business associates back home, and with those associates looking after his properties and business interests, Othman continued to prosper, even in Medina. There was never any suggestion that he came by his wealth dishonestly: quite the opposite. Some people simply have the golden touch, and Othman was such a man. Nor was he a miser.

He spent lavishly for the public good; for example, he expanded the mosque in Medina for Mohammed, and when the Muslims needed water, he bought a valuable well from one of the Jewish tribes and donated it to the public.

Staggering wealth, dazzling beauty, two of the Prophets daughters for wives—what did this man lack? And yet Othman seemed haunted by the fear that he was not good enough.

Or perhaps he worried that his character was not quite at the level of the Prophet’s other close companions. He missed the battle of Badr be­cause his wife was sick. At the battle of Uhud, when a rumor spread that Mohammed had been killed, Othman was among the Muslims who aban­doned hope and left the field. Othman redeemed himself at the Battle of the Moat, but shortly after that battle, his son died, and Othman seemed to feel that God was still punishing him. To earn forgiveness, he made a practice of buying slaves and liberating one each Friday.

After Mohammed died, Othman worried that the community might fall apart, but in addition he seemed particularly afraid for his own individual soul. “How will we now be safe from the snares of the devil?” he lamented. Fear of the hereafter consumed the poor man. “Every day is doomsday,” he once said, by which he meant there is never an instant when it’s safe to stop being good, so he for one stepped up his fasting and praying, and dispensed ever more extravagant contributions, trying desperately to deserve a place in paradise that the Prophet Mohammed had assured him was already his. This haunted giant of benevolence became the third khalifa of Islam.

When Omar began his khalifate, Islam had been a new kind of social or­ganism still growing into its identity. Omar’s khalifate was filled with a sense of spiritual adventure, invention, and discovery. By the time Othman took charge, the Islamic community was a government in control of a vast territory. It was no longer enough to preach, defend, attack, and spread holy excite­ment. Muslim leaders now had to collect taxes, run courts, keep bridges and highways in repair, set salaries, define duties for various positions—all that dull administrative stuff of daily life. Managing this transition fell to Othman.

One great project Othman saw to fruition during the first half of his khalifate was the preparation of a definitive edition of the Qur’an. He set scholars to work combing out redundancies among the copies that existed, resolving discrepancies, and evaluating passages whose authenticity was subject to doubt. The final product was compiled into a book in which the verses were arranged more or less in order of length (rather than the­matically or chronologically). All other compilations, competing versions, and rejected verses were destroyed. From then on, every Qur’an would be the same, word for word, and that’s the Qur’an all Muslims have today. You can see why this had to be done if the priority was to keep the com­munity unified, but you can also see why this project might have disgrun­tled some Muslims, especially if they already had suspicions about Othman’s intentions—as some did.

Next came the job of setting the community’s finances in order. In the Prophet’s time, there were basically no state expenditures. All money that flowed into Medina was distributed more or less immediately. Abu Bakr and Omar had operated in much the same way, although Abu Bakr did set up a treasury, and Omar did build up a surplus out of which he paid stipends to soldiers, the beginnings of a standing army for Islam. Under Othman, however, the treasury swelled into a regular organ of govern­ment, which financed an ever-proliferating array of state expenses.

This third khalifa dramatically increased the flow of tax revenues from his far-flung provinces. When Amr ibn al-A’as, the governor of Egypt, failed to send in enough money, Othman dismissed him and appointed his own foster brother Abdullah to the post. Abdullah succeeded in getting a great deal more money out of the province—in fact, doubling the revenue from Egypt—proving that Othman had made a wise business decision, but Amr ibn al-A’as grumbled that his successor was getting more milk out of the she-camel only by starving the camel’s young.

Othman upheld Omar’s prohibitions against confiscating land in con­quered territories, but he lifted Omar’s restrictions on Muslims buying land there, for Othman believed in economic freedom. In fact, he let eminent Muslims borrow money out of the public treasury to finance such pur­chases. Soon, Muslim elites, including most of the Prophet Mohammed’s companions, were amassing fortunes and acquiring immense estates throughout the new Islamic empire. Othman’s “economic reforms” tended to profit his own clan, the Umayyads, above all because they were best sit­uated to take out loans from the treasury. This khalifa also appointed his relatives and “favorites” to many powerful political posts throughout the empire, simply because they were the people he knew best and trusted most. As a result, the Umayyads ended up acquiring disproportionate clout, both economically and politically.

The third khalifa continued to practice an austere lifestyle but de­manded no such austerity from his officials. Being a rich man, he took no salary, but he did dole out grants to his favorites and spent lavishly on pub­lic works. His administration built over five thousand new mosques across the empire. Othman promoted a building boom that turned Medina into a city of broad streets and imposing buildings paved with fine tile, includ­ing a palatial mansion for Othman himself, a headquarters suitable to the dignity of his powerful office (within this palace Othman lived on bread, water, and prayer).

Throughout the empire, Othman demonstrated his business genius by ordering improvements beneficial to commerce. Canals were dug, highways built, irrigation systems improved. Ports got new facilities. Proliferating cities got new wells and water systems, and new bazaars regulated by government- appointed market officers. The Muslim enterprise didn’t have quite the same flavor as it had in Omar’s day, but who could argue with prosperity?

On questions of personal morality such as drinking and sex, Othman’s asceticism put him beyond criticism.

One of Othman’s great favorites was his cousin Mu’awiya. Omar had appointed Mu’awiya governor of Damascus and its surroundings. Othman kept adding bits to his cousin’s territory, until Mu’awiya governed every­thing from the headwaters of the Euphrates River down the Mediterranean coast to Egypt.

Mu’awiya was the son of Abu Sufyan, the Meccan tribal aristocrat who led the attack on Islam in two of those three iconic battles between Mecca and Medina. Mu’awiya’s mother, Hind, followed her husband to those bat­tles, and at Uhud, after the Muslims fled, she reputedly ate the liver of Mohammed’s fallen uncle Hamzah in an act of triumphalist gloating. The Prophet, however, was never one to hold a grudge: as soon as someone embraced Islam, he or she became part of the family, and so it was with the Umayyads. The Prophet thought Mu’awiya especially competent and kept him close after his conversion.

No doubt Omar appointed Mu awiya governor of Damascus because he got things done, but perhaps Omar should have paused to consider why Mohammed had kept the man so close: once ensconced in Damascus, Mu’awiya put his brilliance to work assembling a standing army loyal to himself. This would have grim consequences after Othman’s untimely death.

Toward the end of Othmans twelve-year reign, grumbling began to sound throughout the empire. In Egypt, his foster brother was squeezing people so hard for money that riots broke out. Egyptian notables wrote to the khalifa, begging him to recall the governor. Hearing nothing back, they sent a delegation to petition him in person. As it happened, at this very time, groups of disgruntled citizens were converging on the city from the north as well. Apparently, Othman had displeased a lot of people.

All these petitioners made Othman nervous. He begged Ali to go out and talk to the malcontents on his behalf, placate them and persuade them to go home, but Ali refused, perhaps because he himself disapproved of the third khalifas policies and practices. He advised Othman to secure himself by addressing the peoples legitimate complaints. Finally, Othman gave in and met with the Egyptian delegation. He promised to replace his foster brother and told the Egyptians to go home and let the governor know a new man would soon be coming to replace him.

The Egyptians started back, feeling pretty good, but along the way they caught up with a slave of Othmans. Something about the man aroused their suspicions. They searched him and found a letter on his person, seemingly signed by the khalifa and addressed to the governor of Egypt, which told Governor Abdullah to arrest the delegation of malcontents as soon as they showed up at his court and to execute them as soon as it seemed politic!

The delegation returned to Medina in a fury. Othman came dithering out of the palace to meet them on the steps: Back so soon? What was wrong? They showed him the letter and Othman expressed shock. He swore he had never written such a thing, never heard of it until this mo­ment. In fact, his troublemaking cousin Marwan, a relative and ally of the governor of Damascus, might have penned the letter and forged the khal­ifa’s signature to it. Poor Othman, nearly eighty at this time, might well have been easy to manipulate.

In any case, the peaceful petitioners turned into an angry mob. First, they demanded that the khalifa deliver Mu’awiya’s brother to them. The khalifa refused. Then they demanded that Othman step down and let some better man take over. Othman indignantly refused this too. His obligation was to God, he said, and quitting his office at the behest of a mob would be an affront to God! He then retired to his private chambers, where he lit a little lamp and settled in a corner to do what he always did in times of turmoil and doubt: humbly read his Qur’an.

Outside his palace, the rioters worked themselves into a frenzy, broke down palace doors, and burst in with a roar. They found the khalifa in his study, and there in the flickering twilight of the old man’s lamp, in year 34 of the Muslim era, they beat their own leader to death. Suddenly, the suc­cession conundrum had turned into a horrifying crisis that threatened the very soul of Islam.

For four days the mob rampaged through the city. The citizens of Med­ina cowered in their houses, waiting for the violence to die down. Even when the uproar faded, the leaders of the mob said they would not quit town until a new khalifa was appointed, someone they could trust. Now, at last, all thoughts turned to the one candidate who had been passed over time after time, the man some had always called the Prophet’s only legiti­mate successor: Mohammed’s son-in-law Ali.

At first, Ali refused the honor; but every other prominent member of the Muslim community turned down the khalifate as well, and the rebels threatened to launch a reign of terror unless Medina chose someone they could live with and chose him fast, so leading Muslims crowded into the mosque and begged Ali to take charge.

What a strange moment this must have been for Ali. For twenty-five agonizing years he must have felt like he was watching the ship drift off course. Three times, the Umma had rejected his leadership when he still would have had the power to make things right. Each time, he had been a good sport, because what else could he do? Trying to seize the helm would have split the community. He had to choose between causing trouble or watching the enterprise falter; killing it or letting it die. Only now, when things had gone so off kilter that Muslims had murdered their khalifa, now when his successor would face an impossible challenge, now the Umma was saying, “Take the reins, Ali.”

THE FOURTH KHALIFA (36-40 AH, 656-661 CE)

Ali finally accepted the khalifate, but in his first oration to the people, he told them he had accepted this office under duress. He lamented the un­raveling of the Umma in the single generation since the Prophet’s death. It would take a stern hand to put things back in order, Ali said, and he gave the Umma fair warning: from him, what they could expect was stern.

One key segment of the community didn’t hear him. The members of the Umayyad clan, Othman’s close relatives, had fled to Damascus, where their kinsman Mu’awiya had quietly been assembling his military force. Mu awiya began touring his province with a professional storyteller. At each stop, the storyteller aroused the crowd with a dramatic account of the murder in Med­ina. At the climactic moment, Mu’awiya himself would burst onstage, waving a bloody shirt, the very shirt in which (he claimed) the khalifa had been mur­dered. It was masterful political theater. Mu’awiya would then call upon the new khalifa to arrest and punish Othman’s murderers or step down.

But how could Ali arrest the assassins? No one knew exactly who in that mob had dealt the actual blows. In any real sense, the whole mob was “the assassin.” To meet Mu’awiya’s demands, Ali would have had to arrest and punish the whole mob. This would never have been practical, but in the circumstances, it was utterly impossible: the mob still ruled the streets of Medina. Ali simply did not have the power to do as Mu’awiya de­manded, and the governor knew it.

Besides, the rioters who murdered Othman had started out as victims of injustice and oppression. They had come to Medina with legitimate grievances, but in killing the khalifa, they had handed the higher moral ground to their oppressors. Now, Ali was forced to choose between align­ing himself with the oppressors or the murderers—a heartbreaking choice!

He decided he would start by attacking the corruption rotting the em­pire. Win or lose, it was his only hope: by reversing Othman’s policies and restoring rectitude, he might still pull the community back onto the Path, thereby acquiring the credibility and stature he needed to do all the other things that needed doing.

But a whole new class of nouveau riche had sprung out of the compost of the Muslim conquests, and this elite was not interested in All’s idea of purity or his reforms. To them, Ali looked like a revolutionary threat, and Mu’awiya looked like the guardian of their wealth and safety, the new status quo.

Ali fired all the governors Othman had appointed and sent out new men to replace them, but none of the fired governors agreed to step down, except the one in Yemen, and he fled with all the money in the treasury, leaving a bankrupt province for All’s appointee to take over.

Meanwhile, trouble cropped up in another quarter. The Prophet’s youngest wife Ayesha happened to be in Mecca when Othman was assas­sinated. When Mu’awiya began his ruckus, Ayesha threw in with him, in part because there had always been bad blood between her and Ali. She an­nounced her alignment with a fiery speech in Mecca. “O ye people! Rebels... have murdered the innocent Othman.... They violated the sanctity of the city of the Holy Prophet in the sacred month of hajj. They plundered and looted the citizens of Medina. By God, a single finger of Othman was more precious than the lives of all the assassins. The mischief has not been crushed, and the murderers of Othman have not been brought to book.... Seek satisfaction on these murderers. Only vengeance for the blood of Othman can vindicate the honor of Islam.”

Capitalizing on the passion she aroused, she assembled an army, con­vened a war council, and mapped out a campaign. The ousted governor of Yemen pledged all his stolen treasure to her cause. Flush with funds, Ayesha led her troops north and stormed Basra, a key city in southern Iraq. She dispatched All’s loyalists quickly and took over.

At this point, someone started a whispering campaign charging Ali himself with complicity in the assassination of Othman. Poor honest Ali admitted that he bore some responsibility for the crime because when Othman was pleading for protection, Ali had withheld his sword arm. The thought that he might have saved Othman tormented the fourth khalifa of Islam, and his honesty only fueled the rumors that undermined him.

Ali tried to raise an army to fight Ayesha, preaching that this was a jihad and that people should rally to defend Islam as they had in days of yore. But Muslims were confused, because Ayesha was calling for jihad too, against Ali. Both sides claimed to be fighting for truth, justice, and the Islamic way, yet each was calling on Muslims to fight other Muslims. This wasn’t what they called jihad back in the good old days!

Curiously, Ayesha’s cohorts included two men, Talha and Zubayd, companions of the Prophet, who may have been part of the mob that at­tacked Othman’s palace that day. If not themselves assassins, they were cer­tainly associated with the assassins—yet here they were, leading members of a force vowing to avenge the assassination of Othman by toppling Ali!

Ali marched out of Medina with the few troops he could muster, but various tribal warriors joined him on his way north, and his army grew to imposing size. When he reached Basra, he sent a trusted comrade into the city to negotiate with Ayesha. Remarkably, the spokesmans arguments got through to the fierce young woman. First, she admitted that she didn’t re­ally think Ali had anything to do with Othman’s murder. What she blamed him for was failing to arrest the criminals responsible. Then, she agreed that the criminals were part of a mob, and that the mob, which was still in charge, drew its strength from chaos. Next, she admitted that by fighting Ali, she was promoting chaos and so, yes, in a sense she herself was helping the assassins escape justice. By the end of the day, she had agreed to lay down her weapons, disband her army, and join forces with Ali. She would meet with him in the morning to discuss terms.

The interaction reflected credit on both leaders: on Ali for seeking ne­gotiation before battle, on Ayesha for the intellectual honesty that enabled her, even in the heat of anger, even while surrounded by the smell of war and the threat of death, to listen to All’s case and admit the validity of points that eroded her position—just because they were true. In this, there was heroism.

The envoy returned to All’s camp to give him the good news, and that night celebration rang out on both sides. There would be peace! There was just one problem that no one took into account: both armies contained members of the very mob that had killed Othman and would be brought to book if Ali and Ayesha made common cause. These men obviously could not afford to give peace a chance.

Early the next morning, a gang of them crept out of All’s camp and launched a surprise attack on Ayesha’s sleeping forces. By the time Ali woke up, Ayesha’s men were striking back. Both Ali and Ayesha thought the other had double-crossed them, and thus began the Battle of the Camel, so-called because Ayesha rode a camel right into the battlefield and directed her troops from its back; the battle ended only when her camel was cut down and she was captured. Ali won the day, but what a bitter vic­tory! It’s difficult to imagine how the two of them must have felt, meeting after the carnage ended, the Prophet’s adored wife and the Prophet’s beloved son-in-law, face to face on a blood-soaked field littered with ten thousand Muslim dead, many of them close companions of the Messenger of God.

As they pieced together how people and events had betrayed them both, these two survivors made some sort of peace with one another. Per­haps they found their way to a friendship, even. Perhaps, in some strange way, the tragedy that engulfed them both, and the horrors that neither could have wanted, drew them together. In any case, they never fought again. After the Battle of the Camel, Ayesha retired to Medina, and spent the rest of her life recording the sayings of the Prophet and writing com­mentaries on them. She ended her days as one of the most respected early scholars of Islam.

Ali never went back to Medina. He made the city of Kufa, in modern- day Iraq, his seat of government to reward the people of that city for sup­porting him, and he tried to piece together the remains of his khalifate, but the heartbreaking war with Ayesha only marked the beginning of his troubles. The master troublemaker still loomed in the wings, sharpening his scimitar and drilling his troops. Mu’awiya was getting ready for his final push.

By this time, Mu’awiya had formally refused allegiance to Ali and de­clared that the khalifate belonged to him. Both sides led armies into the field. In the year 36 AH, (657 CE), Ali confronted Mu’awiya at the battle of Siffin. It started when Mu’awiya’s army tried to block Ali’s access to water. A brief battle burst out, but Ali’s men gained the river bank, and the fighting subsided into a stalemate that lasted for months, interrupted only by sporadic skirmishes. Both sides were holding back, looking for a way to win without brutality, because each side stood to lose religious authority by spilling Muslim blood.

The standoff ended with a four-day outburst of violence in which some sources reckon that sixty-five thousand people died. The slaughter led to calls that both armies pull back and let the two leaders settle the dispute with hand-to-hand combat. Ali, who was fifty-eight years old but still a fearsome physical specimen, eagerly accepted the challenge. Mu’awiya, who was about the same age as Ali, but dissipated and fat, said no.

Alis troops renewed the attack, this time felling Mu’awiya’s soldiers like weeds, but Mu’awiya devised a stratagem to give them pause: he had his soldiers attach pages of the Qur’an to their lance tips and march behind recitation experts who chanted Qur’anic verses and exhorted Ali to nego­tiate in the name of peace among Muslims. All’s troops quailed at the prospect of defiling the Qur’an and Ali agreed to negotiations.

He probably didn’t think of himself as giving into anything, since he had been calling for negotiation from the start; but no doubt he was think­ing of talks that would end with Mu’awiya acknowledging his right to rule in exchange for some concession such as a guarantee to let him stay on as governor of Syria. Instead, when the representatives of the two leaders met, they agreed that the two men were equals, and that each should remain in charge of his own territories, Mu’awiya ruling Syria and Egypt, Ali ruling everything else.

This wasn’t what Ali had been looking for, and it certainly infuriated his partisans, his shii, to use the Arabic word—a word that became the name of the sect that grew out of this rift. But Ali could not now reject the results without seeming to show bad faith. Mu’awiya had snookered him!

Besides, Ali was operating with a handicap. For twenty-six years All’s shi’i had been declaring that he possessed God-given powers of leadership, powers that could save the Muslim community from its ills. Originally, this claim referred to his blood relationship with the Prophet, but over the decades, as the first three khalifas were shaping a new social order, Ali had been delivering mystical sermons that held forth rapturously on the nature of Allah’s omnipotence, immensity, oneness, and beyondness. In short, while the other khalifas had made themselves the guardians of Mo­hammed’s communitarian vision, Ali had established himself as the keeper of the inner flame. So his partisans’ proposition came to be that unlike all other claimants to the khalifate, Ali had some mystical personal access to Allah’s guidance. His whole case rested on this image.

Now he was... negotiating With Mu’awiya, the utter embodiment of anti-Muslim materialism? What kind of God-gifted avatar of Allah-guided truth was he?

Compromising with the enemy disappointed a faction of Alis most committed followers, and these younger, more radical of his partisans split away. They came to be known as Kharijites, “ones who departed.” This splinter group reformulated the ideals of All’s followers into a revolution­ary new doctrine: blood and genealogy meant nothing, they said. Even a slave had the right to lead the community. The only qualification was character. No one was born to leadership, and mere election could not transform someone into the khalifa. Whoever exhibited the greatest au­thentic devotion to Muslim values simply was the khalifa, no election needed. He was, however, accountable to the people. If he ever fell a hair short of complete moral excellence, he forfeited his right to high office and someone else became khalifa. Through what actual machinery all this de­motion and promotion was to occur, the Kharijites didn’t say. Not their problem. They only knew that Ali had squandered his entitlement and needed to step down; and since he didn’t step down, one young Kharijite took matters into his own hands. In the year 40 AH, this hothead assassi­nated Ali.

All’s partisans immediately looked to his son Hassan as his successor, but Mu’awiya swept this challenge aside by offering Hassan a sum of money to renounce all claim to the khalifate. Mohammed’s older grand­son, heartbroken and war-weary at this point, stepped aside. He had no stomach for continuing the fight, and under the circumstances now pre­vailing, claiming the khalifate could only constitute a power grab, and what good was that? And so the Umayyad dynasty began.

All’s death ended the first era of Islamic history. Muslim historians came to call the first four post-Mohammed leaders the Rightly Guided Khalifas. Life in their time was certainly not undiluted sweetness and won­der, but in calling them the Rightly Guided Ones, I don’t think responsi­ble Muslim historians mean to suggest such perfection. Rather, they’re saying that the evolution of the community from the time of the Hijra to the assassination of Ali was a religious drama. Yes there was bloodshed and heartache, but the turmoil didn’t stem from petty people vying for power, money, or ego gratification. The four khalifas and Mohammed’s close companions who formed the core of the Umma in this period were hon­estly striving to make the revelations work. Each of them had a handle on some essential aspect of the project, but no one of them was big enough to grasp the whole of it, as Mohammed had done. The Prophet s immediate successors were like the six blind men trying to discern whether the ele­phant was more like a rope, a wall, a pillar, or what. All the struggles over the khalifate in the period of the Rightly Guided Ones had theological meaning because the issues they struggled with were essentially theologi­cal. After Ali’s death, the khalifate was just an empire.