After the Prophet: The Epic Story of the Shia-Sunni Split in Islam (13 page)

“Would to God that you and your cousin who entrusts his affairs to you each had a millstone around his feet,” she retorted, “because then I would cast both of you into the depths of the sea.” And with that, she left for Mecca.

The end began with a rumor. Word spread among the rebels that military reinforcements for the besieged Caliph were on the way from his governor in Syria. The reinforcements never arrived, and nobody
knew whether the Syrian governor had ever received such a request, or if he had received it and, for reasons of his own, ignored it. Either way, it made no difference; the very idea of Syrian reinforcements brought things to a head. Rumor did its work, as it always does.

The first fatality was one of the most venerable of Muhammad’s early companions. He had limped up to the front of the siege line and there, balancing on crutches, called on Othman to come out onto his balcony and announce his abdication. One of Marwan’s aides came out instead. He hurled a large stone at the white-haired elder, hit him in the head, and killed him on the spot. “I, by God, ignited the fighting between the people,” he boasted later. Nobody would ever know if he acted on his own initiative or at Marwan’s orders.

They were to call it the Day of the Palace, though the melee lasted barely more than an hour. The defenders were vastly outnumbered, and once both Marwan and Ali’s son Hasan had been injured, the others fled. A small group of rebels led by Muhammad Abu Bakr made their way upstairs and into the Caliph’s private chambers. There they found just two people: Othman and the Syrian-born Naila, his favorite wife.

The elderly Caliph, undefended, was seated on the floor, reading a parchment manuscript of the Quran—the authorized version he had devoted years to compiling. Even as the group closed in on him, he kept calmly reading, as though the Holy Book could protect him from mere mortals. Perhaps this was what so infuriated the young Abu Bakr: Othman’s assumption of invulnerability even as he was plainly so vulnerable. Or perhaps violence had been building so long that by now it was simply inevitable.

Abu Bakr was the first to strike, the son of the first Caliph leading the assassins of the third. His dagger slashed across the old man’s forehead, and that first blood was the sign that released the others. As Othman fell back, they piled in on him, knives striking again and again. Blood splashed onto the walls, onto the carpet, even onto the open pages
of the Quran—an indelible image of defilement that still haunts the Muslim faithful, both Sunni and Shia. Yet still they attacked, even after there was no breath left in Othman’s body.

Naila flung herself over her dead husband. She begged the assassins not to desecrate his corpse, only to have her blood mixed with his as yet another knife slashed down and cut off part of her right hand. Her dreadful wail of pain and outrage bounced off the blood-spattered walls to pierce the consciences of the attackers; only then did they stop.

Muhammad Abu Bakr had struck the first blow but not the fatal one. There would never be any definitive answer as to exactly whose hand did that. But the question that was to haunt Islam was not who held the knife but who guided it. Who was behind it? Or rather, who was not? One Umayyad later said that Othman was killed by “a sword drawn by Aisha, sharpened by Talha, and poisoned by Ali.” Others would say that it was Marwan who both drew the sword and poisoned it. Yet others that it had all been engineered from afar by Muawiya, the powerful governor of Syria, whose rumored reinforcements never arrived.

All that can be said for certain is that the third Caliph was assassinated by persons both known and unknown, with both the best intentions and the worst.

The torn and blood-stained shirt Othman had been wearing when he was killed was to have a long life. After the assassination, someone—nobody is sure exactly who—had the foresight to take it, together with Naila’s severed fingers, and wrap the remains carefully for a journey. The next morning, as all of Medina buzzed with the news that the rebels had acclaimed Ali as the new Caliph, a small, somber caravan set out on the seven-hundred-mile ride to Damascus, and in one of the saddlebags, they carried with them that shirt and those fingers.

Was it the Syrian-born Naila who had sent them? Or Marwan? Or
Umm Habiba, the only Umayyad among Muhammad’s widows and the sister of the Syrian governor, Muawiya? Whichever it was, the purpose was clear: the grisly relics would serve as a powerful call for revenge. When they arrived, Muawiya ordered them displayed in the main mosque in Damascus, and there they would remain for a full year.

“The shirt was placed each day on the pulpit,” said a Syrian historian. “Sometimes it was draped over it, sometimes it covered it, and Naila’s fingers were attached to its cuffs—two fingers with the knuckles and part of the palm, two cut off at the base, and half a thumb. The people kept coming and crying at the sight, and the Syrian soldiers swore an oath that they would not have relations with women or sleep on beds until they had killed the killers of Othman and anyone who might try to stop them.”

In Medina, Othman was buried quickly and quietly—not by Muhammad’s side in Aisha’s former chamber, as his predecessors had been, but in the main cemetery. If there was any mourning, it was done privately. In public, the whole of Medina was jubilant. Led by the rebels, they turned to Ali as their new leader. They would have nobody else. The man who so many insisted should always have been the heir to Muhammad had finally come into his inheritance, his ascendance surely all the sweeter for the length of the wait.

On June 16 in that year 656, they crowded into the mosque and spilled out into the courtyard to pledge allegiance to him. The years of dust and thorns seemed finally over—not just for him but for them all.

How were they to know that dust and thorns are not shaken off so easily? They had no idea that Ali would rule for only five years. They rejoiced, applauding the new Commander of the Faithful when he refused to take the title of Caliph. That title had been honored by Abu Bakr and Omar, Ali said, but it had since been corrupted beyond repair by the Umayyads. Instead, he would be known as the Imam—literally, he who stands in front. On the one hand, it was a modest title, given to whoever
leads the daily prayers. On the other, this was Imam with a definite capital
I,
the spiritual and political leader of all Muslims. And between Caliph and Imam, a world of politics and theology would intervene.

Ali was destined to be the only man aside from Muhammad himself whom both Sunnis and Shia would acknowledge as a rightful leader of Islam. But while Sunnis would eventually recognize and respect him as the fourth Caliph—the fourth and last of the
rashidun,
the “rightly guided ones”—the Shia would never recognize the caliphate at all, not even the first three Caliphs. To them, Ali was and always has been the first rightful successor to Muhammad, designated by him as the true spiritual leader who would pass on his knowledge and insight to his sons, so that they in turn could pass it on to their own sons. Ali, that is, was the first of the twelve Imams who would join Muhammad and his daughter Fatima as the true
Ahl al-Bayt.

But on that June day, as all Medina lined up to pledge allegiance to Ali, nobody yet thought in terms of Sunni versus Shia. As they pressed their forearms against his and swore to God that his friend was their friend, his enemy their enemy, they thought that divisiveness was at an end. Ali was the one who would reunite Islam. There would be no more greed, no more self-aggrandizement, no more corruption. The stranglehold of the Umayyads had been broken, and a new era dawned. Under Ali, they would return to the true path of the Prophet.

Yet even as they celebrated, as the drums were beaten and the children danced and the women’s ululations lifted joy into the air, that bloody shirt and those severed fingers were on their way to the pulpit in Damascus. And Aisha was in Mecca, planning her own course of action.

T
HE MOMENT SHE HEARD THE DOGS
, A
ISHA KNEW IT FOR AN
omen. The sound itself was familiar enough; howls often rang through the desert night as wolves and hyenas and jackals prowled in the dark. It was where they were howling that unnerved her so: the very place Muhammad had warned her of.

As her army filed into the small oasis midway between Mecca and the distant lowlands of Iraq, it had seemed a welcome stop for the night, but when the howling began, she’d asked: “What is this place?” And when she’d heard the answer—“the waters of Hawab”—a terrible fear possessed her.

“We belong to God and to Him we shall return,” she screamed—the Islamic formula recited in the face of death. People crowded around her in alarm. “Don’t you see?” she pleaded. “I am the one they are howling at. I heard the Prophet say darkly to his wives, ‘I wish I knew which one of you the dogs of Hawab would howl at.’ I am the one! Take me back! Take me back!”

What had she done? What had she set in motion? For the first time
in months, doubt crept into her mind, and once there, it settled in, paralyzing her.

She had still been in Mecca when the news arrived of Othman’s assassination—of her own half brother’s role in it and, worse still, Medina’s acclamation of Ali. Never mind that she had taunted Othman as “that dotard,” or that she had brandished Muhammad’s sandal at him and openly accused him of betraying the
sunna.
Never mind that her own letters had helped fuel the rebellion against him or even that her most earnest wish had been to toss him into the sea with a millstone around his feet. Whatever she had intended, it was not this. Not assassination, and certainly not Ali as the new Caliph.

A mix of shock and fury carried her straight to the center of the great mosque—to the sanctuary itself, the Kaaba—and there she stood by the sacred black stone set into its corner and raised her voice loud and clear for all to hear, a firebrand speaking in the name of justice.

“People of Mecca,” she proclaimed. “The mob of men, the riffraff from the garrison cities, together with boorish Beduin and foreign slaves, have conspired together. They have spilled forbidden blood and violated the sanctity of the sacred city of Medina. This is a heinous crime! A forbidden thing!” And fired up by the Meccans’ roars of approval, she went further still. “By God,” she declared, “a single fingertip of Othman’s is better than a whole world full of such people. Seek revenge for the blood of Othman, and you will strengthen Islam!”

In response, a fervent rallying cry surged up from the crowd: “Revenge for Othman!” If the Mother of the Faithful could call for her own half brother to be put to death for his crime, by God they would support her! If she could place justice above kinship, righteousness above blood ties, by God so could they! In the name of Muhammad, in the name of Islam, they would take revenge for this son of Mecca struck down by the rebels of Medina.

Aisha never paused to question her motives. Carried along on the crest of her own rhetoric, she didn’t ask if it was guilt that impelled her—guilt at having left Medina and abandoned Othman to his fate—or outrage that of all people, it was Ali, the man she most loathed, who had been acclaimed as the fourth Caliph. These questions would rise only by the muddy pool of Hawab, and by then it would be too late to turn back. For the moment, the crowd’s acclaim was a heady thing, an intoxicating rush that made her feel all the more righteous.

In death, Othman had achieved the grandeur and nobility that so many had accused him of lacking in life. His murder lay at Ali’s door, the Meccans said. Ali knew who was responsible—everyone knew—yet word was that he refused to hand over the culprits for punishment. He was sheltering assassins, and that made him as guilty as the assassins themselves. It might as well have been his hand that wielded the knife, said some, and none as pointedly as the ever-wily Marwan, who had fled Medina for a hero’s welcome in Mecca as he showed off his flesh wound from the battle for Othman’s palace. “If you, Ali, did not strike the murdered man openly,” he declared, “you surely struck him in secret.”

The poets, quick as ever to seize the spirit of the moment, took up the call. “Your kinsmen, Ali, killed Othman with no
halal
claim to his blood,” said one—no right under Islamic law. “That makes you, their leader, Ali, the one to pay,” he continued, “and pay you surely will.”

By the time Ali’s letter demanding Mecca’s allegiance arrived and was read out loud in the mosque, feeling against him ran so high that the demand could barely be heard for the catcalls. The whole crowd burst into frenzied roars of approval as one young Umayyad seized the letter, stuffed it in his mouth, chewed it to a pulp, and spat it out in disgust.

Aisha’s vendetta was now that of all Mecca, but passion would convert into action only when her brothers-in-law Talha and Zubayr fled Medina to join her. Both had been among the six who had sat in closed caucus after Omar’s death, and both had voted against Ali. Both, like Ali, had become vocal critics of Othman’s rule, but that did not
mean they wanted Ali to take his place. Talha and Zubayr were ambitious men; each wanted the caliphate for himself, and that was what united them.

So what if they had publicly sworn allegiance to Ali just a few weeks before fleeing to Mecca? They now swore that they had been forced into it by the rebels. They had done it at swordpoint, they claimed. Had pledged allegiance “with a withered hand”—no firm grasp of palm against palm and forearm against forearm, but a halfhearted clasp that belied the words of the oath even as it was proclaimed. It had been clear for all to see. “No good will come of this,” people had muttered, and when it was done, Talha had been heard to say: “All we’ll get from this is a dog poking its nose in the ground, sniffing dung.”

But neither Talha nor Zubayr had the backing to claim the caliphate on his own. Both needed the support of their sister-in-law, especially now that she had the whole of Mecca behind her. With her help, they aimed to force Ali to cede the caliphate. Which of them would then claim it was an open question, best left for later; in the meantime, they would work in concert. With Aisha’s presence and influence as the leading Mother of the Faithful, they would muster an army against Ali and confront him—not in Medina, where Ali was too powerful, but eight hundred miles away, in Iraq, where Zubayr had supporters in the southern garrison city of Basra. With Aisha in the lead, they could not fail. “You will rouse the Basrans to action, just as you have the Meccans,” they told her.