After the Prophet: The Epic Story of the Shia-Sunni Split in Islam (17 page)

“If there be but one hair binding someone to me, I do not let it break,” he once said. “If he pulls, I loosen; if he loosens, I pull.” As for any sign of dissent: “I do not apply my sword where my whip is enough, nor my whip where my tongue is enough.”

His displeasure, when it was roused, was not a dictatorial wrath,
but something far more subtle and, because of that, far more chilling. As one of his senior generals put it, “Whenever I saw him lean back, cross his legs, blink, and command someone ‘Speak!’ I had pity on that man.” Yet Muawiya accepted with equanimity the one thing that might have displeased him most, and that was his nickname, Son of the Liver Eater. He certainly recognized the taunt in it, for it was an insult for any man to be known by his mother’s name instead of his father’s, as though he had been born out of wedlock. But he purposely let it ride. “I do not come between people and their tongues,” he said, “so long as they do not come between us and our rule.” After all, why ban the nickname? The famed image of Hind cramming Hamza’s liver into her mouth worked to his advantage. Any son of such a mother could inspire not just fear but respect, and Muawiya commanded both. Except from Ali.

From the moment he had been acclaimed Caliph, Ali was intent on a clear and radical break with Othman’s regime. To that end, he’d ordered Othman’s provincial governors to return to Medina, and they all had, with the sole exception of Muawiya. The only response from Da mascus had been an echoing silence. Muawiya had no intention of being deposed by Ali. In fact quite the reverse.

Ali’s aides warned that Muawiya would not fall into line unless he was reaffirmed as governor. Rather than threaten him, they said, Ali should play politics. Leave Muawiya in place and sweet-talk him with promises, they urged, and they would take matters from there. “If you persuade him to give you allegiance, I will undertake to topple him,” one of his top generals had promised. “I swear I will take him to the desert after a watering, and leave him staring at the backside of things whose front side he has no idea of. Then you will incur neither loss nor guilt.”

Ali would have none of it. “I have no doubt that what you advise is best for this life,” he retorted. “But I will have nothing to do with such
underhanded schemes, neither yours nor Muawiya’s. I do not compromise my faith by cheating, nor do I give contemptible men any say in my command. I will never confirm Muawiya as governor of Syria, not even for two days.”

Yet by the time the Battle of the Camel was won, four months had passed; Muawiya was still governor of Syria, and he still had not pledged allegiance. By the time he finally replied to Ali’s demands for obedience, he was openly hostile. “Ali, be firm and steady as a fortress,” he wrote, “or you will find a devouring war from me, setting wood and land ablaze. Othman’s murder was a hideous act, turning the hair white, and none can settle it but I.”

Ali’s response, as Muawiya had intended, was fury. “By God, if Muawiya does not pledge allegiance, I will give him nothing but the sword!” he swore, even as his aides counseled caution.

“You are a courageous man,” said one, “but you are not a warmonger.”

“Do you want me to be like a hyena cornered in his lair, terrified at the sound of every loose pebble?” Ali retorted. “How then can I rule? This is no situation for me to be in. By God, I tell you, nothing but the sword!”

Yet his aide had read him well. Ali was the best kind of warrior, one who hated war. Especially civil war. He had fought the Battle of the Camel, proving his determination no matter how high the cost, but he had not chosen that battle and had done all he could to avoid it. And now, despite his anger, he would do all he could to avoid further bloodshed, trusting that Muawiya shared his horror of civil war.

In time some would say that this was naive on Ali’s part, even foolish. Others would say that he was misled by his own sense of honor, and that his hesitation in taking military action against Muawiya was that of an upright man confronted with a man who was anything but. But then hindsight is always wise. All that can be said for certain is that in the standoff between Ali and Muawiya, right may have been on one side,
but political adroitness was on the other. Only faith could imagine that the former would prevail.

Hoping to pressure Muawiya into obedience, Ali led his battle-tested army north out of Basra to Kufa, a hundred and fifty miles closer to Damascus, and prepared for a long stay. The message was clear: if Muawiya wanted a confrontation, the whole of Iraq would be against him.

The former garrison town of Kufa was now a thriving city on the banks of the Euphrates, with villas built by Othman’s administrators lining the river. But Ali refused to take up residence in the former governor’s mansion. Qasr el-Khabal, he called it, the Castle of Corruption. Instead, he made his headquarters in a modest mud-brick house alongside the mosque. There would be no more green-marbled palaces, no more favoritism of cronies and kin, no more profiteering at public expense, he declared. He would restore the rule of righteousness, and the Kufans loved him for it.

With the Caliph in residence, Kufa became the effective capital of the Muslim empire. Its inhabitants were no longer “provincial rabble” and “boorish Beduin.” They were at the heart of Islam, and Ali was their champion. The burgeoning city had drawn in freed slaves, peasants, traders, and artisans, attracted to Kufa as people still are today to rapidly expanding cities: by the prospect of opportunity, real or illusory. Persians and Afghans as well as Iraqis and Kurds, most of them were converts to Islam, but until now they had been considered second-class Muslims. Under Ali, they were welcomed as equals. The Arabism of Omar and the Umayyadism of Othman were things of the past. Ali, the closest of all men to the Prophet, would lead a return to the ideal of a more perfect union of all believers.

Ali never intended the move to Kufa to be a permanent one. His plan was to return to Medina as soon as he had settled the issue with
Muawiya and Syria, but he never would return. From the moment he made the decision in favor of Kufa, Muslim power began to leave Arabia behind, and this was entirely Muawiya’s doing. By refusing to recognize Ali as Caliph, he had forced the issue. It was his defiance that had brought Ali to Kufa and that would lead to Iraq’s becoming the cradle of Shia Islam.

Yet it was perhaps inevitable that sooner or later the center of Islamic power would move out of Arabia, and nowhere more naturally than to Iraq. The fertile lowlands between the Tigris and the Euphrates, together with the rich grazing of the Jazeera steppes to the north, had traditionally been the true heartland of the Middle East. The great cities of ancient renown—the Sumerian city of Ur, a hundred miles downriver from Kufa; the Assyrian capital of Nineveh, near Mosul in the north; Babylon, some forty miles north of Kufa; the Persian jewel of Ctesiphon, close to modern Baghdad—all had been in Iraq. Now this land was again the geographical and agricultural center of a vast region, its control pivotal, as both Ali and Muawiya were highly aware, to control of the whole empire.

To the Umayyad aristocrats of Mecca, however, there could be no worse fate. The power they had wielded under Othman would be utterly lost, while these Iraqi newcomers to Islam would be empowered. For the center of Islam to move from where it belonged, in Arabia? It was an insult, a clear reward to the “provincial riffraff” that so ardently supported Ali. Were Mecca and Medina to be sidelined? To become mere places of pilgrimage, hundreds of miles from the center of power? Were they to be relegated to the status of onlookers in the faith to which they had given birth?

The Meccans’ concerns were well founded. Their descendants were to be the Islamic rulers of the future, but they would never live in Arabia. As the centuries passed, Muslim power would center in Iraq, in Syria, in Persia, in Egypt, in India, in Spain, in Turkey, anywhere but
Arabia, which became increasingly cut off, saved from reverting back to its pre-Islamic isolation only by the pull of the annual
hajj
pilgrimage. Arabia would not exert political power again for more than a thousand years, until the fundamentalist Wahhabi sect emerged from the central highlands in the eighteenth century to carry out violent raids against Shia shrines in Iraq and even against the holy places of Mecca and Medina. In alliance with the Saud family, the Wahhabi influence would spread worldwide in the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. Financed by oil wealth, Arabia—now Saudi Arabia—would regain the preeminence it had once held in Islam, aided and abetted by the Western thirst for oil even as it nurtured the Sunni extremists who would turn so violently against the West.

Only one thing remained for Muawiya to put into place, and that was a popular outcry for war against Ali. His position would be far stronger if he could manipulate not just assent to war, but a demand for it. He had kept the pot simmering with the display of Othman’s shirt and Naila’s severed fingers on the pulpit in Damascus, but now he needed to bring it to a boil. In a move worthy of the most skillful modern spin-meisters, he would steal Ali’s sense of honor and adapt it to fit himself instead.

He set about a carefully staged campaign to present himself as loath to take action. He would have to be forced into it by the outraged conscience of the people. If he declared war on Ali, he would then merely be obeying their will, the humble servant of his people and their demand for justice.

The first line of attack in this campaign was poetry. This is certainly a strange idea in the modern West, where poets are so easily ignored, but in the seventh-century Middle East, poets were stars. Especially satirical poets, whose work was endlessly quoted and chanted. It was written not
to be read but to be memorized and repeated, to make the rounds not of literary salons but of the streets and the alleys, the marketplace and the mosque. The more cutting the verses and the sharper the barbs, the more popular and irresistibly repeatable they were, and the more renowned their creators.

They were taken with sometimes deadly seriousness. When one popular poet opposed Muhammad’s ascent to the leadership of Medina—“Men of Medina, will you be cuckolds allowing this stranger to take over your nest?” she’d taunted—she had received a sword through her heart in the dead of night for her pains. Word spread as quickly as her poems had, and other Medinan wordsmiths who had been critical of Muhammad quickly began turning out verses in his praise.

In the twenty-first century, Westerners shocked at the scope of Muslim reaction to Danish cartoons of Muhammad seemed to conclude that there is no tradition of satire in Islam. On the contrary, there is a strongly defined tradition, and one clearly linked to warfare. In the seventh century, satire was a potent weapon, and it is still seen that way. Salman Rushdie’s novel
The Satanic Verses
created such a stir in the Islamic world because it was an extraordinarily well-informed satire. By playing on Quranic verses and on
hadith
reports of Muhammad’s life, Rushdie cut close to the bone. While satire may be thought relatively harmless in the West—at its best, cutting-edge humor, but the cut only a figurative one—in Islam the cut is far more literal. When they are the first weapon in war, words draw blood.

Satire was usually aimed at the enemy, however. It took a mind as subtle as Muawiya’s to see the potential in poems that seemingly insulted him, calling his virility into question and accusing him of weakness if he held back from open war with Ali.

Some of these were written, or at least signed, by his cousin Walid, who was also Othman’s half brother—the same man who had fueled resentment of the third Caliph with his drunken antics in the pulpit as governor
of Kufa. “Muawiya, you have wasted time like a stallion camel in lust, confined and bellowing in Damascus but unable to move,” Walid wrote. “By God, if another day passes without revenge for Othman, I would that your mother had been barren. Do not let the snakes come at you. Do not be faint with withered forearms. Present Ali with a war to turn his hair gray!”

Others urged Muawiya to “rise high in the stirrup” and “grasp the forelocks of opportunity.” But the most popular of all the verses making the rounds in Damascus was the one that clearly laid out the opposing sides. “I see Syria loathing the reign of Iraq,” it went, “and the people of Iraq loathing Syria. Each one hates his partner. They say Ali is our leader, but we say we are pleased with the son of Hind.”

Such poems could not possibly have circulated without Muawiya’s knowledge and approval. They were an essential part of his campaign to rouse the will of the people to war—a will that was eminently amenable to skillful manipulation. In fact, the will of the public can still be manipulated in much the same way in even the most proudly democratic of countries, as was clear when the Bush administration falsely presented the 2003 invasion of Iraq as a response to the Al Qaida attack of September 11, 2001.

Muawiya’s declaration of war came by letter. “Ali, to each Caliph you had to be led to the oath of allegiance as the camel is led by the stick through its nose,” he wrote, as though Ali were not himself the Caliph but at best a mere pretender. He accused Ali of inciting the rebellion against Othman “both in secret and openly.” Othman’s murderers were “your backbone, your helpers, your hands, your entourage. And the people of Syria accept nothing less than to fight you until you surrender these killers. If you do so, the Caliph will be chosen by a
shura
among all Muslims. The people of Arabia used to hold that right in their hands, but they have abandoned it, and the right now lies in the hands of the people of Syria.”

In Muawiya’s hands, that is. The governor of Syria was ready to claim the caliphate for himself.

Early that summer of 657 the two armies, Syrian and Iraqi, met at the Plain of Siffin just west of the Euphrates, in what is today northern Syria. Ali’s army had followed the river five hundred miles north from Kufa in high spirits. The farther they’d ridden, the clearer the air had become, free of the humidity that hung over the lower Euphrates. The rich alluvial valley gradually narrowed. Desert bluffs gave way to the high grazing lands of the Jazeera with snow-covered mountains to the north, and the silt-laden river that had eddied wide and brown at Kufa ran strong with the end of the snowmelt.