After the Prophet: The Epic Story of the Shia-Sunni Split in Islam (18 page)

If they prevailed, all Syria lay before them, and its crown, Damascus, with its enormous wealth. They had heard tell of the lushness of Damascus—the canals, the trees, the exotic fruit, the Green Palace with its marble forecourts and gem-encrusted thrones and bubbling fountains. The very idea of fountains! Clear, fresh water in such lavish abundance that it could be used for mere amusement? This was worth fighting for.

Thousands of armed men do not march hundreds of miles to make peace, yet once they reached Siffin, it was a matter of honor to each side that it be seen as the injured party, not the aggressor. For weeks, then, they held back, engaging only in duels and skirmishes. Even these almost ritualized encounters were strictly limited, for when the time for prayer arrived, as it then did three times a day, the warriors separated and moved half a mile apart to pray. “As night fell,” one of them remembered, “we would ride into each other’s camps and sit down and talk.”

Their commanders talked too. An ornate canvas pavilion was erected between the two armies, with the banners of both sides fluttering from each corner. Here Ali’s and Muawiya’s envoys tested each
other’s determination. But Muawiya had a clear advantage in such talks: he was fully aware of Ali’s horror of civil war, and now sought ways to make this work to his advantage. After all, there were other, less costly means than outright war to achieve his aims.

Even as he publicly demanded that Ali resign as Caliph, Muawiya instructed his envoys to quietly propose an alternative solution. He and Ali should avoid war by agreeing to divide the empire between them, he said. He would take Syria, Palestine, and Egypt and all the revenue from them, and Ali would retain control of Iraq, Persia, and Arabia. A de facto partition of the empire, that is, along the very lines that had divided the Byzantine and Persian empires before the Arab conquest, and in effect, two Caliphs instead of one.

It came as no surprise when Ali indignantly turned down the idea, but even if the proposal was bound to fail, it served as yet another means of taunting him. Ideally, it might even prompt him into attack so that Muawiya would then seem the injured party, and Ali the aggressor. Instead, Ali made one last effort to avoid all-out battle. He rode up to the pavilion at the center of the plain and called out Muawiya, his voice carrying to the front lines of either side as he challenged the Syrian governor to a one-on-one duel that would decide the whole matter and save mass bloodshed.

Muawiya’s chief of staff, Amr, the famed general who had conquered Egypt for Islam, urged him to accept the duel. “It is not fitting that you refuse such a challenge,” he said with the military man’s code of honor. “Ali has made you a fair offer.”

But Muawiya was more than content to leave honor and valor to Ali. His concern was far more practical. “It is not a fair offer,” he retorted. “Ali has killed everyone he has ever challenged to single combat.” And with this refusal, the only option left was battle.

Ali turned back and addressed his troops. “The Syrians are fighting only for this world, that they may be tyrants and kings in it,” he said. “If they are victorious, they will pervert your lives and your faith. Fight
them now, or God will take the rule of Islam away from you and never bring it back!” As his men cheered him on, he called on them to display all the ferocity of those who had been grievously wronged. “Fight the enemy,” he said, “until their foreheads are split by shafts of iron and their eyebrows are dispersed over their chins and their chests.”

This time there would be no breaks for prayer and no riding into each other’s camp to talk things over. The Battle of Siffin lasted three days, and the fighting was so intense that it continued right through the second night. The Night of Shrieking, they were to call it, for the unearthly howls of men in mortal agony, a sound more fortunate people now know only as that of an animal hit by a car, dragging itself to the side of the road to die.

Ali himself was nearly killed. Arrows fell so thick and fast around him that as one witness said, “his two cubs, Hasan and Hussein, were hard put to fend off the shafts with their shields.” They urged Ali to move faster so as to avoid being so exposed. His famed reply, the epitome of heroic sangfroid in the face of battle, was an augury of what was to come.

“My sons,” he said, “the fateful day will inevitably come for your father. Going fast will not make it come later, and going slow will not make it come sooner. It makes no difference to your father whether he comes upon death, or death comes upon him.”

But death would not come upon Ali at Siffin. As the sun rose on the Friday morning, the field was all but won. The Syrian line was not holding, and the Iraqis were slowly but inexorably advancing, despite their losses. It was only a matter of time—another few hours at most—until Ali’s forces could claim a definitive victory, or so it seemed.

Amr persuaded Muawiya that what could not be won by might could nonetheless be won by guile. Unburdened as Muawiya was by any aspiration to spiritual leadership, he should feel free to make whatever he saw as the best use of faith. So the command was given: not to retreat, and certainly not to surrender, but to bring several parchment copies of
the Quran. These were distributed among Muawiya’s top cavalry, with orders for each horseman to spear a single parchment sheet on the tip of his lance and then ride into the enemy lines. Instead of waving the white flag of surrender, Muawiya would wave the Quran.

No white flag could have been more effective than the sight of those parchment leaves fluttering atop the enemy lances. Stop fighting, in the name of God, was the message. Do not shed blood on the leaves of the Holy Book. As Muslim men, put up your arms. And in case any missed the message, the Syrian cavalrymen cried out the words Muawiya had ordered them to use: “Let the Book of God be the judge between us!”

Ali was stunned by such gall. Even to think of placing the Quran on lances was blasphemy. Surely his own soldiers could see this for what it was, a ruse, pure and simple. “They have raised up the Holy Book only to deceive you,” he yelled at his troops. “All they want is to outwit you and trick you.”

But if half the men could see that, the other half could not. “When we are called to the Book of God,” they said, “we must answer the call. We cannot fight against the Quran itself.” And despite orders to the contrary from their commanders, they laid down their weapons. On the verge of victory, Ali could only watch as it was snatched away.

“By God,” he fumed at his men, “I tell you that you have been cheated!” But reason was no weapon against faith. The image of Othman’s blood-stained Quran was still fresh in the men’s memory; they were not about to commit sacrilege again.

Muawiya quickly sent up a herald to stand between the two armies and read aloud his proposal for how they should proceed. The issue of who should be Caliph, he said, should be resolved not by men but by God, not by battle but by the Quran itself. Each side should pick its most trusted representative to sit in arbitration and resolve the issue, using the Quran as his sole guide. The final judgment would thus be that of God alone.

The proposal drew cheers from Ali’s men, for Muawiya had deliberately couched his proposal in the most pious terms. Besides, it seemed clear to them that any arbitration guided by the Quran could only favor Ali. But Ali himself was not deceived. The very idea of arbitration to decide who was to be Caliph not only placed his own right to the caliphate in question from the start, it also made the Quran itself a matter of negotiation. For the first time, the Quran was being made into a political tool.

Ali had been thoroughly outmaneuvered. No matter that he could plainly see how Muawiya had manipulated the situation, or that one of the most worldly of men had used faith as a weapon against one of the most spiritual. With his troops standing fast by their refusal to fight any further, Ali was left no option but to consent to arbitration. “Do not forget that I forbade you this,” he told his men. “This will only demolish strength, destroy right, and bequeath lowliness. Shame on you! You are like cowardly she-camels rooting in the muck for scraps. You will never again see glory!”

It was less than a year since he had been acclaimed Caliph in Medina, yet here, on the Plain of Siffin, he surely sensed that his reign would not be a long one. He had been on the brink of winning the battle, and now had begun to lose the war.

A
DISPIRITED
I
RAQI ARMY FOLLOWED
A
LI ON THE LONG JOURNEY
back to Kufa. Many of the men had begun to second-guess their eagerness to accept arbitration at Siffin. Perhaps they realized that they had indeed been duped, and their faith used against them, because none were more bitter than those who had most stoutly insisted on laying down their arms when they had seen the Quran on the lances of Muawiya’s cavalry. And since Muawiya was by then back in Damascus, they took out their bitterness on the man who had led them to Siffin in the first place.

Blaming Ali for the very act they had forced him into, they would form an entirely new kind of enemy, not from Mecca or from Syria but from within his own ranks—an enemy all the more dangerous since they were fueled not by the desire for power but by the blind, implacable logic of embittered righteousness.

Their leader was Abdullah ibn Wahb, a name that still reverberates in the Islamic world since it calls to mind Abd al-Wahhab, the founder of the fundamentalist Wahhabi sect that today holds sway in Saudi Arabia and is the ideological backbone of Sunni extremism. To his followers,
the seventh-century Wahb was known as Dhu’l Thafinat, the Scarred One. Some said this was because of the dark callus on his forehead, a sign of extreme piety created by repeated bowing down in prayer, others that it was because his left arm was deformed from battle wounds. Either was reason enough to hold him in awe.

When Ali ascended the steps of the pulpit to give his first sermon back in Kufa, Wahb began to berate him. “You and the Syrians have vied with each other in unbelief like two horses in a race,” he declared. “God’s ruling on Muawiya and his followers is that they should repent or be killed, yet you have made an agreement with them to let men decide. You have given men authority over the Book of God, and so your deeds are worthless, and you are lost!”

His followers joined in. The role of Caliph could not be arbitrated, they shouted. The succession to the Messenger of God was a matter of divine right. That right had been Ali’s, but he had now forfeited it. He was as guilty as Muawiya of transgressing divine law. There was no difference between the two; both were equally abhorrent in the eyes of God. And again and again, they shouted out the slogan that was to become their rallying cry. “Judgment belongs to God alone!” they cried. “To God alone!”

“Those words are true,” Ali countered, “but you twist them and use them to mean something false.” It was they who had insisted that he agree to arbitration at Siffin, he said. They had ignored his warnings then; how could they now attack him for doing what they had insisted on?

But there is nobody as righteous or as blind to reason as the reformed sinner. “When we wanted arbitration,” Wahb replied, “we sinned and became unbelievers. But we have repented. If you now do the same, we will be with you. But if you will not, then as the Quran says, ‘We reject you without distinction, for God does not love the treacherous.’ ”

As the rest of the mosque rose in uproar over the idea of Ali as a traitor to Islam, Wahb declared that the whole of Kufa was mired in a
state of
jahiliya,
the pagan darkness that had reigned before the advent of Islam. “Let us go out, my brothers, from this place of wicked people,” he said, and go out they did, some three thousand strong. Fifty miles north of Kufa they established a new settlement on the Tigris at Nahrawan. It was to be a haven of purity, Wahb announced, a beacon of righteousness in a corrupt world.

He and his men were to be the first Islamic fundamentalists. They called themselves the Rejectionists
—khariji,
meaning “those who go out.” The reference was to the phrase “those who go forth to serve God’s cause” in Sura 9 of the Quran, which is aptly titled “Repentance.” They had seen the light and repented, and with the absolutism of the newly penitent, they devoted themselves to the letter of the Quran and to the exclusion of its spirit. We are holier than thou, they were saying, purer than the pure. And as is the way with such righteousness, they took their zeal for purity over the brink into all-out fanaticism.

Anything that fell short of their standard of faith was nothing less than apostasy and had to be ruthlessly rooted out lest it contaminate the righteous. They began to terrorize the countryside around Nahrawan, submitting everyone they caught to a kind of mini Inquisition. If the answers failed to satisfy their rigid standards, the punishment was death.

Matters came to a head when they chose the farmer son of an early companion of Muhammad’s as their victim. A number of them had ridden into his village for supplies and decided to make an example of him. Since his father had been among those who had warned against taking sides before the Battle of the Camel, they posed a loaded question. “Did your father not tell you that the Prophet told him: ‘There will be
a fitna
in which the heart of a man will die as does his body, and if you are alive then, be not the slayer, but the slain’? Did he not say that?”

That was indeed what the Prophet had told his father, the farmer replied, even as he trembled in fear, for it was clear that a refusal to take their side was the utmost betrayal in the eyes of these men and that he himself was about to be not the slayer but the slain. Yet as they closed in
around him, he took a brave last stand. “Ali knows far more of God than you do,” he said.

With that, he sealed his fate. Ali was an apostate in Rejectionist eyes, and anyone who submitted to the rule of an apostate was himself guilty of apostasy, and his life forfeit. They leaped on the farmer, tied him up, and dragged him together with his pregnant wife beneath the heavily laden date palms of an orchard next to the river.