After the Prophet: The Epic Story of the Shia-Sunni Split in Islam (20 page)

And indeed, he had few days yet to come.

It happened at dawn on Friday, January 26, in the year 661, midway through the monthlong fast of Ramadan. Ali had walked to the mosque in Kufa for the first prayer of the day. He never saw the armed man lurking in the shadow of the main entrance, not until the raised sword glistened above him in the early light and he heard the Rejectionist cry coming from his attacker’s lips: “Judgment belongs to God alone, Ali! To God alone!”

The sword blow knocked him to the ground and gashed his head open. “Do not let that man escape,” he shouted as he fell, and worshipers rushed out of the mosque and caught hold of his assailant.

Ali remained lucid even as the blood ran down his face and people began to panic at the sight. There was to be no call for revenge, he said. “If I live, I shall consider what to do with this man who attacked me. If I die, then inflict on him blow for blow. But none shall be killed but him. Do not plunge into the blood of Muslims saying ‘The Commander of the Faithful has been killed!’ And do not inflict mutilation on this man, for I heard the Messenger of God say, ‘Avoid mutilation, even on a vicious dog.’ ”

The assassin was executed the next day. Ali’s wound had not been fatal, but the poison smeared on the sword had done its work.

Hasan and Hussein washed their father’s body, rubbed it with herbs and myrrh, and shrouded it in three robes. Then, as Ali had instructed them, they set his body on his favorite riding camel and gave it free rein. Forty years before, Muhammad had given his camel free rein to determine where the mosque would be built in Medina. Where it stopped, there the mosque was built. Now another sainted animal would determine where Ali would be buried. Wherever it knelt, that was where God intended Ali’s body to rest.

The camel went a half day’s journey, walking slowly as though it knew its burden and was weighed down by grief. It knelt some six miles east of Kufa, atop a barren, sandy rise
—najaf
in Arabic—and there his sons buried the man who would ever after be revered by all Muslims, but by two very different titles: the first Imam of Shia Islam, and the last of the four
rashidun,
the Rightly Guided Caliphs of Sunni Islam.

“Today, they have killed a man on the holiest day, the day the Quran was first revealed,” Ali’s elder son, Hasan, said at the graveside. “If the Prophet sent him on a raid, the angel Gabriel rode at his right
hand, and the angel Michael at his left. By God, none who came before him are ahead of him, and none who come after him will overtake him.”

In time, a shrine would be built over Ali’s grave on that sandy rise, and the city of Najaf would grow up around it. Each time the shrine was rebuilt, it grew more magnificent, until the gold-leafed dome and min a rets soared above the city, shining out to pilgrims still twenty miles away. By the late twentieth century, Najaf was so large that nearby Kufa had become little more than a suburb hard by the river. All the more canny, then, of Muqtada al-Sadr, the leader of today’s Mahdi Army, when he adopted not the Najaf shrine but the main mosque of Kufa as his home pulpit. In doing so, he took on the spirit not of Ali assassinated, but of the living Imam. Preaching where Ali had preached, Muqtada assumed the role of the new champion of the oppressed.

But Najaf was to be only the first of Iraq’s twin holy cities. As the Caliph Muawiya assumed uncontested power, the second city was still just a nameless stretch of stony sand fifty miles to the north. It would be twenty years yet until Ali’s son Hussein would meet his fate here, and this stretch of desert be given the name Karbala, “the place of trial and tribulation.”

O
N THE MORNING OF
S
EPTEMBER 9 IN THE YEAR 680, A SMALL
caravan set out from Mecca, heading for Iraq, and at its head Hussein, Ali’s younger son. Nineteen years had passed since he and his brother had buried their father on that sandy rise outside Kufa, then made the long, dispiriting trek back across northern Arabia to the shelter of the Hijaz mountains. Hussein had waited with almost impossible patience as Muawiya consolidated his rule over the empire, but now the waiting was over. Muawiya was dead, and Hussein was intent on bringing the caliphate back where it belonged, to the
Ahl al-Bayt,
the House of Muhammad.

The divisiveness that had begun with Muhammad’s death and then taken shape around the figure of Ali had now reached into the third generation. And here it was to harden into a sense of the most terrible wrong—a wrong so deeply felt that it would cut through the body of Islam for centuries to come, with still no end in sight.

Hussein was by now in his mid-fifties, and it surely showed. His beard must have been at least flecked with white, his eyes and mouth etched around with deep lines. Yet the posters that today flood Iraqi and
Iranian markets show an extraordinarily handsome man in his twenties. Long black hair cascades down to his shoulders. His beard is full and soft, not a gray hair to be seen. His face is unlined, glowing with youth, and his dark eyes are soft but determined, sad and yet confident, as though they were seeing all the joy and all the misery in the world, and embracing joy and misery alike.

In the West, the posters are often mistaken for somewhat more muscular images of Jesus, and indeed the resemblance is striking. If Ali was the foundation figure of Shia Islam, Hussein was to become its sacrificial icon. The story of what happened to him once he reached Iraq would become the Passion story of Shiism—its emotional and spiritual core.

Yet as Hussein’s caravan threaded its way out of the mountains and onto the high desert, a dispassionate observer might have taken one look and thought that he was almost destined to fail. If his aim was to reclaim the caliphate, this small group seemed pitifully inadequate to the task. The line of camels traveled slowly, for they carried the women and children of his family, with only seventy-two armed warriors for protection and just a few horses tied to the camels by their reins. Nevertheless, the group rode with assurance, confident that once they arrived, the whole of Iraq would rise up under their banner.

At first, that confidence had seemed justified. Letter after letter had been carried across the eight hundred miles between Kufa and Mecca in the weeks since Muawiya had died and his son Yazid had succeeded to the throne in Damascus—so many letters that they filled two large saddlebags, and all of them from the Shiat Ali, the followers of Ali.

“Speed to us, Hussein,” they urged. “The people are waiting for you, and think of none but you. Claim your rightful place as the true heir of the Prophet, his grandson, his flesh and blood through Fatima, your mother. Bring power back where it belongs, to Iraq. We will drive out the Syrians under your banner. We will reclaim the soul of Islam.”

The pivotal message was the one that came from Hussein’s cousin
Muslim, whom he had sent to Kufa to confirm that the Iraqis were indeed committed to his leadership. “I have twelve thousand men ready to rise up under you,” Muslim wrote. “Come now. Come to an army that has gathered for you!”

It was the call Hussein had waited nineteen years to hear, ever since his father’s death.

Ali had not been the only target the morning he was attacked, or so it was said. Word was that the
khariji
Rejectionists had also planned to kill Amr in Egypt and Muawiya in Syria. But Amr had been sick that day—a stomach ailment, they said—and the cloaked figure struck from behind was only a subordinate. And though the would-be Syrian assassin found the right man, he merely slashed Muawiya in the buttocks, and the newly uncontested ruler of the empire suffered only temporary discomfort.

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.