After the Prophet: The Epic Story of the Shia-Sunni Split in Islam (5 page)

The name Lion of God was intended to convey spiritual as well as physical strength, and that is the sense you get from these ubiquitous posters. With his high cheekbones,
kohl-rimmed
eyes, and green
keffiya
artfully draped around his head and falling onto his shoulders—the green of Islam from the banner of Muhammad’s clan, the color so evocative of ease and bounty to a mountain desert people—Ali is shown as the perfect Islamic man.

So what if at thirteen he was a shortsighted, spindly-legged adolescent? As Shia Muslims point out, these are not direct portraits but representations. They express the feel of Ali, who he is for them—the man mentored and groomed by Muhammad himself, inducted by the Prophet into the inner, gnostic meaning of Islam so that his understanding of the faith would far surpass that of all others. What does it matter if in life he was not the most handsome man in the world? In spirit is where he lives, stronger in body and in many ways stronger still in influence and respect than when he was alive.

Muhammad seemed to recognize this the moment he heard those first words of unwavering commitment from his young cousin. “He put his arm around my neck,” Ali remembered, “and said ‘This is my brother, my trustee, and my successor among you, so listen to him and obey.’ And then everyone got up and began joking, saying to my father, ‘He has ordered you to listen to your son and obey him.’ ”

It seems clear enough when told this way: not only the designation of Ali as Muhammad’s successor but also the first sign of what Islam would mean—the revolutionary upending of the traditional authority of father over son and by implication of the whole of the old established order. No one tribe would lord it over another any longer. No one clan would claim dominance within a tribe, and no one family within a clan. All would be equal in the eyes of the one God, all honored members of the new community of Islam.

Yet from Ali’s own account, it was not taken seriously. In fact it is not even clear that it was intended seriously. Ali was still a mere stripling, barely strong enough to wield any sword, let alone Dhu’l Fikar, while Muhammad was a man without his own means, an orphan who had been raised in his uncle’s household and whose only claim to wealth was through his wife, Khadija. It made little sense for this seemingly ordinary man, whom his kinsmen had known all their lives, to suddenly declare himself the Messenger of God. The declaration itself must have seemed absurd to many of those who heard it, let alone the idea of appointing a
successor. There was, after all, nothing to succeed to. At that moment in time, Islam had only three believers, Muhammad, Khadija, and Ali. How could any rational person imagine that it would develop into a great new faith, into a united Arabia and an empire in the making? Muhammad was a man who appeared to have nothing worth bequeathing.

That was to change over the next two decades. As the equalizing message of Islam spread, as Muhammad’s authority grew, as tribe after tribe and town after town officially accepted the faith and paid tribute in the form of taxes, the new
ummah,
the community of Islam, grew not only powerful but wealthy. By the time Muhammad lay dying, nearly the whole of the Arabian Peninsula had allied itself with Islam and its unitary Arab identity, and over those years, time and again, Muhammad had made it clear how close he held Ali, the one man who had had faith in him when all others scoffed.

“I am from Ali and Ali is from me; he is the guardian of every believer after me,” he said. Ali was to him “as Aaron was to Moses,” he declared. “None but a believer loves Ali, and none but an apostate hates him.” And most famously, especially for the mystical Sufis, for whom Ali would become the patron saint of knowledge and insight: “I am the City of Knowledge and Ali is its gateway.”

Shia scholars still relate these sayings obsessively as proof of Muhammad’s intention that Ali succeed him, yet not one of these later declarations has the absolute clarity of that word “successor.” Not one of them clearly said, “This is the man whom I designate to lead you after I die.” Always implied, it was never quite stated, so that what seemed incontrovertible proof to some, remained highly ambiguous to others.

One thing was not ambiguous, however. Nobody, Sunni or Shia, denies the extraordinary closeness between Muhammad and Ali. In fact the two men were so close that at the most dangerous point in the Prophet’s life, Ali served as Muhammad’s double.

That had been when the Meccans had plotted to kill Muhammad on the eve of his flight to Medina. While the would-be assassins lay in wait outside his house for him to emerge at dawn—even in their murderous intent, they obeyed the traditional Arabian injunction barring any attack on a man within the confines of his own home—Ali had arranged for Muhammad to escape along with Abu Bakr, and stayed behind as a decoy. It was Ali who slept that night in Muhammad’s house, Ali who dressed in Muhammad’s robes that morning, Ali who stepped outside, risking his own life until the assassins realized they had the wrong man. Ali, that is, who for the space of that night stood in for Muhammad and who finally escaped himself to make the long journey to Medina in the humblest possible fashion, alone, on foot.

In a way, it seemed fated that Ali should take on the role of Muhammad’s double. Despite the twenty-nine-year age difference between the two cousins, there was a kind of perfect reciprocity in their relationship, for each had found refuge as a boy in the home of the other. After his father’s death, the orphaned Muhammad had been raised in his uncle Abu Talib’s household, long before Ali was even born, and years later, when Abu Talib fell on hard times financially, Muhammad, by then married to Khadija and running the merchant business she had inherited from her first husband, had taken in his uncle’s youngest son as part of his own household. Ali grew up alongside Muhammad’s four daughters and became the son Muhammad and Khadija never had. The Prophet became a second father to him, and Khadija a second mother.

Over time, the bonds of kinship between the two men would tighten still further. In fact, they would triple. As if Ali were not close enough by virtue of being Muhammad’s paternal first cousin and his adoptive son, Muhammad handpicked him to marry Fatima, his eldest daughter, even though others had already asked for her hand.

Those others were the two men who would lead the challenge to Ali’s succession after Muhammad’s death: Aisha’s father, Abu Bakr, who had been Muhammad’s companion on the flight to Medina, and the
famed warrior Omar, the man who was to lead Islam out of the Arabian Peninsula and into the whole of the Middle East. But whereas Abu Bakr and Omar had given Muhammad their daughters in marriage, he had refused each of them when they asked for the hand of Fatima. The meaning was clear: in a society where to give was more honorable than to receive, the man who gave his daughter’s hand bestowed the higher honor. While Abu Bakr and Omar honored Muhammad by marrying their daughters to him, he did not return the honor but chose Ali instead.

It was a singular distinction, and to show how special he considered this marriage to be, the Prophet not only performed the wedding ceremony himself but laid down one condition: the new couple would follow the example of his own marriage to Khadija and be monogamous. Ali and Fatima, he seemed to be saying, would be the new Muhammad and Khadija, and would have the sons Muhammad and Khadija never had.

Sure enough, the man who remained without sons of his own soon had two adored grandsons, Hasan and Hussein. Only a year apart, they instantly became the apples of their grandfather’s eye. It is said that there is no love purer than that of a grandparent for a grandchild, and Muhammad was clearly as doting and proud a grandfather as ever lived. He would bounce the young boys on his lap for hours at a time, kissing and hugging them. Would even happily abandon all the decorum and dignity of his position as the Messenger of God to get down on all fours and let them ride him like a horse, kicking his sides with their heels and shrieking in delight. These two boys were his future—the future of Islam, as the Shia would see it—and by fathering them, Ali, the one man after Muhammad most loyal to Khadija, had made that future possible.

When Khadija died, two years before that fateful night of Muhammad’s flight to Medina, Ali had grieved as deeply as Muhammad himself. This was the woman who had raised him as the son she never had, and then became his mother-in-law. Devoted as he was to Muhammad, he had been equally devoted to her. It was clear to him that no matter how many wives the Prophet might take after Khadija’s death, none
could possibly compare, and least of all the one who seemed the most determined to prove herself superior.

Long before the Affair of the Necklace, then, before those beads went rolling in the desert to set off scandal, Ali remained impervious to Aisha’s sassiness and charm. In his eyes, Muhammad’s youngest wife must have seemed an unworthy successor to Khadija. And the antipathy was mutual. To her, Ali’s devotion to Khadija’s memory was a constant reminder of the one rival she could never conquer, while his two sons were daily reproof of her own inability to produce an heir. She, Aisha, was supposed to be the apple of Muhammad’s eye, not these two adored grandsons in whom the Prophet seemed to take even more delight than he did in her, and certainly not the drab, modest Fatima, their mother, or the superior Ali, their father, who accorded her none of the deference and respect she was convinced she should command.

That rebuke of Muhammad’s for her criticism of Khadija had hit Aisha hard, and since she was not the forgiving type, let alone the forgetting one, the impact of the blow did not lessen with time. If anything, it increased. Banned from any further criticism of Khadija, and unable to compete on the most basic yet most important level—the continuation of the bloodline—she displaced her resentment onto the one person who seemed safe, Khadija’s eldest daughter.

Fatima had none of the robust health and vitality of Aisha. Fifteen years older, she was frail by comparison, almost sickly. She could not make her father laugh with paternal affection as Aisha did, could not tease him, could barely even gain his ear unless it was to do with her sons. Her place had been taken by Aisha, who effectively set about shutting her out. More daughter than wife, Aisha saw herself as competing with Fatima for Muhammad’s affection, and in such a competition, Fatima stood no chance.

It became known throughout Medina that if you wanted a favor
from Muhammad, the best time to approach him was after he had been with Aisha because then he was guaranteed to be in a good mood. The young wife had influence, and in one way or another, she used it in a barrage of small slights and insults that Fatima was helpless to counter. Things came to a head when Muhammad’s other wives begged Fatima to go to her father and protest against his favoritism of Aisha. She felt she had no choice but to comply yet must have known that in doing so, she would be setting herself up for humiliation. And indeed, the moment she broached the subject, Muhammad stopped her short.

“Dear little daughter,” he said, “do you not love who I love?”

To which Fatima could only meekly reply, “Yes, surely.”

His question was rhetorical, of course, and though it was phrased in loving terms, you can almost hear the impatience in his voice, the desire to put a stop to this constant bickering among those close to him and have them leave him alone to get on with important matters of state. But he also seemed to be saying that his love for Aisha trumped his love for everyone else.

That is certainly what Ali heard when his wife came home in tears of shame; the insult was not only to Fatima but also to him, and, worst of all, to Khadija. He immediately sought out Muhammad and confronted him, calling him to account for neglecting his blood family. “Was it not enough for you that Aisha should have insulted us,” he said, “but then you tell Fatima that Aisha is your best beloved?” And while the Prophet may have been able to ignore Fatima, he could not ignore Ali. He would now make amends.

He chose the occasion well. The long arm of the Byzantine Empire had reached deep into Arabia, and the town of Najran, midway on the main trade route between Mecca and the Yemen to the south, was the largest center of Christianity in the peninsula. The Quranic message spoke powerfully to Arabian Christians, as it did to several of the Jewish tribes that had fled south from Palestine after failed rebellions against Roman rule centuries before, and that were by now all but indistinguishable
in language and culture from their Arab neighbors. Islam was based, after all, on the religion of Abraham. It was widely believed that the Kaaba had originally been built by Adam and then rebuilt by Abraham, and that the Arabs were the descendants of Abraham’s son Ishmael. Islam was seen less as a rejection of existing faiths than as an elevation of them into a new, specifically Arabian identity.

Yet Najran was divided. Those in favor of accepting Islam argued that Muhammad was clearly the Paraclete or Comforter whose arrival Jesus had foretold in the Gospels. Those against maintained that since the Paraclete was said to have sons, and Muhammad had no son, it could not possibly be he. Finally they decided to send a delegation to Medina to resolve the matter directly with Muhammad in the time-honored manner of public debate. But Muhammad preempted the need for debate. In a piece of consummate theatricality, he came out to meet the delegation without his usual bevy of counselors. Instead, only his blood family were with him: Ali and Fatima, and their sons, Hasan and Hussein.

He didn’t say a word. Instead, slowly and deliberately, in full view of all, he took hold of the hem of his cloak and spread it high and wide so that it covered the heads of his small family. They were the ones he sheltered under his cloak, he was saying. They were the ones he wrapped around himself. They were his nearest and dearest, the
Ahl al-Bayt,
the People of the House of Muhammad—or as the Shia would later call them, the People of the Cloak.

It was a brilliantly calculated gesture. Arabian Christian tradition had it that Adam had received a vision of a brilliant light surrounded by four other lights and had been told by God that these were his prophetic descendants. Muhammad had certainly heard of this tradition and knew that the moment the Najran Christians saw him spread his cloak over the four members of his family, they would be convinced that he was another Adam, the one whose coming Jesus had prophesied. Indeed, they accepted Islam on the spot.