After the Prophet: The Epic Story of the Shia-Sunni Split in Islam (10 page)

In a close-knit society, boycott is a powerful weapon. The pressure to conform mounts as day by day, week by week, you become increasingly invisible. People turn their backs; friends keep their distance; acquaintances pass by in silence, staring through you as though you were not there. Even in the mosque, Ali prayed alone.

Ironically, the same weapon had earlier been used in Mecca against Muhammad and his clan. Despite its power, it had failed then, which was why the Meccan elite had resorted to attempted murder, and it would fail now. Fatima refused to bow to the pressure. When she knew death was close, she asked Ali for a clandestine burial like that of her father less than three months before. Abu Bakr was not to be informed of her death, she said; he was to be given no chance to officiate at her funeral.
She was to be buried quietly, with only her close family, the true
Ahl al-Bayt,
in attendance.

If Aisha felt any sense of triumph on hearing of her rival’s death, she was unusually quiet about it. But she had no need to exult. She was now doubly honored: the widow of the Prophet and the daughter of his successor. Triply honored, indeed, for her chamber by the courtyard wall of the mosque was also Muhammad’s grave.

You can see how some might treasure the image of the young widow sleeping with her husband buried under her bed. It has a touch of magical realism, like a scene from a novel by Gabriel García Márquez, but this is no novel, and the reality is that Aisha never slept in her chamber again. All the widows were moved out into private quarters away from the mosque, each with a generous pension—and Aisha’s more generous than the others. She would not eat and sleep for the rest of her life in the company of her dead husband, though she would certainly live as if she did.

Where she had striven so hard to own Muhammad in life, it now seemed she would succeed in owning him in death. She would become a major source of
hadith—
the reports on the Prophet’s practice, or
sunna,
in things large and small, from great matters of principle to the most minute details of when he washed and how, even what kind of toothpick he used to clean his teeth. The Sunnis would eventually name themselves for the
sunna;
they would own it, as it were, despite the fact that the Shia honor it too.

Yet no matter how many
hadith
would be attributed to Aisha—and there were thousands—the future would not be kind to her. As long as she lived, she was honored as the leading Mother of the Faithful, but in memory she was destined to remain an embattled symbol of slandered virtue. In later centuries, conservative clerics would point to her as an
example of the division they claimed ensues when women enter public life, as Aisha would so disastrously when Ali finally became Caliph. Everything that makes her so interesting to the secular mind—her ambition, her outspokenness, her assertiveness—would work against her in the Islamic mind, even among Sunnis.

And no matter how pale an image Fatima left in comparison with Aisha, no matter that she died young and never got a chance to dictate her own version of history, time would favor her. The Shia would call her Al-Zahra, the Radiant One. If she seemed anything but radiant in life—a pale, almost self-effacing presence—that was of no importance. This was radiance of spirit, the pure light of holiness, for the Prophet’s bloodline ran through Fatima and into her two sons.

In Shia lore, Fatima lives on in another dimension to witness her sons’ suffering and to weep for them. She is the Holy Mother, whose younger son would sacrifice himself to redeem humanity just as had the son of that other great mother, Mary. Like her, Fatima is often called the Virgin as a sign of her spiritual purity. Like her, she will mourn her offspring until the Day of Judgment, when legend has it that she will reappear, carrying the poisoned heart of Hasan in one hand and the severed head of Hussein in the other.

Ali honored Fatima’s wishes. He buried her in the dead of night, as he had so recently buried her father, and then, after he had consigned her to the earth, he did what he had refused to do since he had been passed over as Caliph: He conceded, and pledged allegiance to Abu Bakr. Many said he acted in grief or even in despair, but in fact there were pressing reasons for him to do as he did.

As the news of Muhammad’s death had spread throughout Arabia, rebellion had spread with it. Many of the tribes in the north and center of the vast peninsula threatened to break away from Islam, or at least
from its taxes. This was not a matter of faith, they said, but of tribal autonomy. To pay tribute to the Prophet was one thing; to enrich the coffers of the Quraysh tribe was quite another.

As Muhammad had wished, Ali had been loyal to Fatima to the end, but there was now, he said, a higher call on his loyalty. This was no time to hold grudges. He would pledge allegiance to Abu Bakr for the sake of unity in the face of rebellion, for the good of the community, and to present a solid front against the forces of divisiveness. If this was a declaration of idealism over experience, so be it. Indeed, his followers later praised it as an act of utmost nobility, but then Ali would rarely be anything but noble. His highest virtue, it would also prove to be his greatest liability.

With Ali at last in support, Abu Bakr took a hard line with the rebel tribes. “If they withhold only a hobbling cord of what they gave the Prophet, I will fight them for it,” he declared, and his choice of language was a deliberate insult. These were mere camel herders, he was saying, “boorish Beduin” in the eyes of the urbanized Quraysh aristocracy. The thousands of Arabic odes extolling the purity of desert life were no more than nostalgic idylls, much as pastoral images of shepherds and shepherdesses would later be in Europe, or the John Wayne cowboy in the United States. Actual shepherds and camel herders were something else. Indeed, the few Beduin who have not been absorbed into urban life are still scorned within the Arab world.

Abu Bakr declared that since the taxes belonged to Islam, to refuse them was an act of apostasy. And where grace could be extended to a nonbeliever, none could be offered an apostate, someone who had first accepted and then turned against the faith. Such a person was no longer protected by the Quranic ban on Muslims shedding the blood of Muslims. That was
haram,
taboo, in Islam. But since an apostate was to be considered an active enemy of Islam, to shed his blood was no longer taboo. It was now
halal—
permitted under Islamic law.

This was to become a familiar argument, one made over time by
Sunnis against Shia, by Shia against Sunnis, by extremists against moderates, by legalist clerics against Sufi mystics, and most notoriously perhaps, at least in the West, by the Ayatollah Khomeini against novelist Salman Rushdie. Declare your opponent an apostate, and as the Arabic phrasing goes, “his blood is
halal.”

The Wars of Apostasy—the
ridda
wars—were as ruthless as Abu Bakr had promised. Within the year, all resistance had been crushed, and within another, Muslim forces had begun to strike north out of Arabia. It seemed that under Abu Bakr, the first of the four Caliphs the Sunnis would call
rashidun,
“the rightly guided ones,” Islam was poised to achieve its full potential. Yet a year later, even as his forces prepared to lay siege to the Byzantine-controlled city of Damascus far to the north, Abu Bakr lay deathly ill, struck by fever. He would be the only Islamic leader to die of natural causes for close on fifty years. This time, however, there would be no doubt about who was to be the successor.

Some Sunnis would later say that Abu Bakr acted as he did to spare the community the divisiveness it had gone through before his own election; others, that as the Arab conquest began, he wanted a strong military figure in command. The Shia would see it very differently, arguing that he was driven by his antagonism toward Ali and his desire to keep the younger man out of power. Whichever it may have been, Abu Bakr’s deathbed declaration was clear: there would be no
shura,
no conclave of tribal chiefs and elders. Though he had been elected by consensus himself, Abu Bakr had good reason to distrust the process.

How then to proceed? In the days before Islam, it would have been simple enough; one of Abu Bakr’s sons would have inherited his rule. Hereditary monarchy lasted so long through history because it established a clear line of succession, avoiding the messy business of negotiation, the political maneuvering, the difficult, wearing process of the fragile thing we now know as democracy. But Islam was essentially egalitarian. As Abu Bakr himself had argued when he prevailed over the proponents of Ali, leadership, like prophecy, was not to be inherited. He
was thus faced with the questions that still dog even the best intentions in the Middle East: How does one impose democracy? How can it work when there is no prior acceptance of the process, when there is no framework already in place?

You might say that Abu Bakr settled on a middle course. He would appoint his successor, but appoint him on the basis of merit, not kinship. He would choose the man he saw as best suited to the task, and if that was the same man he had proposed at the
shura
just two years before, then this merely demonstrated how right he had been. In a move destined to be seen by the Shia as further evidence of collusion, the dying Abu Bakr appointed Omar the second Caliph.

Again, Ali had been outmaneuvered. Again, he had been passed over, and this time in favor of the man who had injured his wife and threatened to burn down his house. Yet even as Abu Bakr was buried alongside the Prophet—the second body to lie under what had once been Aisha’s bed—Ali insisted that his supporters keep their peace. Instead of challenging Omar, he took the high road a second time. He had sworn allegiance to Abu Bakr and been a man of his word, and now that same word applied to Abu Bakr’s appointed successor, no matter the history between them. And if anyone doubted his absolute commitment to Islamic unity, he laid such doubts to rest with a remarkable move. As Omar’s rule began, Ali married Abu Bakr’s youngest widow, Asma.

To the modern mind, marrying a former rival’s widow might seem an act of revenge. In seventh-century Arabia, it was quite the opposite: a major gesture of reconciliation. Ali’s marriage to Asma was a way of reaching out, of healing old divisions and transforming them into alliance, and with Ali, the healing impulse went deep: He formally adopted Asma’s three-year-old son by Abu Bakr and, by so doing, extended a hand in another direction—to the boy’s influential half sister Aisha.

Once again, though, Aisha remained unusually silent. If she felt that Ali had stolen part of her family, there is no record of it, though over the years, as her half brother grew to manhood in Ali’s house, her resentment of his loyalty to Ali would become all too clear, and the young man who should have bound the two antagonists together would only split them farther apart. For the meantime, however, that division would merely simmer, upstaged by a second even more remarkable union. In the strongest possible sign of unity, Ali honored the Caliph Omar by giving him the hand of his daughter Umm Kulthum—Muhammad’s eldest granddaughter—in marriage.

The vast vine of marital alliance now reached across generations as well as political differences. Omar was the same generation as Muhammad yet had married his granddaughter. Ali, thirteen years younger than Omar, was now his fatherin-law. And if Fatima turned in her modest grave at the idea of any daughter of hers being married to the man who had burst into her house and slammed her to the floor, that was the price of unity—that, and Omar’s settlement of a large part of Muhammad’s estates on Ali, exactly as Fatima had wanted.

Omar had now doubled his kinship to the Prophet: both fatherin-law and grandson-in-law. His position as Caliph was secure. Ali could still have been a powerful rival, but Omar followed the ancient political dictum of keeping your friends close and your enemies closer. As son-in-law and fatherin-law, the two men would work well together, so much so that every time Omar left Medina on one of his many military campaigns, Ali stood in as his deputy. It was a clear sign, understood by all to mean that when the time came, Ali would succeed Omar as Caliph.

The Arab conquest now began in earnest. Omar had taken Abu Bakr’s title of Deputy to Muhammad but added another one: Com mander of the Faithful. And a superb commander he was. He lived rough and ready with his troops on campaign, sleeping wrapped in his cloak on
the desert floor and leading his men into battle instead of ordering them from the rear, thus earning their absolute loyalty and respect. If he had a reputation for strictness and discipline, it was balanced by his insistence on justice. As part of his commitment to Islam, he would tolerate no favoritism, least of all for his own family. When one of his own sons appeared drunk in public, Omar ordered that the young man be given eighty lashes of the whip, and refused to mourn when he died as a result of the punishment.

In the ten years of Omar’s rule, the Muslims took control of the whole of Syria and Iraq, an expansion so rapid that it is still often explained by “a tribal imperative to conquest.” The phrase is unknown to anthropologists, but it calls up an image of bloodthirsty peoples impelled by primitive urges, threatening the sane rationalism of the more civilized—the image incessantly echoed in current coverage of conflict in the Middle East.

In fact there was less blood involved than money. The Muslim forces did indeed win stunning military victories over the Persians and the Byzantines, despite being vastly outnumbered, but for the most part, the Arab conquest took place more by messenger than by the sword. Given the choice to accept Arab rule—albeit with the sword held in reserve—most of Islam’s new subjects raised little objection. The Arabs, after all, were no strangers.

Long before Muhammad’s ascent to power, Meccan aristocrats had owned estates in Egypt, mansions in Damascus, farms in Palestine, date orchards in Iraq. They had put down roots in the lands and cities they traded with, for to be a trader in the seventh century was to be a traveler, and to be a traveler was to be a sojourner. The twice-yearly Meccan caravans to Damascus—up to four thousand camels at a time—did not merely stop and go at that great oasis city. They stayed for months at a time while contacts were made, negotiations carried out, hospitality extended and provided. Arabian traders had long been part and parcel of the social, cultural, and economic life of the lands they were to conquer.