After the Prophet: The Epic Story of the Shia-Sunni Split in Islam (11 page)

And the timing was perfect. Just as Islam had come into being, a vast vacuum of power had been created. The two great empires that had controlled the Middle East—the Byzantines to the west and the Persians to the east—were fading fast, having worn each other out with constant warfare. The Persians could no longer even afford the upkeep on the vast irrigation systems fed by the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in Iraq. The Byzantines’ hold on Damascus and Jerusalem was tenuous at best. Both empires were collapsing from within, their power waning just as the Muslim nation was born, opening its eyes to what was practically an open invitation to enter and take over.

There was no imposition of Islam. On the contrary, Omar discouraged conversion. He wanted to keep Islam pure—that is, Arab—an attitude that would earn him no love among the Persians, who felt especially demeaned by it and would convert in large numbers after his death. He even ordered two new garrison cities built in Iraq—Basra in the south and Kufa in the center—to protect his administrators and troops from what he saw as Persian decadence.

But there was another strong incentive to keep conversion to a minimum. Omar had set up the
diwan,
a system by which every Muslim received an annual stipend, much as citizens of the oil-rich Gulf state of Dubai do today. It followed that the fewer Muslims there were, the larger the stipends, and since the taxes that provided these stipends were no greater than those previously paid to the Byzantines and the Persians, there was at first little resistance to them. As in any change of regime today, when photographs of the old ruler suddenly come down off the walls and ones of the new ruler go up, most people made their accommodations with Arab rule. But not everyone.

Nobody could have foreseen the assassination, the Medinans would say. It seemed to come out of the blue. How was anyone to know that a Christian slave from Persia would lose his mind and do such a dastardly
thing? To stab the Caliph six times as he bent down for morning prayer in the mosque, then drive the dagger deep into his own chest? It was incomprehensible.

There would be hints of a conspiracy—veiled derision of the very idea of a lone gunman, as it were, instead of a sophisticated plot by dark forces intent on undermining the new Islamic empire. Yet in the seventh century, as in the twenty-first, people could be driven to irrational despair. Or in this case, perhaps, to rational desperation.

The story has it that the slave’s owner had promised to free him but reneged on that promise. The slave had then appealed to Omar for justice, only to be rebuffed, and so bore an intense personal grudge against the Caliph. The story made sense, and people were glad to accept it. Even as Omar lay mortally wounded, even as they faced the death of their third leader in twelve years, there was nonetheless a palpable undercurrent of relief that the assassin was not one of theirs. He was Persian, not Arab; a Christian, not a Muslim. The assassination, terrible as it was, was the act of a madman, an outsider. Muslims did not kill Muslims. That was still
haram,
taboo—still the ultimate horror.

Again, the problem of succession faced a dying Caliph, and again, in the absence of an established process, the solution would be controversial, open to challenge for centuries to come. In the hours left before he died of his wounds, Omar decided on a middle course between the open consensus of a
shura
and the power to appoint his successor. As expected, he named Ali, but what nobody expected was that he also named five others—not one man, but six. These six, he decreed, were to be both the candidates and the electors. One of them would be his successor, but which one was up to them. They were to meet in closed caucus after his death and make their decision within three days.

Did he take it for granted that the electors would choose Ali? Surely that was so, yet two of the men he named were brothers-in-law of Aisha: her cousin Zubayr, as well as Talha, the man who had rashly declared his intention to marry her. And a third was Othman, the Umayyad
aristocrat whom Abu Bakr had proposed as the leader of the
shura
after Muhammad’s death. These were not people likely to agree to Ali as Caliph.

The moment Omar was buried—the third and final grave to be dug under Aisha’s old sleeping platform—the six electors gathered in a room off the main part of the mosque. Omar had placed them in a terrible bind. If so much had not been at stake, it could almost be described as a fiendishly intricate game of strategy: six men trapped in a locked room, as it were, unable to leave until they cooperated even as cooperation was the last thing they were ready for. Each of the six wanted the leadership for himself, yet all six had to agree on which of them would get it. None wanted to be seen as wanting it too much, yet none was ready to concede.

By the third morning they had narrowed the choice to the two sons-in-law of the Prophet, Ali and Othman. To many outside that room, it seemed obvious which of the two should be Caliph. On the one hand was Ali, now in his mid-forties, the famed philosopher-warrior who had been the first man to accept Islam and who had served as deputy to both Muhammad and Omar. On the other was Othman, the pious and wealthy Umayyad who had converted early to Islam but had never actually fought in any battle and, at seventy, had already survived far beyond the average life span of the time. Nobody could have expected him to live much longer, and this would prove to be precisely his advantage.

If they settled on Othman over Ali, each of the others could buy time to position himself for the leadership the next time around. They saw Othman as a stopgap, a substitute until one or the other of them could muster enough support to take over when he died, surely a matter of no more than a year or two. Even as Ali could see the consensus building among the other men in the room, he was powerless to prevent it. As dusk fell on the third day, they preempted his assent by announcing their decision publicly in the mosque, and he knew then that his years of dust
and thorns were not yet at an end. Left with no option, he pledged allegiance to yet another man as Caliph.

How bitter must it have been to see the leadership withheld from him yet again? How patient could he be? How noble in the name of unity? In the blinding light of hindsight, Ali should surely have been more assertive and insisted on his right to rule. But then he would not have been the man he was, the man famed for his nobility, his grace and integrity—a man too honorable, it seemed, for the rough-and-tumble of politics.

Or perhaps he too thought Othman would live only a short time.

I
F
O
THMAN HAD NOT BEEN BLESSED WITH GOOD GENES, MUCH
blood might have gone unshed, including his own, so whether his longevity was indeed a blessing is a matter of some dispute. The fact remains that he defied all the odds and lived another twelve years, and when he died, at the age of eighty-two, it was not of old age. Like Omar before him, the third Caliph died under an assassin’s knife. This time, however, the assassin was Muslim, and many would argue that he had excellent cause.

Othman was a man used to entitlement. He had been renowned for his good looks, as those who carry themselves with aristocratic ease and assurance often are. Despite his smallpox-scarred cheeks, people still talked admiringly of his “golden complexion” and his flashing smile—flashing not with whiteness but with the fine gold wire bound around his teeth as decoration. That emphasis on gold might perhaps have been a warning of what was to come.

His predecessor, Omar, had certainly foreseen it. When the spoils from the Persian court were sent to Medina, Omar had not smiled with
satisfaction as all had hoped. Instead, he looked gravely at the piles of gold regalia, at the jewel-encrusted swords and the lavishly embroidered silks, and tears began to roll down his cheeks. “I weep,” he’d said, “because riches beget enmity and mutual bitterness.”

As the Arab empire expanded farther still under Othman—across Egypt to the west, all of Persia to the east, the Caspian Sea to the north—so too did its wealth, and with that wealth came exactly what Omar had feared. Muhammad had wrested control of Mecca from Othman’s Umayyad clan, but with one of their own now in the leadership of Islam, the Umayyads seized the chance to reassert themselves as the aristocracy, men of title and entitlement, and Othman seemed unable—or unwilling—to resist them.

Nobody doubted his piety and devotion to Islam, but neither could anyone doubt his devotion to family. Top military positions, governorships, senior offices—all now went to Umayyads. Capable men were passed over for family cronies, and as might be expected when they had achieved their posts through nepotism, the new appointees were flagrantly corrupt. One senior general seethed in anger as his hard work went unrewarded and his authority was undermined by the greed of others. “Am I to hold the cow’s horns while another man draws off the milk?” he protested.

Under Abu Bakr and Omar, Muhammad’s ethic of simplicity and egalitarianism had prevailed, but now conspicuous consumption became the order of the day, exemplified in the extravagant new palace Othman had built in Medina, with enclosed gardens, marble columns, even imported food and chefs. Where both Abu Bakr and Omar had taken the relatively modest title of Deputy of Muhammad, Othman took a far more grandiose one. He insisted on being called the Deputy of God—the representative of God on earth—thus paving the way for the many future leaders all too eager to claim divine sanction for worldly power.

The old Meccan aristocracy rapidly became the new Muslim aristocracy. Othman began to deed vast private estates to his relatives, some
with thousands of horses and as many slaves. In Iraq, so much of the rich agricultural land between the two rivers was given to Umayyad nobles that the whole of the Mesopotamian valley gained a new, ironic nickname, the Garden of the Umayyads. The other legacies of Othman’s rule—the authoritative written compilation of the Quran and the further expansion of the empire north into the Aegean, west along the North African coast, and east to the frontiers of India—were increasingly overshadowed by what was seen as the Umayyad stranglehold on power.

The ruling class of Mecca was back in control, and with a ven geance. There was no doubt as to who was drawing the milk, and the ones left holding the horns became increasingly outspoken as nepotism and corruption devolved into their inevitable correlates: wrongful expropriation, deportation, imprisonment, even execution. The most respected early companions of Muhammad began to speak out in protest, as did all five of the other men who had sat in caucus and elected Othman, and none more clearly than Ali.

The property of Islam was being embezzled, he warned. The Umayyads were like a pack of hungry animals devouring everything in sight. “Othman shrugs his shoulders arrogantly, and his brothers stand with him, eating up the property of God as the camels eat up the springtime grasses.” Once that brief treasured lushness was gone, only barren desert would be left.

But the voice that gained the most attention was that of Aisha, who found herself for once on the same side as Ali. “That dotard,” she called Othman—a doddering old man in thrall to his relatives—and the word stuck, demeaning and mocking.

Some said she was roused to action only when Othman reduced her annual pension to that of the other Mothers of the Faithful, challenging her prominence. Others said she acted in the hope that her brother-in-law Talha would take over as Caliph. But there is also no doubt that Aisha was truly outraged by the extent of the corruption, which came to
a head over the scandalous behavior of Walid, one of Othman’s half brothers.

As the governor of the garrison city of Kufa in central Iraq, Walid did not even bother to disguise his aristocratic disdain for the residents under his control. With a kind of Arabian snobbery that would surface again and again, he contemptuously dismissed the native Iraqis as “provincial riffraff.” Unjust imprisonment? Expropriation of lands? Embezzlement from the public treasury? Such complaints against him, Walid declared, were worth “no more than a goat’s fart in the desert plains of Edom.”

One particular goat’s fart, however, would reach all the way to Medina when Walid appeared in the Kufa mosque flagrantly drunk and, in front of the assembled worshipers, vomited over the side of the pulpit. The Kufans sent a delegation to Medina to demand that he be recalled and publicly flogged, but Othman refused them point-blank. Worse, he threatened to punish them for daring to make such a demand, and when they then appealed to the leading Mother of the Faithful for support, he was heard to sneer in disdain: “Can the rebels and scoundrels of Iraq find no other refuge than the home of Aisha?”

The gauntlet was thrown: a challenge not just to “the rebels and scoundrels of Iraq” but to Aisha herself. As word spread of Othman’s sneer, many thought it a foolish thing to have done. Perhaps Aisha had been right in calling Othman a dotard. Perhaps he really was losing his grip, or at least his judgment. Certainly it seemed that way when a respected Medinan elder stood up in the mosque in public support of the Iraqis’ demands, and Othman’s response was to order him thrown out—so violently that four of his ribs were broken.

If Aisha had been outraged before, she was now incensed. That the guilty should go free and the innocent be beaten? No curtains or veils could stop her. Covering her face in public did not mean muffling her voice, not even—particularly not—in the mosque. The following Friday she stood up at the morning prayers, brandishing a sandal that had
belonged to Muhammad. “See how this, the Prophet’s own sandal, has not yet even fallen apart?” she shouted at Othman in that high, piercing voice of hers. “This is how quickly you have forgotten the
sunna,
his practice!”

How could Othman have underestimated her? But then whoever would have thought that a mere sandal could be used so effectively? As the whole mosque erupted in condemnation of the Caliph, people took off their own sandals and brandished them in Aisha’s support. A new propaganda tool had made its first powerful impression, one not lost on all the caliphs and shahs and sultans of centuries to come, who would produce inordinate numbers of ornately displayed relics of the Prophet—sandals, shirts, teeth, nail clippings, hair—to bolster their authority.