After the Prophet: The Epic Story of the Shia-Sunni Split in Islam (12 page)

Othman was left with no option but to agree to Walid’s recall. He delayed giving the order, however, and balked at the demand for a flogging. Nobody could be found who was willing to administer the required eighty lashes, he claimed, though this was clearly untrue. Worse, the contrast with his predecessor, Omar, could not have been stronger. Nobody had forgotten that Omar had ordered precisely the same punishment for one of his own sons, who had then died under the lash. Under Omar, loyalty to the principles of Islam had trumped any loyalty to family—a principle now utterly undermined by Othman.

Merely recalling his half brother was no longer enough. Letters calling for stronger action traveled the desert routes between Arabia, Egypt, and Iraq, and among them, fiery broadsides from Aisha. Writing in the name of all the Mothers of the Faithful, she called on true Muslims to defend Islam against injustice and corruption. The response took even her by surprise. Within weeks, three columns of heavily armed warriors had arrived in Medina: one each from the garrisons of Kufa and Basra in Iraq, and one from the garrison of Fustat in Egypt, just south of what would eventually be the city of Cairo.

These were no “provincial riffraff.” They were several hundred of
the best of the Muslim military, led by men of impeccable lineage who left no doubt as to what they wanted: Either Othman took decisive action to address their complaints, or he should resign. Most prominent among their leaders was the son of the first Caliph—Aisha’s own half brother Muhammad Abu Bakr. The boy whose widowed mother had married Ali was now grown to manhood, but with neither the judgment nor the patience of his father or his stepfather. Under his orders, the three armed columns did not disperse on arrival to stay with family in Medina but demonstratively set up camp in the dry riverbeds just outside the oasis, on full military alert.

All of Medina waited tensely to see what would happen. Was a coup d’état in the works? Would there be an attack on the palace, even on the Caliph himself? Surely that was unthinkable; Muslim did not kill Muslim, after all. And indeed, despite their militant posturing, the rebels—for that is what they surely were—held back from immediate action. Instead, they reached out to Ali, the one man who had proven his commitment to unity above all else.

For two weeks, Ali acted as mediator. No matter that one side was headed by his own stepson, whose demands he fully endorsed; he was horrified by the younger man’s rashness in resorting to armed threat. No matter either that the other side was headed by a Caliph whose style of leadership was the antithesis of everything Ali believed in; he had sworn allegiance to Othman, and allegiance he would give. His would be the role of the honest broker, his ultimate loyalty to neither side, but to the good of Islam, and he might well have succeeded were it not that every step he took was undercut by Othman’s cousin and chief of staff, Marwan.

Marwan was known as Ibn Tarid, the Son of the Exile, at least when his back was turned. The exile in question was his father, who had
been a leading Umayyad opponent of Muhammad’s. When Muhammad had conquered Mecca, he had given all the Quraysh a last chance to be accepted into the Islamic fold as full members of the community. The sole exception he made was Marwan’s father, whom he so distrusted despite his last-minute avowal of faith that he ordered him banished along with his family to the mountain city of Taif. Both Abu Bakr and Omar had kept the order of exile in place, but when Othman became Caliph, he had revoked it and called his young cousin to Medina to serve as his chief of staff. It was a position of enormous power, and one that Marwan lost no time taking advantage of.

There was the huge bite he took for himself out of the war booty from the conquest of Egypt, for example, or the matter of how he leveraged the market on animal feed to his own advantage. A canny operator with an eye always on the main chance, he would finally claim the caliphate for himself forty years later, but only for a year. After he had married the widow of the man he had deposed, she and her servants would trap him in his own bed, piling all their weight on top of him until he suffocated—an ignominious death that would give great pleasure to many in the telling.

Under Othman, however, Marwan was in the ascendant. Every approach to the aging Caliph, every financial decision, every piece of information, had to come through him. Nobody said so much as a word to Othman without his say-so. People had the impression of an increasingly frail leader so overwhelmed by the demands of empire that he preferred to retreat into the solitary work of scholarship. Othman spent most of his time compiling the authorized version of the Quran, they’d say, and so was unaware of the degree to which his ambitious kinsman was subverting his authority. Whether this was really so, or whether it was politically wiser to blame Marwan instead of Othman himself, is another question.

Meanwhile, with the rebels camped outside the city, it was Marwan
who argued most forcefully against any concession to their demands. That would only encourage further mutiny in the provinces, he insisted. With almost deliciously hypocritical righteousness, he urged Othman to stay the course and not be intimidated, however wrong he might be. “To persist in wrongdoing for which you can ask God’s forgiveness,” he said piously, “is better than penitence compelled by fear.” And in demonstration of his point, he went out to the rebel encampment and let loose with a tirade that seemed designed only to provoke.

“What is the matter with you that you assemble as though for plunder?” he yelled. “May your faces be disfigured! You have come wanting to wrest our property from our hands. Be off from us! By God, if that is what you want, you will not praise the outcome. Go back where you belong, for we shall not be deprived of what is ours.”

It was a measure of Ali’s success in urging restraint that Marwan was driven off by curses instead of arrows, but such restraint could not last, and Ali knew it. He managed to warn Othman. Marwan was making it impossible for him to act effectively as a mediator, he said, and he could take no responsibility for what might happen if Othman did not put his foot down and rein in his cousin. But the Caliph would hear nothing of it, not even when his favorite wife, Naila, seconded Ali, trying to make her husband see the danger of Marwan’s advice. Was it loyalty to family, or was he really in his dotage? Nobody knew, and by now it hardly mattered.

Three days later, when Othman next appeared in the pulpit of the mosque for Friday prayers, he was greeted by jeers and catcalls. One respected elder had even brought along props for emphasis. “Look,” he shouted at Othman, “we’ve brought you a decrepit she-camel, along with a striped wool cloak and an iron collar. Get down from the pulpit so that we can wrap you in the cloak, put the collar on you, and put you on the camel. Then we ’ll carry you off to the Mount of Smoke”—the main garbage dump of Medina, smoldering with decomposing trash—“and leave you there.”

And with that, to drive the message home, the crowd began to fling pebbles at the pulpit, a hail of them aiming hard and true, striking the aging Caliph and knocking him unconscious.

For the Caliph to be stoned unconscious, and in the mosque itself? This was surely full-scale rebellion, an invitation to the harshest of reprisals, as Marwan had urged. Yet even as he was recovering from the stoning, Othman steadfastly refused to order the use of force. Whatever his sins, he said, he was a devout Muslim, and as such, he was determined that no Muslim blood be shed at his order. Yet with equal determination, he refused to resign. Perhaps he really did not grasp the extent of what was happening, or perhaps he truly did believe that he was the deputy not of Muhammad but of God. He hadn’t the right to resign, he maintained. “I cannot take off the robes in which God has dressed me.” And with this, he signed his death warrant.

The question was who would write that warrant, for it did indeed exist. It took the form of what came to be known as the Secret Letter, lying in wait to be discovered just when it looked as though the crisis had been defused and open conflict averted.

After that stoning in the mosque, Othman had appeared truly shaken and chastened, professing profound regret at having let things develop to such a pass. Now at last he acknowledged the justice of the rebels’ demands and pledged not only to dismiss the two most controversial of his governors—his half brother Walid in Kufa and a brother-in-law in the Egyptian garrison of Fustat—but to appoint Ali’s stepson Muhammad Abu Bakr the new governor of Egypt. Moreover, lest anyone doubt the sincerity of this pledge, Ali would stand as its personal guarantor.

If one could hear a city sigh with relief, it would have been Medina at that moment. The crisis had been averted, and justice achieved. With Ali’s word as their pledge, the rebels struck camp and set off on the long
ride back to their garrisons. All might have been well if just three days into their journey back to Egypt, the young Abu Bakr and his men had not seen a messenger riding full tilt behind them, evidently intent on overtaking them.

They stopped and questioned the messenger, and when they realized he was in the service of the Caliph, they searched his saddlebags. There they found a heavy brass inkpot of the kind used by professional scribes, with ink powders and mixing bottles set into a solid base, and compartments for parchment and quills, knives, and seals. One of these compartments was a secret one, however, and inside it they found a letter stamped with Othman’s personal seal and addressed to his brother-in-law, the governor of Egypt he had just pledged to replace.

All the leaders of the returning rebels were to be arrested instantly, the letter instructed. First their hair and beards were to be torn out—a calculatedly emasculating form of punishment when so much male pride was vested in long hair and ample beards—and then they were to be given one hundred lashes each. If any still survived, they were to be thrown in prison.

What more was needed? With the written evidence of double-dealing in their hands, the rebels turned around. Three days later they were back in Medina, and this time they didn’t merely camp on the outskirts. In no mood to negotiate, they surrounded the palace and placed it under siege.

The seal on the letter was clearly Othman’s. Indeed, he acknowledged as much when faced with it. But the letter itself? He swore he’d had absolutely no knowledge of it. Nobody knew for certain if this was the truth or merely plausible deniability. Some were convinced he was lying, while some saw the hand of Marwan at work, even claiming that the letter was in his handwriting. Others argued that it made no difference whose handwriting it was; the Caliph’s seal was on the letter, they said, and if his seal could be used without his knowledge, he had no right to his position. Eventually, it was even rumored that it was Ali who had arranged for the letter to be planted and discovered in order to bring
about Othman’s downfall—and said too that this rumor had itself been planted by Marwan. There was room enough in the story to support any number of conspiracy theories. Only one thing was certain: the secret letter was the end of Othman.

The rebels were not intent on murder—not at first, at least, since they chose to besiege the palace, not to storm it. Though a few did call for
outright jihad
against the Caliph, even they could never have had any intention of beginning the long succession of assassinations that would blight the coming centuries of Islamic history and continue to blight it today. There was still horror at the idea of Muslim killing Muslim, let alone the Caliph.

What they wanted was the very thing Othman refused to give them: his abdication, immediately. There was no longer any room for negotiation. Ali had tried his best, but as the guarantor of the agreement betrayed by the secret letter, he had been double-crossed as badly as the rebels themselves. He could see the potential for violence—he even posted his sons Hasan and Hussein, now grown men in their twenties, to stand guard at the palace—but he surely knew that with Othman so stubbornly entrenched, there was no more he could do to avert disaster. He spent the coming days in prayer in the mosque.

Aisha must have wished she could do the same, and in her way, she did. She could not have played a more public role in stirring up feeling against “that dotard,” but she had never imagined things would go this far. She had used Muhammad’s sandal to bring Othman back to his senses, but now he seemed to have lost them completely. How could she have foreseen that secret letter? How had things come to the point where she was on the same side as Ali, of all people? Where her own half brother was now besieging the palace? Where she could in good conscience defend neither him nor the Caliph? The whirlpool of overlapping conflicts and loyalties overwhelmed even
her, and as the situation worsened, she reached for a way out. She would leave for Mecca on pilgrimage, she announced—not the
hajj
but the
umra,
the individual “lesser pilgrimage” that could be made at any time of the year.

The moment he heard of her plans, Marwan recognized the danger. Aisha’s leaving under such circumstances would be taken as a clear signal to the rebels that she would not stand in their way—a silent but powerful blessing of their position. He slipped out of the palace under cover of darkness and made his way to her house. She could not leave, he argued. She had helped create this situation with those fiery letters and speeches of hers, and now she was duty bound to stay and help resolve it. If Othman had scorned her for sheltering “the rebels and scoundrels of Iraq,” he had been wrong; he needed her influence with them now, lest things get completely out of hand.

But it was too little, too late. Just a few weeks earlier, Aisha might have taken a certain pleasure in the Caliph’s right-hand man pleading with her. She might have taunted him with his newfound respect for the Mother of the Faithful, and would certainly have found a way to turn the situation to her advantage. By now, however, there was no longer any advantage to be had.

“You’re running away after setting the country ablaze,” Marwan finally accused her, but Aisha would have none of it.