After the Prophet: The Epic Story of the Shia-Sunni Split in Islam (16 page)

“Hamstring the camel!” he shouted. “If it’s hamstrung, it will fall, and they will disperse!” And the sudden leap of reason spurred one of his men to slip through the cordon of Aisha’s defenders and slash at the tendons of the camel’s rear legs.

An agonized bellowing filled the air. It took everyone by surprise, as though after all the terrified trumpeting of horses, the cries and howls of men on the attack or falling to their deaths, the clash of steel on steel, the unending stream of curses and taunts from the howdah, the last thing they expected was to be rooted to the spot by the maiming of a single animal. “I have never heard a louder sound than the bellowing of that camel,” one warrior declared, haunted by the memory of it, perhaps because once the bellowing stopped, there was silence.

Ali’s men stood staring as the camel teetered for a long moment, then slowly collapsed. When it finally hit the ground, they seemed to regain their senses, rushing to cut the straps holding the howdah in place, then lifting it off with Aisha still inside. There was not a sound from her now that she had been brought down to earth, and the silence
from the howdah was almost as unnerving as the noise from it had been before.

They had captured the Mother of the Faithful, but now they hung back, unsure how to proceed. None of them dared approach until Ali gave the order to Muhammad Abu Bakr, his stepson and Aisha’s half brother, who shouldered his way through the crowd, strode up to the howdah, and drew apart the armored curtains to ask, “Is all well with you?”

“I have an arrow in me,” she whispered, and there it was, embedded in the flesh of her upper arm, the only barb out of the hundreds shot at the howdah that had penetrated the armor. Her half brother reached in and pulled it out, and if the pain of it was terrible, as it surely was, Aisha allowed not so much as a whimper to escape her lips. Even in defeat, her pride would not permit weakness.

Her voice issued calm and clear from inside the howdah as she finally conceded the battle, if not the war. “Ali son of Abu Talib,” she said, “you have gained victory. You have put your forces to the test well today, so now pardon with goodness.”

“Oh Mother, may God forgive you,” he said.

“And you,” was her ambiguous reply, but Ali let it pass.

Goodness there would be. Ali ordered his stepson to escort Aisha back to Basra; her wound was to be treated, and she was to be accorded full respect. Only then, as she was mounted on a horse and led away from the field, did she seem to register the full extent of what had happened. “Oh God,” she kept saying, “had I but died two decades before this day!” Yet it would never be clear if she said this in shame at her defeat, or in regret for her actions, or in sorrow for the thousands of warriors slain at her command.

Ali stayed behind. As the light faded, he walked the corpse-strewn battlefield, and as he went, he repeated the same phrase Aisha had used:
“Oh God, had I but died two decades before this day!” Deep in dismay and sorrow, he patrolled the field far into the night. His men watched as he stopped at every dead body and prayed over it, both those of his own side and those of Aisha’s. Many of them he recognized. He paid tribute to their bravery and grieved for their lives, but above all, he spoke of his horror at the sight of so many Muslims killed by Muslims. “I have healed my wounds this day,” he mourned, “but I have killed my own people.”

He stayed there three days, making amends in the way only he could. He forbade his men to kill the enemy wounded or captives. These were not apostates but good Muslims, he declared; they should be accorded the utmost respect. Those who had fled were not to be pursued. All prisoners were to be set free after pledging allegiance to him, and the usual spoils of war swords and daggers, purses and jewelry—were to be returned. To compensate his own men for the loss of spoils, he would pay them directly from the treasury of Basra.

The enemy dead were buried as honorably as those who had fought for Ali. The hundreds of severed limbs were gathered together and placed with ceremony in one large grave. Only when all that had been done—when each and every one of the thousands of dead had been laid to rest in accordance with Islamic law—did Ali ride into Basra and accept the whole city’s renewed pledge of allegiance.

If he had done all he could to ease the inevitable bitterness of defeat for those who had fought against him, he now did even more for the woman who had led them. To demean Aisha in defeat, he insisted, would only be to demean both himself and Islam. Once again, he chose the path of unity over that of revenge. When Aisha had recovered from the wound in her arm, Ali assigned Muhammad Abu Bakr to head a military escort to take her back to Medina, together with a full entourage of Basran women to see to her every need, and as her caravan prepared to leave, Aisha seemed to acknowledge his graciousness—at least in part.

“My sons,” she told the Basrans, “it is true that some of us criticized
others, but do not hold what you have heard against them. By God, there was never anything between myself and Ali other than what usually happens between a woman and her in-laws. Whatever I have said in the past, he has shown himself one of the best of men.”

It was as close as she would ever come to a concession speech. Never mind that despite the apparent meekness, it glossed over the truth. She had reduced a bid for control of a vast empire to the level of a mere family squabble, and, in so doing, had surely belittled the thousands who had given their lives for it. Moreover, if she seemed to imply that she accepted Ali as Caliph, she had avoided actually saying so. But Ali could see that this was as far as she would go; there was nothing to be gained by pushing for more. “By God, men,” he said, “she has spoken the truth and nothing but the truth. She is the wife of your Prophet now and forever.” And together with his sons Hasan and Hussein, he did her the honor of riding alongside her for the first few miles of the route back to Medina.

Aisha accepted all this as her due, but on that long journey back to the Hijaz mountains and the shelter of home, she surely knew that she had suffered far more than a single defeat in battle. If Ali had accorded her honor in defeat, his aides had been less inclined to goodness. She would have many years yet to mull the words of one of his cousins, who had marched uninvited into the house where she was recuperating in Basra and let loose with a torrent of vituperation.

It was she who had incited the people against Othman, he reminded her. Brandishing the Prophet’s sandal the way she had? That was an insult to everything Muhammad had stood for. “If you had but a single hair of the Prophet’s,” he said, “you would boast of it and claim to benefit through it.” Worse, by inciting Muslims to battle against other Muslims, she had committed a crime against the Quran, the word of God. But above all, how dare she challenge the
Ahl al-Bayt,
the family of Muhammad?

“We are of the Prophet’s flesh and blood,” he said, “while you are merely one of nine stuffed beds he left behind. And not the one with the firmest root, or the lushest leaves, or the widest shade.”

How horrible for the defeated Aisha to hear herself described as just another of the Prophet’s wives, and in such crude terms. For the woman who had always insisted on her unique closeness to Muhammad, this was the ultimate humiliation. And how awful to have her childlessness—no root, no branches, no leaves—thrown in her face yet again, and under such circumstances. This she would never forgive, or forget.

N
OW, SURELY, WAS THE GOLDEN MOMENT FOR
A
LI, THE MOMENT
he and his supporters had waited for. After the stunning victory of the Battle of the Camel, his position seemed unassailable. Yet he must have sensed that the prize he had thought rightfully his all along had begun to turn to dust from the moment he first held it in his hand. He had been Caliph for four months and would remain Caliph for only another four and a half years.

As the early Islamic historians told the story of his brief rule, it would achieve the epic dimensions of classical tragedy. The story they told was that of a noble leader brought low by his own nobility. Of a man of integrity undone by his reluctance to compromise his principles. Of a ruler betrayed as much by the inconstancy of his supporters as by the malice of his enemies. And all of it fated to be, for the tragic flaw was there from the beginning.

Ali had gained the caliphate under tainted circumstances. They were circumstances beyond his control, to be sure—he had done all he could to prevent Othman’s assassination—but they were tainted none theless. No matter the twenty-five years he had sacrificed for the sake of
unity within Islam, or his spiritual insight, or the justice of his cause. However great his determination to avoid the nightmare of dissension—of
fitna—
the nightmare had caught up with him, and engulfed him.

History had turned on him with a horrible irony. Beware of what you wish for, they say, and that thought surely haunted him as he roamed the battlefield after his victory, praying over the corpse of each warrior and wishing he had not lived to see this day. He had pardoned Aisha with goodness—would have done so even if she had not asked—but all the goodness in his nature had not saved him from what he most feared. Worse still, it would now work against him, for though Ali did not yet know it, he had only just begun to fight the real war.

All the while, a far more formidable opponent had been merely biding his time. In Damascus, Muawiya had stood calmly by as Ali had been drawn into civil war. The grisly relics of Othman’s assassination still hung on the pulpit of the main mosque as he had ordered, serving as all too vivid testimony to the original sin of Ali’s rule. But Muawiya saw no reason to take action as long as there was a chance Aisha would do his work for him. Now that she had been defeated, however, he decided to play his hand. He made the cool calculation that if Ali had displayed great nobility of purpose in dealing with Aisha, that same nobility could also serve to hasten his undoing.

The slinky sinuousness of the four drawn-out syllables of the name—Mu-a-wi-ya—seems almost tailor-made for the Shia curses that would be heaped on it in centuries to come. Yet though he would become the Shia epitome of evil, Muawiya may well have been the one man with the political skill and power to keep Islam from falling apart after Ali’s death. Certainly he was no one-dimensional villain, though it is true he looked the part. He had a protruding stomach, bulging eyes, and feet swollen by gout, but as though in compensation for his physical shortcomings, he was possessed of an extraordinary subtlety of mind. If
he lacked Ali’s virtues, he had instead the inordinate advantage of strategic skill and political adroitness.

He ran Syria smoothly—“there is nothing I like better than a bubbling spring in an easy land,” he was fond of saying—but it took a certain brilliance to make it look so effortless. By his own account, Muawiya was “a man blessed with patience and deliberateness”—an expert dissimulator, that is, with a positively Byzantine sense of politics that allowed him to turn things to his advantage without seeming to do so.

“How far does your cunning reach?” he once asked his top general. The proud reply—“I have never been trapped in any situation from which I did not know how to extricate myself”—set up the perfect trump card for Muawiya, who countered: “I have never been trapped in any situation from which I
needed to
extricate myself.”

Eight centuries before Niccolò Machiavelli wrote
The Prince,
Muawiya was the supreme expert in the attainment and maintenance of power, a clear-eyed pragmatist who delighted in the art and science of manipulation, whether by bribery, flattery, intelligence, or exquisitely calculated deception. His father, Abu Sufyan, had been the wealthiest and most powerful of Mecca’s traders and had owned valuable estates and mansions in the rich trading hub of Damascus long before Muhammad had his first Quranic revelation. And though Abu Sufyan had led the Meccan opposition to Muhammad, his son’s family ties extended even to the Prophet himself. After the
fatah,
the “opening” of Mecca to Islam, Muhammad had brought Muawiya close in a demonstration of unity. His eighth wife after Khadija’s death had been Umm Habiba, Muawiya’s sister, and he had appointed her brother to the coveted position of one of his scribes, so that Muawiya could tell of being among those present in Aisha’s chamber in the days that Muhammad lay dying. If no others remembered him being there, it was certainly not in their interest to say so.

He had originally been appointed governor of Syria by the second Caliph, Omar, and was then reconfirmed by Othman, not the least because
he was Umayyad kin—a second cousin, in fact. But he was also extraordinarily capable. By the time Ali was acclaimed Caliph, Muawiya had ruled Syria for close to twenty years, and the whole province—nearly all the land now known as Turkey, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Israel, and Palestine—had become his own personal fiefdom, a powerhouse in its own right.

Until now any role he had played in determining the caliphate had been behind the scenes. Certainly there had been rumors about his involvement in Othman’s assassination. Had that secret letter that so incensed the rebels been planted by Marwan on Muawiya’s orders? Had Muawiya deliberately withheld the reinforcements requested by the besieged Caliph? Whether there was any truth to such rumors would always remain unclear, and that was the way Muawiya liked it. If they were to be proved true, they would assign power to him; if proved untrue, they would underline his integrity and loyalty to his cousin. So why acknowledge or deny? Either way, rumor played to his advantage. If people wanted to see him in the role of puppet master, staying behind the scenes and pulling the strings, so be it. It established him as a man it was always unwise to ignore.

For the meantime, he had seemed content to consolidate his position and wait patiently, and he had done so in luxury. His palace in Damascus—known as al-Khadra, the Green One, for its distinctive green-marbled facing—was finer by far than Othman’s in Medina, yet there was none of the resentment against him that Othman had seemed to inspire, perhaps because Muawiya was known for his generosity as much as for his ruthlessness. In fact, he prided himself on being exactly as generous and precisely as ruthless as he needed to be.