After the Prophet: The Epic Story of the Shia-Sunni Split in Islam (22 page)

The son of her nemesis Ali to lie alongside the Prophet? Under the floor of the chamber that had once been hers and that still legally belonged to her? She could not allow such a thing. She gave orders for a gray mule to be saddled and rode out to intercept the procession as it
wound through the narrow alleys near the mosque, stopping it in its tracks. “That chamber is still my property,” she announced. “I do not grant permission for anyone else to be buried there.”

The crowd of mourners came to a halt, and their numbers soon swelled with others, attracted by the confrontation. Some spoke out in favor of Hussein, who stood by his brother’s bier at the head of the procession; others were in favor of Aisha, who sat firm on her mule, unbudging. One of her nephews tried to defuse the situation with humor. “Oh aunt,” he said, “we are still washing our beards from the Battle of the Red Camel, and you would now have people speak of the Battle of the Gray Mule?” But as the dispute grew more heated and threatened to get physical, it was Hussein who found a way to save face for all concerned.

It was true that his brother had asked to be buried alongside his grandfather the Prophet, he said, but the request had come with a proviso: “unless you fear evil.” Since evil was now to be feared in the form of a fight at a funeral, Hussein gave the order to divert the procession to the cemetery. Instead of being buried alongside Muhammad, Hasan would lie next to his mother, Fatima.

And so it was done. Nobody would ever know for sure whether it was at Muawiya’s command or Aisha’s insistence, but to place the blame on Aisha was certainly an excellent way to divert it from Muawiya. The bold and irrepressible leader of the Mothers of the Faithful was no longer beyond reproach.

The fire was still there, but only in sparks. “Are you not afraid I will poison you in revenge for the death of my brother Muhammad Abu Bakr?” she once asked Muawiya when he visited Medina and paid her a courtesy call. It was he who told the story, laconically adding the famed comment that “there was never any subject I wished closed that she would not open, or that I wished opened that she would not close.” Even in forced retirement, Aisha still commanded respect, however grudging.

These were the years in which she did what retired public figures
still do: in effect, she wrote her memoirs, or at least dictated them. She told the stories of her life with Muhammad, many of which are still enshrined as
hadith—
the reports of Muhammad’s sayings and practice that would form the
sunna,
taking second place in Islam only to the Quran itself. Aisha told the stories again and again, refining them each time, and if anyone pointed out that her recollections sometimes contradicted one another, she would take a tack familiar to modern politicians. She had misspoken then, she would say, but was speaking correctly now. Or in a still more familiar tactic, she would simply deny ever having said whatever it was she had said before.

Still, retirement did mellow even her. In the years after Hasan’s death, with Muawiya clearly bent on turning the caliphate into a monarchy, she seemed to regret her role in taking arms against Ali. “I caused wrongdoing after the Prophet,” she acknowledged, and steered clear of politics, contenting herself with the constant flow of visitors, the diplomatic courtesy visits, the gifts and adulation. Yet she must have realized how meaningless all this was. She had been at the center of the story of Islam, and now she was on the sidelines. Times had changed, the empire had changed, and Aisha had little option but to accept being made into a kind of living monument.

Worse still, there were those who would have preferred that she be a dead one. Among the politicians making the obligatory courtesy call on her in Medina was Amr, Muawiya’s governor of Egypt and his former chief of staff, who made no bones about the matter. Aisha knew that Amr spoke for Muawiya as well as for himself when he told her to her face that it would have been better for all concerned if she had been killed at the Battle of the Camel. When she asked how so—and only Aisha would even have asked—the answer came with horribly unexpected frankness. “Because then you would have died at the height of your glory and entered heaven,” Amr said, “while we would have proclaimed your death as the most infamous act of Ali.”

And so saying, he left Aisha with the question that would surely
unsettle her for the rest of her life. Where she had always thought of herself as the virtual queen of Islam, had she been all along merely a pawn in someone else’s game?

Muawiya made the formal announcement of his son, Yazid, as his successor. He included no mention of Hussein, doubtless certain that he could persuade Ali’s younger son into passivity just as he had done the elder. Since the father had accepted arbitration, and the older brother abdication, why should the younger brother behave any differently? Indeed, for another ten years, so long as Muawiya ruled, he would not. Hussein also knew how to be patient. Age, after all, was the one thing Muawiya could not control.

The gout and obesity caused by a lifetime of indulgence finally caught up with the fifth Caliph, though even in his last days, he made sure to present the image of someone in firm control. Propped up on pillows, he had
kohl
applied around his eyes to make them livelier and his face oiled to make it shine as though with vigor. But if vanity ruled the end of his life, so too did a sudden burst of piety. He instructed that he be buried in a shirt he said had been given him by Muhammad himself, a shirt he had kept along with some of the Prophet’s nail clippings. “Cut up and grind these nail parings,” he said, “then sprinkle them in my eyes and in my mouth. Thus God might have mercy on me by their blessing.”

He died with Yazid by his side and Hussein on his mind. His last words to his son included a caution: “Hussein is a weak and insignificant man, but the people of Iraq will not leave him alone until they make him rebel. If that happens and you defeat him, pardon him, for he has close kinship to the Prophet and a great claim.”

If Yazid had only heeded him, centuries of strife and division could perhaps have been avoided. But one way or another, history is often made by the heedless.

On April 22 in the year 680, Yazid was acclaimed Caliph. He
moved swiftly to consolidate his position, reconfirming Ziyad’s son Ubaydallah as governor of Iraq in the hope of squelching any incipient uprising there. At the same time, he ordered his governor in Medina to arrest Hussein. “Act so fiercely that he has no chance to do anything before giving public allegiance to me,” he wrote. “If he refuses, execute him.”

But the same governor who had done Muawiya’s bidding was not so quick to obey Yazid’s orders. To prevent Hasan from being buried alongside Muhammad was one thing, but to kill Hussein, Muhammad’s one remaining grandson? That was beyond the pale. “I could not do this, not for all the wealth and power in the world,” he said.

Perhaps it was the governor himself who warned Hussein of what was afoot, or perhaps someone in his employ. All we know is that later that night, under cover of darkness, Hussein gathered together all his blood kin and fled the two hundred and fifty miles from Medina to Mecca.

That was when they began to arrive, messenger after messenger, exhausted from the long, urgent ride from Kufa. All of them bore letters begging Hussein to come to Iraq. Pleading with him to save them from the brutality and injustice of Yazid and his governor Ubaydallah. Calling on him to reclaim the caliphate and restore the soul of Islam. And then came the most persuasive letter of all, the one from Muslim, Hussein’s cousin, assuring him that he had twelve thousand men ready to rise up under his leadership.

Hussein’s response was to engrave the tragic rift between Shia and Sunni deep into the Muslim psyche. The third Imam, son of the first and brother of the second, set out from Mecca for Iraq in September of 680, with his family and just seventy-two armed men, not knowing that he was journeying toward his death—that within the month, he was destined to become forever the Prince of Martyrs.

I
T IS NOT TRUE THAT
H
USSEIN DID NOT KNOW WHAT AWAITED
him, the Shia maintain. The whole point is that he knew, yet set out nonetheless in full awareness of the sacrifice he would make. He had to have known, after all. There were so many warnings from so many people, warnings that began even before he started on the journey to Iraq with his family and those seventy-two warriors.

“Who can tell if the Kufans will really rise up and overthrow their oppressors?” worried one of his cousins. “These are people who can always be bought. They are slaves to the dirham. I fear they will desert you, even make war on you.”

Hussein seemed immune to such concerns. “By God, cousin, I know your advice is good and reasonable,” he replied. “But what is fated is fated, and will happen whether I heed you or not.”

Still, why court fate? Why ride toward it even as the warnings multiplied? Just one day’s journey out of Mecca, a rider came with a message from another cousin. “I ask you by God to return,” he wrote. “The hearts of the Iraqis may be with you, but I fear their swords belong to Yazid.” Hussein merely registered the warning and kept going.

The following day brought a message from none other than the governor of Mecca. Risking his position, even his life, he gave Hussein his personal guarantee of “safe conduct, kindness, generosity, and protection” if he would only return to Mecca. But all Hussein would say in response was: “The best guarantee of safe conduct is that of God.”

Besides, his numbers were growing. As his small caravan crossed over the jagged Hijaz mountains and into the high desert steppeland of northern Arabia, their pace timed to arrive at least every other night at a watering place—a well or at least a small shallow spring—word of their journey preceded them. Tribal warriors joined their ranks, roused by the idea of Hussein’s reclaiming power for Arabia. By the end of the first week of the three-week journey, the original seventy-two warriors had swelled to several hundred. By the time they reached Iraq they would surely be an army.

Yet still the messages kept coming, each one a warning to beware of Iraq. Each time Hussein acknowledged it as “good and reasonable advice,” and each time he ignored it. And then came the message that was surely impossible to ignore.

The messenger rode so hard that even in the twilight they could see the cloud of dust thrown up by his horse when he was still miles away. He came not from behind them, as the others had done, but from ahead—not from Mecca, that is, but from Iraq. They had just begun to set up camp when he pulled in, dismounted, and refused even a drink of water, so urgent was his news.

He had been sent by Hussein’s cousin Muslim, who had not misled Hussein when he had written that he should set out immediately for Kufa. All the men of that city had indeed streamed out to pledge allegiance to Hussein as the true Caliph. They had indeed sworn to rise up and oust Yazid’s governor Ubaydallah, and had called for Hussein to come and lead them on to Damascus, to unseat the usurper Yazid and to declare himself as the one and only true successor to his grandfather Muhammad and his father, Ali. All this was true, said the messenger, but things had changed.

If Muslim had been less devoted, he might perhaps have been a more careful judge of oaths given with such demonstrative alacrity. He might have remembered that oaths were one thing, the courage to follow through on them another. But he too had been caught up in the moment and had believed what he wanted to believe.

The men of Kufa could not be blamed. They had been carried away with hope, caught up in the heady idea of Hussein ready to overthrow oppression and injustice. But hope can be as evanescent as it is inspirational. The Kufans had families to care for, livings to make, lives to protect. They could recognize a superior force when they saw it.

Their governor, the son of the infamous Ziyad, was about to become still more infamous himself. Like his father before him—like any tyrannical ruler at any time, in fact—Ubaydallah knew how dangerous hope can be, and knew equally well how to quash it. There was no question of his ever allowing Hussein to reach Kufa, none either of Muslim’s ever leaving the city alive.

“Do not expose yourselves to death,” he told the Kufans. “If you shelter this man, you will taste the evil you have earned.” And with the stick well established, he introduced the carrot: a large bounty on Muslim’s head.

Nobody in Kufa entertained the slightest doubt as to exactly how Ubaydallah might wield the stick. Those who had displeased him in the past had been crucified in the camel market, their bodies left there to rot as their homes were demolished and their families turned out into the desert. The twelve thousand men who had so loudly and bravely pledged to fight alongside Muslim under Hussein’s command were quickly reduced to only four thousand, then to three hundred, then to a mere handful. Within the space of a single day, Muslim found himself alone.

He had gone from house to house, knocking on barred doors and pleading for shelter from Ubaydallah’s police. He never thought to be
suspicious when one door opened at last, never imagined that this family had taken him in only in order to betray him and claim the bounty on his head.

When Ubaydallah’s agents came for him that evening, he managed to persuade one brave soul to ride out of Kufa as fast as he could, both night and day, and intercept Hussein. “Tell him to turn back,” Muslim said. “Tell him the Kufans have lied to me and lied to him.”

The messenger had set out even as Muslim was being taken in chains to the governor’s mansion. There was no doubt what Muslim’s fate would be. It was the evening of Monday, September 8, in the year 680, and whatever hope there had been for an uprising was utterly extinguished. At dawn the following morning, at the exact time that Hussein and his small caravan set out from Mecca en route to Iraq, Muslim’s headless body would be dragged to the camel market and strung up for all to see.

This was the story the messenger told, and before he had even finished, the tribal warriors began to melt away into the darkness, leaving only Hussein, his family, and the original seventy-two warriors. Hussein’s mission had surely failed before it had even begun. Yet if he considered for a moment turning back, there is no record of it.