After the Battle of the Camel, Ali settled matters in Basra, paying those who had fought for him out of the official treasury. With Basra secured, he rode north to Kufa and stayed there. To some extent, the future of these cities as strongholds for the Shi’a, the Party of Ali, was laid now. He had been a revered Companion in Medina, but now they knew him. Instead of viewing Basra and Kufa as full of riffraff, he lived with them, and not in the luxurious walled-off house Uthman’s governor had built. He lived in a simple house by the mosque, as Muhammad had done. His sons Hassan and Hussein, as well as younger sons by other wives, lived with him and helped to rule, so they too formed many ties of personal loyalty in Iraq.
But in all of the garrison cities, a new faction was coming to prominence. The Quran had to be memorized and recited, but not every convert or fighter had the ability to learn the whole thing. The mosques recruited a corps of semi-professional Quran reciters who could always be called on to teach the recitation or simply recite for a group. They were called the Qurra. In the garrison cities, the Qurra were socially and politically powerful. The new generation who had grown up in Islam in the territories looked to them for leadership. They were the strictest of traditionalists who found fault with many things. They had criticized Uthman’s luxury, but they also criticized Ali’s becoming Caliph by acclamation of the crowd. The Qurra were to have an outsized influence on the second challenge to Ali. Worse, some of them would form the core of the third opposition—and become the first historical example of a militant faction like today’s ISIS.
Ali had fired and replaced Uthman’s governors. The second formal challenge to his authority was that Mu’awiya, Governor of Syria, refused to be fired and replaced. Mu’awiya had all of the political craft that Ali lacked, so while Ali was fighting the Battle of the Camel, Mu’awiya was setting things in place for himself. He made a separate peace with the Roman army (even paying tribute), so that he could forget about that border. He sent the tribes most likely to be loyal to Ali to guard frontier posts. He arrested any of Ali’s messengers to and from Egypt, and he sent his own messages to Amr, whom he knew well.
It’s possible that Amr was Mu’awiya’s half-brother, though legally he was not. (Insert complicated tale about Amr’s mother.) Amr had twice conquered Egypt and twice been fired as governor, each time replaced by Uthman’s half-brother. Now, with the Umayyad governor fired, Amr wasn’t the new choice. He was to be replaced again by the very young Muhammad ibn Abi Bakr, who had led the assassination of Uthman. Mu’awiya suggested that if Amr helped him stay in power, he would help Amr become Governor of Egypt. But their pact was kept strictly secret so that Amr could act independently on the surface.
I think Ali had a blind spot: his foster son, Muhammad ibn Abi Bakr. Caliph Umar (had he been alive) would have executed the young man and his friends for killing Uthman. But Ali didn’t. Shi’ites point out that Ali was supposed to succeed Muhammad from the start, and he had tolerated three Caliphs who moved increasingly away from the Prophet’s ways. Uthman wasn’t a legitimate ruler, they argue, so killing him was merely an act of war, not regicide. Additionally, Ali held A’isha, Talhah, and Zubayr equally responsible since they had incited revolt against Uthman.
But by appointing young Muhammad Governor of Egypt instead of punishing him, Ali was leaving open a big vulnerability. And by not appointing Amr, he was making a powerful enemy.
Mu’awiya’s rebellion was framed this way: he said that Ali could not dismiss him until Syria had been pacified by seeing Uthman’s killers punished. Uthman’s bloody shirt was circulating among Syrian mosques, and so were the cut-off fingers of his Syrian wife. Mu’awiya had spent months securing the loyalty of every Arab tribal chief in Syria and telling preachers to talk up how pious and holy Uthman had been. He had even brought out the old conflict between the Roman Arabs of Syria and the Persian Arabs of Iraq. His local converts had always viewed it as their duty to fight the Arabs of Iraq, even if that was supposed to be defunct now that they were all Muslims. So Mu’awiya could count on all of Syria to back him as he demanded justice.
The only way to defuse this crisis was for Ali to confirm to Mu’awiya that he could continue being governor and then make some sort of gesture about the murder. But Ali had no inclination to do this. To be fair, Umar would not have done it either. Umar’s policy had been not to let some governor build up independent power, which is why he had fired Amr in Egypt. But Uthman had wanted power built up in Syria, and now Ali faced the outcome. He could take actions like Umar, firing the arrogant governor, but the only way to enforce it was to confront him in battle. He was as reluctant as ever to force a battle with fellow Muslims, but some of his men were calling for an end to Mu’awiya’s corruption. Ali could count on Iraq to back him, even if he didn’t want it to come to that.
- After the Prophet, by Lesley Hazelton.
- The Heirs of Muhammad, by Barnaby Rogerson
- The Prophet’s Heir, by Hassan Abbas