All of these events had taken just over a year to play out (though the arbitration process may have gone on longer). Ali remained Caliph of the eastern portion of the Islamic Empire, with nominal control of Arabia. Mu’awiya ruled Syria and Egypt. Effectively it was the solution Mu’awiya had proposed before the Battle of Siffin, which Ali had refused; but Ali was not willing to go to war for this cause again. He felt enough blood had been shed.
Ali lived an austere life, as had Umar. He ate simple food; Shi’ite history remembers him as eating a diet of barley, greens, and occasional milk. The traditional Arab diet had majored in meat from sheep, goats and camels, but Ali ate some meat only once a week, saying that the stomach should not be a graveyard. (Abbas, 155) He wore old clothes and spent time with the poor. He preached the Friday sermon in Kufa every week, too. The Najul al-Balagha contains 240 sermons, probably from these years.
He was focused on scrupulous justice and forgiveness. An interesting detail about Ali’s rule: Abbas (The Prophet’s Heir) reports that he continued to pay veterans’ stipends to Rejectionists. If they were owed money from having fought in a historic battle, they still got it, even if they had been rebels.
The Rejectionist survivors were still around. Their attitudes had hardened even more; they saw things as a defeated Bedouin tribe with a duty to take revenge for their relatives’ deaths. They blamed Ali first, but also Mu’awiya. There are two ways the final chapter can be told.
In 661, a Rejectionist assassin went to the Kufa mosque and hid, waiting to kill Ali when he entered. As Ali prostrated himself in prayer, the assassin struck him with a poisoned blade. Ali might have survived the wound, since of course there were many men around him to seize the assassin before he could strike again.
The story can also be told as of three assassins who all set out to kill Mu’awiya, Amr and Ali at (roughly) the same time. This is more the Sunni version, since it emphasizes an attack on all authorities, not just on Ali. Mu’awiya and Amr survived, though. One didn’t go to prayers that day, and another man was killed by mistake; the other had guards to wrestle the assassin to the ground.
In the Shi’ite telling, Ali foresaw his death and felt happy to be finally going to Paradise. He lingered for two days, his body battling the poison. He forbade revenge, saying that if he died, the assassin should be simply beheaded for murder, no torture or painful extras. His last words told his sons not to value the world, nor to weep for anything that was taken from them. He died on the 21st day of Ramadan, which is the same day (by Arab lunar calendar) that Muhammad had his first revelation. In a sermon after his death, his son Hassan claimed it was also the same day that Moses received the Commandments and Jesus was crucified.
Ali wanted a secret burial, since he could be fairly sure that the Rejectionists or Umayyads would want to violate his grave. He left orders for his sons to put his body on his camel and allow it to wander. It was the same method Muhammad had used to choose two key places. The camel wandered toward present-day Najaf, finally stopping at a random place. They buried him there. But several more “burials” were carried out as decoys, including the honored public funeral in Kufa that everyone expected.
The place was a secret for a long time, marked very simply so that only those in on the secret could know. Years later, Caliph Haroun al-Rashid found the marker, and at last the keepers of the secret decided to tell him. He honored the gravesite. Ali’s shrine in Najaf has been a pilgrimage destination for Muslims, especially the Shi’a. Of course, in our time it has also been a bombing destination. So far, the mosque has survived with only superficial damage.
- After the Prophet, by Lesley Hazelton.
- The Heirs of Muhammad, by Barnaby Rogerson
- The Prophet’s Heir, by Hassan Abbas