After the Prophet: The Epic Story of the Shia-Sunni Split in Islam (9 page)

As the light faded on the Tuesday evening, the
shura
seemed to have reached deadlock. Most of those present were near the point of exhaustion. They had sat through more than twenty-four hours of speeches, proposals, and counterproposals, yet consensus seemed further away than ever. Then, with what might be seen as the finesse of an endgame in a champion chess match, Abu Bakr and Omar made their closing move.

Had they worked it out beforehand? Nobody would ever know, but it went so smoothly, with such an air of inevitability, that Ali’s followers would always suspect that it had been planned all along.

First, Abu Bakr proposed Omar as the new leader of Islam, though he must have known that after Omar’s panic-stricken speech denying Muhammad’s death, the tall warrior was not exactly the man of the moment. Then Omar responded by proposing that Othman be the leader, though he in turn must have known that since Othman was Umayyad, this was a nonstarter. Sure enough, both proposals provoked heated opposition, and tempers finally frayed beyond the breaking point.

Speeches gave way to shouting, outward calm to heated finger-pointing.
Ibn Obada, the Medinan Helper who had originally convened the
shura,
stood up and openly accused the Emigrants of working in collusion to take over the leadership. No sooner were the words out of his mouth than several of the Emigrants leaped on him, fists flying. In the ensuing free-for-all, he was beaten unconscious.

The sudden outburst of violence seemed to sap the resistance of the Medinans. They were dismayed at seeing Ibn Obada carried out with his head bloodied, and in shock that a
shura
should come to this. All desire for any further debate seeped out of them, so that when the final proposal came, they simply gave in. In a move that the Shia have ever since claimed was rigged beforehand, and that Sunnis acclaim as the perfect example of the wisdom of consensus, Omar suddenly came up with what he presented as the ideal compromise.

His account of it has all the terse brevity of a military man: “Altercation waxed hotter and voices were raised until, when a complete breach was to be feared, I said ‘Stretch out your hand, Abu Bakr.’

“He did so and I pledged him allegiance. The Emigrants followed, and then the Helpers.”

And so it was done. The successor to Muhammad—the
khalifa,
the Caliph—was not Ali. It was the father of Muhammad’s most prominent widow, the ever-controversial Aisha.

The burial would be strangely hugger-mugger. It was done in haste—indeed, in secrecy—and with a matter-of-factness that seems startling in the light of all the pilgrimages and sacred precincts to come.

By the time Ali and his kinsmen heard the news of Abu Bakr’s election, Muhammad had been dead a full day and a half, and for reasons all too obvious in the intense June heat, the matter of burial was becoming urgent. Custom decreed that a body be buried within twenty-four hours, but with all the tribal and clan leaders at the
shura,
there had seemed no option but to wait. Now that the
shura
had agreed on a leader,
however, Abu Bakr was likely to make Muhammad’s funeral a major occasion, a stage for confirmation of his election, and this was exactly what Ali would deny him. There would be no funeral, just burial in the dead of night.

In the small hours of that Wednesday morning, Aisha was woken by scraping sounds echoing around the mosque courtyard. While Muhammad’s body lay in her chamber, she had moved in with her co-wife Hafsa, Omar’s daughter, a few doors down. In the exhaustion of grief, however, she could not rouse herself to investigate the noise. If she had, she would have discovered that what had woken her was the sound of steel digging into rocky soil. With pickaxes and shovels, Ali and his kinsmen were digging Muhammad’s grave, and they were digging it in Aisha’s chamber.

Muhammad had once said that a prophet should be buried where he had died, they explained later. Since he had died on the sleeping platform in Aisha’s chamber, that was where he had to be buried, so they dug the grave at the foot of the platform, and when it was deep enough, they tipped up the pallet holding the Prophet’s shrouded body, slid it down into the earth, quickly covered it, and placed the stone slab of the platform on top.

None of the wives was present, nor any of the other Emigrants, nor any of the Helpers. It was a fait accompli, as final in its way as the decision of the
shura.
Aisha’s chamber, the place she had lived and eaten and slept, was now the grave of the Prophet, and her father was the new leader of Islam, the first of three Caliphs over the next twenty-five years—none of them Ali. What he was to call his “years of dust and thorns” were about to begin.

I
F YOU WERE A BELIEVER IN FATE, YOU MIGHT THINK THAT
A
LI
was destined never to be Caliph, and that when he finally did accept the caliphate twenty-five years after Muhammad’s death, he was provoking fate and thus the tragedy that would follow. He would be passed over not once or even twice, but three times in those twenty-five years, and all that time, he said, he lived “with dust in my eyes and thorns in my mouth.”

Dust and thorns are a vivid image of life in exile—not physical but existential exile, from one’s sense of purpose and self. But for Ali, the image was also cruelly ironic. The Lion of God was only one of the many titles the Prophet had bestowed on him; the one that would haunt him now was
Abu Turab,
Father of Dust. A lowly title to Western ears, but not to Arabian ones.

Some say that the name came from the dust thrown up by the hooves of Ali’s horse as he charged into battle. Others that it was from the time Muhammad found his young cousin deep in meditative prayer despite a raging sandstorm, his robe white with blown dust. Yet others that it came from the early years in Medina, when Ali had worked as a
manual laborer, hauling stones and water, an image that was to establish him as the champion of working people, a bridge between the early Arabian Muslims and the new Muslim masses to come.

All three are possible, and in all, the dust was a mark of honor. It still is. The Shia faithful still gather dust from the sandy soil of Najaf, the city surrounding Ali’s gold-domed shrine a hundred miles south of Baghdad, then press it into small clay tablets that they place in front of them as they pray so that wherever in the world a Shia prostrates himself in prayer, the soil his forehead touches is sacred soil.

That same soil is where Shia from all over the Middle East still ask to be sent for burial, as they have for hundreds of years. The shrouded bodies once transported like rolled-up carpets by mule and camel now arrive by car and truck. They are carried in procession around the shrine of Ali in Najaf or that of his son Hussein in Karbala, then to one of the vast twin cemeteries known as the Vales of Peace, there to rise together with Ali and Hussein on the Day of Judgment, when their descendant the Mahdi will return to lead a new era of truth and justice.

But truth and justice must have seemed a long way off to Ali in those days after Muhammad’s death. “Woe to the Helpers of the Prophet and to his kin,” wrote one of his Medinan supporters. “The land has become narrow for the Helpers and their faces have turned black as
kohl.
We have given birth to the Prophet and among us is his tomb. Would that on that day they covered him in his grave and cast soil on him, God had left not a single one of us, and neither man nor woman had survived him. We have been humiliated.”

A Hashimi poet put it more succinctly: “We have been cheated in the most monstrous way.”

They had been disinherited, deprived of what they saw as their rightful place, the leadership of Islam. And this sense of disinheritance would sear deep into Shia hearts and minds, a wound that would fester through to the twentieth century, there to feed off opposition to Western colonialism and erupt first in the Iranian Revolution, then in civil
war in Lebanon, and then, as the twenty-first century began, in the war in Iraq. Disinheritance was a rallying cry, which was why the classic anticolonial text of the 1960s, Frantz Fanon’s
The Wretched of the Earth,
became an Iranian best seller with a pointed change in title, one specifically designed to speak to the Shia experience:
The Disinherited of the Earth.
The time was coming, as it eventually would for Ali himself, when the Shia would reclaim their inheritance, in however embattled a form. But first, the dust and thorns.

The thorns were felt immediately. Even while others lined up to pledge public allegiance to Abu Bakr as Caliph, the man who had been passed over remained with his family inside his house. He was in mourning, he declared, and this was certainly so, but his refusal to come out and pledge allegiance to Abu Bakr was also a clear gesture of defiance, and a major challenge. If Ali held out, the Medinan Helpers might renege on their allegiance and follow him, overturning the outcome of the
shura.
Ali had to be pulled into line, and quickly, so Abu Bakr delegated Omar to deal with the problem. But by doing so, he only worsened it.

The choice of a stern military man like Omar for what was surely a diplomatic task was at the least unfortunate. Omar’s courage and skill as a commander were beyond question, but so too was his reputation as a man quick with the whip, “too severe” to bother with verbal niceties. He was not a man of finesse, and he demonstrated as much that night. He gathered a group of armed men, led them to Ali’s house, stationed them around it, then planted himself right in front of the door. Ali should come out and pledge allegiance to Abu Bakr, he shouted. If not, he and his men would burn down the house.

“If I had had only forty men, I would have resisted with force,” Ali said later. But that night only the members of his immediate family were with him: the
Ahl al-Bayt,
the People of the House. Ali chose passive resistance instead, and refused to budge.

Short of actually following through on his threat and killing all of Muhammad’s closest family, Omar was left, as he saw it, with only one option. If Ali would not come out, then he, Omar, would have to force his way in. He took a running leap and threw his whole weight against the door, and when the latches and hinges gave and it burst open, all six feet of him came hurtling through, unable to stop as he slammed full force into the person who happened to be on the other side of the door at that moment. That person was Fatima, several months pregnant with the Prophet’s third grandson.

Some say she was only badly bruised. Others that she broke her arm as she fell. But all agree that even Omar was stunned by the sight of the Prophet’s heavily pregnant daughter doubled over in pain at his feet. As Ali bent over his injured wife, Omar retreated without another word. He had made his point.

A few weeks later, the fragile Fatima gave birth to a stillborn infant boy. Nobody was sure if the miscarriage was a result of her being knocked down by Omar or whether she was so frail that it would have happened regardless. Either way, some overture might have been warranted from Abu Bakr, or at least from Omar, but there was none. Indeed, there was less than none.

To add insult to the injury that had already been done her, Fatima would now lose the property she considered hers. Soon after her miscarriage, she sent a message to Abu Bakr asking for her share of her father’s estate—date palm orchards in the huge oases of Khaybar and Fadak to the north of Medina. His response left her dumbfounded. The Prophet’s estate belonged to the community, not to any individual, Abu Bakr replied. It was part of the Muslim charitable trust, to be administered by him as Caliph. He was not at liberty to give it away to individuals. “We do not have heirs,” he said Muhammad had told him. “Whatever we leave is alms.”

Fatima had no alternative but to accept his word for it. Abu Bakr’s reputation for probity was beyond question, whatever her suspicions.
Sunnis would later hail his stand as affirming the supremacy of the community over individual hereditary rights. “You are not the People of the House,” Abu Bakr seemed to be saying. “We are all the People of the House.” But the Shia would be convinced that Muhammad’s closest family had now been doubly disinherited, or cheated, as the poet would have it: Ali out of his inheritance of leadership, and Fatima out of her inheritance of property.

There was no denying the populist appeal of the message Abu Bakr sent by denying Fatima’s claim: the House of Muhammad was the House of Islam, and all were equal within it. But as ever, some were more equal than others. Even as he turned down Fatima, Abu Bakr made a point of providing generously for Muhammad’s widows—and particularly for his own daughter Aisha, who received valuable property in Medina as well as on the other side of the Arabian Peninsula, in Bahrain.

It was the final straw for Fatima. That her father’s uppity youngest wife should be rewarded and she, his firstborn by his first and most beloved wife, should be rebuffed? She never did recover from her miscarriage or from the bitter argument with Abu Bakr. But perhaps most painful of all in those months after the loss of her third son was the ostracism she suffered, ordered by Abu Bakr to force Ali into line.