The Complete Infidel's Guide to ISIS (43 page)

Besides the opposition of Ali’s supporters, Uthman also faced armed revolt from Egypt and elsewhere; the rebels offered the title of caliph to several prominent Muslims, including Ali, but could find no takers. Finally, Uthman was assassinated in 656 by some of those who had rebelled against his rule. The challenges to his caliphate by the party of Ali and the Egyptian insurrectionists exemplify what became a recurring feature of the history of the caliphate: despite his status as successor of Muhammad, there were always some Muslims who refused to accept the caliph’s rule—and seldom a shortage of heavily armed men ready to supplant him by force.

The Fourth Rightly Guided Caliph: Ali Finally Gets His Chance

After the assassination of Uthman, Muhammad’s son-in-law Ali, who had first sought to become caliph twenty-four years earlier upon the death of Muhammad, finally got his chance. However, as was perhaps inevitable, his authority was never fully accepted, and his rocky five years as caliph coincide with the period known as the First Fitna (Disturbance) or First Civil War.
⁴⁰

Some of the most prominent companions of Muhammad refused to accept Ali’s authority, including Muhammad’s last and favorite wife, Aisha. Upon learning that Uthman had been assassinated, Aisha organized an armed uprising against Ali, culminating in the Battle of the Camel, fought in Basra on November 7, 656—so named because Aisha, fully veiled as Muhammad had ordered for all his wives, directed her forces from the back of a camel, on which she was concealed inside a howdah.

Aisha’s men lost and she was captured, but Ali magnanimously forgave her and spared her life.
⁴¹
Ali faced another rebellion, led by Muawiya, the
governor of Syria, who claimed the caliphate for himself. Ali fought Muawiya in the Battle of Siffin in 657, near Raqqa, the present-day capital of the Islamic State. After a bloody battle, to avoid further bloodletting both claimants agreed to accept the decision of a panel of arbitrators.
⁴²

Their leader, Abu Musa al-Ashari, announced their decision: “We have devised a solution after a good deal of thought and it may put an end to all contention and separatist tendencies. It is this. Both of us remove Ali as well as Muawiya from the caliphate. The Muslims are given the right to elect a caliph as they think best.”
⁴³

Ali was indignant and reneged on his pledge to accept the arbitrators’ decision, thereby enraging a group of his supporters who then left his camp, earning forever the name Khawarij, or Kharijites, “those who left.” The Kharijites—whom we have already met as the historical group to whom any new group of rigorist Muslims known for violence against fellow Muslims they regard as heretics is inevitably compared—rejected both Ali and Muawiya, declared that all who didn’t reject them as well were unbelievers, and plotted to assassinate both of them, as well as other Muslim leaders—but the plot was foiled.
⁴⁴

Ali defeated many of the Khawarij at the Battle of Nahrawan near Baghdad in 658, and gradually the sect died out, but the Ibadi school of Islamic thought that is dominant in Oman today has historical links with the Kharijites. And more importantly, as we have seen, many modern Muslim and non-Muslim scholars castigate contemporary jihad groups, including the Islamic State, as neo-Kharijites.
⁴⁵
There certainly are similarities between the Kharijites and the Islamic State: in their readiness to pronounce takfir—that is, declare to be unbelievers—Muslims who oppose them and to say they can lawfully be killed; in their extremely rigorous understanding of how Islamic law should be applied; and in their rejection of the authority of Muslim rulers they consider to have strayed from Islamic norms.

Islam has always been susceptible to these rigorist movements; they can easily find justification in the Qur’an and the teachings of Muhammad.

Given all this rebellion and civil strife, it came as no surprise to anyone when Ali was finally assassinated in January 661—by a Khawarij, Abdul Rahman ibn Muljam, who stabbed him with a sword coated with poison while he was praying in the Great Mosque of Kufa in Iraq, which he had made his capital.
⁴⁶

That ended the twenty-nine-year period of the Rightly Guided Caliphs, who are still considered by many Muslims today to be the representatives of a golden age that Muslims must strive to restore. And yet it was the period of the Wars of Apostasy; the brutal conquest of huge swaths of the Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia; the systematic oppression of the non-Muslim populations in those lands; and bloody civil strife among Muslims that, as we shall see, ultimately led to the Sunni-Shi’ite schism that persists, and remains violent, to this day.

Contrary to assertions—which were heard after the Islamic State’s declaration of the caliphate—that historically the caliph was always chosen by the peaceful and unanimous consent of the worldwide Muslim community, the caliphate was often rent by dissent, rival claimants, and bloodshed.
⁴⁷
In late June 2014, the internationally renowned Muslim Brotherhood sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi denounced the Islamic State’s proclamation of itself as the caliphate: “We look forward to the coming, as soon as possible, of the caliphate . . . but the declaration issued by the Islamic State is void under Sharia and has dangerous consequences for the Sunnis in Iraq and for the revolt in Syria.” Qaradawi said that the Islamic State was “known for its atrocities and radical views,” and that the title of caliph could “only be given by the entire Muslim nation.”
⁴⁸
Yet the history of the Rightly Guided Caliphs is full of “atrocities and radical views,” and demonstrates that the title of caliph was most often not “given by the entire Muslim nation.” During the “golden age” when they ruled, three of the four “Rightly
Guided Caliphs” were assassinated, and three of the four faced violent challenges to their authority.

The Umayyad Caliphate

Ali’s rival Muawiya succeeded him, and the caliphate became a family dynasty; when Muawiya died in 680, he was followed as caliph by his son, Yazid I. This succession, however, touched off another period of civil war, the Second Fitna, as some of the Muslims refused to accept the hereditary accession to the caliphate.
⁴⁹
Hussein, the son of Ali and grandson of Muhammad, refused to swear allegiance to Yazid. At the Battle of Karbala in Iraq in 680, Hussein and his six-month-old son were killed.
⁵⁰
The split between the supporters of Yazid and those of Hussein solidified into a schism that persists to this day between the Sunnis and the
shiat Ali,
the party of Ali, the Shi’ites.

Yazid’s party was by far the largest, and came to be known as the Umayyad caliphate, after the Meccan family to which Muawiya belonged. At their peak the Umayyads ruled a vast empire stretching from Spain to India, but they had to deal with internal strife and rebellion on a more or less perpetual basis. The caliph Abd al-Malik, who ruled from 685 to 705 and built the Dome of the Rock on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, fought a protracted conflict with a rival caliph, Abdullah ibn al-Zubayr, who had never accepted the hereditary succession, and who at one point ruled much more of the Islamic world than did Abd al-Malik.
⁵¹

The wars, both civil and foreign, continued. Several Muslim revolts against the caliphate were put down in Iraq in the early eighth century. The caliph Sulayman (715–717) tried and failed to conquer Constantinople, then the greatest city in the world.
⁵²
Yazid II (720–724) ordered that all Christian images throughout the caliphate be destroyed, believing that Allah would let him reign for forty years if he did so.
⁵³
So the Islamic State is hardly the first caliphate to destroy pre-Islamic artifacts.

The Umayyads expanded into Spain and even into southern France before being stopped at the Battle of Tours by Charles Martel (Charles the Hammer) in 732. A few years later, Muslims in Spain revolted against Umayyad rule. Discontent was spreading: the caliph Al-Walid (743–744) was widely despised for his open drinking and debauchery, for which he tried to compensate by violently persecuting a sect called the Qadaris—Muslims who had the temerity to claim that human beings had free will and were not simply under Allah’s absolute control.
⁵⁵

Then in 750, a rival clan, the Abbasids, overthrew the Umayyad caliphate altogether. The Abbasid caliphate was to prove more durable, lasting in various permutations nearly eight hundred years.

The Abbasid Caliphate

The Abbasid caliphate takes its name from Muhammad’s uncle, Abbas ibn Abd al-Muttalib, from whom its caliphs were descended.
⁵⁶
Although this caliphate lasted until the sixteenth century and at its height ruled over territory from Spain to India roughly corresponding to the expanse ruled
by the Umayyads, from the beginning it was beset by challenges from within, losing control over Spain and North Africa, including Egypt, within its first five decades.

The Abbasids never regained complete control over those territories. In the tenth century, a Shi’ite movement originating in Syria gained control of North Africa and established the Shi’ite Fatimid caliphate, which lasted until the latter half of the twelfth century.
⁵⁷
And in Islamic al-Andalus (Muslim Spain) in 929, Abdul Rahman III, the last living member of the Umayyad royal family, declared his own caliphate centered in Córdoba and challenging the Abbasids in North Africa.
⁵⁸
There were now three competing caliphs: the Abbasid in Baghdad, the Umayyad in Córdoba, and the Fatimid in Tunisia and, after 969, in Cairo.

Also in the tenth century, the Abbasids lost much of Iraq, Iran, and the surrounding regions to the Shi’ite Buwayhid (or Buyid) dynasty.
⁵⁹
The Buyids then gave way to the Seljuq Turks (who were Sunni), who also gained control of more Abbasid domains, reducing the caliph to a figurehead with little real political power outside of his base around Baghdad.
⁶⁰
The Seljuqs also won a stunning victory over the Byzantines at the Battle of Manzikert in eastern Anatolia in the summer of 1071, ending forever the Byzantine hold on Anatolia, and paving the way for the advent of the Ottoman Empire and modern Turkey.
⁶¹

In 1258 the Mongols sacked Baghdad, ending Abbasid rule there, but the Abbasids relocated to Cairo and continued their caliphate, drastically weakened and fragmented, until the Ottomans, the last Muslim group to lay effective claim to the caliphate before the Islamic State, removed them from power in Cairo in 1517.
⁶²

The history of the Abbasid caliphate thus vividly illustrates the fact that the unity of the Muslims that is supposed to be guaranteed and enabled by the caliph is more of a theological fiction than a reality. Only rarely did the caliph actually unite all the Muslims, and even more rarely did he sleep easily in his bed without having to worry about rivals who were determined to unseat and supplant him, or diminish his domains to insignificance and his theological and juridical authority to that of a figurehead.