Library:Right and Left in Islam

Right and Left in Islam Ahmad Abbas Saleh Right and Left in Islam Ahmad Abbas Saleh Arab Institute for Studies and Publishing Beirut All rights reserved Second edition January 1973 Arab Institute for Studies and Publishing Syria Street — Samadi and Salha Building P.O. Box 5160 — Telephone: 25110 Beirut — Lebanon Right and Left The use of “right” for conservatives and “left” for revolutionaries comes from the West. It goes back to the first parliamentary assembly in the Western world, where the conservatives sat on the right and their opponents sat on the left. Since then, the meaning of these terms has changed and developed. Today, “the left” generally refers to socialists of different kinds and degrees. The left itself has even been divided into the centre-left, the right wing of the left, and the left wing of the left. But in its broadest sense, the left remains closely associated with socialism and is understood to represent it. If we wanted to trace the original meanings of right and left in the Arabic language, we would need to spend a long time with dictionaries and works of Qur’anic commentary—especially if our subject is the right and left in Islam. There we would find the people of the right hand consistently associated with Paradise, and the people of the left hand with Hell. The right therefore carries the sense of acceptance and faith, while the left carries the sense of opposition and denial. The Qur’an itself speaks of the people of the right and the people of the left in ways consistent with these meanings. On the Day of Judgement, the person who receives his record in his right hand will face an easy reckoning, while the person who receives it in his left will face a difficult one. But that is not what we mean by “the left” here. We mean those Muslims who gave particular importance to the social dimension of Islam. They believed that Islam, besides being a revealed religion governing the relationship between God and the human being, is also a social philosophy governing the relationships between people, and that it does so for the benefit of the great majority—the poor and the oppressed. Indeed, they believed that the very heart of a person’s relationship with God lies in the way that person treats other human beings. That conduct should be based on equality, compassion, and solidarity. There can be no sound relationship between God and the human being except through this good conduct, which is what Islam calls righteous action. So when we speak of the left here, we mean the term in its modern political sense: people concerned with the social question who believe that Islam, properly understood, set out to solve it, and regarded its solution as a path both to salvation in the next life and to well-being in this one. The Islamic left, then, as we use the term here, is the tendency that seeks to remove injustice from the poor and the oppressed and establish equality among members of society in their rights and duties. In short, it is the socialist tendency within Islam. By the Islamic right, we mean the opposing tendency: the one that accepted wide inequalities within Muslim society and fought against the left so that a small group could continue to hold wealth and exercise political and social control over the Muslim majority. We will use the phrase “socialist tendency” many times in this book. Some readers may feel that the term is historically out of place. After all, socialism cannot emerge as an opposing political force until society has passed into the industrial age, when methods and tools of production have developed far enough to make it possible to distribute wealth on a socialist basis. Indeed, at a certain point such a transformation becomes unavoidable. Production itself moves out of the individual sphere and becomes collective, creating a sharp contradiction between this collective form of production and the individual way in which wealth is distributed. This would mean that socialist thought could not exist before production had moved into large-scale mechanised industry—that is, modern industry. The beginning of socialist thought would therefore have to be placed at the Industrial Revolution, since socialist thought arose alongside it, and in opposition to it, as its direct contradiction according to Marxist dialectical logic. All of that is true. But the word socialism was used before Marx wrote, and it was used in many senses far removed from its modern meaning. Professor Cole’s explanation of socialism in his famous History of Socialist Thought, however, fits the way we intend to use the word while examining the struggle between right and left in the earliest period of Islam. Those who favour a collective outlook are the socialists; those who favour an individual outlook are the non-socialists. The Left and the Socialist Tendency The fact is that the socialists of early Islam were crushed. Indeed, every revolt with a socialist —or collective—orientation was crushed. This may be one reason why we will later need to examine the economic foundations of Muslim society at the time these revolts took place, and ask whether the nature of that society, together with the conditions of its historical development, made the successful application of any kind of socialism impossible. But our use of the word socialism here is quite simple. We mean its collective or social sense: working for the benefit of the majority and placing the good of the community above the interests of particular individuals. We certainly do not mean collectivist or totalitarian systems that conflict with socialism in its commonly understood sense. The Islamic left discussed in this book, then, is the tendency that places the community first. On the basis of the definition just given, we may call it a socialist tendency. The Islamic right, by contrast, is the individualist tendency: the one that seeks private interest before the common good. It should be obvious that we are not going to enter into a pointless argument in order to prove that the socialist tendency found in early Islam was identical to modern socialism. Such a claim has nothing to do with serious scholarship. Modern societies are very different in their structure from the society of early Islam. Nor will we force old texts into interpretations designed to make them fit the particular problems of our own age. What matters to us are the general principles that point toward social justice and equality, and that encourage both. No one can seriously dispute that such principles are present in Islam. This is not a study devoted to interpreting the general principles of Islam; we already have many such studies. It is an attempt to look at Islamic civilization as a whole, especially in the region now called the Arab world. Any civilization should, in fact, be studied as a whole, whether it lasted for a few centuries or several thousand years, and whether it passed through many different social stages or only one. This is the direction taken by modern historical study. Many modern writers—indeed, the overwhelming majority—now see world history as the history of a group of civilizations rather than simply as a sequence of stages in social development. This does not mean that looking at history as a series of stages in social development is simply wrong. It is a partial view, and valid as far as it goes. But it becomes seriously inadequate when we try to trace the causes of development and change beyond the development of material means of production; when we ask why development moves quickly in one place and slowly in another; and, even more importantly, when we try to uncover the organic unity of a civilization and understand or explain it. Islamic civilization is, by general agreement, an organic whole. Like other civilizations, it passed through many stages, and we can see those stages of development quite clearly. But if we want to study it simply as a succession of developmental stages, we can do so only by looking separately at each of its economic units. We may be able to trace such stages in Egyptian society, Iraqi society, or Syrian society, because these regions did not move through development in parallel. But it is difficult to look at the Islamic world as a whole except from the standpoint of Islamic civilization as a single civilization. The Islamic world was not governed from one imperial centre in a way that would allow us to focus on that centre. In reality, this happened for only two or three centuries. After that, little remained of the imperial centre but its name. Several centralised states arose within the Islamic world, all of them Islamic and all drawing their intellectual and cultural foundations from Islam. A comprehensive view of Islamic civilization is therefore the method followed in this study. Its sole purpose is to discover the elements of continuity within that civilization that have survived into the present. We do not want to stop the wheel of history and turn it back to the age of the Umayyad or Abbasid caliphates. That would contradict the logic of events. What we are searching for is our lineage: the origin from which we ourselves can begin. Roman civilization grew out of Greek civilization. Western civilization then grew out of both, with Arab—or Islamic— civilization serving as the bridge between them. New civilizations connect themselves to an ancient tradition from which they claim descent. But when a civilization rises to lead the world, and possesses the means to do so, it also draws upon the whole of humanity’s existing heritage. Civilization is like a torch in a relay race, passed from hand to hand while carrying with it everything humanity has accumulated in its capacity for progress. Yet every civilization that has appeared has rested on some older foundation closely connected to it. European civilization, despite the enormous benefit it received from Arab civilization, traces its origins back to Greece. Everything the Greeks wrote in art and thought, and everything the Romans created in institutions, law, thought, and art, became the foundation on which it stood. A civilization’s connection to such an origin is the legitimate birth certificate that every civilization seeks. Islam itself began from the idea of Hanifism, the religion of Abraham. So when we search for the lineage of Arab civilization, we are not trying to go back fourteen centuries. We want to discover how that civilization continues within us, and to begin from its essential foundations in giving birth to a modern civilization directed not only toward ourselves, but toward the whole world. Through this investigation we will discover that we are being born again from the very body of that great civilization—the civilization of the Arabs—and that we carry the marks of our origins just as any child of true lineage does. Some civilizations do not die, because they give birth to a new civilization. Arab civilization is one of these. Its descendant is not, of course, an exact copy of it. That could never happen. It is a new fruit produced by a long struggle and by repeated adaptations to every change in the outside world. When the European Renaissance arose, the idea driving it was one that belonged to its own character and revealed its lineage from Greek and Roman civilization: the idea of the individual human being standing before God and before the world. But the Renaissance was certainly not an exact copy of Greek civilization. It was a new product: an experimental and challenging cast of mind that eventually took its fullest form in the liberal outlook, which brought about the vast transformations that followed throughout the world. A civilization is not driven forward by one idea alone. But after many struggles with competing principles, one broad principle comes to dominate it. For although rationalism may appear to have been the essence of the transformation that took place in European societies, rationalist thought had existed in Muslim society centuries before it came to dominate Europe. Yet this raises an obvious question: why did the rationalism of Ibn Rushd fail to prevail, while the outlook of al-Ghazali remained dominant in Muslim society until very recently? Al-Ghazali came to be known as “the Proof of Islam,” and his influence continued into modern times, before the scientific method became dominant in scholarship. He was aristocratic in outlook and was the first major Muslim thinker to confront philosophy with the explicit purpose of demolishing it. He received broad support from the authorities of his time. Rationalism had therefore existed before al-Ghazali, and Islamic philosophy in general had placed a high value on reason and based its theory of knowledge upon logic. Yet rationalism did not die when al-Ghazali launched his great attack upon it in his famous The Incoherence of the Philosophers. Much later, Ibn Rushd answered him with his own famous book, The Incoherence of the Incoherence. But Ibn Rushd’s books were burned in public squares by order of the ruler and confiscated from those who possessed them. Orders were issued that anyone found with one of his books who had failed to surrender it at the great public ceremony in which the works of this magnificent philosopher were burned would be punished. Even so, Ibn Rushd passed into the European Renaissance, where he became a bridge between modern Europe and the ancient Greeks. Many historians of philosophy believe that Bacon’s empirical method was taken directly from Ibn Rushd’s ideas, although the French scholar Renan and other thinkers believed that Ibn Rushd was simply an excellent commentator on Aristotle and a gifted disciple of Saint Augustine. What matters here is that some fundamental idea comes to dominate a society because it suits that society’s readiness and becomes the idea best fitted to its development. From there, across the centuries, a new civilization is born. It then affects the human world beyond the place of its birth to the extent that this central idea possesses strength, originality, reach, and a complete fit with the needs of its age. The Islamic world knew more than one such idea. It knew rationalism, and it knew the intuitive tendency that despised reason. It knew individualism, and it knew the collective tendency. Its cultures were filled with struggles among many fundamental ideas. Some would fade during one period or another, only to return later in a form suited to modern thought. Throughout all of this, the same broad conflict continued: the struggle between stagnation and progress, shaped by the social and political conditions through which Muslim society passed. What matters, then, is not that we can find rationalism somewhere in our heritage in the work of one thinker or a group of thinkers. What matters is whether that rationalism came to dominate Muslim society as a whole and move it toward its own ends. In the ancient Western heritage too, we find many fundamental ideas struggling for supremacy. But it is a society’s readiness to embrace one of them that determines the direction of its history—toward stagnation or toward progress. We will not try here to identify the idea that dominates Arab society in our own age. We will encounter it naturally when we examine the struggle between right and left shortly before the appearance of Islam, and then in Islam’s dawn, so full of vigour, originality, and revolutionary force. We will encounter all the competing currents within the complete system of ideas that Islam brought to humanity as a whole. This study, which these words are intended to introduce, will not ignore religious belief in the way some modern writers try to do. It accepts that there is a close connection between the divine message and human development. It is true that our method will not concern itself with questions such as monotheism and plurality, or whether the Qur’an is eternal or created, except where a particular interpretation of such questions reveals a tendency toward progress or stagnation. Even then, we will touch only on the main outlines of these issues, because the foundation of this study is social development, not the development of religious doctrine. For that reason, the investigation will begin primarily with pre-Islamic Arab society in Mecca, then turn to the other regions of the Arabian Peninsula, examining the different sources of conflict between the classes of this society on both economic and intellectual levels. It is therefore extremely important for us to arrive at an accurate picture of pre-Islamic society in Mecca, despite the extreme scarcity of texts dealing directly with that reality. The Islamic message was not simply another religious sect. Nor was it merely a call to abandon idols and embrace monotheism. Alongside all of this, it was a social revolution that possessed all the conditions necessary for revolution. There had already been many religious preachers before revelation came to the Prophet—peace be upon him. There were priests and monks in Arabia, and people calling for a return to the faith of Abraham. Yet none of them had any connection with prophecy, nor were they revolutionary leaders. Some of the facts presented in this study may seem unfamiliar compared with what we are accustomed to hearing. Certain religious commentators, approaching the subject from an exclusively religious standpoint, simply ignored everything that came before Islam. Yet we urgently need a detailed study of this period if we are to understand Islam in both its revolutionary and its religious dimensions. Most studies, including modern ones, have tried to explain the appearance of the Islamic message in terms of geographical, social, or religious conditions. Yet these explanations are often shaped by the researcher’s belief that the further the Islamic message can be removed from any immediate social or religious cause, the closer it appears to a miracle; and that the fewer objective reasons there were for its emergence, the stronger the proof that it was one of God’s miracles. But Islam, at its heart, rests upon logic, reasoned argument, and the force of evidence. Traditional books therefore fell into the habit of describing pre-Islamic society as backward and primitive. Yet the advancement of a society, together with its heritage and culture, does not in any way contradict the miraculous nature of the Islamic message or its divine source. The truth is that society in Mecca was completely different from the picture found in most of those books. There were the beginnings of civilization. There was culture. There was urban life. And in the end, there was a people ready to break out of its narrow boundaries and enter the wider world. At the opposite extreme, we find modern studies—most of them by Orientalists—that concentrated on the social dimension of the Islamic message, almost as though Islam were nothing more than a social revolution. Some describe it specifically as a merchants’ revolution, intended to secure their caravans, unite the Arabian Peninsula, and open the way to new realities. Yet Islam, in its spiritual dimension, was a comprehensive human revolution. Indeed, it was a complete ideology in the modern sense of the term. This study has therefore taken upon itself the task of gathering together the facts about the society in which Islam appeared as both a spiritual force and a social force, and of drawing objective conclusions from those facts. Once we do this, we will have grasped the fundamental threads from which Islam developed in both its religious and social dimensions. We will see that the struggle between right and left within it then took on a new form. This is the central point of the present study, because that struggle never stopped for a single moment. We may even find the revolutionary roots of our own modern revolution stretching all the way from the beginning of the Islamic message to the present day. The fact is that from the Umayyad transformation under Mu‘awiya onward, social revolts never stopped. Some lost their way. Some preserved their original character. Others were corrupted by their opponents with extraordinary skill. Yet none of these revolts ultimately succeeded. Muslim society eventually disintegrated and fragmented, Islamic civilization retreated, and the torch passed from it to modern Western civilization. We have become accustomed to studying modern Egyptian history in isolation from the wider framework of Arab society. As a result, the lineage of the revolution we are living through today has been connected more closely to the struggle for national independence than to the Arab national movement. Yet we discover many new things about the meaning and ancestry of this revolution when we connect it to its larger lineage: Islamic civilization and the struggle between right and left throughout the history of that civilization. The Egyptian national movement at first appeared to seek its ancestry in ancient Pharaonic civilization. This was especially understandable because the national struggle coincided with major archaeological discoveries from ancient Egypt. It was natural for the national movement to find strength and support by claiming descent from such a magnificent civilization. This shift had a major effect on the study of modern history and almost completely separated the Egyptian national movement from its Arab roots. Some began to speak of an independent Egyptian nationalism entirely separate from Arab nationalism. Yet when these same writers tried to give a comprehensive historical account of Egypt, they became uncertain when they reached the complete transformation that followed the Arab conquest. However hard a historian may try to construct connections between modern Egypt and Pharaonic civilization, there is little evidence to support them. Pharaonic civilization had already declined and died at an early period, before the Roman conquest. Egypt remained in a state of transition and uncertainty throughout the Christian era until Arab-Islamic civilization came to dominate Egyptian society and, indeed, transformed it even anthropologically. The great English historian Toynbee concluded that Pharaonic civilization had died. He expressed his surprise that he could find no later continuation of it into modern times, to the point that he regarded it as a unique historical phenomenon. The study of modern history was also affected by the Western outlook adopted by most educated people. They wanted to detach Egyptian society from its Arab roots and turn it toward the West. Some leading professors even began to claim that in every age we had belonged to a Mediterranean civilization. We will not announce our conclusions in this introduction. We will derive them through an examination of the history of Islamic civilization: its emergence, and then either its continuation or its death. Once again, this study does not aim to establish or prove a conclusion decided in advance. Its basic purpose, however, is to search for the true lineage of the pioneering Arab revolution that began in Egypt and that appears to point toward a new and far-reaching civilizational awakening. The Reality of Mecca Before Islam At the beginning of the second chapter of his book The Dawn of Islam, Ahmad Amin writes: “It has become widely believed that the Arabs in the pre-Islamic age were a nation isolated from the world, with no contact at all with other peoples; that the desert on one side and the sea on the other enclosed them and cut them off from everyone around them, so that they had no material dealings with other peoples and borrowed nothing from them in literature, culture, or refinement. The truth is that this idea is mistaken. The Arabs did have material and cultural contact with the peoples around them, although these connections were weaker than those between the civilized nations of that age because of Arabia’s geographical position and social conditions.” Although more than thirty years have passed since these words were written, the common belief still remains that the Arabs were a backward people living a harsh Bedouin existence far removed from civilization and settled life. Yet most Arab scholars and Orientalists have made serious efforts to draw an accurate picture of Arab life before Islam. It is obviously difficult to imagine that a collection of nomadic tribes could suddenly become the greatest empire of its age, overthrowing the Persian Empire and coming close to destroying the Roman Empire altogether. Nor was this simply a matter of military power. The new civilization went on to provide intellectual and scientific leadership to the entire world, radiating its influence everywhere and across every continent. An event of such magnitude could not have taken place without preparation, ability, and readiness. Modern scholarship therefore began searching for the civilizational foundations from which this great civilization arose. Researchers studied the economy of the Arabian Peninsula before Islam, its existing religions, its political struggles, and its intellectual currents, hoping to discover the foundation from which the new civilization emerged. Research into the pre-Islamic period, particularly the years immediately preceding Islam, was surrounded by enormous difficulties because the new religion swept away nearly all the remains of the older age. Yet researchers—especially Orientalists—did not give up. They faced extraordinary dangers in this work. Some even lost their lives, but their efforts produced major results and shed light on what had once been a dark and violent historical landscape. These scholars travelled throughout the Arabian Peninsula, from south to north. They photographed inscriptions, studied archaeological remains, and exposed themselves to the risk of death and murder. At the same time, they immersed themselves in the writings of earlier authorities who had recorded life in Arabia, checking and scrutinising their accounts. Some of these scholars, whether field explorers or academic researchers, approached their work with genuine scientific objectivity. Others were unable to free themselves completely from the bias of inherited beliefs. In any case, they did far more in this field than we ourselves have done, and we owe to them much of the picture we are now able to present of life in Arabia before Islam. Mecca on the Eve of Islam — Economic Conditions Through a number of developments that we do not need to trace here, Mecca became one of the major commercial centres of its age. It formed a link between Yemen, Abyssinia, Persia, and Byzantium. The goods and products of these regions were carried between them by Arab caravans that could contain as many as two thousand camels loaded with valuable merchandise. These caravans were heavily guarded and were led by guides, accompanied by experts in commerce, interpreters, and organisers. The value of such caravans could reach one hundred thousand dinars. According to some estimates, the perfumes and luxury goods that the Roman world purchased from Arabia, Persia, and China were worth as much as one hundred million dirhams. “Before Islam, when hostility between the Persians and Romans had reached its height, the Meccans achieved a remarkable position in trade. The Romans depended on Meccan commerce for many of their needs, even for luxuries such as silk. Some European historians have even suggested that there were Roman trading houses in Mecca itself, used by the Romans both for commercial affairs and for gathering information about the Arabs. There were also Abyssinians there looking after the commercial interests of their people.” This would mean that Rome, Abyssinia, Persia, and Yemen all had something like consular representatives looking after their commercial interests and organising trade in this great commercial capital, which has been compared to Venice in its golden age. It would also be a mistake to think that the Meccans were involved only in trade. They owned land in Ta’if where various crops were grown, especially grapes. As many as three hundred shipments of raisins were exported from there each year. Ta’if also had a very important leather industry, famous throughout the region, and leather products were among its main exports to Abyssinia, Persia, and Byzantium. The English scholar Montgomery Watt writes: “There were small local industries in the Hijaz, generally serving the needs of the Bedouins and the inhabitants of the towns. We hear, for example, of leather being exported from Ta’if,” and so on. Al-Hamdani writes: “Ta’if was a city even in the pre-Islamic age, and it was a centre of tanning. The famous worked hides of Ta’if were tanned there.” In Ibn Hisham’s Sirah, we read that “among the most remarkable goods sent from Mecca to the Negus were leather hides.” It goes without saying that for a leather industry to export its goods abroad and gain an international reputation in its own time, it must have had workshops operating on a considerable scale and with a reasonable degree of efficiency. Trade in Mecca developed to a very high level. Quraysh concluded commercial treaties with the governments of the Byzantines, Persians, and Abyssinians. These were the agreements known as the ilaf, mentioned in the Qur’an: “For the security of Quraysh—their security in the journeys of winter and summer.” As Mecca grew in importance and began to threaten the commercial and economic position of centres controlled by Abyssinia, the Abyssinian kings made enormous efforts to build a sanctuary in Yemen that could rival the Kaaba in Mecca, draw the Arabs around it, and transfer commercial activity there. But the sanctuary was built and failed to achieve its purpose. Abraha therefore led a large army toward Mecca, intending to destroy the Kaaba, seize the commercial capital, and put an end to its influence. The people of Mecca left the city and took refuge in the mountains, praying to God to save them. Meanwhile, an outbreak of smallpox spread through Abraha’s army and his soldiers fell in large numbers. He was unable to destroy the Kaaba or conquer Mecca and was forced to return in defeat. There had been earlier attempts by the Byzantine emperors with much the same aim, but these too had all failed for geographical and military reasons. In the end, all these attempts amounted to an acceptance of Mecca’s commercial position. Various governments concluded treaties with it to protect trade, set customs duties, and regulate the different forms of commercial dealing. These were not merely verbal understandings. They were formal written treaties signed by the highest responsible authorities. Although Mecca traded with different countries under their own laws and customs duties, Mecca itself functioned as a free commercial centre in which all kinds of goods were sold, much like a modern free-trade zone. This was another major reason why commercial transactions of every kind were conducted there: Mecca was the trading centre of the region. In this respect it also resembled a stock or commodities exchange. International prices were set there, speculation took place there, and goods could change hands on paper between merchants and speculators while they were still in warehouses or even on the road. When Islam came, it condemned these forms of speculation because the poor consumer ultimately bore their cost. The Prophet therefore forbade them, saying: “Do not go out to meet the caravans before they reach the market; let none of you undercut another man’s sale; do not bid up prices falsely; and let no townsman sell on behalf of a Bedouin.” The merchants of Mecca also practised monopolisation. A merchant might buy up the entire available supply of a particular commodity, corner the market, and then set whatever price he wished. This too was one of the practices Islam opposed. Alongside all this, Mecca had extensive financial and money-lending activity. Investing money through interest-bearing loans was widespread, with different forms of collateral— sometimes even a wife or child could be pledged as security. Both simple and compound interest were known. These financial operations became so extensive that all the leading merchants took part in them. It may come as a surprise to learn that Abbas ibn Abd al-Muttalib, Khalid ibn al-Walid, Uthman ibn Affan, Abu Sufyan ibn Harb, and others were among the major figures involved in this business. Alongside finance, the slave trade was also widespread in Mecca. Slaves were brought there from many places by Arab and non-Arab merchants, sold in Mecca, and then moved on to other markets. It may also surprise the reader to learn that the mother of Amr ibn al-As was sold as a slave woman at the market of Ukaz to al-As ibn Wa’il, Amr’s father. All this activity gives us some idea of life in Mecca, the degree of its development, and therefore the kind of society that had taken shape there. The Class Structure of Mecca From this survey of Mecca’s different forms of economic activity, we can begin to see the shape of its society and the classes within it. Religious Officials The sources available to us tell us very little of importance about the position of religious officials. Almost all we find in the works on the Prophet’s life concerns the custodianship of the Kaaba. When one tries to piece the evidence together, it seems that there was no distinct religious class in the usual sense of the term. Nor do the works of Orientalist scholars establish the existence of an independent class with a particular interest in caring for the Kaaba, supervising its rites, and benefiting from sacrifices, offerings, or money donated to it. Scholars such as Hommel, Rhodokanakis, Grohmann, Nöldeke, Andrea, Montgomery Watt, and others concentrated on religion in the pre-Islamic period—its rites and its origins. The religious officials themselves, and their role in Meccan and Arab society more generally, have barely been studied. Or, more precisely, we have not found a study devoted to the subject. It is certain that soothsaying was known in Meccan society. It would be natural for the sanctuary of the Kaaba to have had men or women who understood its rituals, knew the proper ways of approaching the gods, foretold the future, and acted as intermediaries between human beings and the gods. We know many stories about male and female diviners and soothsayers. One of the best known is the story of Abd al-Muttalib, who vowed to the gods of the Kaaba that if his sons grew to manhood and reached ten in number, strong enough to defend and protect him, he would sacrifice one of them. When this came to pass, he gathered his sons, went with them before Hubal, and cast lots among them. The lot fell upon his youngest son, Abdullah, the father of the Prophet. When Abd al-Muttalib prepared to sacrifice him, his sons and companions stopped him and suggested that they refer the matter to a female diviner in Yathrib. The rest of the story is well known. But does this mean that there were no diviners at the Kaaba itself, and therefore no religious officials acting as intermediaries between the gods and human beings? That seems to have been the case, although we know that pilgrims were charged certain dues to support those who managed the affairs of the pilgrimage. Something similar can still be seen in Mecca today in the services provided by pilgrimage guides and others. In any case, it seems that Quraysh as a whole possessed something of the sacred standing of a religious class in the eyes of the other Arabs. There was no clear separation between religion and commerce, nor does there seem to have been a particular group or family that monopolised the custodianship of the Kaaba and used it to exercise authority over the rest of Quraysh. We do know, however, that the Prophet descended from the Qurayshite families associated with this custodianship. We therefore cannot say with certainty that Meccan society contained a distinct class that could properly be called a religious class, playing a political and economic role comparable to that of religious classes in other developed societies. The Great Merchants and Property Owners There is no doubt, however, that the great merchants formed a class with common interests, and that these interests shaped both their conflicts and their aims. All the sources confirm this. The great merchants were active in trade and finance, invested in land in Yathrib, and had interests in various local industries in both Mecca and Yathrib. We know, for example, that Abbas ibn Abd al-Muttalib owned an orchard in Yathrib. It is only natural to assume that other members of Quraysh owned some of the small workshops engaged in leatherworking, drying grapes, and the other industries found throughout the region. This class exercised complete control over Meccan society. We will see that the government of Mecca—the mala’, as it was called, or the “senate,” as Montgomery Watt calls it—was made up of these great merchants. Judicial authority was in their hands, as were legislative and executive power. In other words, united by their shared interests, they controlled the entire Meccan community in legislation, government, and justice. Small Merchants These were far more numerous. They traded in modest quantities of goods and borrowed from the great property owners in order to carry on their businesses. Some practised small trades, tended sheep they owned, or ran shops and inns. Others contributed a small sum to one of the caravans organised by the great merchants, rather like small shareholders in the joint-stock companies of our own time. Still others ran drinking houses and brothels. This was a common practice: a man might force some of his slave girls into prostitution and live on what they earned. The trade was widespread and openly recognised until Islam came and took a severe position against it. The Qur’an declared: “Do not force your slave girls into prostitution, if they desire chastity, seeking the temporary gains of this worldly life. And if anyone forces them, then after they have been forced, God is forgiving and merciful.” In explaining this verse, the Qur’anic commentators report that Abdullah ibn Ubayy ibn Salul owned two slave girls called Musaykah and Mu’adhah, whom he forced into prostitution in return for a payment he collected from them. When Islam came, Mu’adhah said to Musaykah: “There are only two possibilities in this life we are living. If what we do is good, we have already had more than enough of it. And if it is evil, then it is time we gave it up.” But Abdullah told them, “Go back and commit fornication.” They replied, “By God, we will not. Islam has come and forbidden fornication.” They went to the Messenger of God and complained to him about their situation, whereupon God revealed this verse. This class therefore included many different occupations. But all its members had one thing in common: they possessed some form of capital, whether property, camels, money, or slave girls, and they employed these assets within the customary laws that governed society. The Destitute These were people who owned nothing except their own capacity to work, which they hired out to others. They might guard caravans, manage them, join scouting parties sent ahead to inspect the road, or perform other kinds of paid labour. They were numerous. Many could not even obtain enough food to survive from day to day. When their condition became desperate, some would withdraw to a remote place and sit there waiting to die of hunger unless a charitable person found them and gave them food or paid work. Alongside extraordinary wealth, therefore, there was extraordinary poverty. At the very time when a caravan belonging to Abu Sufyan ibn Harb might be carrying goods worth fifty thousand dinars, famine could be consuming large numbers of Quraysh. The historians tell how, during one famine, Hashim travelled away and returned with bread, clarified butter, and camels. He broke up the bread, mixed it with the butter, slaughtered the camels, and fed the destitute at an enormous meal that historians continued to describe long afterward. They even derive his name, Hashim, from his act of hashm—breaking up the bread. During these repeated famines, the wealthy men of Quraysh stored enough food for their own needs. Yet anyone who possessed such enormous wealth, together with such extensive international trading experience, could surely organise the arrival of food and supplies in a way that protected the population from famine—unless, of course, the people who starved simply had no money with which to buy the food they needed. Stories of people withdrawing from society to await death by hunger appear frequently in the works on the Prophet’s life and in early Arabic literature. Although Mecca had a permanent market, its most important commercial operations were the great trading journeys, especially the famous winter and summer caravans. Unemployment also seems to have been common, since commerce required relatively little labour. This helps explain the spread of outlaw banditry: a destitute man might break away from his tribe, lie in wait for passing caravans, attack them, and seize their goods. It was also from this class that sons, daughters, and wives could pass from freedom into slavery when a family became unable to repay its loans on time. The following incident shows how a free person could be reduced to slavery without being captured in war. It is taken from Ibn Hisham’s Sirah, as quoted in Professor Said al- Afghani’s The Markets of the Arabs. The Sirah relates: “Abu Na’ilah, Sultān ibn Salamah, met one of the leading and wealthiest Jews, Ka‘b ibn al-Ashraf, who was also his foster-brother. He said to him: ‘We would like you to sell us some food. We will give you something as security and make it binding upon ourselves, if you will deal generously with us.’ Ka‘b said: ‘Will you pledge your women to me?’ He replied: ‘How could we pledge our women to you when you are the handsomest and most perfumed man in Yathrib?’ Ka‘b said: ‘Then will you pledge your sons?’” And the account continues. What happened in Yathrib also happened in Mecca. Although Abu Na’ilah later offered to pledge his weapons and armour as security, the Jewish moneylender refused and insisted that his sons be pledged instead. Nor was this severity in demanding collateral peculiar to Jews. It was part of the normal commercial practice and accepted custom of this immensely wealthy society ruled by merchants. This class of destitute people represented the opposing force—the other side of the class struggle that broke out in Mecca and in the other Arab cities shortly before Islam. The incident just related took place in Medina during the period of the Islamic mission. Slaves There was also a fourth class: the slaves. In Meccan society, and Arab society more generally, slaves did not form a class in the strict economic sense in which they did, for example, in agricultural societies. Production had little need for slave labour. Most slaves worked in domestic service, herding, the limited agriculture found in certain farming regions, or in serving travelling caravans. Some were also used to guard and defend caravans. We have not been able to find even a rough estimate of the number of slaves in Mecca, Yathrib, or Medina. It seems that they were employed on a limited scale. Many slaves who arrived in Mecca were effectively transit goods passing through its markets. We have already seen that a destitute free man might be unable to find enough food for the day even while offering his labour for hire. When the labour market reaches such a condition, there is little economic reason to exploit slave labour. Keeping a slave may cease to bring any benefit and may even become a burden. We have also seen that some Arabs used their slave girls in prostitution as a source of income, and this may have been one reason for keeping female slaves. Even so, slaves were natural allies of the destitute. Indeed, the destitute themselves supplied society with a fresh stream of slaves, alongside those acquired through purchase, raiding, and capture. We will see how large numbers of slaves joined Islam in the earliest days of the mission, and how some became formidable fighters and influential believers. A few even rose to positions of high authority. Salman the Persian, for example, eventually became governor of al- Mada’in in the reign of Umar ibn al-Khattab. Political Power in Mecca It is doubtful that the tribal system had much influence on the government of Mecca. Tribal leadership alone was not the foundation of political power, nor did the chief of a tribe automatically become a ruler. Wealth was the central factor according to which power was distributed. We have already seen that large numbers of Quraysh could die of hunger without either their tribe or its wealthy members giving them enough to survive. In the Sirah, we even find Abu Talib, the Prophet’s uncle, sending his son Ali to Muhammad to be raised in Muhammad’s household because of Abu Talib’s extreme poverty. Something similar had happened to the Prophet himself in childhood when he was placed in the care of his uncle. Tribal solidarity had little real existence except in the mufākhara or public contests of prestige, where two men competed in the markets over which of them had the greater and more powerful following. Such solidarity also appeared in war and in disputes between leading families. Economically, however, the tribal system seems to have had little effect. Montgomery Watt, comparing the position of Abu Sufyan in Mecca with that of Pericles in Athens, and therefore Arab democracy with Athenian democracy, argues that the Arabs did know a form of democracy, though one less committed to equality than that of the Greeks. He writes that it is interesting to compare Abu Sufyan’s position in Mecca with that of Pericles in Athens. Arab democracy embraced the idea of equality less fully than Athenian democracy. Every individual within the clans of Mecca counted as one person and no more. Yet the Arabs somehow developed a way of recognising which members of a clan were prominent enough to attend meetings of the mala’. Watt continues that the mala’ of Mecca was more sensible and more conscious of responsibility than the Athenian Ecclesia. Its decisions therefore rested on the strength of the men involved, their qualities, and their judgement, rather than on rhetorical skill capable of making evil appear good. On the other hand, even at their best the Athenians did not necessarily accept a man’s opinion simply because he was known to be honourable and had a good reputation. The Meccans, by contrast, were more concerned that “the man chosen to lead” should distinguish himself through practical ability and personal competence. A man’s value in Mecca was therefore determined by his own qualities and capacities, above all by his financial power. He was not regarded merely as a member of a tribe and treated on that basis, however humble his position. He was treated as an individual and judged according to what he personally possessed and could do. This was a very different arrangement from that of a tribal society, and in this respect it was highly developed. We will also see that Watt agrees with Lammens that Quraysh possessed a number of black slaves whom they used in war whenever the need arose. This fact itself points to the weakness of tribal solidarity and to the reduced need for it in times of crisis. Indeed, we will see that many members of Muhammad’s own family, once their interests came into conflict with the new mission, allied themselves against him in defence of those interests from the very first moment that he preached openly. The military strength of Quraysh was not based primarily on tribal solidarity, but on alliances with other tribes whose commercial interests were tied to theirs. Through their trading enterprises alone, they succeeded in forming a powerful network of alliances across different parts of the Arabian Peninsula. Even so, we cannot deny the importance of blood ties and kinship. They clearly played a part in many disputes, even after the beginning of the Islamic mission. This eventually led to the severe boycott imposed on the Hashimites through the famous document known as the Sahifah, whose signatories agreed neither to marry into the Hashimite clan nor to buy from them or sell anything to them. Yet even this alliance was not formed on a purely tribal basis. It was driven by interest and by a struggle for power once Muhammad came to be seen not only as the preacher of a new religion, but as a statesman who might revive the old rivalry for power between the Hashimites and the Umayyads—a rivalry in which Hashim had lost ground while Umayya and its allies had prevailed. Muhammad appeared, through his new religious mission, to be recovering the political authority that the Hashimites had lost. The tribal system, then, was not the main force driving the conflicts among the different groups in Mecca. The real forces were wealth and power. A person’s standing was determined not by belonging to a powerful tribe, but by the money he possessed and the authority he exercised. The System of Government in Mecca Lammens compares Mecca’s system of government to the republics of Venice and Carthage, where wealthy men controlled political power. We can now describe the structure of this government, the offices it contained, and the men who held them. The tribes were indeed represented in this government, which can create the impression that the tribal system was its only foundation. In reality, however, the great men of wealth were its true foundation. They controlled it because they were wealthy and powerful, not because they were tribal representatives. Ibn Abd Rabbih writes: “Ten men from ten branches of Quraysh attained positions of honour in the pre-Islamic age and continued to hold them into Islam. They came from Hashim, Umayya, Nawfal, Abd al-Dar, Asad, Taym, Makhzum, Adi, Jumah, and Sahm.” 1. From Hashim came Abbas ibn Abd al-Muttalib. He was responsible for providing water to the pilgrims in the pre-Islamic age, and he retained this office under Islam. As we have already noted, Abbas was one of the great property owners and merchants of Quraysh. Alongside his extensive commercial activity, he owned an orchard in Ta’if. It is interesting that, although he was the Prophet’s uncle, he continued to refuse Islam until late in the Prophet’s life, despite the many occasions on which the biographical sources describe him supporting his nephew. Providing water was not the simple task it might appear to be. Water was as important as food because it was scarce in Mecca and its distribution had to be organised. Charges were collected for it, and its supply required careful supervision and regulation. If water is important enough in river countries, because of agriculture, to require a major ministry in modern states, then in Mecca the life of the whole city depended on it, as did the lives of visitors and travellers who came there for their own purposes. 2. From the Umayyads came Abu Sufyan ibn Harb. He held al-Uqab, the banner of Quraysh. When war broke out, the man who held it would bring it forth. If Quraysh agreed on a particular commander, they handed the banner to him. If they did not agree on anyone else, the holder of the banner himself became their leader and was placed at their head. 3. From Banu Nawfal came al-Harith ibn Amir, who was responsible for the rifada, the provision of food for pilgrims. 4. From Banu Abd al-Dar came Uthman ibn Talha, who was responsible for the military banner, the custodianship and guarding of the Kaaba, and the council house where public affairs were discussed. 5. From Banu Asad came Yazid ibn Zam‘a ibn al-Aswad, who held the office of consultation. Quraysh would not settle an important matter until they had presented it to him. If he approved it, they proceeded. If he did not, they reconsidered the matter, and they supported whatever position was finally agreed. 6. From Banu Taym came Abu Bakr al-Siddiq. In the pre-Islamic period he was responsible for matters of blood money and financial liabilities. If he undertook responsibility for a payment arising from bloodshed and appealed to Quraysh for support, they trusted him and honoured the obligation alongside him. If another man assumed the same burden, they might leave him to face it alone. 7. From Banu Makhzum came Khalid ibn al-Walid, who was responsible for the war tent and the cavalry. In war, the tent was set up and the equipment used to supply the army was gathered there. Khalid was also in charge of the cavalry of Quraysh. 8. From Banu Adi came Umar ibn al-Khattab. He was responsible for diplomacy in the pre- Islamic age. If war broke out between Quraysh and another people, they sent him as their envoy. If another clan challenged them to a contest of honour and prestige, they appointed him to represent them and accepted his judgement. 9. From Banu Jumah came Safwan ibn Umayya. He was responsible for the divining arrows by which Quraysh sought guidance when deciding matters of public concern. 10. From Banu Sahm came al-Harith ibn Qays. He was responsible for judicial affairs and for property that had been set apart and dedicated to their gods. Political Blocs in Mecca Power in Mecca was therefore held by a government of ten men who outwardly represented the different clans, but who in reality represented the commercial and financial power of Meccan society. Abbas ibn Abd al-Muttalib, who was responsible for providing water, was the wealthiest of the sons of Abd al-Muttalib ibn Hashim. He was a leading figure in Meccan society and represented Mecca in major affairs. He was the man who negotiated with Abraha the Abyssinian when Abraha attacked Mecca, and he was consulted in serious disputes. Abu Sufyan ibn Harb was responsible for directing the affairs of the state when war broke out. He held al-Uqab, the banner of Quraysh. When war began, he brought out the banner and Quraysh gathered around him, unless they chose another man around whom to rally. He was therefore commander-in-chief and, in wartime, effectively head of state. Abu Sufyan was the richest man in Mecca and belonged to the Umayyads, who competed with the Hashimites for power. Al-Harith ibn Amir was one of the wealthiest men in Mecca and was responsible for the rifada: organising supplies, feeding the pilgrims, and supervising the arrangements connected with this service. A tax was levied on the people of Mecca and collected by the official responsible for the rifada, who used it to feed the pilgrims. Al-Harith ibn Amir belonged to Banu Nawfal. Uthman ibn Talha was a very wealthy man. He was responsible for the custodianship of the Kaaba and for convening the council in the meeting place where the leading men of Quraysh gathered to discuss important affairs. He belonged to Banu Abd al-Dar. Yazid ibn Zam‘a ibn al-Aswad was responsible for consultation. When the leading men of Quraysh reached a decision, they referred it to him. If he approved it, it became binding on everyone. If he rejected it, another decision had to be made, and this new decision would then be binding on all. Yazid was one of the richest men in Mecca and belonged to Banu Asad. Abu Bakr al-Siddiq ruled on matters of blood money and financial compensation. If a man was killed and Abu Bakr fixed the compensation owed by the killer, Quraysh accepted his judgement and worked to enforce it. He belonged to Taym and was one of the great merchants of Mecca. Khalid ibn al-Walid belonged to Banu Makhzum and was one of its wealthy men. When war broke out, he set up the war tent, around which weapons, military equipment, and horses were assembled, and then organised the army. Umar ibn al-Khattab, one of the wealthy men of Quraysh and a member of Banu Adi, was responsible for diplomatic relations between Quraysh and other peoples and tribes. In other words, he handled Mecca’s foreign affairs. Safwan ibn Umayya, of Banu Jumah, was the religious official who cast the divining arrows for them whenever Mecca was about to undertake some important affair. He was also one of the great wealthy men of Mecca. Al-Harith ibn Qays administered the wealth endowed for the service of the gods, in something rather like a ministry of religious endowments in modern times. He belonged to Banu Sahm and was one of the rich men of Quraysh. Each of these ten men administered the affairs of this small republic within his own area of responsibility. Together they held legislative and judicial authority, enforced judgments, directed war and defence, and dealt with everything else connected with the affairs of government. If we examine the prevailing laws and customs, we find that they gave absolute protection to private property and were centred above all on trade. The Meccans recognised as many as twelve different forms of sale, as well as various kinds of mortgage and pledge. They sometimes drew up written contracts, especially for loans and certain forms of sale. The modern, highly organised form of the state is in fact something quite new, not only in comparison with the government of Mecca but with many of the civilised centres of the ancient world. Mecca, after all, was essentially an important centre of trade and a meeting place where the various Arab tribes gathered for pilgrimage and worship. The judgments and decisions issued by this government, or by any of its members, were enforced against those concerned through the solidarity binding the members of the government together and through the power on which they relied. That power was both material and moral, and it was only rarely ineffective in carrying out judgments and enforcing decisions. The Struggle for Power The struggle for power in Mecca was an old one. In the end, the city settled on this oligarchic form of government. Earlier, however, it had been ruled by a single man, Qusayy Abd Shams, who fought a number of wars against Khuza'a and Banu Bakr until he gained complete control over Mecca. After Qusayy's death, conflict broke out among his sons and their allies. During his lifetime he had entrusted the provision of food for pilgrims, the water supply, the war banner, the council, and the custodianship of the Kaaba to his eldest son, Abd al-Dar. A revolt against Abd al-Dar then broke out under the leadership of Banu Abd Manaf, and Quraysh split between supporters of Banu Abd al-Dar and supporters of Banu Abd Manaf. The Abd Manaf camp consisted of the clans of Abd Shams, Asad, Zuhra, Taym, and al-Harith. The Abd al-Dar camp consisted of Banu Taym, Makhzum, Sahm, Jumah, and Adi. Banu Amir ibn Lu'ayy and Muharib ibn Fihr remained neutral. Each side entered into a pact not to abandon one another or hand any of their allies over to the opposing side. “The Banu Abd Manaf brought out a large bowl filled with perfume. They say that one of the women of Banu Abd Manaf prepared it for them. They placed it before their allies in the sanctuary beside the Kaaba, and the men dipped their hands into it. They and their allies then pledged themselves to one another and confirmed their covenant. Afterward they wiped their hands over the Kaaba to make the oath binding upon themselves. For this reason they were called al-Mutayyabun, ‘the Perfumed Ones.’ “Banu Abd al-Dar and their allies likewise made a solemn covenant beside the Kaaba, pledging that they would neither abandon one another nor surrender one another. They became known as al-Ahlaf, ‘the Confederates.’” Before war broke out between the Perfumed Ones and the Confederates, efforts were made to reach a settlement. It was agreed that responsibility for supplying water and food to the pilgrims would go to Banu Abd Manaf, while custodianship of the Kaaba, the war banner, and the council would remain with Banu Abd al-Dar. This division endured. In effect, power had moved from one-man rule to government by an elite, or oligarchy. But the struggle for power continued. One faction would prosper in trade, its wealth would grow, and with that wealth came greater political ambition. The less wealthy faction would then close ranks to resist the new power of money. It was in this setting that the Hilf al-Fudul, the Pact of the Virtuous, emerged among Banu Hashim, Banu Abd al-Muttalib, Asad, Zuhra, and Taym. These clans agreed to come to one another's aid. Ibn Hisham says that the Pact of the Virtuous arose because some members of Quraysh had repeatedly mistreated visitors from other tribes who came to Mecca for pilgrimage or for trade. One man, having suffered an injustice he could no longer bear, publicly appealed to the leading men of Quraysh for protection. The clans that formed the pact then gathered in the house of Abd Allah ibn Jud'an and pledged to defend anyone who was wronged, so that security and peace might prevail in Mecca and trade could proceed normally. But this explanation is not entirely convincing, because the pact did not include all the clans of Quraysh. If its purpose had simply been to protect and secure trade, every clan should have been eager to join, since all of them were engaged in commerce and all had an interest in safe dealings in Mecca. W. Montgomery Watt is therefore right to observe that the Pact of the Virtuous was in fact a development and continuation of the older Pact of the Perfumed Ones. It included Banu Hashim, al-Muttalib, Asad, Zuhra, and Taym, who were essentially the members of the earlier alliance. Watt also divides the political blocs competing for power in Mecca into three groups. Group A consisted of the members of the Pact of the Virtuous together with Adi and al-Harith ibn Fihr. Group B consisted of Abd Shams, Nawfal, Asad, and Amir. Group C consisted of Makhzum, Sahm, Jumah, and Abd al-Dar. Watt's division of Group A differs from Ibn Hisham's account in the Sira. According to Ibn Hisham, the Pact of the Virtuous did not include Adi or al-Harith ibn Fihr, but it did include Asad, whom Watt places in Group B. In any case, the Pact of the Virtuous was a political alliance formed to confront another bloc; it was not simply an organisation for protecting wronged outsiders. As we shall see, this alliance continued to exist in one form or another even after the rise of Islam. During the reign of Mu'awiya, Husayn ibn Ali ibn Abi Talib became involved in a dispute with al-Walid ibn Utba ibn Abi Sufyan over money that al-Walid owed him. Al-Walid refused to pay, and at the time he was governor of Medina and held political authority there. Husayn threatened to appeal to the Pact of the Virtuous to secure justice. When Mu'awiya heard of this, he ordered al-Walid to pay what he owed, fearing that otherwise unrest might break out and the Pact of the Virtuous might be revived. In fact, the old political blocs continued to exert their influence until the rise of Islam and even afterward, though they took on new forms and entered into new relationships. We shall see that the Prophet, peace be upon him, valued the Pact of the Virtuous and continued to recognise it even after Islam. He is reported to have said: “I witnessed in the house of Abd Allah ibn Jud'an a pact that I would not exchange for the finest red camels. If I were called to uphold it in Islam, I would answer the call.” In other words, he would not have wished to break that pact even in return for the most valuable wealth. The Prophet, peace be upon him, was a member of this pact by virtue of belonging to those who had entered into it. If we return to the composition of the government, we find that only three of its members belonged to the Pact of the Virtuous: al-Abbas ibn Abd al-Muttalib, Yazid ibn Zam'a ibn al- Aswad, and Abu Bakr al-Siddiq. The rest of the government did not belong to the pact. We also find that the main offices in this ten-man government were concentrated in the hands of the other seven. Abu Sufyan ibn Harb held the war banner; al-Harith ibn Amir was responsible for provisioning the pilgrims; Uthman ibn Talha held the banner, the custodianship, the guardianship of the Kaaba, and the council; Khalid ibn al-Walid was responsible for the war pavilion and the cavalry; Umar ibn al-Khattab handled diplomatic missions; Safwan ibn Umayya had charge of the divining arrows; and al-Harith ibn Qays administered the religious endowments and the judiciary. If power in Mecca had really been distributed through a balance among the various forces in society, there would have been no need to form an alliance whose clear purpose was to gather together enough strength to defend its aims against the government or against some other bloc within the government. And if we look at the clans that made up Meccan society, we find that not all of them were represented in the government. A number of clans had no representative at all. The government was therefore not formed on the basis of tribal representation, but on some other basis: financial power. As we shall see, its members were not simply representatives of their tribes; they were generally the richest individuals within those tribes. This political arrangement took shape shortly before the Pact of the Virtuous, or at roughly the same time. The Prophet attended the pact when he was around twenty-five years old. Abu Bakr al- Siddiq and Umar ibn al-Khattab, who were members of the government, were around the same age as he was. Are we really to suppose that the leadership of the tribe of Taym had already passed to Abu Bakr at such an early age? Or was it Abu Bakr's wealth that qualified him to take part in government? We shall find that Abd Allah ibn Jud'an, in whose house the Pact of the Virtuous was concluded, was an elderly and highly respected man and the chief of the tribe of Taym. The same applies to Umar ibn al-Khattab, who represented Adi in the government while still a young man. There were other elders of Adi who were no less capable of governing. On the other hand, Muhammad was not represented in this government, though he was of an age comparable to Abu Bakr and Umar and could in principle have represented Hashim. Instead, Hashim was represented by its richest man, al-Abbas ibn Abd al-Muttalib—not because of his age, for he was not the eldest of his brothers, but because of his wealth. We shall see that tribal influence largely disappears once the Islamic mission begins. Among Hashim, only Hamza and later al-Abbas would stand beside the Prophet, peace be upon him. His other uncles did not rally to him. More than that, his uncle Abu Lahab became one of the fiercest and most brutal enemies both of the new message and of the Prophet himself. We may well be struck by al-Abbas's refusal to embrace Islam despite the many favourable positions he took toward the message and its bearer. Had Abu Talib and al-Abbas not protected the Prophet when Quraysh as a whole conspired against him, there would have been no pact recorded in the document imposing the boycott on Banu Hashim, in which the entire clan was made to suffer because Abu Talib and al-Abbas stood beside the Prophet and protected him. Yet Abu Lahab broke with his own clan during that boycott. The Prophet's enemies themselves had transformed what had originally been a political conflict—one in which people aligned according to interests rather than kinship and tribal loyalty—into a tribal dispute. We shall see tribal solidarity breaking apart while solidarity based on shared interests grows stronger at the beginning of the Islamic mission, when the struggle takes on its true form. Many people from tribes that had not joined the Pact of the Virtuous embraced Islam and stood beside the Prophet. Meanwhile, within Hashim itself, those who accepted Islam were mainly its poorer members. If we look at the first migration to Abyssinia, we find Muslims drawn from many tribes that, in the old tribal order, had competed with one another for authority and government. Islam brought these Muslims together around a single intellectual and religious position. It united them behind the new faith and behind the justice it promised to the needy and the poor. Those who took the most extreme and hostile position toward the Islamic message were overwhelmingly the wealthy, whether they came from Umayya, Hashim, or any other tribe. A powerful alliance united them on the basis of economic interest alone against the new religion, which threatened those interests. We also find that the Qur'anic verses revealed against the fiercest enemies of Islam repeatedly point to their wealth, stressing that their money will do nothing to save them from God's punishment. Of Abu Lahab the Qur'an says: “May the hands of Abu Lahab perish, and may he perish. His wealth and what he earned will not benefit him.” And of Umayya ibn Khalaf came the verse: “Woe to every slanderer and backbiter, who gathers wealth and counts it over and over, thinking that his wealth will make him immortal.” There are many examples of this kind. The Pact of the Virtuous therefore embraced a range of aims and brought together conflicting interests which, despite their differences, united against a more dangerous political bloc—one that sought complete control of government and threatened to close off every path to growth, advancement, and freedom for everyone else. The Basis of the Struggle Abu Sufyan rose to the height of wealth and influence, and he and his allies represented the bloc opposed to the Pact of the Virtuous. The Prophet's clan descended from the powerful line that had once fought for control of Mecca, seized it for a time, and later been displaced from it. Abu Sufyan, meanwhile, came from the rival line of forces that had taken turns in power over different periods. By the time the Prophet began preaching openly, it seemed possible that Abu Sufyan might restore the rule of a single powerful man over Mecca. His influence rested not only on alliances within Quraysh, but on alliances with Arab tribes outside Mecca. He paid these tribes a form of tribute to protect his trading caravans as they passed through their territories, and they were ready to answer his call when war broke out. Quraysh itself was not a fighting people. It had largely abandoned everything except trade, in which it became highly skilled. Most of its leading men were financiers and merchants who had grown extraordinarily rich, and that wealth allowed them to buy the loyalty of experienced fighting tribes. This was the source of Abu Sufyan's strength, and of the domination that he and his allies among the great merchants exercised over Meccan society as a whole. On the other side, we find that the Prophet's clan, with the exception of his uncle al-Abbas, possessed little wealth and belonged economically among the smaller property owners. Abu Sufyan's domination of Meccan trade had reached its height. He therefore saw the Islamic message as nothing less than a revolt against himself and his allies, and this is why he fought it with such relentless ferocity. In Abu Sufyan's view, Muhammad, peace be upon him, was simply a man from a rival camp who had risen to challenge his authority and the power of Umayya and its allies, so that Banu Hashim could seize power for themselves. If the Pact of the Perfumed Ones, and later its new form, the Pact of the Virtuous, was a political alliance founded partly on tribal solidarity and clan loyalty, then its first objective was the struggle for power. The alliance rested on three foundations. The first was the desire to gain a share in political authority. The second was economic: it included a majority of smaller merchants, or merchants who had become small in comparison with their rivals, and it also benefited from the support of the destitute. This gave it a popular character, since it presented itself as an alliance defending the weak and oppressed against the strong oppressor. The third foundation was tribal solidarity. The alliance therefore included great merchants, small merchants, destitute people, and men whose traditional positions of leadership were threatened by the growing influence of their rivals. The Pact of the Virtuous was certainly not an example of pure class conflict. It was a political coalition led by men who themselves belonged to the class of great merchants, while also including allies from outside that class. When the Islamic message appeared, bringing with it a radical transformation of the existing social order, this old alliance disappeared. It played no visible role either in supporting the new message or in resisting it. Indeed, some of the leaders of the pact would fight Islam fiercely. Later, when the social revolution succeeded, came to lead Arab society as a whole, and placed power in the hands of new forces, the old Pact of the Virtuous began once again to make itself felt in the struggle for political authority. The political forces took on a new shape, and the socialist tendency—a fundamental element of Islam—came to be represented by descendants of the old Pact of the Virtuous together with their new allies. Even then, however, the pact appeared as a powerful and sustained political force only on a few occasions, after the structure of society had changed and power had been redistributed in a new way. Islam Was Not a Merchants’ Revolution Many Orientalists argue that the economic and social basis of Islam lay in the commercial interests of Meccan society. As the merchants of Mecca expanded their business, the argument goes, they needed to unite the Arabian Peninsula under their leadership in order to secure their trade and extend their influence as widely as possible. This interpretation is fundamentally mistaken. At the simplest level, it denies something essential to Islam: its socialism, which was directly opposed to the ambitions of the great merchants. The history of the Islamic mission and the savage resistance it faced from the great merchants, led by Abu Sufyan, also contradict this interpretation. So do Islam's basic sources of law, the Qur'an and the Sunna. In reality, Islam was a comprehensive human revolution against social injustice, the sacred and unrestricted claims of property, and the domination of weaker classes by stronger ones. At the same time, it offered a new vision of the world in many different areas. It belongs to that rare class of historical transformations from which a new civilisation is born—a civilisation capable of taking hold of the world and leading it onto a broader path of human development. Islam was therefore not limited to social revolution. It also brought a new understanding of the universe, of humanity's relationship with the world, and of the relationships between human beings. In the modern sense of the word, it was an ideology. Islam has a view of what lies beyond the material world, a view of society, a view of ethics, and a view of history. Islam's victory and its domination of the civilised world of its time cannot be explained by military strength. The Roman Empire, without any need for elaborate proof, possessed military power on a scale that cannot reasonably be compared with the collection of tribes among whom Islam first arose. The Persian Empire, which ruled a large part of the world, likewise possessed armed forces that cannot seriously be compared with the military strength of the Arab tribes. Some may try to explain the astonishing victories of Islam by pointing to the weakness of the Roman and Persian empires. But however great that weakness may have been, no one can reasonably compare their power with the primitive strength available to the Arabs when the Islamic mission began. Most people who study a great historical phenomenon such as Islam tend to produce explanations that are not always very logical, however much evidence they may collect. The historian who believes that economics is the sole foundation of all human development searches Islam for economic motives and concentrates on them alone, until Islam appears to be nothing more than a social transformation produced by conflicting economic and social structures. Military historians concentrate on the distribution of power across the civilised world and construct explanations that first astonish even themselves, until Islam's military victories appear almost natural when considered purely as a matter of armed force. Among military writers in particular, words such as “astonishing,” “unbelievable,” and similar expressions of amazement constantly accompany descriptions of Islam's victories. Scholars of religion do something similar, searching for the historical origins of Islamic belief in the ancient religions of Arabia, in Judaism and Christianity, and in Zoroastrianism. But the truth is that Islam was a new vision embracing many dimensions. These different elements may all have played some part in it, but as a whole it was something radically new and extraordinary. Behind it lay inspiration, intellectual and social development, readiness, challenge, and preparation for the decisive moment when the great leap occurs. Something similar happens in the biological development of living organisms, where most modern scientific theories have struggled to trace all the intermediate transformations that precede a sudden evolutionary leap and help bring it about. Human history is driven by an impulse toward transcendence and toward mastery over the mysteries of the universe. Many forces operate beneath this larger aim: material development in science and methods of production; conflict among human beings over power and the distribution of wealth; abstract philosophical thought; the values that arise naturally from collective human life; and the inspiration granted to certain exceptional individuals. Many forces combine and struggle with one another, and from them emerges humanity's movement toward transcendence and toward mastery over the mysteries of existence. Humanity's problem is not simply how to release the powers of nature in order to satisfy people's basic material needs. The matter goes much deeper than that. The human need for the necessities of life is only one motive driving humanity toward a wider goal, behind which lies a metaphysical impulse present in all human beings. Every new vision that carries humanity one step farther along this long road ultimately triumphs, because humanity is bound to travel that road, whatever obstacles may stand in its way. We may investigate the material and intellectual causes that gave birth to such a vision and brought it to light, but when we do so we cannot simply declare one cause superior to all the others. So far we have been tracing the political and social forces involved, postponing the other dimensions because we shall encounter them soon enough. At this point the struggle begins to take clearer shape. Islam was not a merchants' revolution; our brief examination of the rival political blocs immediately before the mission has already shown the weakness of that claim. In its social dimension, Islam represented the gathering together of the oppressed against the domination of the great merchants. Seen from this angle, everything Islam called for fits this pattern with remarkable clarity. The First Muslims There is no doubt that dividing people into social and economic groups is always an approximation. In the history of every revolution, the class or classes in revolt are united by common interests, but we still speak of a class in a general sense. It does not follow that every member of that class must move with it, or act in accordance with its economic and social goals. We know that some members of the feudal nobility broke with their own class and joined the bourgeois revolutions of Western society. We also know that some wealthy members of the bourgeoisie broke with their own class and joined socialist revolutions. History is full of such cases and such exceptions. In Islam too, a number of Mecca's great merchants broke with their own class and joined the new faith. Just as such cases are exceptional in social revolutions, they were exceptional in Islam as well. Islam differs from the revolutions known to ancient and modern history because, alongside being a social revolution, it was also a religious faith capable of drawing the hearts of rich and poor alike. Even so, the campaign against Islam was led, in general, by the wealthy, while the oppressed, in general, stood beside it. The ten-man government of Mecca fought the new faith, and the three members of the Pact of the Virtuous who sat in that government supported the struggle against it. Some of those already fighting Umayya and its allies for political power may have seen Islam as an opportunity to shift the balance, a means to victory, and a new field of struggle. Such people may have entered Islam partly for political reasons, alongside the religious appeal of the message and the coherent relationship it established between God and the human being. The oppressed, meanwhile, could see in Islam a social revolution that would restore to them their stolen rights to life, dignity, and freedom. Those who embraced Islam therefore did so for more than one reason: religious conviction, political struggle, and class conflict. The new faith drew believers from different directions. But the broad feature shared by those who joined it was their struggle against the power of the great merchants and against their attempt to monopolise life itself for their own benefit. When we examine the earliest converts to Islam, we find that many of them came from the families and clans associated with the Pact of the Virtuous. It is natural that Khadija should have been the first person to believe in Islam. She was the wife of the Prophet, peace be upon him, and a noble woman who had extended a helping hand to him when he was a poor shepherd. She supported him, strengthened him, and lived beside him as an exemplary wife. She and the Prophet shared long conversations about everything—his social ideas as well as his religious inspiration. She understood his character deeply and recognised the signs in his conduct that pointed toward something extraordinary. She also helped him find solitude and withdrawal from ordinary life, creating the conditions in which he could discover his path. His long retreats in the Cave of Hira, made possible with Khadija's support, are clear evidence of how deeply she understood the Prophet's character. Her closeness to him was enough for her to know his truthfulness, honesty, and sincerity. When we read the story of Zayd ibn Haritha, we see the same thing. Zayd was a slave belonging to Khadija whom the Prophet asked her to give to him because of the affection and concern he felt for the boy. The story shows how strongly the Prophet's character affected those around him and how profoundly humane his treatment of people was, even toward dependants and slaves. Zayd had been a boy from a respectable family in Syria. He was captured and later sold as a slave in Mecca, where Khadija bought him. His father spent years searching for him. Eventually the grieving father came to Mecca to recover his son. The Prophet welcomed him and readily agreed that Zayd could return with him. But Zayd, who had found in the Prophet a kind of fatherhood beyond anything he had known, chose to remain in the Prophet's care. The story tells us that when Zayd's father spoke to the Prophet and then to his son, he did not become angry or collapse in grief at losing the child for whom he had searched for more than ten years. Instead, he left happy and reassured, because he saw that his son was receiving in the Prophet's household a degree of affection, love, and dignity wholly unlike the life ordinarily endured by dependants and slaves in Meccan society and throughout the civilised societies of the time. The Prophet freed Zayd and adopted him, and Zayd remained a devoted son until the end of his life, dying in battle in defence of the new faith. Such conduct tells us much about the Prophet's character and the genuine influence he had on those around him. It was therefore entirely natural that Ali ibn Abi Talib should embrace Islam while still a child living in the Prophet's care. A similar scene was then repeated between Ali and his father, Abu Talib. Abu Talib saw his son praying behind the Prophet and, astonished by what he saw, quickly asked him: “My son, what is this religion you have adopted?” Ali replied: “Father, I believe in God and in the Messenger of God. I believe what he has brought, I pray with him to God, and I follow him.” It is striking that the first male to embrace Islam was Ali ibn Abi Talib, whose father had been too poor to support him and had therefore entrusted him to the Prophet's care, while the second was Zayd ibn Haritha, who had been sold as a slave. Khadija, Ali, and Zayd would in the long run represent three different social groups that supported the Prophet and believed in him. Abu Bakr's conversion represents another form of belief that brought people outside the oppressed classes into Islam. He was a major merchant from the same social class as Khadija, and he was bound to the Prophet by a close friendship resembling the deep bond of love and understanding between the Prophet and his wife. Abu Bakr also belonged to the tribe of Taym, whose chief, Abd Allah ibn Jud'an, had hosted the Pact of the Virtuous in his house. We shall then see that when Abu Bakr began inviting others to Islam, he first approached men from his own social class and from his own wider tribal circle. Among the men of his own class, the first was Uthman ibn Affan, one of Abu Bakr's closest friends, even though he came from the house of Umayya, which fought the Islamic message with extraordinary intensity. Abu Bakr then brought into Islam al-Zubayr ibn al-Awwam of Asad, whose clan had belonged to the Pact of the Virtuous; Abd al-Rahman ibn Awf of Zuhra, another clan in the pact; Sa'd ibn Abi Waqqas, also of Zuhra; and Talha ibn Ubayd Allah of Taym, Abu Bakr's own tribe and another member of the Pact of the Virtuous. The conversions of the first Muslims continued in this way, and they broadly represented the same three tendencies first visible in Khadija and Abu Bakr, in Ali ibn Abi Talib, and in Zayd ibn Haritha. From the very first moments of the Islamic mission, then, its political and social outlines had already begun to emerge. The Centre Takes Power “Then take special care of the merchants and craftsmen, and treat them well: those who are settled, those who travel with their wealth, and those who labour with their own hands. They are the sources of benefit and the means by which useful goods are brought from distant and difficult places, by land and sea, across plains and mountains—places where people do not gather and where few would dare to go. They are a peaceful people whose violence need not be feared, and a conciliatory people whose treachery need not be expected. “Attend to their affairs both in your own presence and in the distant parts of your territory. Yet know that many of them are guilty of excessive greed, shameful avarice, hoarding necessities, and controlling prices. This harms the public and disgraces those who govern. Therefore prevent hoarding, for the Messenger of God, peace be upon him, forbade it. “Let buying and selling be conducted freely and fairly, with just measures and prices that do not wrong either seller or buyer. Whoever continues to hoard after you have forbidden him should be disciplined and punished, though without excess.” This passage comes from a letter sent by Ali ibn Abi Talib to al-Ashtar, one of his closest governors and one of the men who stood beside him to the end. The letter makes Ali ibn Abi Talib's position toward trade and merchants quite clear, and it is a position fully consistent with what Islam taught. Islam prohibited usury and interest, and in doing so abolished the financial operations that had formed the backbone of economic life in Mecca. Islam also introduced legislation preventing polytheists from entering Mecca, at a time when most Arabs were still polytheists. The Arabs had come to Mecca largely because it was a marketplace where they could buy and sell, and so the merchants were alarmed and feared that their trade would collapse. The Qur'an says: “O you who believe, the polytheists are unclean, so let them not approach the Sacred Mosque after this year. If you fear poverty, God will enrich you from His bounty if He wills. God is All-Knowing, All-Wise.” This prohibition was enforced, and trade came to occupy a secondary position. The Qur'an also makes clear that commerce is secondary: “When they see trade or entertainment, they rush toward it and leave you standing.” The Qur'an therefore prohibited the financial practices that had been vital to Mecca's capitalists. It also laid down rules for trade that rejected hoarding and the manipulation of prices, and it gave the ruler authority to intervene in buying and selling, set prices, and punish those who violated the rules. All of this was precisely what Quraysh's wealthy merchants opposed. It was what brought the rich men of Quraysh together and united them in the struggle to defeat Islam. And from the very beginning, it was this same issue that defined the position of the different political blocs toward the new faith, as well as the social classes that supported or opposed it. The first merchants to embrace Islam had one thing in common: they were either close friends of the Prophet, like Abu Bakr al-Siddiq, or close friends of Abu Bakr, like Uthman ibn Affan and others whom Abu Bakr persuaded to accept Islam. But these men were few. The great majority of the early Muslims were small property owners, people with nothing at all, or slaves. The Meccans even mocked the Prophet when they saw him gathering with freedmen, servants, the poor, and the destitute, preaching Islam to them and leading them in prayer. Not one of the great men of the city had entered this religion. If it were true, they thought, surely their leaders and nobles would have believed in it. That was shallow reasoning, but it reveals how deeply the wealthy and powerful sensed that Islam stood against them and threatened their interests. Unfortunately, the works of the early biographers rarely look beyond the religious surface of the conflict to examine its deeper causes. Even so, they give us enough material to identify the material interests that lay behind the opposition to Islam. As the leader of a new movement that he wanted to spread, the Prophet naturally approached tribal chiefs and other influential figures and tried to persuade them to accept Islam. When the blind man Ibn Umm Maktum once came to ask him about the religion while he was trying to win over al-Walid ibn al-Mughira, the Prophet turned away from him. Islam needed the support of the powerful, not the weak. But this judgement was mistaken. The new religion carried within it the seeds of a social revolution, and its true champions were precisely these weak people. The Qur’an soon rebuked the Prophet for what he had done and drew his attention to the error: “He frowned and turned away because the blind man came to him. Yet how could you know? Perhaps he might purify himself, or take heed and benefit from the reminder. As for the one who considers himself self-sufficient, you give him your attention, though you are not responsible if he does not purify himself. But the one who comes to you eagerly, in reverent fear—you neglect him. No. This is indeed a reminder. Whoever wishes may remember it, in honoured pages.” The Prophet took this lesson to heart. His closest companions came to include Suhayb, Bilal, Yasir, Ammar, Salman, Abu Dharr, and others from among the slaves and the weak. They formed his true inner circle and became some of Islam’s strongest and most steadfast soldiers. We may recall the famous story of Salman al-Farisi, who tried to make his way past a group of prominent Muslims so that he could sit beside the Prophet. The Qurayshi nobles among the Muslims became angry and objected. The Prophet answered them decisively: “Salman is one of us, the People of the House,” and allowed him to sit beside him. Salman had once been a slave and had gained his freedom only through Islam. We may also remember that the Prophet appointed Zayd ibn Haritha, his adopted son whom he had freed, to command one of the military expeditions he sent out. More striking still, he appointed Zayd’s son, still a young man of no more than twenty, to lead an army that included among its soldiers Khalid ibn al-Walid. After the Prophet’s death, this caused some debate. Should such a young man really remain in command of so important a mission? Abu Bakr upheld the Prophet’s decision, refused to remove Zayd’s son, and confirmed him as commander over some of the greatest Arab military leaders. The slaves and the oppressed understood that Islam, as a social revolution, was their revolution. That was why they rallied beneath its banner and fought for it with extraordinary courage. The Prophet’s closest associates and most trusted followers came from these classes. The wealthy men who embraced Islam, on the other hand, were drawn to it by a genuine goodness in themselves, by the influence of the Prophet’s personality and their friendship with him, and by their objective recognition of his sincerity. Yet despite all this, they still carried social attitudes inherited from their class, and Islam did not enable them to rid themselves of these completely. As in every revolution, we can see three tendencies within the vanguard that believed in the new religion: a revolutionary left, a moderate centre, and a conservative right. The revolutionary left naturally consisted of the propertyless, the freedmen, and the slaves. Their view of Islam was clearer because they were not burdened by property or by class roots that might distort or obstruct their understanding. The centre consisted of practical men who, after the Prophet’s death, had to save Islam from a conflict that was threatening to erupt between a left that interpreted Islam in a way that would bring social justice to its fullest possible extent and a right that believed Islam had never intended to abolish class privilege or establish social justice on so wide a scale. Several important events then took place. The first came when the Prophet was victorious and entered Mecca without fighting. He wanted to win over the Quraysh and encourage them to accept Islam, hoping that Islamic teaching would work upon their hearts and draw them toward genuine faith. He therefore spared his former enemies and told them, “Go, for you are free.” He guaranteed Abu Sufyan’s safety and declared, “Whoever enters the house of Abu Sufyan is safe.” The mission was greater than the Prophet’s quarrel with Abu Sufyan and greater than any quarrel with any individual or group within the new Muslim community. The vanguard working beside the Prophet was so strong in faith and revolutionary commitment that no reactionary force inside the community could dislodge it or corrupt the social message of Islam. The most stubborn men of wealth, together with those who hungered for power, submitted to the new force and concluded that entering its ranks offered the surest and easiest road to authority. Muawiya began drawing close to the Prophet, as did many others from the Umayyads and from the tribes and families that had previously waged a bitter war against the Prophet and Islam. The Prophet accepted their conversion and went to considerable lengths to treat them generously, hoping to win their hearts and bring them into Islam both outwardly and inwardly. We do not intend to follow the most extreme Shiite writers and claim that all of these conversions were false, or that these men merely acted opportunistically so that they could ride the wave they had once opposed. There is no doubt that Islam came to dominate everyone. But the reactionary forces of Quraysh also saw the success of the new faith throughout Arabia, and the possibility of its expansion beyond the peninsula, as an opportunity for their own ambitions. They therefore entered the new religion with all their weight behind them. They were satisfied with its acts of worship and perhaps understood religion only in those terms. They fought in its wars, fought bravely, and became a force that could no longer be ignored. During the Prophet’s lifetime, his closest followers were the oppressed, foremost among them Ali ibn Abi Talib, who scarcely left the Prophet’s side throughout his life. Yet the higher political need to secure the foundations of the new state required that the council of consultation take a particular form—though we do not know exactly how formally that council was constituted. All we really know is that its members were leading Muslims whose tribal and political standing gave weight to their words among the people they represented. Tribal influence had not yet disappeared. Islam had existed among them for only ten years, far too short a time to erase deeply rooted traditions. Of the revolutionary left, this council included only Ali ibn Abi Talib. The rest of the left were oppressed people who possessed no kind of power except that which came from the sincerity of their faith and their struggle for Islam. These were the teachers of Islam whom the Prophet sent to newly converted tribes to instruct them in the religion. Later, they became preservers of the hadith and Sunnah and among the strongest voices insisting that Muslims adhere to the teachings of Islam. Their standing came from this alone, but it was considerable, and their influence over all Muslims —even their enemies—was profound. Had the council of consultation been made up of such men—or rather, had it been possible for such a council to be made up of them—Islam would have followed an entirely different course. But while tribalism remained at its height, men like Salman al-Farisi, Abu Dharr al- Ghifari, Ammar ibn Yasir, and Suhayb al-Rumi could hardly have stood at the head of such a council. Most were either oppressed people or former slaves from foreign lands. Salman was Persian, Suhayb was Byzantine, Ammar was a slave, and Abu Dharr belonged to Ghifar, a tribe of little importance except that it lay along the route of the Qurayshi caravans and protected them in return for payment. Similar descriptions and circumstances applied to the other revolutionary Companions. They had to be content with the formidable title of “Companions of the Prophet.” These men did not enter the council of consultation, nor were they counted among the men of authority and decision. Indeed, it may be that no formally constituted council existed during the Prophet’s lifetime at all. Its later conditions seem instead to have been worked out by interpretation, and politics played a large part in that process. Most likely the Prophet deliberately refrained from formally establishing such a council so that he would not impose a fixed model upon the Muslims. There is nothing to prove that the “men of authority and decision” were necessarily the wealthy senior Companions such as Talha, al-Zubayr, Abd al-Rahman ibn Awf, and others whose fortunes, by the time of Uthman, were counted in the millions. They were simply the Muslims who possessed the greatest authority over their tribes. Because of their social position, the Prophet kept them close and consulted them, just as he consulted others. Had the Prophet lived longer, perhaps a stable and clearly defined practical system of consultation would have emerged. The principle of consultation itself is firmly established in the Qur’an as one of Islam’s basic principles. But what precise form was that consultation supposed to take in practice? No one can answer this with certainty from either the Qur’an or the Sunnah. In any case, when the Prophet lay dying, Umar ibn al-Khattab urged Abu Bakr to go with him to the Saqifa after they learned that a group of the Ansar had gathered there to discuss who should succeed the Prophet as leader of the Muslims. The Ansar believed that they were the ones who had sheltered the Prophet and fought beside him at Badr, the battle that marked a turning point in Islamic history. For this reason, they argued, the man who succeeded the Prophet should come from among them. There were certainly some among the Ansar who tried to use this argument for personal advantage. Both the early biographies and modern historians suggest as much. Many other arguments were certainly raised at this crucial meeting as well. It was said, for example, that Islam rejected tribal partisanship and recognised no superiority of one man over another except through his struggle for the faith and the sincerity of his devotion as tested by experience. The principle of equality may well have been raised in its widest sense, along with the question of hereditary succession and other major issues brought suddenly to the surface by the overwhelming event of the Prophet’s death. The early biographies record the discussions of the meeting only briefly, leaving us to reconstruct much of what happened by inference. What matters is that the Emigrants felt, with some justification, that they had been the first pioneers of Islam: the first to suffer exile and sacrifice for it, the first to embrace it, and the first to stand beside the Prophet. The discussion may initially have involved the Prophet’s family, before widening into a debate between the Emigrants and the Ansar. The dispute was ultimately settled with great diplomatic skill by that seasoned statesman Umar ibn al-Khattab. He put forward a man whom almost no one could oppose because of his exceptional closeness to the Prophet, his early conversion, and his lifelong struggle beside the movement from its earliest days: Abu Bakr al-Siddiq. The choice of Abu Bakr was extraordinarily successful. Both right and left could accept him, and the Ansar could scarcely challenge him. The left respected Abu Bakr, however, without necessarily accepting that he should lead the Muslims. The social principles of Islam had not yet been put into practice. The Prophet had proclaimed the general principles in his famous Farewell Sermon, but those principles had not yet been transformed into concrete institutions and policies. Ali ibn Abi Talib and the group of Companions who represented the left therefore opposed the pledge of allegiance to Abu Bakr. Ali even regarded the meeting at the Saqifa, held in his absence, as a conspiracy engineered by Umar ibn al-Khattab. The estrangement between them lasted for some time. Ali and his companions had been beside the Prophet, preparing his body for burial. As some historians put it, the Prophet’s body had not yet grown cold when Umar hurried Abu Bakr to the Saqifa to settle the question of the Messenger of God’s successor. When Ali learned what had happened, he became angry and refused to give allegiance, as did his party and supporters. Ali and his companions remained outside the pledge for a full six months. The entire right welcomed Abu Bakr’s caliphate, including the council of consultation, which did not emerge as an important and formally recognised political force until the pledge of allegiance itself. The council then continued to exist until all its members had disappeared—through death, withdrawal, or killing in the struggle among them over the caliphate. Eventually Muawiya seized power from Ali ibn Abi Talib, the extreme right came to power, and this theory of consultation disappeared until modern times, or at least ceased completely to operate in practice. The right’s enthusiastic welcome of Abu Bakr’s caliphate and its haste to support him can mean only one thing: that the majority of Muslims were inclined toward the left represented by Ali and his companions. By this I mean that the broad Muslim masses favoured this tendency because the Prophet himself had been its leader and had laid down its fundamental principles. Any openly opposing tendency would have met fierce resistance and would have been crushed at birth. Abu Bakr’s caliphate therefore gave the right an opportunity to gather its forces and prepare for a future seizure of power after the death of the Prophet, during whose lifetime no one had dared divert the movement away from its proper course. For this reason, the right accepted the pledge to Abu Bakr, welcomed it, and worked for its success, while the left, led by Ali ibn Abi Talib, openly opposed it. Events soon postponed this conflict. Tribes outside Mecca and Medina quickly renounced Islam, and Muslims of every tendency had to unite to defeat and suppress the rebellion. The centre, represented by Abu Bakr and Umar ibn al-Khattab, thus benefited from historical circumstances that made the transfer of power to them virtually unavoidable. We shall see that the early biographies sometimes suggest that Ali desired power for himself. This claim appears again and again. But these biographies—and indeed almost everything written about the early history of Islam—were composed much later, under right-wing governments in which supreme power was hereditary. Those who held power had an interest in condemning what later came to be called the Great Civil War, when an armed revolution overthrew Uthman ibn Affan and killed him. That was the period in which the struggle reached its greatest intensity. These historians explain Ali’s refusal to give allegiance by claiming that he believed the caliphate should be hereditary and that, as the Prophet’s closest relative, he had the strongest right to inherit it. Yet they do not attack hereditary succession itself. On the contrary, they later benefited from it for more than a century under Umayyad rule and then for several centuries under the Abbasids. Ali is therefore made to appear as a self-interested man defending his personal ambition and desires. Yet nothing in Ali’s political conduct at any stage supports such a picture. Strangely, the same idea was later adopted by the Shiites, whose writings came to revolve around Ali’s right to the caliphate because of his kinship with the Prophet rather than because of the social tendency he represented. Shiism later split into religious sects and accumulated many legends from which Ali’s earliest supporters would have dissociated themselves, as would Ali himself, judging from the texts that have reached us. Just as the right feared this left, so did the centre. When Abu Bakr felt death approaching, one of his chief concerns was to ensure that allegiance would pass to Umar ibn al-Khattab. He recommended this to everyone, especially to the council of consultation. The Prophet had deliberately done no such thing, wishing instead to establish the principle that Muslims themselves alone had the right to choose the man who governed them. The left is often slow to take the initiative because it usually believes in ideals and inclines toward compromise, especially when the revolution itself is under threat. The left therefore adopted a strange sequence of positions: first boycott, then reconciliation, then acceptance, while waiting for the revolution as a whole to survive the dangers threatening it. We shall see that Ali and his companions threw themselves fully into the Wars of Apostasy and stood beside Abu Bakr with all their strength. Abu Bakr, after all, was neither an enemy nor an opponent, but a moderate man of immense standing in Islam and in the heart of the Prophet. From the very beginning, people began comparing Abu Bakr and Ali. But this was a constitutional comparison, not a personal one. It was said that the Prophet had once placed Ali in charge of the Muslims during his absence. Against this, others replied that during his final illness the Prophet had ordered Abu Bakr to lead the Muslims in prayer, implying that he intended Abu Bakr to succeed him. In any event, historians never explored either incident in great depth. Both were left vague by historians writing under established political authority, just as later Shiite writers greatly exaggerated the evidence for Ali’s superiority over Abu Bakr—an issue that had never even occurred to the original participants in those terms. All that happened was that each side tried to infer from the Prophet’s actions some sign or indication of whom he wished to succeed him. Abu Bakr’s decision to nominate Umar ibn al-Khattab and his determination, even from his deathbed, to secure the pledge of allegiance to him did not mean that he was waging war on the left or deliberately trying to keep it from power. He believed that the expected conflict should be postponed until the foundations of Islam had become secure. He may also have believed that the left was too radical for the merchants and leading men, many of whom he himself had helped bring into Islam. Umar ibn al-Khattab continued the policy followed by Abu Bakr—a policy that Umar himself had done much to shape, since he had been Abu Bakr’s principal adviser in almost every matter. There were occasional disagreements between them, but these did not undermine the profound agreement in outlook that bound the two men together. Umar ibn al-Khattab is an extraordinary personality who deserves close study. Although modern writers have already produced a wealth of thought about him, much remains to be examined. He was a powerful man who always possessed initiative, and in him thought and action seemed to arise at the same instant. He nevertheless achieved a remarkable degree of fairness and integrity. Ali and his companions did criticise him, but their criticism never became a complete rupture, nor did it ever drive the left into revolution. One especially significant episode concerns Salman al-Farisi. Under Umar, Salman served as governor of Kufa and tried to administer Iraq in a way consistent with his left-wing outlook. He organised associations for craftsmen which, under much later Shiite movements, eventually developed into secret brotherhoods resembling Masonic orders. There is no evidence that Salman himself intended anything of the kind or even conceived of such a development. What happened—and once again the sources are vague—is that the merchants and the wealthy first tried to win Salman over. When they failed, they began openly fighting him. Such opposition would make little sense unless his administrative measures had genuinely threatened their interests. Apparently they could not easily remove him within Kufa itself, which can only mean that he enjoyed broad popular support in the province. They therefore sent a delegation to the seat of the caliphate in Medina. There they met Umar ibn al-Khattab, presented their complaints, and described the measures Salman had taken against their interests. Umar immediately dismissed Salman from Kufa and never again appointed him to an official post. This dismissal must have provoked intense debate between the left and Umar ibn al- Khattab. But Umar did not reverse his decision, and the left took no violent action to overturn it. The dismissal of a single governor, however significant its implications, could hardly be treated as sufficient cause for a revolution that might threaten the young state. In any case, Umar ibn al-Khattab possessed enough genius and ambition to keep all Muslims occupied with conquests on every front. He was also skilful enough never to adopt an openly hostile position toward the left. Its members continued to hold a small number of official posts here and there. After all, Umar himself had been the one to appoint Salman governor of Kufa after the conquest of Iraq. Curiously, Salman’s governorship and dismissal receive very little attention in the works of the historians. We encounter them only in scattered references, and this neglect seems almost deliberate. There can be no doubt that Umar ibn al-Khattab was an exemplary ruler and a man whose sense of justice filled his whole being, until justice seemed almost instinctive in him. Toward the end of his rule, this quality developed still further. The right began to fear him and wait for an opportunity to be rid of him, while the left increasingly drew close to him, gathered around him, and praised his positions. We cannot establish the truth behind his strange and sudden murder, and we therefore do not wish to cast doubt upon the accepted motives without evidence. The historians unanimously agree that Abu Lu’lu’a al-Majusi killed him over a trivial grievance. Some historians trace the killing to a political conspiracy involving al-Hurmuzan and certain Persians. But no one seems to have considered whether the conspiracy might have been wider still. The suggestion of an internal conspiracy behind Umar’s death may at first seem arbitrary. Yet if we consider the extraordinarily elaborate conspiracies and astonishing political calculations that emerged from the camp of the right after the killing of Uthman ibn Affan— the way Muawiya delayed aiding his cousin until the rebels killed him, followed by the conspiracy in which Ali was killed and attempts were made on Amr ibn al-As and Muawiya himself—all this invites reflection, even though our historical sources give us no direct indication of anything similar in Umar’s case. Once we know that political conspiracies of great sophistication did occur on more than one occasion, we cannot help reconsidering Umar’s murder. Toward the end of his reign, Umar had imposed severe restrictions on the leading figures, even forbidding them from leaving Medina. In modern language, he effectively placed them under restricted residence. At the same time, he held the machinery of government in an iron grip. His age, despite its astonishing conquests, therefore became known as an age of severity. Through the force of his personality and the harsh standards he imposed on himself and his own family, Umar won the obedience even of his fiercest enemies and of men who longed for power. He also won the admiration of ordinary people, who appreciated his justice. There was therefore no practical way to overthrow him or conspire against him openly. Alongside this severity, Umar underwent a striking transformation toward the left. This appeared both in his personal conduct in Medina and in the instructions he gave his governors across the provinces, whom he held to strict account in the interests of the Muslim majority and even of the peoples of conquered nations. He also began speaking to those close to him about new laws that would directly affect the interests of the wealthy. Near the end of his life he declared: “If I could begin again knowing what I know now, I would take the surplus wealth of the rich and return it to the poor.” One might initially suppose that by “surplus” he meant only whatever remained after ordinary needs had been met. But we cannot understand the force of the statement until we know what counted as “need” in that period and according to the social logic of the Muslim community: “one garment for winter and one garment for summer,” and a standard of living “like that of a man of Quraysh who is neither among its richest nor its poorest.” This was how Abu Dharr, citing a saying of the Prophet, described what a true Muslim genuinely needed for his livelihood. Such a declaration was extremely serious at a time when enormous private fortunes were being accumulated—fortunes that, after Umar’s death and during Uthman’s caliphate, were counted in millions of dinars. Was Umar’s murder, then, an internal conspiracy by reactionary forces threatened by the justice of this great caliph? Immediately after Umar’s death, in the first days of Uthman’s accession, a sharp dispute arose between Ali ibn Abi Talib and the new caliph over the need to investigate Abdullah ibn Umar’s killing of Abu Lu’lu’a al-Majusi and his alleged accomplice. Was Ali’s extraordinary persistence in demanding an investigation motivated by something more than a simple desire to apply the law of retaliation to the son of the murdered caliph? To this day, we know almost nothing about the details of this case. We do not know what Abu Lu’lu’a or those behind him may have concealed in their hearts. They were killed immediately, before the state could question them. Was Ali really so harsh that he wanted Abdullah punished for spilling the blood of his father’s killers? Or was he trying to uncover something larger? When Abdullah heard what had happened, he drew his sword and rushed in fury to kill the alleged conspirators before any investigation could be conducted. Who told him what had happened? Who identified the killers for him? No one knows any of the details. On the other side, Uthman and his advisers immediately decided to close the case and end the investigation. Ali failed to have it reopened. Their justification was one no one could easily challenge: it was unreasonable, they argued, for the caliph to be murdered one day and then for his son to be executed the next because he had killed his father’s killers. We do not know how to explain Ali ibn Abi Talib’s insistence on putting Abdullah ibn Umar on trial unless the historians preserved the episode in order to damage Ali’s reputation— one among the many open and hidden attacks directed at him decades after his death. It is genuinely strange that Umar ibn al-Khattab should have been killed at a time when he was in complete accord with Ali and his companions, and that Ali should then have taken so firm a position in demanding legal retaliation against Umar’s son. The immediate turn toward Uthman, almost as though it had been arranged in advance, is also striking. Uthman was known as a gentle, kindly old man. Did the leading decision- makers simply want an easier and more lenient age after the severity of Umar, as some modern historians suggest? Or was there another purpose behind the choice? Ali ibn Abi Talib’s appointment was apparently never seriously discussed, as though Ali and a large and influential party of the Prophet’s Companions had never refused allegiance to Abu Bakr, and as though he had not initially taken the same position toward Umar before the two drew together late in Umar’s caliphate. The matter invites questions, but there is no material evidence that proves any of this. All we have is an interpretation of the political situation and of the lines along which the struggle developed. These give rise to suspicion, but they do not establish certainty. Yet the sudden transformation that came under Uthman may strengthen those suspicions. The kindly old man quickly surrendered himself to the influence of his relatives, and authority throughout the Muslim world passed into the hands of members of his family, including men who before Islam’s victory had been among its most bitter and ferocious enemies, only embracing it after its triumph, whether willingly or under pressure. More remarkable still, large-scale private landownership was not firmly established until the time of Uthman. Vast estates in the provinces became the property of the Arab aristocracy, worked by slaves in their hundreds and thousands. Under Abu Bakr and Umar ibn al- Khattab, these lands had remained state property. Suddenly, all or nearly all the provinces were in Umayyad hands. The Umayyads, who since the pre-Islamic period had struggled to dominate Mecca, had at first seen Islam as an attempt to destroy their authority and monopolise power against them. Before long, however, they and their allies changed tactics. Their aim became to work their way into the leading positions of the new order. This does not necessarily mean that their conversion to Islam was insincere. But neither does it change the fact that they represented a class, thought as a class, and planned in ways designed to serve their class interests and ambitions. We shall see the Prophet’s Companions pushed aside and treated harshly, even beaten and humiliated. Abdullah ibn Masud, for example, was removed from his position as treasurer of the public treasury in Kufa because he demanded repayment of a debt owed to the treasury by one of Uthman’s relatives. When he insisted that the debt be repaid, the relative complained to Uthman. The caliph wrote to rebuke Ibn Masud and make him understand that he was merely “our treasurer.” But Abdullah ibn Masud believed that he was the treasurer of the Muslims’ wealth and therefore responsible for it before his conscience and before the Muslim community. He threw down the keys to the treasury, resigned his office, and remained at home. The caliph then summoned him, and the governor sent him to Medina. We do not know under what conditions he was sent. But once he arrived, Uthman insulted him publicly in words so painful that Aisha cried out before everyone: “Uthman! Do you speak this way to a Companion of the Messenger of God?” Ali also rose and protested. Yet Ibn Masud was then taken out on Uthman’s orders and beaten so savagely that one of his ribs was broken. Uthman also ordered that his stipend be stopped, and it remained withheld until Ibn Masud lay dying. And Abdullah ibn Masud was one of the pillars of the Islamic left and one of those closest to the Messenger of God. We shall also see another Companion, Abu Dharr al-Ghifari, subjected to humiliating treatment. His closeness to the Prophet is famous and well known. When Abu Dharr rose against the new laws that greatly expanded private ownership, Uthman summoned him and argued that once a Muslim had paid the required alms, nothing further could be demanded of him. Abu Dharr replied with his famous words: “A man who has paid the alms should not be content with that until he feeds the hungry, gives to the one who asks, and shows kindness to his neighbours.” In this dispute over what the author regards as Islam’s basic principles, Muawiya and Uthman maintained that wealth belonged to God and that the caliph could therefore dispose of it as he saw fit. Abu Dharr argued instead that wealth belonged to the Muslims and that the caliph had no right to dispose of it as he pleased, but only in accordance with the will of the Muslim community. This was part of the famous dispute that ended with Abu Dharr being exiled to the desert of al-Rabadha and deprived of his stipend until he died there. His wife could not even find a shroud in which to bury him until a passing man gave his own cloak for the purpose. When Ammar ibn Yasir rose to defend Abu Dharr and oppose his exile, Uthman rebuked him and belittled his standing in Islam. He ordered Ammar exiled as well. When Ali ibn Abi Talib intervened in protest, Uthman told him: “You are no better than Ammar, and no less deserving of exile than he is.” On another occasion Uthman ordered Ammar beaten. He was beaten until he lost consciousness. At another time Uthman kicked him in the stomach so violently that he suffered a rupture. The leading figures of the left were thus being exiled, dismissed, and beaten. Muawiya ibn Abi Sufyan became the spectre with which Uthman frightened his opponents: he would send them to Muawiya, who devised ever more ingenious punishments for them. These events were not accidents, and they could not have occurred without earlier causes. They show that the right had seized political power. Whether Uthman was a good man surrounded by bad advisers, or whether he consciously understood and carried out the policy himself, the result was the same: every major measure of his reign benefited the wealthy, allowing them to become richer, and harmed the poor, leaving them poorer—to use Abu Dharr’s own words in his arguments with Muawiya and Uthman. At the same time, the chief provincial offices, including the governorships, were gradually emptied of their previous holders and filled by the sons of the “Pardoned”—Umayyads and others whom the Prophet had spared after the conquest of Mecca when he told Islam’s former enemies, “Go, for you are free,” hoping thereby to win their hearts to the religion. The revolution therefore had to erupt. The left was finally forced to take the initiative and defend the fundamental principles that were now being openly altered and challenged. The Right and the Revolution The murder of Umar ibn al-Khattab marks the beginning of the right’s seizure of power within Muslim society. Umar’s death has occupied both ancient and modern historians, Arab scholars and Orientalists alike. Yet most have been unable to decide whether his murder resulted from an internal conspiracy by the right, which used Abu Lu’lu’a al- Majusi as its instrument; from a plot by conquered peoples, especially the Persians, against the caliph of the Muslims; or simply from Abu Lu’lu’a’s personal resentment over the trivial tax imposed on him. Such uncertainty may be understandable if the case is viewed in isolation. But if we follow the intense struggle between right and left from the pre-Islamic period down to Umar’s murder, the logic of events points decisively toward the guilt of the right. In the final years of his life, Umar had shifted toward the left. He increasingly accepted the advice of Ali and his companions and began confiscating the wealth of the Qurayshi aristocracy, including wealth they had acquired as spoils of war. This was controversial, since the rules governing the distribution of war booty, as practised by the Prophet in many campaigns, had often favoured men who already possessed wealth. Umar’s policy therefore broke with an established practice. Yet the Prophet himself had set a precedent for such confiscation, and Umar treated that precedent as a general rule. There can be little doubt that, in the author’s view, Umar was right. The spirit of Islamic legislation supported him, and the Prophet had reinforced that spirit when he carried out the first confiscation. Moreover, the conquests under Umar had expanded enormously. War booty was no longer a limited matter, as it had been during the smaller internal campaigns of the Prophet’s lifetime. For this reason, the right’s opposition to Umar’s measures failed to win popular support. The confiscated wealth went to the public treasury and thus, in principle, to the Muslim community as a whole. The left strongly supported the policy, and the right was forced to remain silent while nursing its resentment and making plans. The right is usually willing to compromise over political authority. It can tolerate a government of the centre so long as that government accommodates it and protects its interests. But when those interests are directly threatened, it moves quickly. The right is not governed by principles in the idealistic sense. Wealth is its highest value because wealth brings prestige and power. It therefore tends toward swift, practical calculation. It usually holds the initiative because it recognises no restraint except personal interest. In its rush to defend those interests, it pays little attention to the public good, human principles, or the judgement of history. The second measure Umar adopted, and one that further angered the right and drove it toward action, was his decision to keep the leading Muslims in Medina under his eye and supervision. If we add to this the increasingly close relationship between Umar and the party of the left, the conclusion becomes clear: the right had to act, and act quickly. The conspiracy with Abu Lu’lu’a al-Majusi was therefore arranged, and every part of it was carefully planned. Immediately after Umar was struck, Ubayd Allah ibn Umar was informed of the crime, the identity of the killer, and the names of those said to have taken part. As soon as the news reached him, Ubayd Allah killed the alleged conspirators. In this way, the evidence of the conspiracy disappeared with the deaths of its only witnesses. Yet when Ubayd Allah first heard the news, he muttered words suggesting that his suspicions extended beyond the Persian and his associates and reached certain Qurayshi nobles as well. Although our ancient historical sources contain no proof of this, it is difficult to accept the naive explanation that the Commander of the Faithful, ruler of the greatest state in the civilised world of his time, was murdered by a Persian labourer over a dispute involving two dirhams. Ali’s insistence on a full investigation, and Uthman’s equal determination to close the case, also give us reason to reflect upon what has been reported about the murder and to suspect that the right was involved. If the surest way to identify the criminal in any crime is to identify the motive, then the motive here appears very clear. The crime achieved its purpose: the right came to power. We will see later how events unfolded, and how Mu'awiya held back from coming to Uthman ibn Affan’s aid until the rebels killed him, only to rise afterward demanding vengeance for his death and accusing Ali ibn Abi Talib of taking part in the killing. We will also have reason to hesitate over the murder of Ali ibn Abi Talib. That killing, too, was carried out through a plot involving three men: each was to kill one of Ali, Mu'awiya, and Amr ibn al-As. Amr and Mu'awiya survived, while Ali was killed, leaving the field clear for Mu'awiya to seize power. The old sources tell us that Abu al-Aswad al-Du'ali accused Mu'awiya of conspiring to kill Ali. Yet this crime, too, was passed over almost without comment. The authorities presented it as they wished, and modern historians later cleared Mu'awiya of the charge. Even an Orientalist such as Julius Wellhausen dismisses the accusation almost instantly, without offering evidence for doing so. We will also read in Wellhausen himself, as in the other early historians despite differences in their accounts, how Mu'awiya secretly used poison against supporters of Ali whom Ali had appointed to office in Egypt. Malik ibn al-Ashtar, Ali’s governor of Egypt, was killed; so was Abd al-Rahman ibn Khalid ibn al-Walid, his next governor there. Mu'awiya’s supporters also killed Muhammad ibn Abi Hudhayfa and Muhammad ibn Abi Bakr al-Siddiq. The right did not shrink from assassination, poisoning, or any other form of killing if that was what it took to secure its rule. We know how it used both intimidation and inducement to establish the Umayyad state. Assassination, then, was hardly an exceptional method in this terrible and bloody struggle. This is why we have paused over the murder of Umar ibn al-Khattab. The religious side of the struggle between right and left in Islam had now faded from view. Political conflict alone rose to the surface, openly and without disguise, and became the force driving events. Uthman’s Caliphate It was impossible to raise the issue of Umar’s murder before a new caliph had been chosen for the Muslims, since only the new ruler could decide the case and authorize the punishment. The first task, therefore, was to choose the caliph. In the shadow of this great event—the murder of the Commander of the Faithful— consultations began over the choice of his successor. We must return here to the Consultative Council, the shura. No such council had existed, officially or unofficially, in the Prophet’s lifetime. Umar ibn al-Khattab created it to nominate the next caliph—or, more precisely, to choose him. As we have said, Ali ibn Abi Talib was the only representative of the left on this council. Its sole official task was to choose the caliph within the three-day period that Umar himself had set. Apart from that, the caliph was free to consult whomever he wished on matters of state, whether they belonged to this council or not. Whatever Umar ibn al-Khattab’s reasons for forming the council in this particular way, at the time of his death it consisted of seven men who could give their views and seek the pledge of allegiance for themselves, with the exception of Abdullah ibn Umar, who could advise but could not put himself forward for the caliphate. The seven were Abdullah ibn Umar, a man who, as Mu'awiya later said, had been “consumed by worship.” He was closer to the life of an ascetic devoted to religion than to that of a statesman or political fighter. Then there was Abd al-Rahman ibn Awf, one of the richest men in the community, who preferred to move the machinery of government through others rather than take power openly himself, and who was perhaps the clearest representative of Quraysh’s wealthy elite on the council. There was Uthman ibn Affan, another of Quraysh’s rich men and one of the leading figures of the Umayyads. There was Sa'd ibn Abi Waqqas, also wealthy and one of the great commanders in the major Islamic campaigns, whose sympathies naturally lay with the party of the right. Then came al-Zubayr ibn al-Awwam, likewise one of Quraysh’s richest and most prominent men. And finally there was Ali ibn Abi Talib. We can imagine Ali’s position among his six colleagues. He was one of those charged with choosing the caliph, which was simple enough. But it was difficult for him to begin by choosing himself. At the same time, he knew that none of the others was likely to choose him. Politically, all of them stood on one side, while he stood alone on the other. This does not cast doubt on the Islam of the other members of the Consultative Council. All of them had served Islam with distinction. But their class position and their interests gave them a particular understanding of social justice, one that differed from the justice Ali called for. It is difficult for any person, even one entering public life with the genuine aim of serving the nation, to nominate himself in an atmosphere that is almost openly hostile. What happened was that no one nominated Ali. Instead, it seemed that everyone wanted to nominate himself. One can understand al-Zubayr ibn al-Awwam or Sa'd ibn Abi Waqqas aspiring to the caliphate. Yet such ambition becomes rather strange in the presence of Ali ibn Abi Talib, when a major current among the Muslims believed that Ali had been more entitled to the caliphate than Abu Bakr, and then more entitled to it than Umar. There can be little doubt that each member of the council knew that he was less qualified for the office than Ali. Yet the logic of events, Ali’s position in Islam, and the sympathy of a large part of the Muslim community toward him might have been expected to make them hesitate, to one degree or another, before competing with Ali ibn Abi Talib for leadership of the Muslims. But that is not what happened. Everyone appeared determined to put himself forward and compete with Ali. There is another striking point connected with the great conquests made during Umar’s reign. We hear of the commands held by Abu Ubayda ibn al-Jarrah, Khalid ibn al-Walid, and Sa'd ibn Abi Waqqas. But we hear of no major command given to Ali ibn Abi Talib. This would be easy enough to explain if Ali had not been a first-rate warrior. But Ali was among the most formidable fighters of the Muslims—perhaps the most formidable of them all. He was a warrior who had never been defeated. Whenever an enemy champion came forward and Muslim fighters failed before him, Ali would step out to meet him. Once the fighting began, Ali’s extraordinary superiority became clear, and his opponent would fall. Ali had been doing this since he was a young man not yet twenty, and he continued to do it throughout the battles fought by the Muslims. Later, when war broke out between him and Mu'awiya—who had deliberately prepared the Syrian army for that decisive confrontation— Ali was winning until Mu'awiya’s army was forced to raise copies of the Qur’an on their spearheads, calling for the fighting to stop and for the dispute to be judged by the Qur’an. As an individual fighter, then, Ali stood at the head of all the warriors who confronted a large part of the Arab army that had shattered the Persian Empire and shaken the Roman Empire. So why did Ali play no leading part in any of the Islamic conquests during Umar’s reign? His exclusion from military command in the major campaigns was certainly not accidental. Umar ibn al-Khattab was plainly cautious in every step he took. The story of his dismissal of Khalid ibn al-Walid and appointment of Abu Ubayda ibn al-Jarrah in his place is well known. Whether Khalid was removed because of his victories and enormous popular reputation, or because of his old disagreement with Umar, the episode shows the degree of Umar’s caution and his sharp awareness of what the future might bring. There was, then, an effort to keep Ali and Ali’s party away from the main theatres of war, just as they were kept away from major appointments. From the first moment, Ali and his followers understood that the centre had taken power, and they accepted the role of opposition: exposing mistakes, warning against them, and resisting decisions they believed to be wrong. This was the role Ali’s party played throughout Umar’s rule. In the end, it produced the meeting between that party and Umar ibn al-Khattab. The atmosphere in which the government overlooked Ali had therefore existed before Umar’s death. It is quite possible that Umar deliberately formed the Consultative Council as he did in order to ensure that the left would not gain the upper hand in the formal institutions of government. We do not know what Umar ibn al-Khattab would have done with the political system, the Consultative Council, or the whole principle of consultation had he lived longer. What seems certain, however, is that toward the end of his life he was moving clearly in the direction of the Islamic left. Perhaps for that reason the opposition of the right intensified and eventually led to Umar’s removal, without any voice of protest being heard from the Consultative Council—not even from Abdullah ibn Umar, the ascetic and devout member whose father’s death shook him so deeply that it made an already silent man still more silent. His brother Ubayd Allah ibn Umar reacted very differently. He drew his sword and took revenge for his father on those he believed responsible for killing him. As for the other members of the council, the sources available to us tell us little about their position, with the exception of Ali ibn Abi Talib. Ali took a firm stand in favor of reopening the investigation into Umar’s murder. Uthman ibn Affan succeeded in closing the case, and the speed of that success strongly suggests that Ali’s persistence and severity had no supporters inside the council. In any event, every member of the council appeared to want the caliphate for himself. For that reason—or for some reason we do not know—Abd al-Rahman ibn Awf stepped forward and effectively took control of the choice. He immediately withdrew his own candidacy, placing himself in the position of a neutral arbiter. He now had the right to choose among his five colleagues. We do not know what Ali thought of this move. What is clear is that he accepted it reluctantly and allowed events to take their course, since there was no real way to change their direction. Abd al-Rahman ibn Awf withdrew for three days, the period Umar had set for resolving the nomination. During that time he held private consultations, and in the end reduced the choice to two men: Uthman ibn Affan and Ali ibn Abi Talib. He asked Ali to accept the caliphate on the basis of the Book of God, the practice of His Messenger, and the conduct of Abu Bakr and Umar. Ali replied: “No—but I will do my utmost, according to my ability.” He then asked Uthman to accept on the basis of the Book of God, the practice of His Messenger, and the conduct of Abu Bakr and Umar. Uthman replied: “By God, yes.” So Abd al-Rahman pledged allegiance to him. That is how the story is told. Ali wanted to preserve his freedom of judgment when it came to the conduct of Abu Bakr and Umar, so he refused to bind himself without qualification. Whatever the full truth of the episode, Abd al-Rahman ibn Awf ended by nominating Uthman and pledging allegiance to him. Ali had little choice but to accept the result after events had begun in this way, and he too eventually pledged allegiance to Uthman. The left had played the role of opposition during Umar’s rule until the government, in the person of its head, had moved toward the opposition. There was no reason that role could not continue under Uthman, though the opposition could hardly expect Uthman to move toward it. Uthman was a leader of the right and its chosen candidate. The struggle between government and opposition would now begin without compromise. On the very first day of Uthman’s caliphate, the opposition entered the battle with all its strength. It demanded an investigation into Umar’s murder through the prosecution of Ubayd Allah ibn Umar, who had exceeded the lawful authority of the ruler by taking punishment into his own hands. The case was closed and the matter ended there. But the significance of this opening confrontation was clear: the left intended to fight with all the strength it possessed. The right, led by Uthman ibn Affan, turned to the traditional method used by the right in every age: flooding people with money to secure their silence and satisfaction. The right does this once, and afterward it turns to exploiting that money on the widest possible scale. During his first year Uthman did not replace a single governor appointed by Umar. He left them all where they were. At that time the Islamic empire consisted of eleven provinces, including Medina. Mecca, Ta'if, Sana'a, Kufa, Basra, Egypt, Homs, Damascus, Palestine, Bahrain, and the territories attached to them all answered to the central government in Medina. There was also an official responsible for the army, who handled mobilization and military preparation. The main machinery of government therefore consisted of eleven provincial officials, apart from the caliph’s secretary, whose position was in some ways more powerful than that of the governors themselves. The reader should imagine a province such as Egypt governed by a representative of the caliph, with all the administrative machinery of the state under him. The four greatest and richest provinces were Kufa, Basra, Egypt, and Syria. For an entire year Uthman ibn Affan made no changes to this large governmental structure. He did not dismiss a single governor. It was as though he and his advisers were feeling their way toward complete control of the empire. Most of these governors were not from Quraysh, and therefore not from the Umayyads, with the exception of Mu'awiya ibn Abi Sufyan, who governed Damascus. We will see later how Uthman’s policy toward the provinces developed. The first step with which he began his rule was an increase in people’s stipends. These stipends were something like salaries or pensions, regardless of whatever other work a person might do in trade, farming, or industry. They were granted in recognition of service to Islam and paid regularly. Naturally, the increase had an effect. It eased people’s concerns and made them keep quiet about many matters they might otherwise have raised—perhaps even the question of the pledge of allegiance itself, or Umar’s murder and the prosecution of his son Ubayd Allah for killing people accused of being Abu Lu'lu'a’s accomplices. Uthman followed this with another measure: he invited delegations from the provinces and towns and gave them gifts and rewards. Then he went further, doubling the stipends of the people of Medina during Ramadan and providing a public feast from the treasury which anyone could attend. All this generosity came after the strictness Umar had imposed on the Muslims, and it took place within the first week of Uthman ibn Affan’s rule. There is no doubt that it had its effect on the general population. People settled into his rule, and whatever resentment they might have harbored toward the new caliph faded. Uthman ibn Affan then moved from winning over the Muslim public through gifts, stipends, and grants to winning over the Muslim elite, especially its leading figures. From the public treasury he gave al-Zubayr ibn al-Awwam—one of the members of the Consultative Council and one of the candidates for the caliphate—six hundred thousand. He gave another council member, Talha, two hundred thousand, and also forgave a debt Talha owed him. We do not know why such enormous grants were distributed from the public treasury, or why these two leaders in particular received them. One possible explanation is that Uthman wanted to draw them to his side and believed they were the members most likely to be won over in this way. We will later find him seeking to satisfy Sa'd ibn Abi Waqqas as well by appointing him governor of Kufa. That left only Abd al-Rahman ibn Awf, who had been extremely wealthy even in the earliest years of struggle during the Prophet’s lifetime; Abdullah ibn Umar, who was an ascetic; and Ali ibn Abi Talib. Ali may well have opposed these excessive payments, which appeared to have no meaning except the waste of Muslim public wealth for political purposes. More serious than any of these gifts, however, was Uthman’s cancellation of the restrictions on residence. The Companions were now free to spread throughout the lands, make contact with the armies, acquire property, and invest without restriction. They went out into the provinces carrying names that were famous, revered, and influential throughout the Islamic world. People gathered around them everywhere. Their influence expanded, and they began to move from the religious sphere into the worldly one. They acquired palaces and underwent a complete change. This was precisely what Umar had feared and had worked so hard to prevent. He wanted those who had fought for the next world to remain committed to it rather than exchange it for this one. Yet this new freedom fitted perfectly with the right’s idea of the social order and of unrestricted private ownership. By the end of Uthman’s first year, the way was clear for the provinces to be distributed among the party of the right, and especially among the Umayyads. Al-Mughira ibn Shu'ba was removed from Kufa and Sa'd ibn Abi Waqqas appointed in his place. Perhaps this appointment was Sa'd’s equivalent of the financial gifts given to al- Zubayr and Talha. But Sa'd was not an Umayyad; he belonged to Banu Zuhra. He therefore remained in office only briefly before being dismissed and replaced by an Umayyad, al-Walid ibn Uqba ibn Abi Mu'ayt, a relative of Uthman. Al-Walid was a man whose commitment to Islam had long been doubted. He had apostatized and later returned to Islam, and he remained a figure of suspicion among ordinary Muslims and even in the eyes of the Prophet himself. Indeed, a Qur’anic verse was revealed concerning him: “Believers, if a wicked man brings you news, verify it, lest you harm people out of ignorance and then regret what you have done.” The wicked man referred to here was al-Walid ibn Uqba himself. Naturally, al-Walid’s appointment to Kufa became a source of unrest and trouble. Before long Uthman dismissed him and replaced him with another Umayyad, Sa'id ibn al-As. He also removed Amr ibn al-As from the governorship of Egypt and appointed another relative, Abdullah ibn Sa'd ibn Abi Sarh. His commitment to Islam, too, had been doubted. He had been among those who mocked the Prophet and resisted him bitterly, and he was known for having said in mockery of the Qur’an, “I will reveal the like of what God has revealed.” He was one of those whose lives the Prophet had declared forfeit, and he survived only because Uthman brought him before the Prophet claiming that he had become a Muslim. This, then, was Uthman’s policy in the provinces: removing one man and appointing another until his party had gained complete control of the government. Under his rule, and as a result of the decrees he issued, large private fortunes also emerged. The revolutionary state with socialist aims was transformed into a new order serving the wealthy and the powerful clans of Quraysh in general and the Umayyads in particular. The left did not remain silent. It continued to mobilize the public and openly attack the caliph. At the head of these campaigns we find Ali leading the opposition. We also find Ammar ibn Yasir, Abu al-Darda, Abdullah ibn Mas'ud, Abu Dharr al-Ghifari, then Muhammad ibn Abi Hudhayfa, Muhammad ibn Abi Bakr, Malik ibn al-Ashtar, and many others who formed the main pillars of the left, all attacking Uthman’s policies fiercely. Ammar openly attacked the caliph. Abu Dharr openly accused the caliph and his governors of departing from the law of Islam. He urged the rich to give up hoarding wealth, and repeatedly cited Qur’anic verses and the practice of the Prophet against them, until Uthman exiled him to Syria, where he would be under the supervision of Mu'awiya. Under Uthman, Mu'awiya had gained control of all Syria, whereas under Umar he had governed only Damascus. Uthman also used the threat of Mu'awiya against his opponents and critics. In Syria, Abu Dharr stood outside the new governor’s palace, known as al-Khadra—the Green Palace—and attacked this extravagance and exploitation of the Muslims. He warned that until then he had addressed his words to the rich, but that from the next day onward he would address the poor and call on them to revolt. Abu Dharr suffered greatly for this. In the end he was exiled and deprived of his stipend. He lost his children one after another and sometimes went for days without food. Abu Dharr died alone in the desert of al-Rabadha, accompanied only by his elderly wife, with nothing to his name except a goat and a few worn-out clothes. What happened to Abu Dharr happened to others in the party of the left. All of this awakened public opinion and became a call to revolution. In Egypt, Muhammad ibn Abi Hudhayfa and Muhammad ibn Abi Bakr were preaching much the same message as Abu Dharr. Ammar ibn Yasir is also said to have joined them there and called for the same cause. Ammar held an important position in Islam. In Kufa there was Malik ibn al-Ashtar, author of the fiery message he addressed to Uthman, fiercely accusing him over the question of Sa'id ibn al-As, Uthman’s governor in Kufa. We will later see Malik in many situations standing beside the leader of the left, Ali ibn Abi Talib. Discontent was widespread in Medina. Uthman dared insult Ali ibn Abi Talib, just as he dared beat and humiliate senior Companions—especially those loyal companions of the Prophet who believed that Uthman’s application of Islam had departed from its foundations. Discontent in Kufa was equally intense. In Egypt the anger rose still further, until revolution seemed unavoidable if the socialism of Islam was ever to be put into practice. But matters were not simple. Corruption had spread everywhere. Noble values became mixed with base conduct. Stories were invented to discredit the leaders of the left. Some of the fighters weakened under the influence of money and office. Competition for position and prestige began to dominate everything. Those committed to the struggle found themselves pulled between staying on the straight path and going with the current. The party of the right exploited all of this. Yet even then it could not completely break the unity of the left. At the same time, not everyone who opposed Uthman’s rule belonged to the left. Some opposed him simply because they had missed out on offices, wealth, stipends, or gifts. The Egyptian Revolt We do not know how the revolt was organized, or even whether it was planned at all rather than arising spontaneously from the general atmosphere of anger. What is certain is that letters were being sent from Medina by senior Companions of the Prophet to Muslims living in the provinces. These letters told them that the true struggle for Islam was no longer the conquest of new frontiers and cities. It was now the condemnation and removal of a government that had gone astray, and the establishment of a new government founded properly on the Book of God and the practice of His Messenger. These letters were probably read aloud at gatherings or secret meetings, where they must have had a powerful moral effect. The men who wrote them held positions in Islam equal to Uthman’s own, if not greater. The way the Egyptians came to Medina strongly suggests that they had planned their movement carefully so that the caliph would have no chance to summon an army from Syria or elsewhere against them. They set out pretending that they were going to perform the lesser pilgrimage, but instead went directly to Medina in a force of nearly a thousand men. There Uthman received them. They argued with him and he argued with them. In the end, he promised to abandon the wrongs he had committed and dismiss the governors who had plundered Muslim wealth, trampled the people underfoot, and divided them against one another. The delegation then began its journey home. Time passed, however, and Uthman changed nothing in his policies. It is said that after making his promises and becoming emotional, he was persuaded to change his mind by his secretary, minister, and adviser Marwan ibn al-Hakam, Uthman’s cousin and the son of a man who had fought the Prophet with exceptional bitterness and cruelty and had harmed him so much that the Prophet refused to allow him to live beside him for the rest of his life, even after Uthman brought him before the Prophet claiming that he had accepted Islam. After that deceptive conversion, he had continued to insult and mock the Prophet. More likely, however, Uthman dismissed the Egyptian delegation simply to gain time to think. Perhaps he believed the revolt would soon die out, or perhaps he was considering how to take revenge on its leaders. It is also said that the Egyptian delegation intercepted one of the caliph’s personal servants carrying a letter from Uthman to his governor in Egypt ordering him to kill the Egyptian leaders. Some modern writers deny that this incident ever happened. But what was the caliph to be expected to do when, for the first time, clear signs of revolt had appeared in the form of organized gatherings and open warnings? If he genuinely intended to keep his promises, there would have been no reason for him to take precautions against the revolt. But if he followed Marwan ibn al-Hakam’s advice—assuming there was such advice— renounced his promise, and allowed things to continue as before, which is what in fact happened, then logic demanded that he protect himself against a revolt whose first signs had already appeared in his debate with the delegation and had forced him to make concessions. Perhaps Uthman did not expect the revolt to reach the point it eventually reached. Perhaps he believed that Mu'awiya, Abdullah ibn Sa'd, and the other governors would come to his aid if matters became serious. He may therefore have felt secure enough not to take adequate precautions. In any case, the disputed letter is hardly impossible. Uthman had already been exiling those who rebelled against him. He had ordered some of them to be brutally beaten despite their high standing in Islam. He had sent others to Mu'awiya for punishment, and to Abd al- Rahman ibn Khalid to be humiliated and broken. A letter of this kind is therefore not beyond possibility, though deciding whether the story is true or fabricated matters little except as an explanation for why the rebels turned back again. What happened was that the Egyptians waited for the caliph to honor his promises, and he did not. The people of Kufa, who had succeeded in removing the caliph’s governor and insisting on the appointment of Abu Musa al-Ash'ari, had no doubt heard what had passed between the Egyptians and Uthman. They too waited, just as the Egyptians did. When none of Uthman’s promises was fulfilled, they began preparing to confront him as well. There may even have been an agreement to depose him. Talk of deposition had become widespread. Uthman answered it more than once by claiming that the robe of the caliphate had been placed upon him by God, and that God alone could remove it. He forgot that God had left the choice of the Commander of the Faithful to the believers themselves, and had entrusted them with the management of their worldly affairs. In every age and under every set of circumstances, the right tends in this way toward the theory of divine authority, denying the people any right or power in the government of their own affairs. Only twenty-five years had passed since Islam’s triumph at the conquest of Mecca, yet already the principle of consultation was beginning to disappear and the meaning of the pledge of allegiance was being distorted until the caliphate was made into a divine right with no connection to the people. The rebels answered Uthman with Islam’s own answer. They paid no attention to his claim, and the theory of divine authority found no response among them. The people of Kufa and Egypt therefore joined forces. Many people in Medina had certainly been corresponding with the Egyptians as well. Delegations came from Kufa, Basra, and Egypt and made their way to Medina to confront Uthman. It is said that Ali ibn Abi Talib, al-Zubayr ibn al-Awwam, and other senior Muslims gathered their followers outside the city when they heard the delegations were approaching. The delegations then pretended to turn back. Once Ali and the others had returned peacefully to their homes, the rebels supposedly doubled back, rushed into Medina, and occupied it without a fight. This story is doubtful. It may have been invented by later supporters of Ali who wanted to clear him of any participation in the revolt. Events do not usually unfold so neatly. Nor is it reasonable to believe that such an obvious trick could have deceived the senior Muslims in the way the story claims and allowed the delegations to occupy Medina without resistance. Ali had openly opposed Uthman. He had blamed him and attacked him. He had even refused to mediate between Uthman and the rebels after mediating during their first delegation, when Uthman let him down by failing to keep his promise. Most likely, Ali simply watched events unfold while trying to calm the rebels and bring about Uthman’s removal without bloodshed. He therefore confronted the rebels to calm and persuade them, while also confronting Uthman with advice and guidance. Eventually Uthman mounted the pulpit to address the delegations. Uthman was the first caliph to sit in the same place on the pulpit where the Prophet had sat. When Abu Bakr became caliph, he had moved down one step from the Prophet’s position. When Umar became caliph, he moved down one step below Abu Bakr. Uthman, by contrast, climbed to the place where the Prophet himself had stood. When Uthman rose to address the delegations, he rebuked the rebels. Some of his supporters stood up to defend him. The rebels rose in response and forced them down. The argument became so heated that the two sides began throwing stones at one another, and Uthman himself was struck. He lost consciousness and his supporters carried him back to his house. The rebels then surrounded the house until the final event took place and the caliph was killed inside his home. Once a revolution is fully ablaze, no one can stop it. That is exactly what happened here. Ali wanted revolution, but he wanted a revolution that would depose Uthman after he had lost confidence in Uthman’s ability to put matters right. It is equally certain, however, that Ali did not want events to develop into bloodshed. He feared that this would create a precedent in Islam with consequences that would continue far into the future. For that reason he made a genuine effort to keep control of the revolution. He sent his two sons to protect the caliph’s life and join those defending him. But events escaped everyone’s control, and the inevitable result followed: the ruling authority was destroyed. The revolution now produced its results and achieved its first objective: the appointment of the leader of the left, Ali ibn Abi Talib. Islam could now begin to recover its original course, and the social revolution could continue along the path laid down by the Prophet—a path from which neither Abu Bakr nor Umar had departed, and which Umar ibn al-Khattab had begun moving toward on a far broader scale during the final years of his life. The Revolution of the Left It is difficult to follow the political and social development of Arab society unless we continually keep hold of the earliest threads of the two sides in this struggle. Those threads had been woven very early, even before the Islamic call, and were created by the social and intellectual conditions of that famous commercial city, Mecca. From them emerged the forces that would later confront one another, until the Islamic message appeared as the creed of the poor and oppressed, their revolutionary weapon, and their guide in the struggle for their rights and human dignity. The Islamic movement was no different from any of the great revolutions known to humanity in that it contained both a material and a spiritual dimension. Its first spark may have been lit by unbearable pressures arising from painful material conditions, but it always moved beyond that modest beginning and developed into a comprehensive human vision extending into every field of human activity. Great revolutions do not happen merely to redistribute wealth more fairly. They also build a new spiritual and intellectual structure, a new philosophy through which humanity as a whole moves several steps further along the road of development. This is why revolutions spread from the place where they are born to every part of the earth. The following is a complete and accurate transcription of Part Six in Arabic in Markdown format, with the headers and page numbers at the top and bottom removed: Every true revolution is therefore necessarily a universal revolution. What a person struggles for in Mecca is the same thing a Roman fighter struggles for in the empire of the Caesars and a Persian fighter in the empire of the Khosrows, and the same is true everywhere. When an Arab fighter in Mecca defeats the forces that hold back the powers of goodness and progress, that victory marks the beginning of revolution and becomes a signal to all similar forces throughout the world. The fact that every revolution begins from local conditions does not weaken this in any way. A revolution worthy of the name is not simply an adjustment of economic and social positions within one particular environment or set of circumstances. It is a fundamental transformation in human life itself: in our idea of justice, freedom, and dignity, and in our eternal desire to connect with the highest idea that gathers all of these things together—the idea of God. Beginning with social conditions does not mean that a revolution remains confined within those conditions. Indeed, in revolutionary action it is difficult to separate the social side from the intellectual or spiritual side. The two are intertwined, just as the meaning of truth, freedom, and justice is intertwined with the meaning and symbol of God. Every movement toward a limited form of good is therefore a movement toward absolute good—toward God. This is why the party of social justice in early Islam was also the party that believed most deeply in Islam, stood closest to its spirit, and held most firmly to its principles. For the same reason, it was the least capable of conspiracy, bloodshed, and ruthless decisiveness, even when such methods might have secured the victory of justice and freedom. Anyone whose goal is based on high ideals finds it impossible to reach that goal by methods that violate those same ideals. This is the secret of the left’s weakness despite its broad popularity and the size of its mass support. On the other side we find parties that despise the masses and believe in domination, privilege, and the monopolizing of wealth. Such parties act quickly, with no restraint on either their hands or their thinking. They commit whatever crimes they wish without a moment’s hesitation, and this often gives them rapid victory. At the same time, they share another feature. Most of their leaders had been among the bitterest enemies of Islam and accepted the new religion only when surrender became unavoidable. Some were among those whose lives had been declared forfeit because of the crimes they had committed against Islam before the Prophet pardoned them. Others belonged to the pardoned Meccans or to those who entered Islam only at a very late stage. If we examine the leadership of the party of the right, setting aside Uthman ibn Affan and a small number of senior early Muslims, we find that many of those who actually held power during Uthman’s rule belonged either to the pardoned Meccans and their sons or to those who had resisted Islam in open hostility until their power was broken and they announced their conversion out of fear or hypocrisy. Some distinguished early Muslims were also drawn into the leadership of the right because their social position, both before and after Islam, had been one of great wealth and high status. Despite the sincerity of their Islam, they had never completely escaped the influence of their social circumstances. Those circumstances narrowed their understanding of social justice within Islam and set limits to it. Their sympathies therefore lay with the parties of the right. The right, in turn, made excellent use of their fame, their distinguished service, and their rivalries with one another to draw them toward it and incorporate them into its ranks. The early Islamic conquests had far-reaching effects on the Arab Muslim army. New frontiers opened before them and they occupied kingdoms on a scale unmatched by any other people of their age. Enormous quantities of booty became available. The struggle over spoils began, and politics moved ahead of religion. Yet politics could not act entirely on its own; it still had to base its claims on religion. Despite his moderation and his middle position, Umar ibn al-Khattab had shown extraordinary skill in creating laws that made private ownership almost meaningless, basing them on the Prophet’s practice and on the spirit of Islam. The Muslim fighting armies received only regular stipends paid at fixed times—something comparable to salaries in our own age. Umar placed the state above the army and above the political factions. Ownership within the Islamic state became essentially collective, with its income and revenues distributed among its people according to categories and systems suited to the conditions of that time. Private ownership did not disappear entirely. Umar ibn al-Khattab had neither the time nor the circumstances necessary to reconsider every form of private property. Most of what remained private was movable wealth: commercial assets, camels, cash, and similar property. This explains the reports in the historical books of enormous gold ingots being broken apart with axes after the deaths of wealthy Muslims so that their estates could be divided among their heirs. Umar did not turn his attention to movable wealth because his main concern was to establish the principles governing ownership of fixed property. Land, farms, rivers, irrigation channels, and similar assets became the property of the state. Farmers and other workers used them much as beneficiaries with secure rights of use, while paying a tax to the public treasury in return. After the great conquests, there was disagreement and protest over the question of distributing conquered land to the victorious soldiers along with the peasants who worked it, as though both formed part of the spoils of war. Such a practice was not unusual in that age. But Islam under Umar’s leadership rejected it. The land was made the property of the state, while the right to benefit from it remained with those who cultivated it. Their personal freedom was fully protected whether they entered Islam or remained outside it. Umar ibn al-Khattab allowed only certain movable goods to remain subject to private ownership through war. Toward the end of his life, Umar was also beginning to consider the question of the surplus wealth of the rich—the money left over after the reasonable personal and family needs of a person living a moderate life had been met. He never achieved this goal, though he openly stated it shortly before his sudden and violent death. The army itself had discovered that Umar’s laws stood in the way of its ambitions for wealth. From the point of view of the Arab Muslim warrior of the time, and according to prevailing custom, the enormous and sudden wealth produced by conquest was his own personal prize. Yet the teachings of Islam, together with the senior Muslims and especially the Prophet’s Companions who formed the backbone of the left and were spread throughout these armies, played a major part in educating the soldiers in Islam and spreading Islamic awareness among them. Fighting itself had been one of their dreams and deepest hopes. Without these teachings and these Companions, how could such laws have been issued by the caliphate against an established custom without provoking the kind of resistance that logic would lead us to expect? Some writers explain the army’s obedience to these rules by pointing to Umar’s severity and firmness. But that alone cannot explain why Muslim armies stationed far away on the newly conquered frontiers accepted them after fighting bitter wars and enduring every kind of hardship. The deeper reason lay in the quality of their commanders and in the Islamic spirit that had spread through the ranks. None of this, however, meant that the army was happy with these restrictions. Nor did it prevent an Arab aristocracy from emerging among the troops stationed in the frontier garrisons, simply because they were the victorious conquerors. This ran against the spirit of Islam, which regarded these wars as fighting in the cause of God and as a means of calling people to Islam by the sword only after preaching and persuasion had failed. Once a territory was conquered, Islamic justice was supposed to prevail: no Arab was superior to a non-Arab, and no white person to a black person, except through righteousness. Umar ibn al-Khattab followed this principle as far as the circumstances of his age allowed, and as far as his own commitment to social justice—and his broad understanding of it— enabled him to do so. Social conditions had therefore changed. The two main sides in the conflict were no longer the merchants and wealthy men of Mecca on one side and its poor and oppressed on the other. The struggle had expanded to include millions of people from different classes and with different interests. Muslim fighters were now conquerors and rulers, not merely the poor and oppressed. This was the difficulty. The social force that had once driven the revolution of the left had almost disappeared. Any poor or previously oppressed Arab Muslim could now fight for Islam in one of these armies and receive a share of the spoils according to his service and courage. On top of that, he was guaranteed a regular stipend, giving him a stable and dependable income. The left’s call for social justice could now draw support only from what belief and ideas could persuade people to accept, and from the moral character Islam could build within its followers. But for those moral principles to have their full effect, a person had to reach a very high level of understanding and human character—and not everyone could do that. During Uthman’s caliphate, the right took advantage of these conditions and expanded them as far as it could. It lavished wealth on the soldiers, who were the decisive force in any revolution, and allowed disagreements over principle to run their course, confident that social realities and material necessity would ultimately overcome spiritual and moral ideals. Muslims generally believed that Ali was the most important man of his generation and the foremost among the leading Muslim figures of his time. Yet they passed him over with little regret when the caliphate was given to Uthman. The sharpness of the old class conflict had faded, and in its place came a conflict of doctrine and ideas, fought mainly through intellectual conviction. Under Uthman, the right removed restrictions on private wealth and allowed property to grow without meaningful limits. Right-wing rule might have become firmly established had the right not moved beyond political partisanship into tribal favoritism. It elevated the families of Abu Mu‘ayt and Umayya over the other tribes and began concentrating leadership and authority in the hands of the very families whose leaders had once stood at the head of the pagan opposition to the Muslims. During this period, the conflict changed from a struggle over class and ideas into a tribal and ethnic struggle—from a struggle to establish a new ideology among the masses into a competition for offices and positions of power. There were still rich and poor, of course. There were still people with nothing and others with enormous fortunes. But general prosperity reduced the intensity of the divide, even though it did not remove the divide itself. The left now found itself calling very different kinds of people to revolution: wealthy men who had been pushed aside or who did not belong to the Umayyads and their allies; senior Companions who no longer had any influence over the affairs of state; and, finally, ordinary people whose right to a secure livelihood had still not been fully guaranteed. We can therefore say that the left found itself surrounded by allies with whom it had never expected to form an alliance—and with whom, in some cases, it had never wanted one. This is why we will repeatedly see leaders of political upheavals in this period move between right and left with astonishing speed. We will even find that one of the men who fought Husayn at Karbala and later scattered the Alids had once fought beside Ali at the beginning of the left’s revolution. In this struggle, the left hoped to take hold of the helm of government and steer it in what it regarded as the proper Islamic direction. It seems, however, that it failed to take full account of all the conflicting forces that had joined its ranks for very different reasons. When we come to the beginning of the left’s revolution, we will find that most of the leading Muslims in Medina had become deeply dissatisfied with Uthman’s conduct in government and with that of his entourage, even though in class terms they belonged to the right, and even though Uthman had given them generous wealth from the public treasury. We will find Talha and al-Zubayr among those who encouraged the revolt against Uthman, only to turn suddenly after Ali became caliph and fight against him. We will find Aisha attacking Uthman and urging rebellion against him, only to later join Talha and al-Zubayr in war against Ali. The forces rebelling against Uthman were not united by a common ideology, nor did they share the same reasons for revolting. Nor did the revolution spread into the heart of the conquered lands or among their native populations. When we hear that “the Egyptians” began the revolt against Uthman, we should not imagine the people who had lived in Egypt from ancient times. The term refers to the Muslim military and political leaders who had settled there. It would hardly have been possible for the peoples of the conquered countries to take part in this political struggle. First, most of them had not converted to Islam during the earliest period of the conquests. Second, not enough time had passed for them to become fully integrated into the new world and emerge as a major force capable of shaping it and being shaped by it. The same was true of the Sawad and of Iraq more generally. Its native inhabitants played almost no political role, much like the native peoples of Egypt and, to a large extent, Syria. A few people from these provinces did appear in the political arena, but their role was limited and their influence almost negligible. It is here that the name of Abdullah ibn Saba repeatedly appears. He is described as a Jew who converted to Islam, and historical works portray him as the devil behind the turmoil that ended in Uthman’s death—indeed, as the hidden force behind almost everything that happened. Writers have taken sharply conflicting positions on him. Some deny that he ever existed. Others treat him as the source of everything that happened, and even as the origin of the strange and deviant doctrines that later entered Islam. Abdullah ibn Saba is undoubtedly a legendary figure. What place could one man possibly have had behind all these events? What could any individual, however remarkable, have done by himself amid so many violent and conflicting currents? The rapid and brutal events that followed one another did not need some hidden mastermind, even if that mastermind had been Satan himself. Their roots ran too deep, and the forces driving them were far too powerful for any one person to control or direct. They were also so tangled and numerous that no single force could have made them much more complicated than they already were. It is plainly naïve to invent a legendary figure of this kind and then give him any real role in what happened. It is even more naïve to imagine that such a man could have influenced the leading Companions, including Abu Dharr al-Ghifari himself. Abu Dharr would not even tolerate an argument from the famous hadith transmitter Abu Hurayra. He struck him and wounded his head, saying contemptuously, “Are you teaching us our religion, son of a Jewish woman?” Everything woven around Abdullah ibn Saba was the work of later writers. There is no evidence for him in the early sources, quite apart from how implausible the whole idea is in the first place. The forces in conflict, then, were neither socially uniform nor made up of non-Arab elements. The “Egyptians” who revolted were Arab leaders settled in Egypt. The people of Kufa, Basra, and Syria who took part were likewise Arab soldiers and political figures who had settled in those regions, not the native populations. The leaders of the left may well have been less wealthy than Muslim leaders in general, and in fact they were. But they were not poor because of helplessness or because of their class position. They were poor by choice, because of their faith and their commitment to the Islamic spirit. Ali himself owned almost nothing even when he was caliph, and the same was true of members of the left despite the senior offices they held in the state. The conflict, then, was not fundamentally a class conflict. It was an ideological and doctrinal struggle in which one view sought to prevail over another. It resembled the struggles that arise among leaders after an original revolution has succeeded, dividing them into moderate, left-wing, and right-wing tendencies regardless of the direction of the original revolution itself. There can be no doubt that the right’s seizure of power under the leadership of the Umayyads represented a rightward departure. But it was not a counterrevolution. It suspended or weakened many basic Islamic principles, but it did not destroy Islam itself. What happened was that several political forces moved to remove Uthman. Letters were sent from Mecca to the frontier garrisons urging military and political leaders to come to Mecca and take part in deposing him. The people behind these letters came from different camps. Many were not members of the left and would not later stand beside it. Islam was still young, and Muslims could not easily abandon Islamic principles. Those calling for Uthman’s removal therefore came from different political tendencies, but all of them considered themselves sincere Muslims who wanted Islam to return to its true foundations. In the eyes of most Muslims, Ali ibn Abi Talib was the man who stood closest to the spirit of Islam and its authentic principles. At the same time, however, he represented a strict political line—or, more accurately, one even stricter than Umar ibn al-Khattab’s. This made many leaders, ambitious men, and beneficiaries of the existing order cautious and hesitant about Ali becoming caliph. Those with vested interests had barely been able to tolerate Umar. They had even more reason to fear Ali and to do everything they could to keep him from the caliphate. And when we speak of strictness, we should not mean merely Umar’s famous whip, which rarely left his hand, or his well-known severity. Those were outward details. I do not believe Umar ruled the Muslims with his whip or with physical force. He ruled through the strength of his faith and the firmness of his commitment to Islamic principles. And in this respect Ali was stricter still. Muslims accepted all the laws Umar introduced and did not revolt against him. Yet the right-wing group whose ambitions for wealth and status had been checked by those laws—and whose existing fortunes were themselves close to being affected, just as their freedom to dominate, conquer, and control had already been affected—moved to rid itself of Umar despite the authority he had achieved. Ali’s accession to the caliphate, therefore, was never going to happen without a struggle. There is no doubt that Muslims who lived through this period understood all of this. They knew far more about the details of their own lives than most later historians who recorded these events. They knew about the mystery surrounding Umar’s death. They knew where the different factions stood and what they represented; otherwise those factions could never have formed in the first place. Support for Ali and his party was therefore an informed choice, made with full awareness of this background. The endless arguments that later arose over Ali’s superiority were not what mattered to the people living through these events. Events themselves determined where people stood. Anyone whose beliefs or interests aligned with the left joined the left, openly and without confusion; anyone whose beliefs or interests aligned with the right joined the right. Theories of hereditary succession or kinship with the Prophet’s family were not decisive in this alignment. What mattered first was the political and social direction represented by each party. The forces that drove the revolt against Uthman’s caliphate were as numerous as the groups involved. Some motives remained hidden behind the general charge that Uthman and his officials had departed from Islamic principles. This was the revolution’s public slogan. It was the issue the people of Medina discussed with Uthman in the mosque, and it was the same issue raised by the Egyptians when they first came to Medina and asked Uthman to uphold justice and follow the principles laid down by Islam. Under this broad slogan—the return to true Islamic principles—stood several demands: that everyone receive what was rightfully his; that Muslims enjoy equal rights; and that the socialism of Islam, which the Prophet had begun to put into practice, which Ali ibn Abi Talib and his party later called for completing, and which Umar ibn al-Khattab pursued through measures such as the confiscation or nationalization of landed property, should be carried through. All of this formed part of the revolution’s program. Whenever Uthman debated his opponents, these were the issues under discussion. The historical sources preserve many debates between Uthman and Abu Dharr al-Ghifari before the revolution about the socialism of Islam. They also preserve exchanges between Ali ibn Abi Talib and Uthman on the same subject, as well as debates between Uthman and Ammar, Abdullah ibn Mas‘ud, and other leaders of the left. This was the broad principle around which the revolution rallied and which it used to justify itself. It also represented the general direction of Muslim public opinion. Yet beneath it lay many other motives and interests. Some people agreed with the supporters of social justice that Uthman had to be removed, but they did not want social justice to be carried to its furthest conclusions. There were those who had been denied office because the Umayyads had monopolized it. Among them was Amr ibn al-As himself, who had been removed as governor and replaced by Uthman’s relative Abdullah ibn Sa‘d ibn Abi Sarh. No one could seriously imagine that Amr ibn al-As agreed with the policies of Ali and his party; his famous role in the arbitration between Ali and Mu‘awiya is enough to dispel that idea, and his whole political career places him far from any social objective in seeking Uthman’s removal. Then there was Mu‘awiya himself, whose failure to come quickly to Uthman’s aid has long raised questions among writers and historians. Whether that delay was deliberate and planned or simply the result of misjudging the situation, Uthman’s fall would in any case open a path toward the caliphate for Mu‘awiya. There were also Talha and al-Zubayr, both of whom hoped to become caliph. They had written to commanders on the frontiers urging them to return to Medina, where, they claimed, the struggle in God’s cause needed them more than the distant garrisons did. There were many other motives as well, some directly at odds with the revolution’s public slogan. Yet all of them brought their holders into the revolutionary camp, and together they joined forces to end Uthman’s rule. Everyone was trying to benefit from the great revolutionary wave, each according to his own circumstances and abilities. With Ali and his party, however, the situation was different. This was the party that had maintained a calm opposition during the caliphates of Abu Bakr and Umar, and then a fierce opposition under Uthman. Its members did not work in secret. They addressed Muslim crowds openly in mosques and public places, attacking the policies of the government and reminding its leaders that they had to abandon a course that violated the Book of God and the practice of His Messenger. These were the same opposition figures whose support had enabled Umar’s laws to be enforced and turned into established realities that those harmed by them did not dare openly resist. They spread throughout the Islamic lands. They were present even in Syria, where they endured severe pressure. We have already seen how Abu Dharr was mistreated there, and there is no reason to think he was the only man openly opposing that government. Others argued sharply in Mu‘awiya’s own presence, and Mu‘awiya could do little more than remain silent and even accommodate them for the time being, protecting himself while waiting for a more favorable moment. What happened in Syria also happened in Egypt, Kufa, Basra, and Medina itself. Even if secret letters passed between senior Muslim leaders and army commanders in these provinces, we cannot say with certainty that the revolt was planned and organized by Ali’s party. There is no doubt that the leaders of the revolt did plan it and calculate their moves. This is clear from the way they left Egypt and from the way they suddenly returned. But whether Ali knew of the plan and took part in it is something no one can prove or disprove with certainty. A man like Ali could hardly have been secretly directing a revolt against Uthman while at the same time sending his sons Hasan and Husayn to stand beside Uthman while his house was under siege. Ali openly expressed strong opposition to Uthman on more than one occasion, including when the rebel delegations arrived. But he did not go beyond this into active participation in overthrowing him. He refused to mediate, and he refused to stand in the rebels’ way. It was clear that he supported what they were demanding. But there is no proof that he urged them to kill Uthman. On the contrary, we have statements attributed to Ali that deny this, if those statements are authentic. What we know of his conduct also contradicts the idea that he had entered into some prior agreement to launch the revolt. The most likely explanation is that members of the left among the rebels made their own plans, assuming that Ali would be their candidate for the caliphate, while Ali himself was not informed of the details. Nor would taking part in the revolution have been something shameful for Ali. Quite the opposite: if anything, the failure to take part and guide it in the proper direction would have counted against him. Islam itself was a revolution, and the Prophet’s determined struggle was an example of active revolutionary action at every stage. What most closely fits Ali ibn Abi Talib’s character is what he actually did: he gave Uthman forceful advice and openly declared his opposition. Ali knew perfectly well the meaning of the Prophet’s saying: “Whoever among you sees a wrong should change it with his hand; if he cannot, then with his tongue; and if he cannot, then with his heart—and that is the weakest form of faith.” As a major leader whose words carried great weight among Muslims, Ali spoke openly with his tongue. He postponed the use of force against Uthman because of the caliph’s position in Islam, and perhaps because he had not yet lost hope that Uthman would return to the right path. Ali had tried this kind of pressure under Umar and had seen Umar respond. The response might have been cautious and slow, but it had still produced results and given grounds for hope. Ali also feared civil strife. Islam was still young, the wars of apostasy were not far in the past, and Islamic moral values had not yet taken firm root in every heart. What can be said with confidence is that Ali believed Uthman should relinquish the caliphate and accepted the legitimacy of that demand. But there is no evidence that he wanted Uthman to be removed by force and killed. Had Uthman not clung to the “shirt of the caliphate” until death, the tragedy might never have happened and the elderly caliph might never have been killed so brutally in his own home. The rebels continued demanding that Uthman step down, while most of the Companions—even members of the council that had selected him—remained silent, which itself suggested consent. Uthman continued to reply, “I will not take off a garment God has clothed me in.” Eventually the rebels’ anger exploded. The caliph could find no force willing to defend his determination to remain in office. From behind the walls of the house, one of Uthman’s supporters shot and killed an elderly Companion. Blood was answered with blood. The rebels climbed into Uthman’s room and attacked him with their blades. According to some accounts, the first to strike was Muhammad ibn Abi Bakr himself. At the time, hardly anyone appears to have treated what happened as a source of deep public shame. On the contrary, the mood in Medina—among both its inhabitants and the incoming rebels—was so hostile that Uthman had to be buried at night, under heavy caution, and in a place regarded as unsuitable. The rebels then nominated Ali for the caliphate and asked people to pledge allegiance to him. A great deal has been said about this pledge. According to some accounts, the rebels offered the caliphate to Ali and he hesitated. Others say that the people of Medina, from the Emigrants and the Helpers, considered choosing among the four remaining candidates: Talha, al-Zubayr, Sa‘d ibn Abi Waqqas, and Ali. Or perhaps they considered only the three active rivals—Talha, al-Zubayr, and Ali—because Sa‘d had withdrawn from the conflict and preferred not to become a party to it. But this makes the revolt look entirely random, as if it had not been guided by any political program aimed at correcting what Uthman had done, or by any policy opposed to the course Uthman had followed. From its earliest days, the revolt had demanded that Uthman remove himself from office. It is hardly reasonable to imagine that the rebels had no idea who they wanted as caliph to carry out the aims of their revolution. If the Egyptians—the group that had played the largest role in the revolt—favored Ali, what are we to make of all this supposed hesitation and deliberation described by later historians? They even claimed that Ali himself hesitated until his supporters among the rebels pressed him to accept. It was also said that the people of Kufa, whose sympathies lay with al-Zubayr, tried to secure the caliphate for him. Al-Zubayr may in fact have reached an earlier understanding with some Kufans that they would pledge allegiance to him once Uthman had been removed. It was likewise said that the people of Basra favored Talha, and we will later see evidence of an earlier agreement between Talha and some Basrans. But the revolution, led by the Egyptians and supported by most of the Emigrants and Helpers in Medina, had been clear in its aims from the beginning. This itself explains the secret arrangements between Talha and the Basrans and between al-Zubayr and the Kufans. If it had not already been clear that events were moving toward Ali, there would have been little reason for such preparations. The logic of events therefore requires us to reject the claim that, after Uthman’s death, the people of Medina and the rebels suddenly found themselves confused, unsure whom to make caliph; that Ali himself hesitated; that the rebels pressed him; and that he accepted only after the Emigrants and Helpers also insisted. The more reasonable view is that from the beginning the revolution was moving toward the man and the party that represented its general direction, while those opposed to Ali’s accession tried to arrange matters so that it would not happen. But events moved too quickly for them to do much. Under these circumstances, we would expect the rebels to turn to Ali and pledge allegiance to him, and we would expect most of Medina to do the same. After all, the people of Medina had themselves joined the rebels in opposing Uthman and demanding his removal. They had also participated in the events surrounding the siege of Uthman’s house. We cannot therefore exclude them from the revolutionary movement. Some reports say that allegiance to Ali was proclaimed five days after Uthman’s death; others say eight. What matters is that the caliphate remained vacant for at least five days, and that al-Ghafiqi, leader of the Egyptian rebels, exercised temporary authority until the question of the caliphate was settled. After Uthman’s death, the conflicting currents that had been hidden by agreement over removing him came fully into the open. Sa‘d ibn Abi Waqqas withdrew. We know that he had once had ambitions for the caliphate when the choice had been between Ali and Uthman, but by the time Uthman was killed he seems to have lacked the political force needed to compete seriously. He therefore chose to stay out, so that nothing from the coming conflict could later be held against him. Abdullah ibn Umar also withdrew, which was consistent with his deeply religious temperament. Talha and al-Zubayr, however, despite having helped incite opposition to Uthman, refused at first to pledge allegiance to Ali and instead wanted the caliphate for themselves. Each of these four men—and three of them had been among those Umar nominated as possible successors—undoubtedly had supporters among the Emigrants and Helpers. Ali also clearly wanted to begin his rule with broad agreement. The leaders of the revolution therefore had to move quickly to secure a general pledge of allegiance to him. This explains the five or eight days consumed by negotiations. The claim that Ali flatly refused the pledge when the rebels first offered it to him may be exaggerated. In reality, the whole direction of the revolt pointed toward Ali. That had been true from the secret meetings of his supporters, from the speeches delivered in the mosques, and from the moment voices of opposition began openly criticizing Uthman. Nor was Ali forced to accept the caliphate, as some reports claim. That would contradict all his earlier positions. The story that the rebels threatened to kill him if he refused is therefore difficult to accept. What Ali wanted was to make sure there was broad consent, above all from the Emigrants and Helpers. Once most opinions had been reconciled, Ali accepted the pledge. Everyone gave it except Sa‘d ibn Abi Waqqas and Abdullah ibn Umar, while the rebels compelled Talha and al- Zubayr to pledge allegiance. But Ali’s accession was surrounded by danger. Syria remained in Mu‘awiya’s hands. Its position had not yet been heard, no Syrian delegation had taken part in the proceedings, and Mu‘awiya’s attitude was already known. More dangerous still was the sudden appearance of all the contradictions that had been concealed by the common desire to remove Uthman. The right now showed its true opposition to Ali. Those hungry for office revealed their ambitions. The situation began moving from one complication to another. Ali nevertheless acted immediately, fully aware of these conditions and determined to settle them quickly. He appointed governors to the major provinces—Kufa, Basra, Egypt, Syria, and Yemen—from among men of the left or men acceptable to the left. All of them took control of their provinces except the governor sent to Syria, whom Mu‘awiya’s soldiers turned back. Ali then concluded that war with Mu‘awiya was unavoidable and began preparing for battle. Ali could not have raised armies if the majority had not stood with him, or if he had not enjoyed the support of Muslim public opinion. The forces of the right did not remain idle. They began acting with all their strength. Talha and al-Zubayr met in Mecca and began preparing for war against Ali in Basra. Aisha joined them, driven by motives that may have been more personal than political. It is difficult to place this revered woman clearly within any of the political or social currents then in conflict. What can be said is that she did not feel affection for Ali. He had taken a famous position during the Affair of the Slander: rather than immediately defend her innocence, he advised the Prophet that he could divorce her, saying in effect that “there were many other women.” Fatima, Ali’s wife and the Prophet’s beloved daughter, also competed with Aisha for the Prophet’s affection. Fatima gave birth to Hasan and Husayn, who became the Prophet’s most beloved descendants. In addition, the mother of Aisha’s brother Muhammad ibn Abi Bakr later married Ali after Abu Bakr’s death. All of this meant that relations between Ali and Aisha were strained, whatever her political sympathies may otherwise have been. These are the reasons given by the historical writers, and they are plausible enough that personal feeling alone could have lain behind Aisha’s hostile attitude toward Ali’s caliphate. This is a complete and accurate Arabic transcription of Part Seven in Markdown format, with the page headers and page numbers at the top and bottom removed: Talha, al-Zubayr, and Aisha now formed an alliance. Another of the Prophet’s wives— Abdullah ibn Umar’s sister—came close to joining them, but Abdullah persuaded her not to. A new front against the caliphate thus opened almost immediately after Ali’s accession, in addition to the Syrian front. Nothing like this had happened to any previous caliph, apart from the wars of apostasy, which were entirely different in nature. Umar’s caliphate had proceeded with remarkable ease. The only serious opposition it faced was the patient and conscious opposition of the Islamic left, and government and opposition had at times come close to meeting one another. Uthman’s caliphate, meanwhile, had faced opposition of opinion rather than armed force until events developed to the point where removing him by revolution became unavoidable. The speed with which war was launched against the new caliphate was itself proof that its opponents understood its political intentions. This was, in reality, a war of interests—a fierce struggle in which no side could afford delay. The caliphate therefore had to strike quickly as well and settle the situation before disturbances multiplied and control slipped from its hands. Ali decided to deal first with the opposition of Talha and al-Zubayr. He gathered his forces and began the campaign to settle the matter. Muslims now faced something new: war against one another. Debate immediately began over who was right and who was wrong, and whether such fighting was lawful in Islam. The original causes of the revolution, and the reasons its leaders had taken power, began to disappear beneath arguments over legal formality. Even some senior Muslims were drawn into these disputes. The right seized on the argument, deepened it, and then opened another front of the same kind: the demand for vengeance against Uthman’s killers. This in turn raised the question of whether Uthman had been killed as an oppressor or as a wronged man. If he had been wronged, his killers had to be punished; if not, then what had happened could be regarded as lawful retribution. The revolution’s opponents pressed the caliph to rule on this question. It is said that Ali nearly allowed himself to be trapped by it. He would have had either to say that Uthman had been killed as an oppressor—a grave judgment to pass on a caliph and Companion of the Prophet—or to deny the Muslim community’s right to remove a caliph when he violated his duties. Most likely, the opponents of the revolution were trying to drive a wedge between Ali and the revolutionary movement, taking advantage of what they knew about his strict commitment to principle. But events did not unfold as the opponents of the revolution wished. Ali never opened a full investigation in the proper sense. He asked Muhammad ibn Abi Bakr whether he had taken part in the killing. Muhammad denied it, Ali accepted his denial, and the inquiry went no further. The matter was quickly set aside without a full explanation. Talha and al-Zubayr’s uprising, together with Aisha’s alliance with them, helped push it aside. The question was postponed while the government dealt with opponents who had now taken up arms. Yet we will repeatedly find that the issue never truly disappeared. The right made excellent use of it. The left’s own restraint prevented it from stating openly that Uthman had been killed as an oppressor, and prevented it from giving a decisive justification for that position. This left the revolt against Uthman available as a weapon that could later be used in the war against Ali. Had the left settled this question clearly, and also settled the legal basis for war against its opponents, the right would have had far less room to attack the caliphate at the foundations of its legitimacy. The left also needed to introduce reforms and pass laws that would convince the revolutionary masses that justice was finally being put into practice and that authentic Islam had begun to return to its original course. But the war with Talha and al-Zubayr came almost immediately, while the threat from Syria also required preparation and perhaps even a pre- emptive response. Even under these extremely difficult conditions, Ali and his party did begin to act. We will later see how the revolution, once in power, confronted its enemies and defeated them, then how it suffered a reversal, and finally how the right won the last round. The Idealism of the Left and the Opportunism of the Right In some modern uses, “the left” may suggest extremism and violence. It may also suggest rigid adherence to the literal wording of texts, harshness in applying them, intellectual stagnation, rejection of renewal, and the accusation that any revision is betrayal, deviation, or decay. But the left discussed in this study is the socialist tendency, with all the idealism that this implies. It is uncompromising in what it believes to be right, but above all it is humane. Its goals are justice, human happiness, respect for freedom, and the protection of human dignity. For that reason, this left refuses to use methods that contradict its goals. It rejects from the outset the idea that the end justifies the means. No matter how difficult circumstances become, and no matter how much necessity may press upon it, it will not pursue a just end by unjust means. That was the character of the Islamic left. We may later have to ask whether this was a source of strength or a source of weakness. As we follow the Islamic left while it is in power, we will encounter decisions by Ali ibn Abi Talib that some historians have described as weakness, mistakes, or similar failures attributed to this great Muslim leader. The matter is genuinely perplexing. Had Ali ibn Abi Talib been less faithful to his human idealism, he might have won his struggle with the right. But what, in that case, would have remained of his socialism? The socialist tendency within Islam did not die with Ali. Revolts of the left continued after his death and extended throughout Islamic history, taking on a new form in every age to suit the conditions of that age. The flame of social justice remained alive through the centuries despite the expansion of the Islamic conquests, the growth of wealth, and the many methods used by ruling forces of the right—methods marked by a political cunning rarely matched in the history of other peoples. Books were written under their eyes and at their direction to brand opponents with every imaginable accusation. Artificial sects were even created and made to appear as though they belonged to the left, so that the left itself could be condemned as deviant or even unbelieving. These fabricated movements sometimes attracted genuine followers among people who had been misled, growing larger and moving further into extremism, until the modern historian can struggle to distinguish the authentic tendencies of the left from those that were manufactured. And so Islamic history became somewhat obscure. The historian must work through it with great care if he hopes to arrive at the truth—or at least at something close to it. Yet despite this enormous mass of inherited material, with all its truth and all its fabrication, the spark first kindled by Islam through its Prophet and his earliest Companions, and later through Caliph Ali ibn Abi Talib, was never extinguished. Muslims continued to sense it in every age, however dimly, whenever they felt the pressure and injustice of their rulers. This is why the Arab people have always been receptive to the idea of socialism, and why this tendency has never ceased to reappear in one form or another: as a social revolt seeking justice for the oppressed against rulers, the wealthy, exploiters, and those who monopolised privilege. I have said before that a revolution is not merely a change in economic positions. Before anything else, it is a radical change in the way human beings look at the universe. It offers a new and broader view of this mysterious existence, of the relationships between one person and another, and of the best path humanity should follow in its long, unending journey toward a deeper understanding of the truth of its own existence. Every revolution in ancient or modern history has brought more than an economic system that redistributes wealth. Before that, it has brought a new philosophy. In this respect, revealed religions, modern revolutions, the bourgeois revolution, and modern socialist revolutions are all alike. Ali ibn Abi Talib, or any other great figure in human history, might succeed in creating a society that enjoys social justice by the standards of his own age. But if he builds it on foundations and by methods that conflict with the very idea and aims of justice, that structure will soon change. Nothing will remain except those methods themselves, transformed into a terrible legacy that later generations will struggle to avoid. Had Ali ibn Abi Talib not lived according to that extraordinary ideal, would that spark have remained alive and hidden in people’s hearts? It is remarkable that no great idea seems able to endure on earth and bear fruit without sacrifice and self-giving—indeed, without suffering of the most extreme kind. This is the fate imposed on a certain kind of great man: he must carry the experiment through to its end and endure every form of torment without hesitation or retreat. His one role is to become an example in human history, like a signpost marking the road. If we leave these general reflections and turn to the actual struggles of Ali’s age, we find that everything about his circumstances prepared him to play precisely this role: the sacrifice and the example. Every road before him seemed to lead toward that painful end—yet an end radiant with extraordinary light. And so Ali played his immense part as only an exceptional human being can play a part in history. He came to power in a society whose economic structure had changed with astonishing speed. The Arabs had once been tribes living a harsh and simple life. They had now become the conquerors of the greatest empire of their age. Tribute flowed to them from every corner of the world, and they competed to seize it while struggling for positions of authority and rule. The fighters among the Emigrants and the Helpers were no longer a poor and powerless group, deprived of resources, rights, and security in the face of Meccan capital and the tribal loyalties of the ruling clans. They themselves had become masters and rulers, even over their former class enemies. As a result of the conquests, nearly every one of those early revolutionaries among the Emigrants and Helpers came to occupy some greater or lesser position in this vast territory, with all its sudden and abundant wealth. Their former class enemies soon came to share much the same social position. The sharp edge of class conflict faded and was replaced by a struggle for dominance, control, and exclusive possession of political power. This struggle took on the form of sectarian and ideological conflict far more than class conflict. It was in these changed circumstances that Ali ibn Abi Talib became caliph. What kind of social justice could he offer the Arabs of the Peninsula, now spreading out in every direction? Yes, class differences still existed. Otherwise Abu Dharr would not have stood first in Medina and then in Syria calling for a ban on the hoarding of wealth and demanding that it be distributed among the Muslims. Yes, rights were still being denied, and Ammar ibn Yasir, Abu al-Darda, Abdullah ibn Masud, and other leaders of the left defended those who had been deprived of them. But the livelihood of the poor whom they defended was, at least, guaranteed at a minimum level. Those capable of fighting had a right to shares of the spoils during war and received stipends in peacetime. The exception may have been the poor among the people of Syria or other conquered provinces who had converted to Islam. This is entirely possible, for we find the Islamic left demanding retaliation against Ubayd Allah ibn Umar for killing a freedman, in accordance with the Qur’anic law of equal justice. We also find them rebelling in Kufa against Ziyad ibn Abih, Muawiya’s governor, because he refused to execute a Muslim who had killed a Christian protected subject and instead settled the matter with blood money. That revolt succeeded, and the Muslim killer was executed in retaliation for the Christian he had killed. There are many examples of this kind. If the Islamic left sought justice even for non-Muslims among the peoples of the conquered provinces, then it was all the more likely to defend poor Muslims from those same populations. The Emigrants and the Helpers had unquestionably become a ruling class, and enormous sums of money unquestionably passed through their hands. But the Muslim community was not made up only of the Emigrants and Helpers. It included many others: people from the desert, Yemeni tribes, settlers in the conquered provinces, and the great numbers who formed the base of Muslim armies in the field. There was poverty, then, and there was wealth. Indeed, there was probably wealth on a scale modern readers would find difficult to believe. The fortunes of some leading Muslims were counted in the millions. At the same time, poverty could be so severe that a great Companion such as Abu Dharr lost children to malnutrition after his stipend was cut off—or because he gave away too much of whatever came into his hands in charity to the poor. The forces competing for leadership and struggling for office were generally well provided for, though to widely differing degrees. Their struggle with one another, representing tendencies toward either the right or the left, was driven chiefly by belief—or at least by belief above all else. The left believed that Islam made people equal in their rights. The right believed they were entitled to keep whatever wealth came to them, whether from the spoils of war, large-scale trade, or, often enough, directly from the Muslim treasury itself. The rulers of the right believed that the public treasury was theirs to distribute among their supporters and themselves whenever they wished. And they wished it often. In the final years of Uthman’s rule, his governors took whatever they wanted from the treasury without supervision. If the treasurer objected—and treasurers usually objected only when they belonged to the type of Muslim we are calling the Islamic left—they persecuted or dismissed him. Uthman himself did this to Abdullah ibn Masud, telling him in a famous remark, “You are only our treasurer.” In other words, he was not the treasurer of the Muslims, but the treasurer of the caliph and his men. In reality, with the exception of men such as Abdullah ibn Masud, the keeper of the treasury often had his own share of the money, whether he openly collaborated with the governor or not. How often did a dismissed governor simply take everything in the treasury with him to Mecca or Medina, build himself a palace, buy slave girls and singing girls, receive poets at his door, and spend a temporary or permanent retirement in comfort—without being called to account by any responsible authority. It almost seems to have become an accepted custom among the ruling elite. There is no doubt that authentic Islam condemned and fought this kind of behaviour. The clearest evidence is the bitter controversy it caused, and ultimately the revolt against Uthman itself—the revolt that brought Ali ibn Abi Talib to power. If we examine Ali’s actions in the distribution of wealth, and what he added to the measures introduced by Umar ibn al-Khattab, we find that he never laid hands on the fortunes already accumulated by supporters of Uthman’s regime. He never had even an hour free to redistribute existing wealth or lay the foundations of a new economic system. What he could do was distribute whatever entered the public treasury immediately among the Muslims. He kept none of it from them. It is even reported that he distributed thread and needles. He took particular pride in sweeping out the treasury, sprinkling its floor with water after emptying it, and then praying two rak'ahs there. In this he was applying the principle of the Islamic left that he himself had expressed to Umar ibn al-Khattab, and that Abu Dharr later expressed to Uthman and Muawiya: the money belonged to the Muslims. It was their right and should be distributed among them. It was not to be withheld from them, nor could some claim it for themselves while others were deprived. But the right knew how far Ali ibn Abi Talib intended to go. They knew his understanding of property—or more precisely, what he believed Islam’s understanding of property to be. He had argued the matter repeatedly with Uthman, as had his supporters, including Ammar and Abu Dharr. They maintained that a Muslim had no right to wealth except what came from the work of his own hands, not from the labour of others. Beyond that, a Muslim should not store up more than he and his family needed. Islam had attacked hoarding with exceptional severity. They often repeated the Qur’anic verse: “Those who hoard gold and silver and do not spend it in the way of God—give them news of a painful punishment,” and so on. Any surplus wealth, anything beyond a person’s needs, should pass to other Muslims who were in need. You must not eat your fill while your neighbour goes hungry, or clothe yourself while your neighbour is naked. By the same principle, you should not live in the luxury of a palace while your Muslim neighbour sleeps in the open or shelters in a collapsing house. Wealth should be distributed among the Muslims until everyone’s needs are met. In the final analysis, wealth belongs to the Muslim community, and all the riches of the earth are God’s gift to humanity. The caliph manages them with the agreement and by the authority of the Muslims, for the benefit of them all. These three simple principles contained the whole of their socialist philosophy. At the same time, they explain the threat Ali’s rule posed to those who had become enormously rich and had hoarded the gold and silver against which the Qur’an warned them—the wealth they had been told would one day be heated and used to brand their foreheads and backs. The right knew that these were Ali’s principles and that, sooner or later, he would apply them. They also knew that he would enforce the Prophet’s practice of equality in rights: that an Arab had no superiority over a non-Arab, nor a white man over a black man, except through piety; that no man, however exalted his position, had the right to monopolise the affairs of the Muslims, for their affairs were to be decided through consultation among them; that there was equal retaliation in matters of life and death; and all the other noble principles of Islam that, alongside social justice, protected freedom, dignity, security, and peace of mind. Talha and al-Zubayr may have rebelled against Ali and broken their oath of allegiance because they wanted the caliphate for themselves. But there is little doubt that they also disliked what they regarded as his excessive determination to apply these Islamic principles —or at least felt a buried and indistinct fear, perhaps not fully admitted even to themselves, of what those principles might mean if Ali translated them into the realities of daily life. Ali’s rule therefore threatened privileged economic positions. It also threatened office- holders and seekers of office, including some who had themselves taken part in the revolt against Uthman. They knew that Ali would appoint only those he believed capable of administering public affairs according to Islamic principles. In other words, an official serving under Ali could expect no profit from the treasury or anywhere else. He could expect only constant labour in the service of the Muslims and in securing their livelihood. That was hardly attractive to an ambitious man. It required him to surrender all the splendour of authority and strip public office of its glamour. Those with privileged economic positions faced the loss of their privilege. Those seeking office discovered that even if they obtained it, the office itself had been emptied of personal reward. Ali demanded that every Muslim live as a Muslim in the manner of the Messenger of God—or in the manner Ali himself tried to live—so that Islam might be realised in its ideal form. When Talha and al-Zubayr called for the oath of allegiance to Ali to be revoked, they found supporters in Mecca, people willing to march with them into Iraq, and others already waiting for them there. Strangely, however, they never openly stated their real reasons for repudiating Ali. On one side, they had broken with him because they desired the caliphate themselves. On the other, they wanted to preserve the existing social order. That was their real position, and it was also the position of their supporters where the social order was concerned. But what they publicly declared was that they demanded vengeance for Uthman against the men who had killed him, whom Ali had supposedly left unpunished. They even accused Ali himself of conspiring in Uthman’s murder, forgetting that they had been among those who incited the revolt against Uthman, and that Ali himself had taken a firm stand against one of them when he gathered rebels around him and urged them on against Uthman. This was the argument used by Talha and al-Zubayr, together with Aisha. Muawiya and his supporters later used exactly the same argument. None of the opponents of the leftist revolution openly revealed the real reason for the violent rebellion they unleashed from the first days of Ali ibn Abi Talib’s caliphate. The true motive remained hidden in people’s hearts because no one dared expose it. Perhaps Ali ibn Abi Talib himself did not think to expose it. More likely, neither side in the struggle—the right nor the left—fully understood that what was taking place was a conflict between two opposing ideas. One regarded social justice as a firm foundation of Islam. The other regarded Islam primarily as worship and the performance of religious obligations, including zakat; everything beyond that was optional, and it was enough for a person to say that there is no god but God and that Muhammad is the Messenger of God. The concealment of real aims behind some public argument far removed from the truth is as old as politics itself. This generation of Arabs did the same. They continued to debate their opponents on the basis of the public pretext while the real objective remained unspoken. Eventually, the arguments surrounding the false pretext accumulated until they genuinely obscured the truth. So it was when Talha, al-Zubayr, and Aisha arrived in Basra. No sooner had they settled there than Uthman ibn Hunayf, Ali’s governor of Basra, sent a delegation to ask what they wanted. They replied that they were demanding vengeance for Uthman and that the question of the caliphate should once again be placed before the Muslims for consultation. Talha and al-Zubayr claimed that they had given their allegiance to Ali under coercion and that their oath was therefore invalid. Many of the people of Basra who were present confronted them and reminded them of the letters Talha and al-Zubayr themselves had previously sent to Basra urging revolt against Uthman. How could they now return demanding vengeance for his blood? Yet they found people in Basra who believed them and argued on their behalf. In the end, a truce was reached. The governor allowed the rebels to remain in Basra so long as they did nothing to disturb its peace, until Ali ibn Abi Talib—who was known to be marching from Medina to meet them—arrived. But the rebels broke their agreement. Before long they attacked Uthman ibn Hunayf at night, killing a number of those around him. They then beat him severely, plucked out the hair of his beard and moustache while he was performing the evening prayer, and finally released him to return to Ali. They seized the public treasury. Even so, when Ali received his governor, Uthman ibn Hunayf, in that condition, he did not let anger overcome him and charge his enemies with his army to punish them. He restrained himself and continued toward Basra. When he reached its outskirts, he stopped and once again sent messengers to the rebels to reason with them peacefully. But what people carry in their hearts is one thing, and being convinced by a sound argument is another. The situation soon became more complicated. The rebels rejected reason and insisted on fighting. Even then Ali did not lose control of himself. He ordered one of his men to raise a copy of the Qur’an between the two sides and make it the judge between them. It is worth noting that Ali told the young man who was to carry the Qur’an that the rebels might kill him with their arrows. The young man hesitated only briefly. Then he raised the Qur’an, walked forward beyond the ranks, stood facing the rebel army, and held the book above him with both hands. What Ali had predicted immediately happened. The young man was struck by arrows until he fell dead. And so began the battle that became famous as the Battle of the Camel. Aisha was placed in her howdah, and the rebels gathered around her to defend her. Their leaders deliberately inflamed their zeal, exploiting her position as Mother of the Believers and correctly predicting the effect her presence would have on the men around her. The fighters battled with fierce passion until Ali ordered the camel to be brought down. When it fell, Ali’s men gathered around Aisha’s howdah and moved it to a place of safety. Among them was her brother Muhammad ibn Abi Bakr. The battle ended in the defeat of the rebels. Talha and al-Zubayr were both killed. Ali ibn Abi Talib stood among the dead of his own army and the dead of those who had rebelled against him in a state of anguish and inner division, like a tragic hero. Among his enemies lay men who had rendered great service to Islam—leaders, warriors, and sincere believers. Why had they died? How could they fail to see the truth when it was so clear? They were Muslims, and he wanted what was best for Islam and the fulfilment of its true meaning. By the testimony and general recognition of the Muslims, no one understood Islam better than he did. So why had this civil conflict happened? Why had these tragedies been necessary? He looked over the dead on both sides with a broken heart and murmured toward God in deep pain: “I bring to You all that lies within me, the hidden and the plain. I have relieved my heart—and killed my own kin.” He then ordered that the dead on both sides be buried, and that none of his soldiers finish off a wounded enemy or pursue anyone who had fled. He went further. There would be no spoils for the victors in this war. Whatever the rebels had owned remained their property. Ali ordered everything to be gathered in the mosque and had a public announcement made that anyone who recognised something belonging to him should come and take it. We know of few parallels to this in any age. Ali’s army protested because they had been denied the spoils of battle. Some said, “You allowed us their blood, yet forbade us their property.” But Ali paid no attention to the complaint. He was establishing principles, and he had to uphold them even when they provoked protest and opposition. More significant still was Ali’s own grief. It spread to everyone around him. Sadness now filled both sides. Each remembered his dead and wounded and the strangeness of a war in which two groups of Muslims had fought one another. Ali’s sorrow, however, came from deeper understanding. He grieved for those he had killed before he grieved for those who had fought beside him. He grieved for the noble message itself, now exposed to civil conflict at the very height of its success and triumph. He grieved for the blindness that had overtaken some Muslims, preventing them from seeing their religion as it truly was or looking beyond their personal ambitions. Perhaps his sorrow also turned inward. It had fallen to him to become the final fighter, the Muslim who must provide the highest example so that the message could survive and continue in the right direction. The greatest burden had been placed on his shoulders: he had to resist his own naturally powerful emotions, fight for the cause to the very end, and drink the pain of victory to its final drop. Among ordinary Muslims, Ali’s grief took a more immediate form. It became disappointment at the loss of spoils, a sense that victory no longer carried joy or celebration, and then grief over the dead produced by the battle. His sorrow passed into them as regret, loss, and bitterness. From this point onward—and even more after the terrible and inhuman killing of Husayn—Iraq would become the homeland of heavy suffering and the land of everlasting remorse. This battle ended only for the greater battle to begin: the struggle against Syria under Muawiya, a man who represented Ali’s complete opposite. Muawiya too was an extraordinary character, combining within himself all the qualities of a man whose actions are restrained by no value or principle. He was the son of the famous Abu Sufyan and of the woman who chewed the liver of Hamza, the Prophet’s uncle, after Hamza had been killed by one of her slaves. In Muawiya was the will to personal victory and domination, the harshness of fate, and the cunning intelligence of a ruthless destiny that plans and arranges. He appears as the negative pole eternally present in existence, the force of absolute negation struggling within the human heart just as it struggles within the universe. That negative force seemed to flow into a human nature especially fitted to contain and express it, just as absolute affirmation flows into a nature fitted to contain it. The two poles, negative and positive, collided as completely as human limitations allow anything to become absolute negation or absolute affirmation. Muawiya had been raised in the household of Abu Sufyan, leader of the reactionary forces of Mecca. Ali had been raised in the household of the Prophet, surrounded by everything prophethood embodied of sacrifice, self-giving, and commitment to absolute good. Had Muawiya been in Ali’s place, he would not have sent delegations, negotiated, and urged reconciliation while possessing a force capable of imposing his will. Had he been in Ali’s position after the Battle of the Camel, he would have rejoiced openly. He would have ordered the bodies of his enemies mutilated and infected his followers with his pride and triumph so that no sign of grief appeared among them. He would have allowed them to seize the defeated side’s wealth, children, and women. And instead of distributing the contents of the treasury equally among all Muslims, he would have selected the most cunning and influential men, showered them with money, and bound them to his side. Ali was nothing like Muawiya. He relied entirely on awakening the better side of the men under him, however difficult that might be. He wanted to shape his men in his own image, not merely use them to win victories. He had succeeded in preparing them to become such men, and he hoped that when crises came, what he had planted within them would grow and the qualities he had instilled in them would become firmly rooted. But Ali had also taught them that the leader of the Muslims must not monopolise opinion or force anyone to accept his view. He had taught them the meaning of human dignity: freedom to express an opinion, freedom of thought, and freedom of choice. He made no decision without consultation and without explaining his reasons. He taught them that they could disagree with him. He would discuss and debate with them, and if the majority stood against him, he would yield and allow experience itself to reveal which view had been right and which had been wrong. Ali placed the human being and the human heart first. His concern was with the inner person: building him, strengthening him, and giving him substance. The forces of the right turned outward instead, toward events and their possibilities, and toward human weaknesses that could be encouraged and exploited. To the right, under Muawiya, people were fears and appetites to be manipulated. To the left, represented by Ali, they were human beings in whom impulses toward dignity and freedom already existed and needed to be developed and brought to the surface. The true victory Ali sought was the elevation of the human soul and its deep union with Islamic principles, until those principles became almost instinctive. For this reason, his military victory at the Battle of the Camel was, in another sense, a defeat for all those principles. It represented a failure in his mission to create an Islamic character in the heart of every man. When Ali’s army moved to confront Muawiya, warnings, delegations, debates, and letters went ahead of it. Ali’s letters were marked by courtesy and by repeated appeals to do what was right. Muawiya’s letters, by contrast, were full of abuse and insult: “We saw it in your hostile glances, your ugly words, your heavy sighs, and the slowness with which you accepted the caliphs. In all of this you were led along like a camel dragged by a ring through its nose. And toward none of them did you show greater envy than toward your cousin Uthman, though his kinship and merit should have made you the last man to treat him so. “You broke the bonds of kinship with him, belittled his virtues, showed him open hostility, concealed treachery toward him, and incited the people against him until camels came galloping toward him from every direction and horses were gathered against him from every horizon. I have heard that you deny responsibility for Uthman’s blood and declare yourself innocent of it. If you are truthful, then hand his killers over to us so that we may execute them for his death.” Now compare this with Ali’s letter: “You mention that Ibn Affan was the third in distinction”—that is, the third caliph. “If Uthman did good, he will meet a grateful Lord who multiplies good deeds and rewards them. If he did wrong, he will meet a forgiving and merciful Lord for whom no sin is too great to forgive. “As for envy, God forbid that I ever concealed it or declared it. As for my delay in giving allegiance, I owe no apology to anyone for that. “Uthman did what you saw, and the people responded in the way you know. I had no part in it—unless you choose to accuse me falsely, in which case accuse me of whatever you please. “You mention his killers, as you claim, and ask me to hand them over to you. I do not know any one man in particular to be his killer. I have examined the matter from every side and found no way in justice to hand over to you those whom you merely accuse and suspect.” The letters exchanged between Ali and Muawiya reveal the style of each man so clearly that Ali can almost appear to be the weaker side, as though he hesitated to fight. But when we remember that Ali possessed the power to crush Muawiya’s army decisively, the question becomes perplexing. Why did Ali not destroy Muawiya? Why did he allow that decisive moment in Islamic history to pass instead of seizing control of events and returning the course of government to what he believed was right? Ali did not want that kind of victory. He wanted inward truth and purity, not the superficial triumph of outward appearances. That is why he endured letters from one of his own provincial governors who refused even to address him by the title of caliph and instead filled his correspondence with insults. Ali endured so much from Muawiya that the historian himself can feel choked with anger while watching that strange and unfathomable patience. This is a complete and accurate transcription of Part Eight in Arabic in Markdown format, with the headers and page numbers at the top and bottom removed: Even then, Ali did not move to fight until his enemies moved first. Muawiya began in a way entirely suited to his character. At Siffin he occupied the water supply in order to deny it to Ali’s army. Ali did not immediately attack. Instead he sent a message asking that the water be shared by both armies. One side should not be deprived of it while the other monopolised it, even in war. Naturally, Muawiya refused. Ali’s army then attacked, drove his men away from the water, and took control of the whole supply. But instead of denying water to his enemies in return, Ali ordered that it remain open to both armies. The war continued in this way: generosity from Ali’s side, cunning and deception from Muawiya’s. When Muawiya’s army was finally on the verge of defeat, they raised copies of the Qur’an on their spears. Ali was not a man ignorant of what lay inside people’s hearts. He read his enemies as though their thoughts were written in an open book. He was never deceived. Indeed, he had never been defeated in any battle he had fought. His life had been a succession of wars from the time he first stood beside the Prophet as a young fighter until, almost without pause, he had grown into a man approaching old age. Of course he understood that the raising of the Qur’ans was not an appeal to truth or to the judgement of God’s words written in those pages. Ali himself had been the first to appeal to the Qur’an—not after battle and defeat, but before the fighting began. But Ali’s army split, or rather a split was deliberately created within it. Before the battle, Muawiya’s messengers had approached leading men and those of weak character who had not yet absorbed the moral principles of Ali and his companions. They tempted them with money and public office and planned with them how the army might be divided. Suddenly, one group in Ali’s army demanded an end to the fighting and arbitration according to the Qur’an. Ali’s arguments and clear reasoning were useless. This obstinacy had been bought with money; how could truth buy it back? After doing everything he could to preserve unity and continue the battle, the caliph was forced to accept the majority’s decision and stop the fighting. He himself had taught his followers that the majority must prevail, even when it was wrong. But some of his supporters were furious that the truth could be so clear and yet be abandoned for an argument so obviously false. They failed to understand that Ali was laying the foundations of a new form of democracy, and that establishing foundations can be harder than winning a battle. Ali now stood between two groups: a minority that wanted to continue fighting, and a majority that wanted arbitration. Having failed to persuade them, he had no choice but to accept the decision of the majority. Perhaps Ali—this was always his way—remained certain that he would ultimately prevail. He knew that the truth was on his side and believed that victory must eventually come, whether soon or after a long delay. The farce of arbitration went ahead and produced its absurd results. But by then the fanatics who had insisted on continuing the war had rebelled against Ali, unable to understand the meaning of consultation or voluntary participation in struggle. Other men had been weakened by bribery and by the hardship of war. Yet Ali continued in the same manner. He tried to persuade and convince. Only when argument failed, and people were given the choice between peace and war without success, did he enter battle reluctantly and in anger. And every time he entered battle, victory was written for him. When he rejected the disgraceful outcome of the arbitration and decided to fight again, weakness had already spread through the ranks. Freedom was still a stranger to these people. A mature human personality was something that could not be created without passing through terrible trials. Freedom had taught some of his followers empty argument, stubbornness, and a preference for comfort and quiet. Here was a ruler they could criticise and debate without fear of punishment. Here was a ruler who divided public money among all Muslims so that every man found his basic livelihood secured. Why, then, should they fight? What did a principle matter? What did struggle mean? Ali told them what all this meant: that the order of things would be overturned, that human beings would be humiliated, that their spirits would be degraded and their lives destroyed without mercy or hesitation; that the powerful would seize wealth and resources while the weak were deprived of everything, unable even to obtain the food required to live. But they understood none of it. They withdrew into the modest security Ali had created for them through Islamic principles and concerned themselves with their own small lives, without confronting the enemy lying in wait to destroy everything they enjoyed. Ali now found himself in a position rarely seen in history. He called on these men to prepare for war against Syria and found no one answering him, as though he were asking them to fight for his own sake rather than for their lives and the lives of future generations. Ali could have acted more harshly. He could have raised armies and driven them forward with incentives. He could have allowed them spoils of war. He could have fed the ambitions of those hungry for office. He could have used the very methods Muawiya used in the service of falsehood, arguing that there was no harm in using them in the service of truth. But that was not Ali’s way. Perhaps a victory won by such methods would have been so incomplete that defeat itself would have been better. And so he addressed his men as saints and martyrs address mankind. The only weapon in his hands was the human heart. At one point, driven almost to despair, he stood before them and said: “O people whose bodies are gathered together while their hearts and desires are divided! No one who calls upon you gains strength through you, and no heart can find rest in dealing with you. Your words would shake solid rock, yet your actions encourage your enemy to attack you. “When I call you to struggle, you answer with this excuse and that excuse, one false pretext after another. You ask me for delay like a debtor forever postponing payment. “Far from it! Humiliation cannot repel oppression, and the right cannot be won except through seriousness, determination, and a willingness to endure hardship. “What land will you defend after your own? Under what leader will you fight after me? “By God, the truly deceived man is the one deceived by you, and whoever wins with you has won with the most worthless arrow in the quiver. “I have reached the point where I no longer hope for your support or believe your words. May God separate me from you and give me in your place people better for me than you. “You will soon experience after me a humiliation that covers everything, a cutting sword, and rulers who make selfish privilege a permanent law among you. They will divide your community, bring tears to your eyes, and bring poverty into your homes. Before long you will wish that you had seen me and supported me. “Then you will know the truth of what I say. “May God cast away none but the unjust.” We may ask: where were the leaders of the left? Many had been killed in the battles they fought, because they were always the first to advance. How many of Ali’s finest men had been consumed in fighting the Kharijites, in suppressing coups planned by the enemies of the left, and in answering the raids repeatedly launched by Muawiya’s supporters. Ali himself was creating a new generation of leaders in the midst of battle, and leaders are not made overnight. Most of the earliest Companions and veteran fighters had reached old age. Yet even then they did not retire into comfort. At Siffin we see the great Companion and revolutionary figure Ammar ibn Yasir entering battle though, according to most reports, he was already over eighty. He fought beside his leader and comrade, fulfilling the prophecy the Prophet had made years before when he once looked at Ammar among a group of his companions and said, “The rebellious faction will kill you.” The old leaders had not deserted Ali. They spent all their strength educating and persuading others. But their numbers had greatly diminished at precisely the moment when the struggle most needed men who had stood beside the Prophet and learned from him for twenty years or more. Despite everything, Ali did not despair. He did not change his methods and begin buying men’s hearts cheaply. He wanted a people strong in themselves. He wanted real men. And his method was, in the end, the right one. Conviction slowly entered their hearts. His patient work of education began to bear fruit. Ali actually began preparing for battle with a huge army in which no man had enlisted out of fear or greed. But before the battle could begin, plans were already being laid in Syria. They were behind the disturbances and attempted coups, behind the whispers and the sterile arguments that had spread through Ali’s ranks. They were behind everything. Murder now emerged as a way out. For the right, assassination was a weapon it repeatedly turned to. Umar ibn al-Khattab had already been murdered by treachery. Later, al-Ashtar, one of Ali’s fiercest supporters, was killed by poison secretly slipped to him. Ibn Abi Hanifa was killed. Muhammad ibn Abi Bakr was killed. And Hasan ibn Ali would later be poisoned in his own home. When news reached Muawiya that al-Ashtar had died from poison mixed into honey, he remarked: “God has soldiers made of honey.” And so the plan to kill Ali was set in motion before his army could even march. The accounts here are almost unanimous in blaming the Kharijites for the crime. According to them, the Kharijites planned for three of their men to kill Ali, Muawiya, and Amr ibn al-As at the same hour, thereby ridding the Islamic world of the three men they believed responsible for dividing the Muslim community. There is no doubt that the Kharijites had broken with Ali and fought against him. There is no doubt that they hated him and regarded him as an enemy. But why was Ali killed only when he had finally succeeded in uniting his supporters and completing his preparations to fight Muawiya and his followers? And why did the plan succeed against Ali, but fail against both Amr ibn al-As and Muawiya? And was assassination not already one of Muawiya’s methods, whether by sword or by poison? This crime was planned with extraordinary care—more carefully, perhaps, than any of the others. Every circumstance was used to advantage. There were supposedly three Kharijites: Abd al-Rahman ibn Muljam al-Himyari, who was to assassinate Ali; al-Hajjaj ibn Abd Allah al- Suraymi, who was to assassinate Muawiya; and Amr ibn Bakr al-Tamimi, who was to assassinate Amr ibn al-As. The assassinations were to take place during the dawn prayer. Ali was in the habit of coming out personally to call the people to prayer. Muawiya’s attacker, they say, struck him but failed to kill him because he was wearing armour. Another account says that the blow caused only a slight wound to his body. As for the man sent to kill Amr, he failed because on that particular day Amr did not come out for prayer: he had fallen ill. Ali’s killer, however, lay in wait with an accomplice. When Ali came out to call the people to prayer, Ibn Muljam struck him with a sword across the forehead. His accomplice also swung at him but missed. The Imam fell to the ground covered in blood. Does this not give us reason to stop and think? This method of disposing of opponents was nothing new among leaders of the right—not only in that age, but throughout history. And this particular right had blood on its hands. Its history was full of such schemes. There is little doubt that the truth about the crime was known at the time, and that the public either knew what had happened or at least suspected it. Many men spoke openly about it. Some even declared it in public. Foremost among them was one of the finest and most respected Muslims of his day, Abu al-Aswad al-Du’ali. But who could unite the ranks when Ali ibn Abi Talib himself had barely managed to do so? Who could mobilise the people to demand justice and carry on the revolution? The crime struck the left like a thunderbolt. Everyone was stunned. The majority seemed paralysed by confusion and fear. They were therefore quick to accept the story of the conspiracy, because doing so relieved them both of their fear and of the sting of conscience. Only two days later, the great Imam died. He did not nominate a successor. He said that the caliphate should be decided through consultation among the Muslims. His final words were the words of God: “Whoever does an atom’s weight of good will see it, and whoever does an atom’s weight of evil will see it.” And with that, the curtain fell on the first and greatest confrontation between the left and the right. The left had held power for only four years, and all four had been consumed by fighting conspirators, trying to reunite its ranks, and preparing to establish the foundations of socialist rule. But the aftermath of the struggle deserves close attention. The right now had to eliminate every remaining trace of the left, using all the cruelty and brutality at its disposal. That is exactly what it did, without hesitation. But did the left disappear completely from the Islamic world? Eliminating the Left When we speak today of the inevitability of a socialist solution, can we also speak of the historical inevitability of a merchant-capitalist solution when considering the crisis of the Islamic left? It seems that we can—at the very least—try. We have seen that the new Islamic vision introduced two fundamental principles: the oneness of God and social solidarity. This vision met the intellectual and social needs of the Arabian environment, but it also answered a broader need in the wider world and among the advanced societies of that age. This is how Islam acquired its universal character—a character present in the message from the moment the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, took it upon himself and from the first words with which he openly proclaimed Islam. The mission succeeded. The Islamic state was established, and its foundations were laid according to principles set down by the Prophet. The first stage of its construction reached its conclusion in the famous Farewell Sermon. But political currents appeared very quickly afterward. Their conflict became intense as the Islamic realm expanded through the many conquests of Umar ibn al-Khattab’s reign, and then through the new policies introduced by Uthman ibn Affan in departure from the practice of his predecessor. These policies helped prepare the ground for the revolt against him, which ended with his death and the accession of Ali ibn Abi Talib. There were many specific reasons for the failure of the Islamic left’s revolution, even though it was the natural continuation of the earliest teachings of Islam, which were at that point no more than forty years old. Perhaps the most important reason was the profound change that had taken place in the economic position of most Muslim leaders, and even among the Muslim rank and file—the ordinary men who made up the armies. There can be no doubt that this transformation had a major effect. Ali ibn Abi Talib would stand before the people of Iraq urging them to fight, yet receive almost no response, despite the extraordinary place he held in the hearts of Muslims in general, to say nothing of his own supporters. Muawiya’s success was not simply the result of his skill in manoeuvre, deception, and his willingness to use methods that the Islamic left disdained even in their mildest forms. More fundamentally, the social conditions of the time worked in his favour. Islam had arisen to establish social justice and defend the poor and destitute against the monopoly and brutal exploitation of the merchants of Mecca. Yet only forty years later, the leadership of the Islamic state passed into the hands of those same Meccan merchants, who carried their interests further than ever before. It was almost as though Islam had unified Arabia intellectually and geographically merely to widen the field of action for these merchants, and as though the conquests had taken place not to spread Islam’s noble message, but to place new sources of wealth at their disposal. When some modern Western historians interpret Islam socially as a “merchants’ revolution,” they are not really looking at the origins of Islam or at its principles. They are looking instead at the transformation produced by the Umayyad takeover. They completely forget the Islamic principles themselves, and the Islamic revolution itself, which rested spiritually and socially on two original ideas: the oneness of God and a community based on socialism and mutual solidarity. Islam may be the only revealed religion to have achieved victory at the very beginning of its mission and to have established, during the lifetime of its Prophet, a living model of the social order it preached. Other revealed religions may first arise as ideas and calls to faith, with tens of thousands dying for them before they become realities in social life. Indeed, such religions may never set out a full model of social life either in theory or in practice, even if their general principles contain the foundations from which such a model could later be drawn. Islam, however, did succeed in creating such a model in real life. But the development of society eventually broke through that model and moved beyond it, despite the fierce resistance of the revolutionaries and great men of this religion. Was Islam’s social theory, then, ahead of its time? If the answer is yes, we must ask another question: why did it achieve such a decisive and astonishing victory in the first place, to the point that theory and practice moved together during the Prophet’s lifetime and under the first caliphs? If Islam suited the social conditions in which it first appeared, within the limited setting of the Arabian Peninsula, did it cease to be suitable once the Islamic world expanded and its social and economic conditions changed? The quick answer would be yes. But if we observe that Islam—at least in its social dimension—never stopped struggling against right-wing forces that regarded property as an absolute individual right, and that treated social solidarity as little more than a fixed Islamic principle to which lip service had to be paid for the sake of appearances, then we must reconsider. If we recognise that this struggle continued throughout the fourteen centuries of Islamic history, we have reason to stop and think before giving such an easy answer. A reading of Islamic history suggests that what we are dealing with is a struggle between two basic ideas: the principle of social solidarity and the principle of individual supremacy. Around these were several connected conflicts. There was Arab tribalism against the principle that all Muslims are equal before God and the law. There was democracy, or consultation, against hereditary monarchy and absolute rule. There was the idea that Islam calls upon people to use reason and reflection, against the idea of unquestioning submission and an unexamined faith. All these conflicts, and others like them, made their way through Islamic history from the moment the left first confronted the right, taking on a different outward form in every age. The social current within Islam never ceased struggling for a moment. Across history it achieved partial victories and suffered partial defeats. Social conditions undoubtedly played a major part in whether a revolt succeeded or failed, but the spirit of revolution remained alive beneath the surface. With every battle it gained new experience and armed itself with a new way of seeing. This is exactly what happened to the idea of Islamic revolution. When we say today that the Arab peoples are receptive to socialist thought, what we really mean is that they possess this enormous heritage of heroic struggle, stretching back to the beginnings of Islam with all its sacrifices and martyrs. And when modern Arab socialism takes shape on the basis of this heritage, it represents the natural continuation of that earliest socialist thought, grounded in a historical reality that is both ancient and deeply rooted. Modern Arab socialist thought is not borrowed from foreign sources, nor is it merely an idea inferred from present local conditions. It is a developed continuation of the spirit of the Islamic revolution. Its roots run deep, reaching back to the great resistance of the Islamic left, which any objective historian can see in every uprising of the left throughout Islamic history. Indeed, we may say objectively that the Revolution of 23 July—with its revolutionary achievements, its socialist policies, and the revolutionary programme embodied in the National Charter—represents the decisive triumph of a left-wing current whose origins reach much further back than many imagine. The specific purpose of this study is to trace the historical continuity of the left in the Arab region, where the struggle between left and right became especially concentrated. The struggle for social justice never stopped. It is present in every period, sometimes weakening and sometimes growing stronger. Nor is it a fixed theory that admits no revision. It is an original and fundamental idea whose details change through experience and changing conditions. Arab socialist thought gained much from its contact with the various cultures that passed through Arab civilisation, just as Arab individualist thought also gained much from its encounters with other cultures. In the earliest Islamic period, socialist thought differed in its details from what it became under the Umayyads, and under the Abbasids, and in the ages that followed. Nor was it confined to the social sphere. It extended into attitudes toward religion, philosophy, science, and history. Modern Arab socialist thought has the same quality: it is a developing body of thought, shaped both by the realities of the society it seeks to organise and by developments throughout the modern world. This is why modern Arab socialism has remained open to ideas from every direction. That openness follows a path already established by Arab socialist thought long ago. And if social conditions in the Arab region have now become more favourable to socialist practice—indeed, if they have made a socialist solution inevitable—this is not only because of economic and social pressures, but because of the wider civilisational development of a nation in which, for the first time in the world, there arose an organised body of thought devoted to social justice and social solidarity. If conditions are favourable today, it is because the struggle of the Islamic left in the region never ceased. In every age, those who fought carried with them the response and experience of earlier generations, including the martyrs of ancient socialist thought. This has made the socialist solution intellectually inevitable as well as economically and socially necessary. From here we can return to our starting point: the defeat of the left with the killing of Ali ibn Abi Talib and the fragmentation of its organisations and groupings under skilful blows from the right. Was this defeat historically inevitable? In other words, was there something in the economic and social development of society itself that necessarily opened the way to a merchant-capitalist state? Put differently, was the Islamic left simply ahead of its time? Not entirely. The mere fact that the right won a decisive victory does not prove it. Tens of thousands fought behind Ali ibn Abi Talib. Tens of thousands were prepared to fight behind Hasan, then Husayn, and later behind the leaders of the left in every age. Even the Abbasid Revolution itself was an extension of the revolt of the left, despite its later transformation toward the right. All we can really say is that social conditions were one decisive factor among several others: the idealism of the left, for example; its insistence that the means must be as honourable as the end; the fact that the new faith had not yet fully taken root in people’s hearts; and the freedom enjoyed by the right to act without restraint from conscience or principle, even from Islamic principles themselves. The change in economic positions within Arab society had already taken place under Umar. Yet society did not move to the right during his reign. On the contrary, it continued moving toward the left until Umar was assassinated, followed by the plot to keep Ali ibn Abi Talib from the caliphate and give it to Uthman. That plot succeeded only partially, because it ended in a sweeping revolution through which the left regained power. We will see that the failure of the left cannot be explained simply by some supposed historical inevitability. It was also the result of weakness and division within the left itself. This does not mean that social conditions had no effect; on the contrary, their effect was extremely powerful. Nor should we ignore the international situation, since the new Islamic state was in direct conflict with the Roman Empire along its borders after taking large territories from it. We must therefore consider the strength of the left and of the right, the social conditions within Muslim society itself, and the wider international circumstances surrounding it. Forces of the Left After Ali’s Death The struggle between Ali and Muawiya took on, in some respects, the character of a struggle between Iraq and Syria. Ali’s party therefore included men who had not joined the conflict for social reasons at all. Many tribal chiefs—most of whom Muawiya eventually succeeded in buying off during the Battle of Siffin—had entered the war partly because they were subject to the authority of the state under Ali, partly out of Iraqi loyalty against Syria, and partly because they hoped to gain power and status if Ali won and the caliphate became firmly established in Iraq. Alongside them were men who believed in Ali and in his special place within Islam, even before they fully understood the true nature of the struggle. Finally there were those who supported Ali’s social policy, whether consciously or simply because of their class position. These formed the majority of the rank and file of Ali’s army. The Islamic left, then, was not a single unified body. It was full of weaknesses and openings, and through these openings Muawiya’s arrows found their way into its camp. The most dangerous blow was the one that ended in the farce of arbitration. It was carefully prepared. The loyalty of men who persuaded Ali’s army to stop fighting was bought. They spread confusion through the ranks, followed by division, the secession and extremism of the Kharijites, and finally the ending of the war without a result at the very moment when victory had seemed close. Here we should stop and ask: could Ali not have put an end to the sedition and continued the fighting? Could he not have anticipated the nature of the forces fighting in his ranks and kept the weakest elements—those with no direct class or ideological commitment—away from contact with the enemy? At the very least, could he not have placed some form of supervision over men whose loyalty was doubtful? He certainly could have done so. He could even have gone further and denied water to the Syrian army, just as the Syrian army had denied water to him. That would have reduced the opportunity for Muawiya’s agents to make contact with the tribal chiefs fighting in Ali’s ranks. If Muawiya and his men could identify among Ali’s followers those who were susceptible to betrayal because of their class position and material interests, could Ali not have been more cautious about those men? All of this was certainly possible. Even though the conspirators succeeded in bringing the campaign of obstruction and arbitration to its intended end, they could not prevent Ali from retaining popular support in the events that followed. Ali did indeed need a long time to rebuild his army, but that very fact shows that his popularity remained broad, that the masses still stood behind him, and that the conspiracy against him had not been decisive in its effects. If Ali had avoided these traps and succeeded in crushing Muawiya’s army, would merchant capitalism still have been the inevitable path of social development for the Arab empire? No one can know. Such speculation is intellectually risky and cannot be given much weight. What we do know is that during the four years of his caliphate, under extremely difficult conditions, Ali left behind a substantial record of socialist practice. This can be seen both in his recognition of the Muslim community’s right to the public treasury and its distribution, and in his correspondence with his governors and the orders and instructions he gave them. We have no way of knowing whether the economic transformation produced by the expansion of the Islamic world—which placed the Emigrants, the Helpers, and other Arabs of the Peninsula in positions of leadership—would have allowed those leaders to remain faithful to Islamic principles of solidarity once enormous wealth lay within their reach. All of that is speculation about the unseen and lies outside a scientific approach. But before Ali became caliph, Umar ibn al-Khattab had succeeded in restricting the movements of Muslim leaders and thereby protecting them from the temptations of sedition, power, and wealth. He had also restricted private ownership of fixed property, and had declared that he intended to examine the surplus wealth of the rich and distribute it among the poor. In other words, he had begun to consider a redistribution of wealth. It is true that Umar was eventually killed and that the revolutionary tide he had begun was reversed. But he had made the attempt and had succeeded in it. Ali attempted the same thing and came close to succeeding, only for the conspiracy to kill him to cut that success short. The life of an Imam who moved toward the left seemed to end in murder. Here were two of the greatest Imams in Islam, both killed under suspicious circumstances and on flimsy pretexts. Was the strength of the left confined to these two great Imams? Certainly not. If it had been, Umar could never have achieved what he did, nor could Ali have reached power. The forces of the left, fragmented though they were, were not weak. Their fate was determined less by some iron law of history than by the actual forces locked in struggle. In the end, the flood of wealth that reached nearly everyone by Ali’s time—after the great expansion of personal fortunes under Uthman—changed the struggle into an ideological conflict no longer fully supported by sharp material interests. The forces of the left were therefore driven less by urgent economic pressures than by ideological or intellectual motives. Human beings have always been, and will remain for a long time, more strongly moved by material pressures than by abstract ideas. A small number of exceptional thinkers may sacrifice themselves for a noble principle, but the majority of people do not attach themselves firmly to such a principle unless it also offers them a direct and visible material interest. This does not mean that the Islamic left was not pursuing an economic interest alongside the higher ideals of Islam. In fact, it was defending an idea directly connected to the economic welfare of the community: the fair distribution of wealth. But when sources of wealth are freely available to whoever can seize them first, it is difficult for people to think in terms of regulating access to that wealth through a system in which everyone receives according to his effort and abilities. This helps explain the repeated betrayals that appeared within Ali’s own camp. One of the most striking was the conduct of his cousin Abd Allah ibn Abbas, and the severe dispute that arose between him and Ali because Abd Allah had failed to fear God in his handling of money belonging to the Muslims. This was Abd Allah, son of the famous Abbas, a man with a distinguished record in early Islam and a Hashimite with no natural reason to favour the Umayyads. Yet we will see that Abd Allah later turned to Muawiya, followed by his brother Ubayd Allah, and that they reached terms with him allowing them to keep what they had taken from the public treasury after Ali’s death. Nor were Abd Allah and his brother alone. These two were among the people closest to Ali and his sons, yet power and the temptation of money had produced even this effect on them. More surprising still, Hasan himself did not take the stand that had been expected of him. Whatever arguments may be made to justify his weakness, or his surrender of the revolution to Muawiya, the fact remains that he departed from his father’s mission and did not carry it through. The transformation of economic positions therefore had an enormous effect, even among those closest to the leader of the revolution. From this perspective, we can say that it played a decisive part in the failure of the left-wing revolution. Forces of the Right After Ali’s Death The forces of the right were the opposite of those of the left. They were bound together directly by material interests, and their economic position was threatened by Ali’s principles and policies. These were forces that had fought Islam fiercely before embracing it. Islam had conciliated them and treated them gently, waiting for the time when their hearts might soften toward the new faith. But events moved faster, and these men themselves proved highly skilled in political action. When the Prophet sought to reconcile the Umayyads to Islam, especially Abu Sufyan ibn Harb, he granted safety to anyone who took refuge in Abu Sufyan’s house. He later accepted Abu Sufyan’s son Muawiya into his service and also drew his brother Yazid close to him. The Messenger of God hoped to bring the sons of this stubborn opponent under his protection, so that the spirit and noble conduct of prophethood might pass to them while they remained under his own eye. The truth is that no one would have dared conspire seriously against Islam during the Prophet’s lifetime, and anyone who tried would never have succeeded. But the house of Abu Sufyan, and the Umayyads in general, moved into positions of power with speed, intelligence, and persistence. Their conversion to Islam gave them protection. At every stage they gained ground despite their bad reputation and their earlier hostility toward Islam. They made use of the disagreements among the older Muslim leaders— disagreements that arise in every age and society. Abu Sufyan himself came to Ali after the Prophet’s death and held out his hand, saying: “Give me your hand and I will pledge allegiance to you.” Ali refused, with al-Abbas supporting his refusal. Abu Sufyan knew that a group of Muslims believed Ali had a stronger claim to the caliphate, and that Ali had initially held back from pledging allegiance to Abu Bakr. He also knew that a dispute had arisen between the Emigrants and the Helpers over the caliphate, and that it had been resolved in Abu Bakr’s favour with Umar’s support. Was Abu Sufyan acting out of concern for Islam? Or did he see the beginnings of a civil conflict and seek to inflame it? Abu Sufyan, of all people, was hardly the most natural man to pledge himself sincerely to Ali ibn Abi Talib. Abu Sufyan had always sought leadership over Quraysh. Before Islam, he had achieved it and rallied them behind him against the Muslims. He wanted leadership because it brought power, wealth, and worldly success. What was there to prevent him and his family from pursuing the same leadership and the same worldly rewards under Islam? The struggle of Abu Sufyan, together with many of the Umayyads and their allies, therefore continued with essentially the same aims in both the pre-Islamic and Islamic periods. Over the course of a long preparation, this current drew together men with shared interests. During Uthman’s reign, his chief secretary and adviser became his cousin Marwan ibn al- Hakam. Marwan stood behind all the most important appointments in the provinces and, indeed, behind virtually every major decision Uthman made, until he himself became one of the direct causes of the uprising against Uthman. Step by step, the right grew into a force that had to be reckoned with everywhere. Under Abu Sufyan, it worked according to a clear plan, secretly when necessary and openly whenever possible. The left, meanwhile, intoxicated by victory, devoted itself to building and establishing the new order. It overlooked certain mistakes and tolerated some figures whose sincerity as Muslims was doubtful. In the end, religion belongs to God, and no human being has the right to judge another person’s inner intentions. Even the Qur’anic verses about hypocrites could not provide a practical test. How was one to distinguish the Muslim sincerely devoted to God and Islam from the Muslim who professed Islam only as a disguise and a precaution, when all invoked the name of God, performed the rites, and testified that there is no god but God and that Muhammad is the Messenger of God? Indeed, the hypocrites may have been among the quickest of all to answer the call to prayer and perform the outward rituals. Through this deliberate, patient, and persistent work, the right became a powerful force. It was no longer a pre-Islamic right, but an Islamic right, benefiting from every contradiction, every surviving social division, the tolerance of the new order, and the immense pressures involved in building a new state. The right succeeded in persuading Umar to appoint Muawiya governor of Damascus, and later persuaded Uthman to confirm his authority over the whole of Syria. In Syria, where the Umayyads had long-standing bases of influence, Muawiya began arranging his forces, organising his ranks, gathering supporters, concentrating wealth, and preparing for the monarchy that was to come. When Abu Dharr arrived in Damascus, he stopped in astonishment before an enormous building that had not yet been completed and asked what it was. He was told that it was al-Khadra, Muawiya’s new palace. Abu Dharr made his famous remark: “If this comes from the Muslims’ money, then it is betrayal. If it comes from Muawiya’s own money, then it is extravagance.” From that moment his campaign against Muawiya began, a campaign that eventually led to his famous exile. Abu Dharr was unable to mobilise the people against Muawiya and Uthman. At that stage, the left was still content to advise, command what was right, and forbid what was wrong. Abu Dharr said that he addressed his advice first to the rich before taking his appeal to the poor, and that he hoped he would never be forced into that final course—for that would mean revolution. Abu Dharr died before the revolt against Uthman broke out, but there is no doubt that he was one of those who preached its principles and prepared the ground for it. The forces of the right gathered behind Muawiya. He represented the younger generation of the right, and at the same time—perhaps even more importantly—he represented the house that had sought supremacy in the days before Islam and around which men of material interest had always gathered. In that sense, Muawiya was the natural candidate to lead the right, and its various elements began to rally around him. Muawiya made use of his rule over Syria by launching expansionist campaigns, first under Umar and later under Uthman. In these campaigns he acted with the mind of a politician rather than that of a missionary. When war broke out between him and Ali, he made peace with the Romans by agreeing to pay them tribute, so that they would leave him alone while he dealt with Ali. That decision alone deserves attention. His campaigns brought large revenues into the treasury under his control, and from the beginning he treated the public treasury as though it belonged to him personally, to be spent however he wished. The wealth flowing into his hands from that rich province and from war was used to buy supporters and shower them with gifts, while enemies were denied their share. Abu Dharr spent most of his years in Syria without receiving anything from his allotted stipend, until his children fell ill and came close to dying of hunger. The Right, then, had a solid and cohesive front. It drew supporters by showering them with money and by offering them stability. One of its established practices was that the authorities did not touch the wealth of governors or senior officials when they retired from office, even if that wealth had been taken unlawfully. Things were very different in the camp of the Left. It offered its supporters nothing but a clear conscience and the hope of pleasing God. The Left held governors to strict account even when they were among the caliph’s closest associates, and it insisted on equality among people to the point of angering chiefs and leading men. So divisions began to appear within the Left, and those who broke away joined the camp of the Right. Under Ali, such defections still happened somewhat discreetly. Under Hasan, they happened openly and without embarrassment. Hasan’s own position made this much easier. We have seen that when Ali ibn Abi Talib, may God be pleased with him, received the treacherous wound that killed him, he lived for two days before God took him. He was asked whom he would appoint as his successor, and replied, “I leave you as the Messenger of God left you.” When they again asked him to appoint Hasan, he said, “I neither command you to do so nor forbid you.” Historians have passed over this position without giving it the study and reflection it deserves. Many early historians, even those sympathetic to Ali, assumed that his claim to the caliphate rested on his kinship with the Prophet and his membership in the Hashimite house, rather than on the principles and convictions he represented. But if Ali had believed that the caliphate of the Muslims belonged to the Prophet’s family, he would have appointed Hasan when the Muslims asked him to do so. Here Ali’s view of the caliphate could hardly be clearer. He believed decisively that consultation belonged to the Muslims and was their unquestionable right. They alone were entitled to choose their ruler, without restriction or condition. This position refutes everything that has been said about Ali seeking the caliphate simply because he belonged to the Prophet’s household. Only the Shi'a maintained that he appointed Husayn as his successor, and they had to say this in order to justify the doctrine of the Imamate. In any case, most historians agree that Ali appointed neither Hasan nor anyone else, and that Hasan himself did not ask people to pledge allegiance to him. It was Qays ibn Sa'd ibn Ubadah, one of Ali’s most loyal men, who called for the pledge. The people responded, Hasan was brought forward and seated to receive their allegiance, and he laid down conditions for them. Among them was that they must fight those he fought and make peace with those with whom he made peace. The note of conciliation sounded strange to people. The blood of the great Imam had scarcely dried, and the fate of the Muslim community after him was surrounded by danger. For two months after receiving the pledge of allegiance, Hasan did nothing and made none of the preparations needed to confront Mu'awiya and his army. This led Qays ibn Sa'd to raise the matter with him, as did Hasan’s cousin Ubayd Allah ibn Abbas. The two men challenged him over it, apparently only after persistent pressure from the Muslim masses in Iraq—the very people whom the murdered Imam had mobilized, and whose anger and enthusiasm had been intensified by his treacherous assassination. It also seems that, under this pressure, Hasan had little choice but to respond, especially after letters arrived from Abd Allah ibn Abbas in Mecca urging him to go to war. It is worth pausing briefly over Hasan himself. He had grown up loving peace and enjoying the pleasures of life. He married so frequently that his father, the Imam, became irritated and began asking people not to give their daughters to him in marriage. During the revolt against Uthman, Hasan opposed the uprising and resented it, as though he saw little wrong in what had happened to the state under Uthman. He often entered into heated arguments with his father that ended with the Imam rebuking him. He also opposed his father’s decision, after becoming caliph, to go out and confront Talha and al-Zubayr, urging him not to leave Medina. When the expedition was being prepared to march toward Iraq, Hasan apparently renewed his insistence that the Imam remain in Medina and avoid fighting those who had rebelled against him. The Imam finally rebuked him and urged him to move, saying, “You whimper like a young girl.” Our great teacher Taha Husayn believed that Hasan was an Uthmani in the strict sense of the word. Whatever the exact truth of that judgement, Hasan was certainly not inclined to shoulder so difficult a mission. He preferred a comfortable and gentle life, far removed from the hardships and burdens of political struggle. In the first days of his caliphate, letters began arriving from wealthy Iraqis to Mu'awiya, urging him to fight Hasan and informing him of Hasan’s weakness. Yet Mu'awiya did not immediately move. Perhaps he already knew that peaceful negotiations with Hasan would produce the result he wanted. But Ali’s committed supporters did not remain silent, nor did the wider public. Qays ibn Sa'd succeeded in recruiting twelve thousand fighters. Hasan placed him in command and, according to the most likely reports, associated Ubayd Allah ibn Abbas with him. Qays ibn Sa'd marched out with the army, and shortly afterward Hasan followed with another force. Rumours spread that Hasan had barely finished dispatching the first army before he began negotiating peace with Mu'awiya. These reports reached Qays’s army and dissatisfaction began to spread. By the time Hasan arrived at al-Mada'in, he found Qays’s men anxious and resentful, and heated arguments broke out. These arguments apparently failed to calm the army. Some of the fighters became enraged, attacked Hasan, and one of them stabbed him. The wound was serious but not fatal. Chaos swept through the ranks. Hasan was taken away for treatment, and the men dispersed. When Hasan recovered, he left al-Mada'in for Kufa. There the peace negotiations began openly. Even before the talks had reached a conclusion, many people hurried either to Mu'awiya himself or wrote to him declaring their loyalty. Foremost among them was Ubayd Allah ibn Abbas himself. Those who rushed to pledge allegiance carried with them whatever wealth they could and asked Mu'awiya to guarantee its safety. He did so. In this way the party of the Left fell apart. Throughout all this, Qays ibn Sa'd remained firm. He gathered his soldiers and addressed them, giving them a choice: remain with him and fight Mu'awiya, or follow the path the Imam had chosen. Naturally, the people chose safety and left matters to fate. The Terms of the Peace There is little need to enter into the details of these terms, especially the conditions that Mu'awiya would leave the caliphate to Hasan after his death, pay him one million dirhams each year from the treasury, and in addition grant him the revenues of two districts in Persia, to which Hasan would send his own officials to collect the taxes. These were bargaining terms proposed by Mu'awiya. In the final settlement, succession to the caliphate was to be decided by consultation, meaning that Hasan would not automatically succeed Mu'awiya. Hasan was also denied the revenues of the two Persian districts. Still, when Hasan left for Medina, he took with him around five million dirhams, and Mu'awiya honoured the annual payment of one million dirhams he had promised. One of Hasan’s most important conditions was that Ali’s supporters should be guaranteed safety for themselves, their property, and their families. Mu'awiya ignored this condition as soon as Hasan had left Iraq. He quickly began tempting Ali’s supporters with money or threatening them with death. Some surrendered, except for a hard core who followed the Prophet’s example by enduring hardship and poverty in order to carry out what they saw as their mission. The committed activists never stopped blaming Hasan. Many even became bold enough to address him harshly. But Hasan believed that his policy was the best course, and that what he sought was a truce that would spare bloodshed. The Left concluded that it needed to close ranks and organize itself so that, when the right moment came, it could rise, fight, and take power. The Death of Hasan Mu'awiya moved forward with confidence. Allegiance was proclaimed to him, and he took complete control. The first breach of the agreement was the persecution he inflicted on the rebels in Iraq and the public abuse of Ali from the pulpits. Throughout this, the Shi'a party watched, recorded what happened, and waited for Hasan to take a decisive stand. Hasan, however, believed the time was not right. In this he may well have been correct, because we will later see just how completely Husayn was abandoned. Time passed while Mu'awiya worked to strengthen his rule and secure it within his own family. He knew that as long as Hasan remained alive, succession would never be simple. Whatever one might say about Hasan, he was many times preferable to Yazid ibn Mu'awiya, the drunken libertine. Mu'awiya therefore did not hesitate to put an end to Hasan’s life. According to most accounts, he arranged for Hasan to be poisoned through one of Hasan’s wives, a woman related to Mu'awiya. The poison was lethal, and Hasan soon died. The way was now clear for Mu'awiya and his son Yazid. Mu'awiya succeeded in taking the pledge of allegiance for Yazid while he himself was still alive. To achieve this he used every form of threat and inducement until the matter was secured for him, despite the desire of most Muslims for a new leadership of the Left. While Hasan had been conciliatory and accommodating, Husayn was gathering supporters and preparing for revolt. Husayn was very different from Hasan. He had much of his father’s character in him, something the Imam himself had noticed. He showed particular affection for Husayn and once said of Hasan that he was “a young man of platters and banquets.” Husayn approved of none of the arrangements his brother had made. He argued with him and could be severe in those arguments. While Hasan lived in comfort, Husayn lived in poverty and asked nothing for himself. Had he wanted wealth, he could easily have obtained it from Mu'awiya, who showered money on anyone who gave him loyalty. Mu'awiya made many tempting approaches to Husayn, as he did to other serious young Muslims, especially after announcing Yazid as his heir. But he gained nothing from Husayn. The party of the Left found in Husayn a firm leader and a steadfast commander. But first he had to gather the scattered remnants of the Left and reunite them in order to confront a state whose foundations Mu'awiya had firmly established, and which Yazid would inherit after him—a state supported by enormous wealth, formidable political power, and disciplined, obedient armies. The task was not difficult. It was impossible. The Left had been weakened by the brutal blows inflicted upon it, as well as by the many temptations and opportunities offered to its members. Leaders who had once played important roles on the side of the Left broke ranks and became clients of the Umayyad house. At their hands the people suffered horrors and atrocities rarely equalled in the history of any nation. The career of Ziyad ibn Abihi, who had fought beside the Imam before joining Mu'awiya, is particularly strange. The Left suffered at no one’s hands as it suffered at the hands of Ziyad. Few people in history who fought for a cause were killed in such numbers as those killed by this tyrant. It was around Husayn that the final surviving remnants of the Left gathered. His confrontation with the Right would be their last round. For that reason, it deserves to be examined in some detail, so that we can gather all the threads before taking up the next phase in the history of the Left. The Final Round After Hasan was poisoned and killed, Mu'awiya had the field to himself. It seemed that the leadership of the Left had now been eliminated twice: first through Hasan’s peace settlement, and then through Hasan’s death. Ziyad ibn Abihi, meanwhile, took responsibility for eliminating every remaining leadership element in Iraq, using the most brutal methods. In Medina, the Arab aristocracy lived in luxury. They occupied comfortable palaces supplied with amusements and pleasures from every region. Female singers and slaves lived in their chambers, while each prince sat surrounded by friends, servants, and dependants. This Medinan aristocracy consisted mainly of former governors who had fled with money from the public treasury, or whom Mu'awiya had enriched as generously as his policy required so that they would retire and keep out of politics. It also included senior warriors with enormous stipends, men of immense personal wealth, their sons, and their followers. Medina would later become an almost idyllic centre of singing, poetry, music, and dance, rivaling the most flourishing cities of the ancient world in their periods of prosperity. It is easy to imagine what occupied the minds of this aristocracy. Political conversation dominated. They were constantly assessing centres of power, factions, and supporters. In Medina, Husayn stood out as the most popular man, the one who enjoyed the greatest support among ordinary Muslims and among the movement’s grassroots. There was also Abd Allah ibn al-Zubayr, son of al-Zubayr ibn al-Awwam, the great Companion of the Prophet. There was Umar ibn Sa'd, son of Sa'd ibn Abi Waqqas, another great Companion and one of those said to have been promised Paradise by the Prophet. There was also the ageing statesman Marwan ibn al-Hakam, one of the leading figures of the Umayyad clan, as well as Abd al-Rahman ibn Khalid ibn al-Walid. Many others belonged to the same class, or stood only slightly below it. Every one of these men looked toward the caliphate and viewed politics from that angle. Immediately behind them came the provincial governors, whose authority over vast territories such as Iraq and Egypt depended on attaching themselves to one faction or another. The upper structure of the state consisted, broadly speaking, of this aristocracy, whose members competed among themselves for power. Each formed circles of supporters in different places, using them to strengthen his influence while waiting for the right moment to seize power. But the strongest party of all was the victorious ruling party: Mu'awiya’s. It possessed not only influence but the official armed force of the state, the only organized military force in existence. The Arab aristocracy in Medina might possess enormous private wealth, but that wealth was nothing beside the public treasury controlled by Mu'awiya, into which revenues flowed from every province under the state’s authority. The wealth was God’s wealth, and Mu'awiya was God’s caliph; he could spend it as he pleased. In this fierce struggle for power, factions multiplied and private interests overshadowed everything else. Public morality fell to its lowest point. We have already seen how easily a man could move from one allegiance to another, becoming more committed to his second loyalty than he had been to his first, only to move soon afterward to a third with equal fervour, despite the complete contradiction between the causes he successively embraced. Killing was the simplest instrument used in this struggle. Mutilating bodies, crucifying men on trees, cutting off hands and feet, and inflicting every form of physical punishment became part of the language of everyday politics. Slander, intrigue, flattery, betrayal, theft, and plunder became the defining features of the age. For the sake of power, even a man who prided himself on honour would not hesitate to compromise that honour if doing so served his interests. The story of Ziyad ibn Abihi is a strange one and deserves reflection. It is repeated in most of the early sources. Mu'awiya formally attributed Ziyad to his own father and declared him his brother, claiming that Abu Sufyan had slept with Ziyad’s mother Sumayya, although she was married to another man, and that Ziyad had been conceived from that union. The strangest part of the story is that this declaration of brotherhood took place in a formal public gathering so that the claim could be established before witnesses. Ziyad felt only limited shame, weighing the advantages of becoming the caliph’s brother against the contempt people might feel for him. He chose brotherhood with the caliph over preserving his honour. This was the same Ziyad who had fought beside Ali ibn Abi Talib and had been one of his strongest commanders in several battles. At Ziyad’s hands, supporters of Ali were killed, crucified, and mutilated after he entered Mu'awiya’s service. One might almost think he bore humanity some ancient grudge. Ziyad was also responsible for the famous affair of Hujr, in which six honourable Muslims were killed because they refused to curse Ali publicly. This extraordinary opportunist, who had once fought beside Ali, now summoned people and ordered them to curse him. If they refused, he subjected them to the most appalling torture. The story of Hujr and his companions fills many pages in the works of Islamic history. It was said that Mu'awiya later regretted the affair, even though it was he who ordered their executions. Each man would be brought forward after his grave had been dug before his eyes and asked to abandon his position. If he refused, he was killed and buried in the grave already prepared for him. Yet what Ziyad did was less terrible than what his son Abd Allah ibn Ziyad would later do. There is another incident that deserves reflection, because it reveals what ambition for power can do to a person and to his sense of dignity. It also reveals something about Mu'awiya’s morality and his outlook on life. A man named Abd Allah ibn Salam, who served as one of Mu'awiya’s governors in Iraq, had married a woman named Zaynab bint Ishaq. She was said to be the most beautiful woman of her age. Yazid ibn Mu'awiya saw her and fell so deeply in love that his passion made him ill. Mu'awiya learned of the matter and discovered that the woman had rejected his son, so he began thinking of a way to have her divorced from her husband and married to Yazid. Mu'awiya summoned Abd Allah ibn Salam. When the man arrived, Mu'awiya brought him close and then suggested that he marry Mu'awiya’s own daughter. Abd Allah could hardly contain his joy. Mu'awiya then told him that it would not be appropriate for him to marry the caliph’s daughter while keeping another wife. Abd Allah ibn Salam thought only briefly before divorcing his wife Zaynab. After the divorce, however, he was astonished to discover that Mu'awiya’s daughter refused to marry him, and that Mu'awiya, being a civilized man, would never force his daughter into a marriage she did not want. As for Zaynab, she rejected the proposal brought to her by Abu Hurayra—the man who had worked for Uthman and later for Mu'awiya, and who took it upon himself to justify Umayyad policies. Abu Dharr once struck him and split his head when Abu Hurayra confronted him with Qur'anic verses that he interpreted and restricted in ways that suited the wishes of the ruler. Abu Dharr then made his famous remark: “Are you teaching us our religion, son of the Jewess?” Abu Hurayra went to Zaynab to ask for her hand on Yazid’s behalf, and naturally she refused. To rescue her from the situation, Husayn quickly married her himself. Then, when Abd Allah ibn Salam returned disappointed, Husayn returned Zaynab to him without ever having approached her as a husband. We do not know how this proud and beautiful woman felt about returning to a husband who had sold her so cheaply. She probably returned only because it was the least damaging solution, and perhaps she never truly gave him her heart again. A story such as this shows how far public morality had fallen and how political rule had corrupted people’s values until they reached such a level. We will find brothers abandoning brothers, sons betraying fathers, and fear and greed becoming the main forces that moved society. It was in this frightening atmosphere of moral collapse that Mu'awiya began planning to make the caliphate hereditary within his own family, less than half a century after the rise of Islam. Islam had been founded on the principle of consultation, and one of the first things it had rejected was hereditary rule. In the view of its earliest leaders, hereditary monarchy was a Persian or Roman imperial practice unworthy of Islam. The caliph was to be chosen freely by the Muslims. Muslims were brothers, equal like the teeth of a comb, and no Arab had any superiority over a non-Arab except through piety. The early books relate that the idea was suggested to Mu'awiya by one of the calculating flatterers around him, Shu'ba ibn al-Mughira. The caliph had become angry with him over some matter, so he sought to purchase Mu'awiya’s favour with this act of flattery, adding to it his own contribution by securing the pledge of allegiance from the province he governed. Such a report is hardly implausible in those circumstances, and what actually happened supports it: Yazid ibn Mu'awiya did indeed become caliph. The extraordinary thing is that this Yazid was a drunken, idle libertine. The story of his passion for Zaynab bint Ishaq reveals the spoiled and dissipated character of his life. For Shu'ba ibn al-Mughira to propose such a man to Mu'awiya as caliph of the Muslims was an astonishing act of hypocrisy. But Shu'ba surely knew that Mu'awiya, after passing through all those struggles while arming himself with so many false justifications, would not hesitate to impose a caliph on the Muslims. Mu'awiya therefore began working to put the idea into practice, indifferent to the dangerous reaction it would provoke among Muslim public opinion. Every Muslim knew Yazid’s reputation, and every Muslim rejected the idea that Islam should become another Persian or Roman monarchy. Yet Yazid was imposed as caliph upon the Muslims, and the pledge of allegiance was taken for him during his father’s lifetime. There is no need to trace every detail of that pledge, or the many reports describing the intimidation Mu'awiya used to obtain it. What is clear is that the people were in one place and the authorities in another. When the sword rules, dignity disappears. People submit, and they call up the ugliest parts of themselves in order to survive under oppressive power using weapons drawn from that power’s own character. At certain moments in history, reality becomes so harsh and brutal that a person living through it begins to think that everything ever written about moral values and humanity’s inclination toward goodness is nothing more than the fantasy of dreamers who have never collided with real life. When reality reaches that intensity, it becomes difficult to tell right from wrong. When falsehood wins in its most shameless form, battle after battle, and a terror-driven regime sweeps every obstacle from its path, something like a general epidemic takes hold. Most people become cowards, opportunists, killers, and criminals. It becomes difficult to believe that human nature contains any impulse toward goodness at all. People’s souls collapse one after another, and the infection spreads like a raging epidemic. Humanity loses its sense of dignity, as though it has passed judgement upon itself and condemned itself to the deepest degradation, punishing itself through the very sins it commits. At that point the struggle is no longer simply between oppressive forces and oppressed ones. In reality, it becomes a struggle between humanity’s highest values and its lowest. Whatever garments of logic, justice, and political necessity the ruling powers may wrap around their actions, they are in truth eating away at the very core of human existence and bringing it close to destruction. Every oppressive authority finds, alongside its sword and its money, thinkers willing to turn domination into a philosophy and provide it with justification. Mu'awiya often repeated the Qur'anic phrase, “He gives sovereignty to whom He wills,” as though his rule were a divine decree and God Himself had chosen him. On that basis, every action he took could be presented as legitimate because it flowed from that supposed divine choice. We may therefore wonder at those views that now present themselves with the solemn language of scholarship and objectivity, and with appeals to the inevitability of history, portraying this period simply as an age of state-building. Mu'awiya, in this reading, becomes the practical statesman whose skilful realism is contrasted with the supposedly idealistic policies of his opponents, who called instead for social justice and human dignity. Many of these historians argue that the transition from tribal society to a centralized state was a historical necessity and that this necessity somehow justifies every crime committed in building that state. Yet the state in question survived for only another sixty years before collapsing completely. The Forces of Revolution Sun Yat-sen, the spiritual leader of modern China, used to say after each failure of his national revolution, “This is our fourth failure,” or fifth, or tenth, and so on through the long series of defeats the Chinese revolution suffered before it finally succeeded. The truth is that the whole history of humanity is a chain of failed revolutions until one mature revolution finally succeeds. That revolution, too, eventually hardens or is seized by others, and new revolutions appear, failing in turn until another decisive victory is achieved. A revolution is never truly premature. The first spark is always the decisive announcement that another step forward has become necessary. That step may take a very long time to become reality, but without the first spark the revolution is never born at all. A revolution is not merely a change desired and pursued by an oppressed group so that it can end its oppression and recover its rights. It goes deeper than that. Revolution is a stage in the moral development of the human community, a development that begins with individual conduct in its simplest form and extends upward into the collective conduct of nations and of humanity as a whole. It is almost as though the struggle over the distribution of wealth were one of the means through which the law of human development drives society toward a higher moral level. The proof is that revolutionary leaders are not driven to revolt by deprivation and oppression alone. They are moved by human values higher than those prevailing in their societies. Indeed, such leaders are often under pressures that are not material at all, and in many cases they themselves suffer no material deprivation or oppression. The psychological makeup of revolutionary leaders conflicts with the moral values dominant in their society. They feel powerful impulses to defend ideals that have been violated. They sense that humanity’s path toward moral and spiritual progress has gone wrong, and they feel called upon to restore the human community to the right path. Very often, the revolutionary leader seems compelled to continue along the revolutionary road and becomes incapable of retreat even if he wants to. His own nature drives him toward revolt, even in moments of overwhelming danger and terrible suffering. We do not know why the revolutionary hero, at the decisive moment, chooses the losing side when faced with two options: retreat now, or face certain suffering. What is true of the revolutionary leader is equally true of the revolutionary soldier. At the gallows and the guillotine, on crosses and in torture chambers old and new, we see the same deliberate, suicidal madness. And facing it is another kind of madness: the madness of power, which casts aside every human value—a savage, determined madness no less astonishing than the revolutionary’s steadfastness and resolve. The most magnificent moments of martyrdom appear only at times of extreme spiritual decline, as though the human community releases all its hidden potential at precisely the moments of greatest danger. At such moments, class struggle becomes little more than the occasion through which humanity crosses the abyss of moral collapse. We have many stories of treachery, betrayal, and brutality from this period, enough to show us how far that moral decline had gone by the time al-Husayn ibn Ali resolved to confront the regime. Al-Husayn had seen the supporters of his father fail him. He had even seen some of his own uncles sink to the level of betrayal. He had seen his brother al-Hasan choose safety. He had seen how weak people became in the face of power and temptation. And he had witnessed other strange events of the kind that can make a man begin to doubt even himself. Yet al-Husayn went out all the same. He still believed that people wanted social justice, and that human dignity would naturally refuse to submit to a ruler— —a drunken debauchee in a society where drunkenness and debauchery were regarded as sins deserving punishment from both God and society. From the very first moment, al-Husayn had chosen his role. His nature rejected everything that was happening, and rejected it to the point of crisis. Sword and terror demanded that he pledge allegiance to Yazid. He refused, and withdrew to Mecca. There, people began coming to him in growing numbers, urging him to rise and seek the allegiance of the people. Even if no one had asked him to do so, he would probably have risen anyway—or else died of grief and frustration. For alongside those urging him to revolt were others urging him to choose safety. Some of these were among his most sincere advisers. Still, he refused the path of safety. Letters came to him from Iraq saying that if he came to them, they would pledge allegiance to him. He took these letters as the occasion to play the role that fate seemed to have assigned him. He sent his cousin Muslim ibn Aqil to those who had written the letters, so that he could assess the situation. Muslim was warmly received, and the governor there was unable to move against him. In fact, all the governor did was offer advice. But as soon as the shrewd advisers of the caliphate learned of his conduct, they proposed removing him and appointing Ubayd Allah ibn Ziyad in his place. Ubayd Allah arrived as the exact opposite of Muslim and the revolutionaries: a man of power whose own nature drove him deeper and deeper into wrongdoing, down to its lowest depths. The struggle became a contest between cowardice and courage, baseness and nobility. He fled before the crowds and sheltered in the palace, then emerged as a tyrant once the crowds had dispersed. He broke promises, tempted men with money and office, and used terror and destruction as weapons. In the end, he succeeded in capturing Muslim. He killed him in a hideous manner and had his head thrown down from the top of the palace. Meanwhile, Muslim’s letters had reached al-Husayn saying that tens of thousands were waiting to pledge allegiance to him. Al-Husayn set out, only to learn what had happened to Muslim. But instead of turning back and choosing safety, he decided to continue toward Iraq. He told himself, his family, and the small group travelling with him that once he entered Iraq, the people would rally around him. What he meant was that his presence among them would break their fear and weakness and restore their humanity. In this way, he defined his role: nothing more, and nothing less, than bringing the human spirit back to life. Al-Husayn continued on with only seventy men, together with his women and children. By this point, he must have understood the whole situation. He knew that Ubayd Allah ibn Ziyad’s armies might intercept him. Indeed, they almost certainly would. And if they did, the end was clear. But al-Husayn also knew that an immense sacrifice was needed—a sacrifice blazing with blood. And he alone possessed the stature to offer himself as the sacrifice that could shake the almost dead conscience of the nation. This was not political skill, nor was it political foolishness. It was not realism, and it was not romanticism. It was something on an entirely different level, beyond ordinary calculations of prudence or fantasy. It was a position almost like that of Christ: the position of sacrifice and redemption. The most intelligent and honourable man of his age offers himself up, allowing the enemies of the highest human values to descend as far into depravity as human beings can go, so that the resulting cry might awaken a conscience they had ruined by every possible means. And so al-Husayn continued toward Iraq. Those who lost courage abandoned him. The lesser men who had joined his procession at the beginning, when they heard that he was setting out to receive the people’s allegiance, now disappeared from around him. Only those remained in whom the revolutionary spirit existed in its deepest sense: the desire for a radical transformation of values themselves. The revolutionary forces were now distilled into this tiny group crossing the desert together, united and determined. They had only one hope: that the revolution would spread from them to others, and above all to the very armies that might block their road into Iraq. This hope was the justification al-Husayn used to pursue his true end: martyrdom in its fullest form. On the road, he asked Mujamma ibn Ubayd al-Amiri about the situation. Mujamma replied: “As for the leading men, they have been bought with enormous bribes and their purses have been filled. They are united against you. As for the rest of the people, their hearts incline toward you, but tomorrow their swords will be drawn against you.” That sentence gives a remarkably sharp summary of the forces at work. The leading men— the men who possessed wealth—no longer cared that the Prophet’s grandson had risen. Indeed, his rising mattered to them in another sense: this grandson wanted to alter the existing balance of power, redistribute wealth, and continue along the same path as his father. From that point of view, he was a class enemy. They did not care that he had risen to seek allegiance from the people. But al-Husayn was the son of Ali ibn Abi Talib and Fatima al- Zahra, daughter of the Messenger of God, while the ruler was powerful and free to do as he wished. But the ruler was not so foolish as to take al-Husayn’s blood upon himself alone. Anyone who wished to defend his wealth and social position would have to share responsibility for that blood. We will see that men from this class were called upon to take part in killing al-Husayn. They found themselves caught between fear of the ruler’s anger and suspicion of their loyalty, together with the obvious demands of their class interest, on one side—and the sin of shedding al-Husayn’s blood on the other. Yet even this did not carry the terrible weight one might imagine. Before this, the Imam himself had been killed, and after him al-Hasan had been poisoned. Muhammad ibn Abi Bakr and Abd al-Rahman ibn Khalid had also been killed. The sense of sin was faint, no more than a passing thought. Had al-Husayn not been raised in the Prophet’s own household, and had he not embodied an ideal image of Islam, perhaps even that passing thought would never have occurred to anyone. The ordinary people, meanwhile, had been subjected to such oppression, uncertainty, and fear that they would think a thousand times before joining a revolt. This was especially true in Iraq, where a man could be seized on mere suspicion. The memory of Ziyad ibn Abih’s rule had not yet faded. In one notorious speech, he had declared that he would punish the innocent for the crimes of the guilty. When Hujr objected and reminded him of God’s words, “No bearer of burdens shall bear the burden of another,” there followed the famous affair of Hujr and his companions. The people of Iraq had endured forms of pressure unknown to other peoples, generation after generation. How could such a crushed people suddenly rise to support al-Husayn? Fear destroys every form of dignity, and Umayyad rule had succeeded in planting fear so deeply that it became the daily bread of the Iraqi people. Seen in this light, al-Husayn’s uprising could have only one meaning: martyrdom. Retreat and Martyrdom Any other politician in al-Husayn’s position might have assessed the situation and withdrawn at the proper moment, or sought another path of struggle. The opportunity to retreat certainly existed. As he approached Iraq, news reached him that Muslim ibn Aqil had been killed and that the people around him had dispersed. Even so, al-Husayn listened carefully when one of his companions said to him, “You are not like Muslim ibn Aqil. If you enter Kufa, the people will rush to you.” Al-Husayn accepted this. Did he fail to think through his situation? Was this simply poor judgement? No one can reasonably accuse al-Husayn of poor judgement here. From the moment he left Mecca, he knew that matters had reached the point of confrontation—of open battle— regardless of the strength of the force that would meet him. This became even clearer afterward. He sent Qays ibn Mushir al-Saydawi ahead, and Qays was killed. Then he sent Abd Allah ibn Buqtur, who was thrown from the battlements of the palace. What, then, could al-Husayn still have been expecting? He persisted in trying to reach the people. His hope lay in them. If he could no longer reach them by letters, because his messengers were being killed one after another, then there remained only one way to reach them: through an event powerful enough to shake them to their core. Was this how al-Husayn consciously thought? The idea need not have existed in his mind in so clear a form. It is enough that it guided his actions—and everything al-Husayn did suggests that something like this lay behind them. The only alternative was retreat, and there were more than enough reasons to retreat. The very people who had written inviting him to come had abandoned his envoy until he was killed. He sent others, and their fate was no better. So why did he not turn back? Because then he would have had to give his allegiance to Yazid, and in al-Husayn’s eyes that was the greatest of sins. Could he simply have withdrawn into the sanctuary of the Kaaba? Would Yazid really have hesitated to kill him even in the heart of the sanctuary? There was nothing left for him but to continue. He was certain that if he appeared before the people, they would gather around him. He knew how to speak to them and how to draw fear out of their hearts. But how was he to reach the approaches to Iraq when Ubayd Allah ibn Ziyad already had armies waiting for him? Even an ordinary man could understand the situation. Al-Husayn certainly understood it from every side. Perhaps he still entertained the hope that any army sent to block his path would soften once he addressed its soldiers and lifted the veil from their eyes. This hope remained with him beside another thought that never left him: that he would undoubtedly be killed. He repeatedly said that death had been decreed for the children of Adam. On one side of the scale he placed his own death; on the other, his faith in human beings. He never lost faith in that hidden core within the human soul, the part that longs to rise spiritually. Once again, al-Husayn did not retreat. He continued on his way. The First Confrontation At the mountain of Dhu Husam, he encountered a force of a thousand horsemen led by al- Hurr ibn Yazid, one of the notables Mujamma ibn Ubayd al-Amiri had spoken of. In fact, we will see that the men chosen to fight al-Husayn were selected with great care, so that the people themselves would become confused. The commander who fought him in the final battle was Umar ibn Saad ibn Abi Waqqas—the son of a great Companion of the Prophet, a famous military commander, and one of those whom the Prophet had promised Paradise. What was the ordinary person supposed to think? The son of Ali ibn Abi Talib was being fought by the son of Saad ibn Abi Waqqas. It is astonishing that Umar ibn Saad ibn Abi Waqqas should have taken orders from Ubayd Allah ibn Ziyad. The son of the conqueror of Persia and a Companion of the Messenger of God obeyed the son of Ziyad, a man whose own lineage was clouded by uncertainty. Nor did Umar merely obey Ubayd Allah. He flattered him and sought his favour. When Muslim ibn Aqil was brought before Ubayd Allah, Muslim asked to speak privately to Umar. Umar came forward, and Muslim whispered in his ear, appealing to the kinship between them and asking him to carry out his final wishes. He owed money to a man in Kufa, he said, and wanted his sword and armour sold so that the debt could be repaid. He also asked Umar to send someone to al-Husayn and prevent him from coming, correcting his earlier message that the people stood with him. To what depths had even great men lost their dignity? And how much more completely had the oppressed people lost theirs? Al-Hurr ibn Yazid approached al-Husayn and told him that he had been ordered to take him to Ubayd Allah ibn Ziyad. Al-Husayn gave him no answer. Instead, he ordered the caller to prayer to announce the noon prayer. Then he addressed everyone present—his own companions and his opponents alike, though especially his opponents: “People, I did not come to you until your letters and messengers reached me, saying: Come to us, for we have no leader. Perhaps through you God will unite us upon guidance and truth. And so I have come. If you now give me assurances and pledges that I can trust, I will enter your city. But if you will not, or if you dislike my coming, I will return to the place from which I came.” A collective silence followed. No one knew what was passing through their minds. Perhaps every one of them wished he could fight for al-Husayn, but fear, self-interest, and everything the world had to offer stood in the way. Al-Husayn then turned and told the caller to prayer, “Begin the prayer.” He turned to al- Hurr ibn Yazid and asked whether each group would pray separately. Al-Hurr replied, “No. We will pray behind you.” The prayer ended with both groups standing behind al-Husayn. His caravan then resumed its journey, and al-Hurr followed. Whenever al-Husayn tried to turn in another direction, al-Hurr blocked him and forced him back toward the road to Kufa. At last al-Husayn stopped once more and addressed them: “People, the Messenger of God, peace be upon him, said: ‘Whoever sees a tyrannical ruler who violates what God has made sacred, breaks God’s covenant, opposes the practice of the Messenger of God, and treats God’s servants with sin and aggression, yet does nothing to change him by deed or word, deserves to be brought by God to the same fate as that ruler.’ These men have chosen obedience to Satan and abandoned obedience to the Merciful. They have openly spread corruption, suspended the limits set by God, seized public wealth for themselves, declared lawful what God has forbidden and forbidden what God has made lawful. I have a greater right than anyone else to stand against them. Your letters and messengers came to me offering your allegiance and promising that you would neither hand me over nor abandon me. If you remain true to your pledge, you will find the right path. I am al-Husayn, son of Ali and Fatima, daughter of the Messenger of God, peace be upon him. My life is with your lives and my family is with your families. In me you have an example. But if you refuse, break your covenant with me, and withdraw the allegiance you gave me, then by my life, this is nothing new from you. Whoever puts his trust in you is deceived. You have lost your own share and squandered your own good fortune. Whoever breaks a pledge breaks it only against himself, and God will make me independent of you.” Once again, the speech was followed by complete silence. Then al-Hurr stepped forward and warned him that if he fought, he would be killed. Al-Husayn cried out, “Do you threaten me with death?” He restrained himself and continued onward, while al-Hurr followed behind, blocking him whenever he moved away from the road to Kufa. Al-Husayn still refused to be the one who began the fighting. At last, the vanguard of another army appeared: four thousand men commanded by Umar ibn Saad ibn Abi Waqqas—no one else. The manoeuvring between the two sides ended with al-Husayn and his companions trapped at Karbala, and it became clear that battle was unavoidable. Soon afterward, Shimr ibn Dhi al-Jawshan arrived to watch Umar ibn Saad and ensure that he did not lose his nerve. At this point, al-Husayn gathered his companions, not all of whom were members of his family, and said: “You have been loyal and have supported me. These people want no one but me. If they fight me, they seek no one else. When night falls, scatter into its darkness and save yourselves.” Not one of them agreed to leave al-Husayn and escape with his life. Al-Husayn urged them again. Not a single man left his camp. They were seventy men facing five thousand. Umar ibn Saad offered surrender. Al-Husayn refused. Instead, he asked that the people themselves be allowed to judge between them. Al-Husayn and his companions were surrounded at Karbala and kept away from the water, which was guarded by Umar ibn Saad’s army. Thirst became severe among the women and children. Al-Husayn carried his young son Abd Allah in his arms, hoping to give him water himself and believing that the sight of the child might prevent the besiegers from harming him. Instead, they shot the child with an arrow, and he died in his father’s arms. Through all of this, al-Husayn kept control of himself. Until the final moment, he still hoped to breathe life back into those dead consciences. Al-Husayn stepped forward to address the army while wearing the cloak of the Prophet, peace be upon him. The soldiers began making such a noise that his words could not be heard. Al-Husayn did not withdraw. He simply stood silent. Their noise gradually died away, and then he burst out: “Ask who I am. Is it lawful for you to kill me and violate what is sacred in me? Am I not the son of the daughter of your Prophet? Has it not reached you that the Messenger of God said of me and my brother, ‘These two are the leaders of the young men of Paradise’? Shame on you. Are you pursuing me because I killed one of your people? Because I consumed wealth belonging to you?” The effect of these words was almost magical. Men from Umar ibn Saad’s army began crossing over to al-Husayn’s side. The situation was becoming dangerous. Had Umar waited much longer, the whole army might have fallen apart. He also feared that those watching him would report what had happened to Yazid. So he seized an arrow and fired it toward al-Husayn’s group, crying: “Bear witness for me before the governor that I was the first to shoot at al-Husayn.” And so the battle began in a rush of tension and speed that gave al-Husayn’s words no time to work upon the men. Al-Husayn and his companions fought magnificently until every one of them fell. Al-Husayn himself went down under the weight of his wounds, struck by some one hundred and twenty blows. Then Shimr ibn Dhi al-Jawshan came forward and cut off his head. They trampled his noble body until his ribs were crushed, mutilated him in the most hideous manner, raised the severed heads on spearpoints, and carried them first to Ubayd Allah ibn Ziyad, and then to Yazid ibn Muawiya. Thus ended the first round of the struggle with the Right. It ended in one of the most magnificent acts of martyrdom and one of the greatest displays of heroism. Al-Husayn’s martyrdom became the revolution’s greatest victory because it penetrated the Arab conscience and revived consciences that terror had strangled. Only sixty years later, the Umayyad state itself would fall. References For the events and historical accounts discussed in this book, we consulted the following primary and secondary sources. Some were used simply to become familiar with the different viewpoints from which the subject has been treated. Al-Aghani, by Abu al-Faraj al-Isfahani (Dar al-Kutub al-Misriyya edition) History of the Prophets and Kings, by Abu Jafar Muhammad ibn Jarir al-Tabari The Incoherence of the Philosophers, by Abu Hamid al-Ghazali The Incoherence of the Incoherence, by Ibn Rushd The Life of the Prophet, by Abu Muhammad Abd al-Malik ibn Hisham, edited by Shaykh Muhyi al-Din Abd al-Hamid (Kitab al-Tahrir) Al-Tabaqat al-Kubra, by Muhammad ibn Saad Al-Iqd al-Farid, by Ibn Abd Rabbih Religions and Sects, by al-Shahrastani The Markets of the Arabs in the Age of Ignorance and Islam, by Said al-Afghani (Dar al-Fikr, Damascus) Abu Bakr al-Siddiq, by Muhammad Husayn Haykal The Life of Muhammad, by Muhammad Husayn Haykal Al-Faruq Umar, by Muhammad Husayn Haykal The Political, Religious, Cultural, and Social History of Islam, by Hasan Ibrahim Hasan, vol. 1, 7th ed. (Maktabat al-Nahda al-Misriyya) Ancient Arab History, translated by Fuad Hasnayn Ali (Maktabat al-Nahda al-Misriyya, 1958) The Arab Kingdom and Its Fall, by Julius Wellhausen, translated by Muhammad Abd al- Hadi Abu Rida Salman al-Farisi and the Spiritual Origins of Islam, by Louis Massignon, translated by Abd al-Rahman Badawi The Arabs Before Islam, by Jurji Zaydan (Dar al-Hilal) The Great Arab Conquests, by John Bagot Glubb, translated by Khayri Hammad The Dawn of Islam, by Ahmad Amin The Forenoon of Islam, by Ahmad Amin The Two Shaykhs, by Taha Husayn Uthman, by Taha Husayn Ali and His Sons, by Taha Husayn Abu al-Shuhada, by Abbas Mahmud al-Aqqad The Genius of the Imam, by Abbas Mahmud al-Aqqad The Genius of Umar, by Abbas Mahmud al-Aqqad Mecca and Medina in the Age of Ignorance and the Time of the Prophet, by Ahmad Ibrahim al-Sharif (Dar al-Fikr al-Arabi) From the History of Intellectual Movements in Islam, by Bandali Jawzi W. Montgomery Watt, Muhammad at Mecca (Oxford University Press, 1960) W. Montgomery Watt, Muhammad at Medina (Oxford University Press, 1962) Contents Subject Page Right and Left 5 The Reality of Mecca Before Islam 17 The Political Blocs in Mecca 34 The Centre Takes Power 51 The Right and the Revolution 70 The Revolution of the Left 88 The Idealism of the Left and the Opportunism of the Right 110 The Elimination of the Left 132 The Final Round 152 References 171 Arab Institute for Studies and Publishing Beirut Recently Published The Complete Works of Imam Muhammad Abduh — introduced and edited by Dr Muhammad Imara Complete Poetic Works — Mahmoud Darwish Drama: Theory and Practice — Husayn Ramiz Rida Women and Sex — Nawal El Saadawi The Fear of Freedom — Erich Fromm Lenin — David Shub Marx — S. G. Sperber Sartre — Philip Thody Centres of Power in Israel — Y. Ben-Porat Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy — Barrington Moore The Military Balance, 1972‒1973 — International Institute for Strategic Studies, London After the King Dies — a verse play by Salah Abd al-Sabur Sticking a Small Tongue Out at the Big World — Mu’nis al-Razzaz