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The Umayyad Rise to the Caliphate
‘Ali after the battle of Siffin. On the way back to Kufa, we are told, a
large part of his army withdrew their allegiance to him and left his
camp because they now repented of their appeal to him to stop the
fighting and enter into discussions. They demanded that ‘Ali too
should repent and withdraw from the arbitration. As a slogan
signifying their opposition to the arbitration they adopted the formula,
‘arbitration (or judgement) belongs to God alone’
(la hukma illa
li’llah),
which is traditionally interpreted as a protest against the
decision to appoint men (the two arbitrators) to decide what was
fundamentally a religious matter and should therefore be left to God.
These dissidents among the supporters of ‘Ali came to be known as
‘Kharijites’ (‘those who went out’ or ‘rebels’) and the slogan
remained a badge of the movement long after the
Fitna
was over.
For the Kharijites the immediate enemy now became ‘Ali, who had
to be fought until he repented of his decision to accept the arbitration.
This ‘Ali could not do, and from Siffin onwards he had to devote more
time to his struggle against the Kharijites and less to that with
Mu‘awiya. He achieved a major victory over the Kharijites at the
battle of Nahrawan in Iraq (658), but this, by providing the movement
with martyrs, merely intensified the hatred against him.
After Siffin, therefore, we see a steady erosion of ‘Ali’s position:
he seemed to have given grounds for the questioning of his legitimacy
by agreeing to the arbitration, and the Kharijite secession threatened
him on another front. At the same time the stock of Mu‘awiya rose. He
had come to be seen as at least an equal of ‘Ali, and was able to rely
on the support of his Syrian Arabs. With the collapse of ‘Ali’s
position, we hear that the Syrians now gave their allegiance
(bay‘a)
to
Mu‘awiya as caliph. The chronology again is not clear, but it seems to
have been in 659 or 660.
After this the
Fitna
came to a dramatic end. In 661 ‘Ali was
murdered in Kufa, reportedly by a Kharijite seeking revenge for the
massacre at Nahrawan, and Mu‘awiya took advantage of the situation
to march into Kufa where he was able, by a combination of tact,
money and the threat of force, to win the acceptance of most of ‘Ali’s
remaining supporters. In the eyes of some of ‘Ali’s supporters the
successor to ‘Ali should have been his eldest son, Hasan, but
Mu‘awiya, it is generally accepted, persuaded Hasan to retract his
claim to the imamate and to withdraw into private life in the Hijaz
where he died some years later.
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Naturally, acceptance of Mu‘awiya as caliph was not unanimous.
He was still opposed by the Kharijites and not all of ‘Ali’s former
The Umayyad Rise to the Caliphate
31
supporters accepted him, but they were no longer able to carry out a
consistent armed struggle against him. The remnants of ‘Ali’s party
formed the basis of what was to become known as the Shi‘a (the
‘Party’ of ‘Ali), supporting the claims of ‘Ali and his descendants to
the imamate and developing into a number of sub-groups as their
religious and political ideas became more elaborate. Eventually they
posed a greater threat to Umayyad rule than did the Kharijites and
were to play a major role in the movement which finally ended the
Umayyad caliphate. This, though, was in the future. For the time
being, 661 saw the end of the
Fitna,
the reunification of the divided
Muslim community, and general recognition of Mu‘awiya as caliph.
With hindsight it was seen as the beginning of the Umayyad dynasty.
If we accept the data provided by Muslim tradition, then, the
Umayyads, leading representatives of those who had opposed the
Prophet until the latest possible moment, had within thirty years of
his death reestablished their position to the extent that they were
now at the head of the community which he had founded. As a result
the
Fitna
has often been interpreted as the climax of a struggle for
power within Islam between that class of Meccans typified by the
Umayyads, the wealthy and powerful leaders of pre-Islamic Mecca,
and those, largely from a lower social stratum, whose acceptance of
Islam was more wholehearted. To use expressions frequently
applied, it was the result of a struggle between the old and the new
aristocracy.
Within this interpretation some have taken a more strongly anti-
Umayyad line and argued that the civil war was consciously
engineered by the old aristocracy in order to regain the position it had
lost with the triumph of Islam. In this view Mu‘awiya plays an active
role by delaying answering the appeals of the caliph ‘Uthman for help
when he was faced with the rebellious Egyptian soldiers in Medina,
arousing the Syrians by holding an exhibition in the mosque of
Damascus of the dead ‘Uthman’s bloody shirt or severed finger, and
even plotting with his relative, the keeper of ‘Uthman’s seal, to ensure
that any possible compromise between ‘Uthman and the Egyptian
rebels would break down. The aim of all this was to ensure that ‘Ali,
whose succession to ‘Uthman was seen as inevitable in any case,
would succeed to the caliphate in circumstances which would cast
doubt on his legitimacy and enable the old aristocracy to turn the
situation to their own advantage. Others have taken a more moderate
line and seen the emergence of the old aristocracy as the new leaders
of Islam as an unconscious and almost inevitable process since they
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