I AM MALALA

11: The Clever Class

IT WAS SCHOOL that kept me going in those dark days. When I was in the street it felt as though every man I passed might be a talib. We hid our school bags and our books in our shawls. My father always said that the most beautiful thing in a village in the morning is the sight of a child in a school uniform, but now we were afraid to wear them.

We had moved up to high school. Madam Maryam said no one wanted to teach our class as we asked so many questions. We liked to be known as the clever girls. When we decorated our hands with henna for holidays and weddings, we drew calculus and chemical formulae instead of flowers and butterflies. My rivalry with Malka-e-Noor continued, but after the shock of being beaten by her when she first joined our school, I worked hard and had managed to regain my position on the school honours board for first in class. She usually came second and Moniba third. The teachers told us examiners first looked at how much we had written, then presentation. Moniba had the most beautiful writing and presentation of the three of us, but I always told her she did not trust herself enough. She worked hard as she worried that if she got low marks her male relatives might use it as an excuse to stop her education. I was weakest in maths - once I got zero in a test - but I worked hard at it. My chemistry teacher Sir Obaidullah (we called all our teachers Sir or Miss) said I was a born politician because, at the start of oral exams, I would always say, ‘Sir, can I just say you are the best teacher and yours is my favourite class.’

Some parents complained that I was being favoured because my father owned the school, but people were always surprised that despite our rivalry we were all good friends and not jealous of each other. We also competed in what we call board exams. These would select the best students from private schools in the district, and one year Malka-e-Noor and I got exactly the same marks. We did another paper at school to see who would get the prize and again we got equal marks. So people wouldn’t think I was getting special treatment, my father arranged for us to do papers at another school, that of his friend Ahmad Shah. Again we got the same, so we both got the prize.

There was more to school than work. We liked performing plays. I wrote a sketch based on Romeo and Juliet about corruption. I played Romeo as a civil servant interviewing people for a job. The first candidate is a beautiful girl, and he asks her very easy questions such as, ‘How many wheels does a bicycle have?’ When she replies, ‘Two,’ he says, ‘You are so brilliant.’ The next candidate is a man so Romeo asks him impossible things like, ‘Without leaving your chair tell me the make of the fan in the room above us.’ ‘How could I possibly know?’ asks the candidate. ‘You’re telling me you have a PhD and you don’t know!’ replies Romeo. He decides to give the job to the girl.

The girl was played by Moniba, of course, and another classmate Attiya played the part of my assistant to add some salt, pepper and masala with her witty asides. Everyone laughed a lot. I like to mimic people, and in breaks my friends used to beg me to impersonate our teachers, particularly Sir Obaidullah. With all the bad stuff going on in those days, we needed small, small reasons to laugh.

The army action at the end of 2007 had not got rid of the Taliban. The army had stayed in Swat and were everywhere in the town, yet Fazlullah still broadcast every day on the radio and throughout 2008 the situation was even worse than before with bomb blasts and killings. All we talked about in those days was the army and the Taliban and the feeling that we were caught between the two. Attiya used to tease me by saying, ‘Taliban is good, army not good.’ I replied, ‘If there is a snake and a lion coming to attack us what would we say is good, the snake or lion?’

Our school was a haven from the horrors outside. All the other girls in my class wanted to be doctors, but I decided I wanted to be an inventor and make an anti-Taliban machine which would sniff them out and destroy their guns. But of course at school we were under threat too, and some of my friends dropped out. Fazlullah kept broadcasting that girls should stay at home and his men had started blowing up schools, usually during night-time curfew when the children were not there.

The first school to be blown up was Shawar Zangay, a government girls’ primary school in Matta.

We couldn’t believe anyone would do such a thing. Then many more bombings followed, almost every day. Even in Mingora, there were explosions. Twice bombs went off when I was in the kitchen, so close by that the whole house rattled and the fan above the window fell down. I became very scared of going into the kitchen and would only run in and out.

On the last day of February 2008 I was in the kitchen when we heard an enormous blast. It was earshatteringly loud and obviously close by. As we always did, we called to each other to make sure we were all safe. ‘Khaista, Pisho, Bhabi, Khushal, Atal!’ Then we heard sirens, one after another as if all the ambulances of Mingora were passing. A suicide bomber had struck in the basketball court at Haji Baba High School. Funeral prayers had been under way for a popular local police officer, Javid Iqbal, who had been killed by a suicide bomber in a remote area while trying to escape from the Taliban. He was from Mingora, and his body had been brought back for the funeral and a police salute. Now the Taliban had bombed the mourners. More than fifty-five people were killed, including Javid Iqbal’s young son and many people we knew. Ten members of Moniba’s family were there and were either killed or injured. Moniba was devastated and the whole town was in shock. There were condolences in every mosque.

‘Are you scared now?’ I asked my father.

‘At night our fear is strong, Jani,’ he told me, ‘but in the morning, in the light, we find our courage again.’ And this is true for my family. We were scared, but our fear was not as strong as our courage.

‘We must rid our valley of the Taliban, and then no one has to feel this fear,’ he said.

In times of crisis we Pashtuns resort to the old trusted ways, so in 2008 elders in Swat created an assembly called the Qaumi Jirga to challenge Fazlullah. Three local men, Mukhtar Khan Yousafzai, Khurshid Kakajee and Zahid Khan went from hujra to hujra persuading elders to join together. The senior elder was a white-bearded man of seventy-four called Abdul Khan Khaliq who had been one of the Queen’s bodyguards when she had visited Swat to stay with our wali. Even though my father was not an elder or a khan, he was chosen as spokesperson as he was not afraid to speak out. Though he was more poetic in Pashto, he could speak our national language, Urdu, and English fluently, which meant he was an effective communicator outside Swat as well as inside.

Every day, on behalf of the Swat Council of Elders, he was at seminars or on the media challenging Fazlullah. ‘What are you doing?’ he would ask. ‘You are playing havoc with our lives and our culture.’

My father would say to me, ‘Any organisation which works for peace, I will join. If you want to resolve a dispute or come out from conflict, the very first thing is to speak the truth. If you have a headache and tell the doctor you have a stomach ache, how can the doctor help? You must speak the truth. The truth will abolish fear.’

When he met his fellow activists, particularly his old friends Ahmad Shah, Mohammad Farooq and Zahid Khan, I often went with him. Ahmad Shah also had a school, where Mohammad Farooq worked, and they would sometimes gather on his lawn. Zahid Khan was a hotel owner and had a big hujra. When they came to our house I would bring them tea then sit quietly listening as they discussed what to do. ‘Malala is not just the daughter of Ziauddin,’ they would say; ‘she is the daughter of all of us.’ They went back and forth to Peshawar and Islamabad and gave lots of interviews on the radio, particularly to the Voice of America and the BBC, taking turns so there would always be one of them available. They told people that what was happening in Swat was not about Islam. My father said the Taliban presence in Swat was not possible without the support of some in the army and the bureaucracy. The state is meant to protect the rights of its citizens, but it’s a very difficult situation when you can’t tell the difference between state and non-state and can’t trust the state to protect you against non-state.

Our military and ISI are very powerful and most people did not like to voice these things publicly, but my father and many of his friends were not scared. ‘What you are doing is against our people and against Pakistan,’ he would say. ‘Don’t support Talibanisation, it’s inhuman. We are told that Swat is being sacrificed for the sake of Pakistan, but no one and nothing should be sacrificed for the state. A state is like a mother, and a mother never deserts or cheats her children.’

He hated the fact that most people would not speak up. In his pocket he kept a poem written by Martin Niemöller, who had lived in Nazi Germany.

First they came for the communists, and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a communist.

Then they came for the socialists, and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I didn’t speak out because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn’t speak out because I was not a Catholic.

Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak for me.

I knew he was right. If people were silent nothing would change.

At school my father organised a peace march and encouraged us to speak out against what was happening. Moniba put it well. ‘We Pashtuns are a religion-loving people,’ she said. ‘Because of the Taliban, the whole world is claiming we are terrorists. This is not the case. We are peace-loving.

Our mountains, our trees, our flowers - everything in our valley is about peace.’ A group of us girls gave an interview on ATV Khyber, the only privately owned Pashto television channel, about girls dropping out of school due to militancy. Teachers helped us beforehand on how to respond to questions. I wasn’t the only one to be interviewed. When we were eleven and twelve, we did them together, but as we turned thirteen or fourteen my friends’ brothers and fathers didn’t allow them because they had entered puberty and should observe purdah and also they were afraid.

One day I went on Geo, which is one of the biggest news channels in our country. There was a wall of screens in their office. I was astonished to see so many channels. Afterwards I thought, The media needs interviews. They want to interview a small girl, but the girls are scared, and even if they’re not, their parents won’t allow it. I have a father who isn’t scared, who stands by me. He said, ‘You are a child and it’s your right to speak.’ The more interviews I gave, the stronger I felt and the more support we received. I was only eleven but I looked older, and the media seemed to like hearing from a young girl. One journalist called me takra jenai - a ‘bright shining young lady’ and another said you are ‘pakha jenai’ - you are wise beyond your years. In my heart was the belief that God would protect me. If I am speaking for my rights, for the rights of girls, I am not doing anything wrong. It’s my duty to do so. God wants to see how we behave in such situations. There is a saying in the Quran, ‘The falsehood has to go and the truth will prevail.’ If one man, Fazlullah, can destroy everything, why can’t one girl change it? I wondered. I prayed to God every night to give me strength.

The media in Swat were under pressure to give positive coverage to the Taliban - some even respectfully called the Taliban spokesman Muslim Khan ‘School dada’, when in reality he was destroying schools. But many local journalists were unhappy about what was happening to their valley and they gave us a powerful platform as we would say things they didn’t dare to.

We didn’t have a car so we went by rickshaw, or one of my father’s friends would take us to the interviews. One day my father and I went to Peshawar to appear on a BBC Urdu talk show hosted by a famous columnist called Wasatullah Khan. We went with my father’s friend Fazal Maula and his daughter. Two fathers and two daughters. To represent the Taliban they had Muslim Khan, who wasn’t in the studio. I was a bit nervous but I knew it was important as many people all over Pakistan would be listening. ‘How dare the Taliban take away my basic right to education?’ I said. There was no response from Muslim Khan because his phone interview had been pre-recorded. How can a recording respond to live questions?

Afterwards people congratulated me. My father laughed and said I should go into politics. ‘Even as a toddler you talked like a politician,’ he teased. But I never listened to my interviews. I knew these were very small steps.

Our words were like the eucalyptus blossoms of spring tossed away on the wind. The destruction of schools continued. On the night of 7 October 2008 we heard a series of faraway blasts. The next morning we learned that masked militants had entered the Sangota Convent School for girls and the Excelsior College for boys and blown them up using improvised explosive devices (IEDs). The teachers had already been evacuated as they had received threats earlier. These were famous schools, particularly Sangota, which dated from the time of the last wali and was well known for academic excellence. They were also big - Excelsior had over 2,000 pupils and Sangota had 1,000. My father went there after the bombings and found the buildings completely razed to the ground. He gave interviews to TV reporters amid broken bricks and burned books and returned home horrified. ‘It’s all just rubble,’ he said.

Yet my father remained hopeful and believed there would be a day when there was an end to the destruction. What really depressed him was the looting of the destroyed schools - the furniture, the books, the computers were all stolen by local people. He cried when he heard this, ‘They are vultures jumping on a dead body.’

The next day he went on a live show on the Voice of America and angrily condemned the attacks.

Muslim Khan, the Taliban spokesman, was on the phone. ‘What was so wrong with these two schools that you should bomb them?’ my father asked him.

Muslim Khan said that Sangota was a convent school teaching Christianity and that Excelsior was co-educational, teaching girls and boys together. ‘Both things are false!’ replied my father. ‘Sangota school has been there since the 1960s and never converted anyone to Christianity - in fact some of them converted to Islam. And Excelsior is only co-educational in the primary section.’

Muslim Khan didn’t answer. ‘What about their own daughters?’ I asked my father. ‘Don’t they want them to learn?’

Our headmistress Madam Maryam had studied at Sangota, and her younger sister Ayesha was a pupil there, so she and some of the other Sangota girls transferred to our school. The monthly school fees were never enough to cover all our outgoings so the extra fees were welcome, but my father was unhappy. He went everywhere he could demanding the reconstruction of both schools. Once he spoke at a big gathering and held up an audience member’s baby girl and said, ‘This girl is our future. Do we want her to be ignorant?’ The crowd agreed that they would sacrifice themselves before giving up their daughters’ education. The new girls had horrible stories. Ayesha told us how one day on the way home from Sangota she had seen a Taliban holding up the severed head of a policeman by its hair, blood dripping from the neck. The Sangota girls were also very bright, which meant more competition. One of them, Rida, was excellent at making speeches. She became a good friend of mine and of Moniba’s, which sometimes caused fights as three is a tricky number. Moniba often brought food to school and would just bring one spare fork. ‘Are you my friend or Rida’s?’ I asked Moniba.

She laughed and said, ‘We are all three good friends.’

By the end of 2008, around 400 schools had been destroyed by the Taliban. We had a new government under President Asif Zardari, the widower of Benazir, but they didn’t seem to care about Swat. I told people things would be different if Zardari’s own daughters were at school in Swat.

There were suicide bombings all over the country: even the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad had been blown up.

In Swat it was safer in the town than in the remote areas and many of our family came from the countryside to stay with us. The house was small and got very crowded with the cousins who already lived with us. There was little to do. We couldn’t play cricket in the street or on the roof like we used to. We played marbles in the yard over and over again. I fought non-stop with my brother Khushal, and he would go crying to our mother. Never in history have Khushal and Malala been friends.

I liked doing my hair in different styles and would spend ages in the bathroom in front of the mirror trying out looks I had seen in movies. Until I was eight or nine my mother used to cut my hair short like my brothers because of lice and also to make it easier to wash and brush as it would get messed up under my shawl. But finally I had persuaded her to let me grow it to my shoulders. Unlike Moniba, who has straight hair, mine is wavy, and I liked to twist it into curls or tie it into plaits. ‘What are you doing in there Pisho?’ my mother would shout. ‘Our guests need the bathroom and everyone is having to wait for you.’

One of the worst times was the fasting month of Ramadan in 2008. During Ramadan no food or drink can pass a Muslim’s lips in daylight hours. The Taliban bombed the power station so we had no electricity, then a few days later they blasted the pipeline so we had no gas either. The price of the gas cylinders we used to buy from the market doubled so my mother had to cook on a fire like we did in the village. She didn’t complain - food needed to be cooked and she cooked it, and there were others worse off than us. But there was no clean water and people started dying from cholera. The hospital could not cope with all the patients and had to erect big tents outside to treat people.

Though we had no generator at home, my father bought one to install at the school, and fresh water was pumped from a bore-hole, which all the children in the neighbourhood went to collect. Every day there would be lines of people waiting to fill jugs, bottles and drums. One of the neighbours got frightened. ‘What are you doing?’ he asked. ‘If the Taliban find out you’re giving water in the month of Ramadan they will bomb us!’

My father replied that people would die either of thirst or bombings.

The days when we used to go for trips or for picnics seemed like a dream. No one would venture from their homes after sunset. The terrorists even blew up the ski lift and the big hotel in Malam Jabba where tourists used to stay. A holiday paradise turned into a hell where no tourist would venture.

Then, at the end of 2008, Fazlullah’s deputy Maulana Shah Dauran announced on the radio that all girls’ schools would close. From 15 January girls must not go to school, he warned. First I thought it was a joke. ‘How can they stop us from going to school?’ I asked my friends. ‘They don’t have the power. They are saying they will destroy the mountain but they can’t even control the road.’

The other girls didn’t agree with me. ‘Who will stop them?’ they asked. ‘They have already blown up hundreds of schools and no one has done anything.’

My father used to say the people of Swat and the teachers would continue to educate our children until the last room, the last teacher and the last student was alive. My parents never once suggested I should withdraw from school, ever. Though we loved school, we hadn’t realised how important education was until the Taliban tried to stop us. Going to school, reading and doing our homework wasn’t just a way of passing time, it was our future.

That winter it snowed and we built snow bears but without much joy. In winter the Taliban used to disappear into the mountains, but we knew they would be back and had no idea what was coming next. We believed school would start again. The Taliban could take our pens and books, but they couldn’t stop our minds from thinking.

12: The Bloody Square

THE BODIES WOULD be dumped in the square at night so that everyone would see them the next morning on their way to work. There was usually a note pinned to them saying something like, ‘This is what happens to an army agent’, or ‘Do not touch this body until 11 a.m. or you will be next.’ On some of the nights of the killings there would also be earthquakes, which made people even more scared as we connect every natural disaster with a human disaster.

They killed Shabana on a bitterly cold night in January 2009. She lived in Banr Bazaar, a narrow street in our town of Mingora which is famous for its dancers and musicians. Shabana’s father said a group of men had knocked at her door and asked her to dance for them. She went to put on her dancing clothes, and when she returned to dance for them, they pulled out their guns and threatened to slit her throat. This happened after the 9 p.m. curfew and people heard her screaming, ‘I promise I’ll stop! I promise I won’t sing and dance again. Leave me, for God’s sake! I am a woman, a Muslim. Don’t kill me!’ Then shots rang out and her bullet-ridden body was dragged to Green Chowk. So many bodies had been left there that people started calling it the Bloody Square.

We heard about Shabana’s death the next morning. On Mullah FM, Fazlullah said she deserved to die for her immoral character and any other girls found performing in Banr Bazaar would be killed one by one. We used to be proud of our music and art in Swat, but now most of the dancers fled to Lahore or to Dubai. Musicians took out adverts in the papers saying they had stopped playing and were pledging to live pious lives to appease the Taliban.

People used to talk about Shabana’s bad character, but our men both wished to see her dance and also despised her because she was a dancer. A khan’s daughter can’t marry a barber’s son and a barber’s daughter can’t marry a khan’s son. We Pashtuns love shoes but don’t love the cobbler; we love our scarves and blankets but do not respect the weaver. Manual workers made a great contribution to our society but received no recognition, and this is the reason so many of them joined the Taliban - to finally achieve status and power.

So people loved to see Shabana dance but didn’t respect her, and when she was murdered they said nothing. Some even agreed with her killing, out of fear of the Taliban or because they were in favour of them. ‘Shabana was not a Muslim,’ they said. ‘She was bad, and it was right that she was killed.’

I can’t say that was the worst day. Around the time of Shabana’s murder every day seemed like the worst day; every moment was the worst. The bad news was everywhere: this person’s place bombed, this school blown up, public whippings. The stories were endless and overwhelming. A couple of weeks after Shabana’s murder, a teacher in Matta was killed when he refused to pull his shalwar above the ankle the way the Taliban wore theirs. He told them that nowhere in Islam is this required.

They hung him and then they shot his father.

I couldn’t understand what the Taliban were trying to do. ‘They are abusing our religion,’ I said in interviews. ‘How will you accept Islam if I put a gun to your head and say Islam is the true religion?

If they want every person in the world to be Muslim why don’t they show themselves to be good Muslims first?’

Regularly my father would come home shaken up due to the terrible things he had witnessed and heard about such as policemen beheaded, their heads paraded through the town. Even those who had defended Fazlullah at the start, believing his men were the real standard-bearers of Islam, and given him their gold, began to turn against him. My father told me about a woman who had donated generously to the Taliban while her husband was working abroad. When he came back and found out she had given away her gold he was furious. One night there was a small explosion in their village and the wife cried. ‘Don’t cry,’ said her husband. ‘That is the sound of your earrings and nose studs.

Now listen to the sound of your lockets and bangles.’

Yet still so few people spoke out. My father’s old rival in college politics Ihsan ul-Haq Haqqani had become a journalist in Islamabad and organised a conference on the situation in Swat. None of the lawyers and academics he invited from Swat to speak turned up. Only my father and some journalists went. It seemed that people had decided the Taliban were here to stay and they had better get along with them. ‘When you are in the Taliban you have 100 per cent life security,’ people would say.

That’s why they volunteered their young men. The Taliban would come to peoples’ houses, demanding money to buy Kalashnikovs, or they would ask them to hand over their sons to fight with them. Many of the rich fled. The poor had no choice but to stay and survive the best they could. So many of our men had gone to the mines or to the Gulf to work, leaving their families fatherless, the sons were easy prey.

The threats began to come closer to home. One day Ahmad Shah received a warning from unknown people that they would kill him, so for a while he left for Islamabad to try to raise awareness there of what was happening to our valley. One of the worst things about that period was when we started to doubt one another. Fingers were even pointed at my father. ‘Our people are being killed, but this Ziauddin is so outspoken and he’s still alive! He must be a secret agent!’ Actually he had been threatened too but hadn’t told us. He had given a press conference in Peshawar demanding that the military act against the Taliban and go after their commanders. Afterwards people told him his name was heard on Mullah FM in a threat from Shah Douran.

My father brushed it off. But I was worried. He was outspoken and involved in so many groups and committees that he often wouldn’t come home till midnight. He started to sleep at one of his friend’s houses to protect us in case the Taliban came for him. He couldn’t bear the thought of being killed in front of us. I could not sleep until he returned and I could lock the gate. When he was at home my mother would place a ladder in the back yard up to the outside wall so he could get down to the street below if he was in sudden danger. He laughed at the idea. ‘Maybe Atal the squirrel could make it but not me!’

My mother was always trying to think up plans for what she would do if the Taliban came. She thought of sleeping with a knife under her pillow. I said I could sneak into the toilet and call the police. My brothers and I thought of digging a tunnel. Once again I prayed for a magic wand to make the Taliban disappear.

One day I saw my little brother Atal digging furiously in the garden. ‘What are you doing?’ I asked him.‘Making a grave,’ he said. Our news bulletins were full of killings and death so it was natural for Atal to think of coffins and graves. Instead of hide and seek and cops and robbers, children were now playing Army vs Taliban. They made rockets from branches and used sticks for Kalashnikovs; these were their sports of terror.

There was no one to protect us. Our own deputy commissioner, Syed Javid, was going to Taliban meetings, praying in their mosque and leading their meetings. He became a perfect talib. One target of the Taliban were non-governmental organisations or NGOs, which they said were anti-Islam. When the NGOs received threatening letters from the Taliban and went to the DC to ask for his help, he wouldn’t even listen to them. Once in a meeting my father challenged him: ‘Whose orders are you representing? Fazlullah’s or the government’s?’ We say in Arabic, ‘People follow their king.’ When the highest authority in your district joins the Taliban, then Talibanisation becomes normal.

We like conspiracy theories in Pakistan and we had many. Some believed the authorities were deliberately encouraging the Taliban. They said the army wanted the Taliban in Swat because the Americans wanted to use an airbase there to launch their drones. With the Taliban in the valley, our government could say to the Americans we can’t help you because we have our own problems. It was also a way to answer growing American criticism that our military was helping the Taliban rather than trying to stop them. Now our government could respond, ‘You say we are taking your money and aiding these terrorists, but if that’s the case why are they attacking us too?’

‘The Taliban obviously have the support of unseen forces,’ said my father. ‘But what’s happening is not simple, and the more you want to understand the more complex it becomes.’

That year, 2008, the government even released Sufi Mohammad, the founder of the TNSM, from prison. He was said to be more moderate than his son-in-law Fazlullah, and there was hope that he would make a peace deal with the government to impose sharia law in Swat and release us from Taliban violence. My father was in favour of this. We knew this would not be the end, but my father argued that if we had shariat the Taliban would have nothing more to fight for. They should then put down their arms and live like ordinary men. If they did not, he said, this would expose them for what they really were.

The army still had their guns trained on the mountains overlooking Mingora. We would lie in bed listening to them boom boom all night. They would stop for five, ten or fifteen minutes and then start again the moment we drifted off to sleep. Sometimes we covered our ears or buried our heads under pillows, but the guns were close by and the noise was too loud to block out. Then the morning after, on TV, we would hear of more Taliban killings and wonder what the army was doing with all its booming cannons and why they could not even stop the daily broadcasts on Mullah FM.

Both the army and the Taliban were powerful. Sometimes their roadblocks were less than a kilometre apart on the same main roads. They would stop us but seemed unaware of each other’s presence. It was unbelievable. No one understood why we were not being defended. People would say they were two sides of the same coin. My father said we common people were like chaff caught between the two stones of a water mill. But he still wasn’t afraid. He said we should continue to speak out.

I am only human, and when I heard the guns my heart used to beat very fast. Sometimes I was very afraid but I said nothing, and it didn’t mean I would stop going to school. But fear is very powerful and in the end it was this fear that had made people turn against Shabana. Terror had made people cruel. The Taliban bulldozed both our Pashtun values and the values of Islam.

I tried to distract myself by reading Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, which answered big questions such as how the universe began and whether time could run backwards. I was only eleven years old and already I wished it could.

We Pashtuns know the stone of revenge never decays, and when you do something wrong you will face the music. But when would that be? we continually asked ourselves.

Chapter 4: The Re-emergence of the 'Alid Party

The sixteen-year period beginning with the caliphate of 'Uthman (24/644) and ending with the assassination of Ali (41/661) represents a marked difference from the preceding period of the caliphate of Abu Bakr and 'Umar in the development of Shi'ism in Islam. It was a turning point in many ways. Firstly, this period created an atmosphere which encouraged Shi'i tendencies to become more evident and conspicuous. Secondly, the events which took place gave an active and sometimes violent character to the hitherto inactive Shi'i movement. Finally, the circumstances which prevailed involved the Shi'i outlook, for the first time, in a number of political, geographical, and economic considerations. The period was therefore one in which the desire of the first Shi'is to express their ideas on the succession of Ali, the religious zeal of the Companions, personal hatreds, provincial and economic interests, political intrigues, and the discontent of the poor against the rich were fused together. This fusion not only provided a new sphere of activity for the Shi'i movement, but also widened its circle of influence to those who needed an outlet for their political grievances, especially those against Mu'awiya, the representative of the Umayyad aristocracy and Syrian domination. Seeing in Ali a champion of the political independence of Iraq, as opposed to this Syrian domination, these groups supported him and were for the time being of the same mind as the religious supporters of Ali, who believed in his right to the caliphate based on the theocratic principle. The emergence of the political Shi'a is characterized both by the increase in its influence and its numbers and by the sudden rapidity with which it henceforth grew. An examination of the period in which this emergence occurred will result in a clearer insight into the split which developed within the main body of Islam.

Abu Bakr and 'Umar did not give their respective clansmen any particular share in the rule of the Muslim community, nor were their clans of much political consequence. Such was not the case with 'Uthman. His clan wanted to regain its past political importance after having taken second place to the Hashimites after the victory of Muhammad. When 'Uthman was elected, the Umayyads regarded this as a triumph for the whole clan, not solely as 'Uthman's personal success.1 They considered it natural that the Caliph should give them a share of the profits, and their demands could hardly be refused by the new caliph, who felt that his strength lay in the support and good will of his powerful clansmen. He did what he could to satisfy their demands, and the people were painfully disillusioned when they found the Caliph committed to the improvement of the lot of his own family and clan rather than to the welfare of the community as a whole. 'Uthman made no secret of bestowing favours on his kinsmen, and justified this action by saying: “The Prophet used to bestow offices on his kinsmen, and I happen to belong to people who are poor. So I let my hands a bit loose in regard to that with which I have been entrusted by virtue of the care I take of it.”2

It is an historical fact that within a few years of 'Uthman's accession the Umayyads claimed among themselves the governorships of Kufa, Basra (capital of a vast territory including Iran and Central Asia and extending to Sind), Syria, and Egypt: all the important provinces of the empire. These Umayyad governors, in turn, relied on the support of their own kinsmen, whom they placated and allowed to dominate the caliphal councils.3 The critical problem here was not so much that the Umayyads dominated all positions of power and advantage, but rather that they were allowed enough latitude to use their powers arbitrarily and unfairly for the benefit of themselves and their kinsmen, thus incurring the dissatisfaction and hatred of many Muslims. Abd Allah b. Sa'd b. Abi Sarh, 'Uthman's milk-brother, who administered Egypt, was an extremely unpopular man, whom the Prophet had ordered to be killed during the conquest of Mecca.4 Al-Walid b. 'Uqba, 'Uthman's half-brother, was even more intensely hated by the Kufans, whom he treated in brutal fashion. He divided lands among his favourites and finally disgraced himself by drunkenness.5 'Uthman was obliged to recall him and appointed another close relative, Sa'id b. al-'As, who infuriated the local notables by his highhanded treatment of them, then alarmed them by declaring that the Sawad of Kufa would become a “Garden of the Quraysh”. Provoked by such abuses, a group of the Qur'an readers in Kufa, such as Malik b. Harith an-Nakha'i, Sulayman b. Surad al-Khuza'i, Hujr b. Adi al-Kindi, Shurayh b. Awf al-Absi, and others, protested in vain against Sa'id's behaviour. Instead of making proper inquiries, 'Uthman ordered the agitators to be sent to Syria for Mu'awiya to deal with.6

The names of these distinguished Qur'an readers are to be taken seriously as they afterwards appeared as the leaders of the Shi'i movement in Kufa. They stood at the forefront of Ali's army at the battles of Al-Jamal and Siffin, and even after Ali's assassination they never reconciled themselves with Mu'awiya. Similarly, the groups of the Qur'an readers from Egypt and Basra were not less violent in their protests against the free hand given by the Caliph to his Umayyad governors and their highhanded treatment of the people. This clash with the Qur'an readers set the seal on 'Uthman's unpopularity in religious circles in the provinces. Here we must point out that the word qurra' (Qur'an readers) used by our sources implies those who distinguished themselves and were recognized by the people as learned in religious matters, and who taught the people the Qur'an and religious observances. Naturally they carried great prestige among the masses and were regarded as the intelligentsia of the people.

In addition to appointing many of his clansmen to lucrative posts, 'Uthman made large gifts to others.7 At the same time, he treated some of the Companions of the Prophet very harshly. Abd Allah b. Mas'ud, then in charge of the treasury in Kufa, was recalled after a quarrel with Al-Walid b. 'Uqba, and the Caliph allowed him to be manhandled in his presence.8 Even worse was the treatment received by Ammar b. Yasir, who was reviled and beaten into unconsciousness when he arrived from Egypt with a letter of complaint against Ibn Abi Sarh.9 During the last few years of 'Uthman's reign, the major part of the population was seething with discontent over the spectacle of Umayyad aristocrats seated in high offices, enjoying wealth and luxury, indulging in debauchery, and lavishly spending the immense wealth which they appropriated to themselves illegitimately. The resulting disequilibrium in the economic and social structure naturally aroused the jealousy of various sections of the population and provided ample combustible material for an explosion. One outspoken leader of the criticism against 'Uthman's regime was Abu Dharr, a fearless and uncompromising partisan of frugality and asceticism who violently protested against the accumulation of wealth in the hands of a few and demanded the distribution of lands among the community. 'Uthman, who did not like the idea of Abu Dharr thundering against the wealthy in the mosque of Medina, sent him to Syria. Before long, the Caliph received a letter from Mu'awiya complaining of Abu Dharr's dangerous activities and ordered that Abu Dharr be bound to a wooden camel saddle and be sent back to Medina under escort. He arrived in the city halfdead, with the flesh torn off his thighs, and he was shortly thereafter exiled to Ar-Rabdha, where he soon died.10 His misadventures were widely related throughout the provinces, awakening an echo of bitterness against 'Uthman and the class of the rich concurrently with the propagation of Ali's claims to the caliphate.

In this connection the speeches of Abu Dharr, frequently delivered in the mosque of Medina, are of special interest Gathering people around himself, he used to say:

“... Ali is the legatee (wasi) of Muhammad and the inheritor (warith) of his knowledge. Oh you bewildered and perplexed community after its Prophet, if you give preference [in leadership] to those whom God has given preference, and set aside those whom God has set aside, and if you firmly place the succession and inheritance in the people of the house of your Prophet, you will certainly be prosperous and your means of subsistence will be made ample.”11

We must strongly dissent from the viewpoint of such writers as have laboured to present the rebellion against 'Uthman as being due to only the evil machinations of some mischief-mongers, and the grievances they voiced as being all forged and artificial. Such writers ignore the fact that these mischief- mongers-if such they were-had real grievances to protest and the tacit support of the Sahaba to provide the necessary sanction. For discontent to develop. into open rebellion, two things are essential: leadership, which must come from those who command respect in society, and the time and opportunity to organize and concert action. Both of these prerequisites were present in the last few years of 'Uthman's caliphate.12 The attitude of the Sahaba, prominent among them being Ali, Talha, and Zubayr, is quite clear.

There is ample material to prove that almost all of them, and especially these three, were equally loud in their opposition to the ways of 'Uthman. Even Abd ar- Rahman b. Awf (died 32/652), who had played an all-important role in the election of 'Uthman, is reported to have hinted long before the outbreak of disturbances that he held ‘Uthman's actions to be a violation of the pledge given by him at the time of his election.13 Even if we disagree with the reports that they wrote letters to the provincials or actually incited them in a systematic manner, the fact remains that they made no secret of their views and moral support for the rebels.

Ali's attitude towards the situation in this period is clearly illustrated by his reaction to the punishment given to Abu Dharr. When 'Uthman ordered the latter to be exiled, he gave strict orders that no one should see him off except Marwan, who was to escort him out of Medina. Despite these orders, Ali, accompanied by Hasan, Husayn, and his partisan Ammar b. Yasir, went along with Abu Dharr for quite a long distance. When reminded of the Caliph's directive by Marwan, Ali replied by cursing him and striking the head of Marwan's beast with his stick. When it was time to part, Abu Dharr wept and said, “By God, whenever I see you, I remember the Prophet.”14 To console Abu Dharr, Ali said to him:

“You were annoyed for the sake of God, so entertain hope from Him for whom you were angry. These people were afraid of you for the sake of their world, and you feared them for the sake of your religion. So leave in their hands that by reason of which they were afraid of you, and flee away with that by reason of which you feared them; for how badly do they need what you have denied them, and how little do you need what they have denied you. If you had accepted their world they would have loved you; and if you had appropriated to yourself some part of it, they would have felt more secure in your presence.”15

Marwan reported the entire matter to 'Uthman, who became quite indignant at such a breach of orders. When he questioned Ali, the latter replied that he was not obliged to obey orders that were not compatible with common sense and justice. “My merits and excellences are far beyond yours; I am far superior to you in every respect.”16 Later these points were more commonly argued by supporters of Ali. The Shi'i poet Sayyid al-Himyari availed himself of these arguments to express his extreme Shi'i views.

After his acceptance of Abu Bakr and the subsequent weakening of his initial party of supporters, Ali remained aloof from all government activities until the end of 'Umar's rule, as mentioned above. The protest raised after the selection of 'Uthman demonstrated that 'Ali's candidacy still had many partisans, but these acted only as individuals and did not form any particular group. Once the caliphate of 'Uthman gained widespread acceptance in the community, the spontaneous protests of men such as Al-Miqdad and Ammar ceased, though their dissatisfaction remained. As the Caliph gradually began to lose popularity, the old partisans of Ali soon revived their grievances and gave full rein to their long suppressed desires to see Ali as caliph. Fresh support rallied to the Hashimite candidate as discontented elements in the empire began to crystallize into factions that needed an effective and acceptable leader. Though Talha and Zubayr had considerable local followings in Kufa and Basra respectively, they were far less important than Ali, and their support was doomed to remain limited in character. Ali found himself surrounded by groups of protesters arriving from the provinces, men who called upon him to support their cause, while at the same time 'Uthman approached Ali and appealed to him to mediate with the rebels. Perhaps compelled by the demands of justice, Ali had no choice but to stand in defence of the offended Companions and demand punishment for the blame- worthy. He himself protested against the rich gifts made by the Caliph to his kinsmen. From this position, he was urged by the qurra' to act as their spokesman, which he did to help meet the just demands of the people on the one hand, and to extricate the Caliph from his difficulties on the other.17

Two groups, different in outlook but with the same goals, were working simultaneously and serving each other's purposes, though not consciously. One group consisted of the discontented provincial elements discussed above which had been hardest hit by the disequilibrium in the economic structure of the empire, while the other mainly comprised the loyal partisans of Ali. This latter group, led by men like Abu Dharr, Miqdad, Ammar, Hudhayfa, and several of the Ansar, enlisted a number of new activist supporters such as Ka'b b. Abda an-Nahdi, Malik b. Habib ath-Tha'labi and Yazid b. Qays al- Arhabi.18 Also included in this circle were the Hashimites as well as Ali's clients and servants. Among the latter were Qanbar b. Kadam,19 Mitham b. Yahya at Tammar, and Rushayd al-Hujuri. Due to their religious zeal for and devotion to the person of Ali as the custodian of Muhammad's message and the true exponent of Islam, these men are symbolic of this stage in the growth of Shi'ism. Both Mitham at-Tammar20 and Rushayd al- Hujuri21 were crucified in Kufa in 61/680 by 'Ubayd Allah b. Ziyad because they refused to curse Ali and continued their zealous adherence to him and to his house even after his death. Their hands, legs, and tongues were cut off and their bodies were hanged, a typical example of Ibn Ziyad's brutal behaviour. Besides these supporters, later writers mention the name of Abd Allah b.Wahb b. Saba, known as Ibn as-Sawda', as having become a great supporter of Ali, travelling from place to place sowing discontent against the rule of 'Uthman.22 He is described as a former Jewish rabbi converted to Islam; however, modern Muslim scholars such as Ali al-Wardi strongly suggest that Abd Allah b. Saba never existed, and that the activities attributed to him were carried out by Ammar b. Yasir, whose nickname was also as-Sawda'.23 Modern European scholars have also expressed their doubts as to the historical personality of Ibn as-Sawda' and tend to agree that he is a legendary figure.24

It is an interesting phenomenon that both the hatred against 'Uthman and the numbers of the supporters of Ali grew side by side. The pious opposition to the Umayyad aristocracy became eagerly involved with the partisanship for Ali.25 In addition to Ali's ardent supporters, Talha and Zubayr also conducted propaganda activities against 'Uthman. When Muhammad b. Abi Bakr and Muhammad b. Ali Hudhayfa went to Egypt to rouse the people against the Caliph, they met Muhammad b. Talha, sent there by his father for the same task.26 Even the widows of the Prophet opposed the Caliph, and 'Aisha was especially loud in her denunciations of “Na'thal” (of the big beard and the hairy chest), as she nicknamed him.27

The simmering discontent exploded into revolt in 35/656, when rebel contingents from Kufa, Basra, and Egypt marched on Medina under the leadership of the qurra'. It is interesting to note that most of the activists leading these contingents happen to have been of Yemeni origin. These were joined by some of the pro-Alid Medinese Muhajirun and Ansar such as Ammar and others. The situation soon became chaotic. The events leading to the murder of 'Uthman are beyond the scope of this study, but it seems fairly certain that his assassination exceeded the desires of even those of the Sahaba who were openly opposed to the Caliph. Their objectives had been only to depose 'Uthman, not to kill him. It also seems clear that even during these last tumultuous days Ali continued to play his conciliatory and mediatory role. He many times did succeed in dispersing the unruly mob that wanted to hurt the Caliph, and during the siege he appointed his sons Hasan and Husayn to stand at the house of 'Uthman and protect him from the angry crowd. They were, however, jostled and pushed aside by the mob, and the Caliph was killed. Hearing the news, Ali was the first to reach the scene and was so furious at what had transpired that he slapped the face of Husayn and hit Hasan for failing to save the life of the Caliph.28

In the confused atmosphere following the murder of the Caliph, the only candidate for the caliphate that was acceptable to the Muhajirun and the Ansar, as well as to the rebellious qurra', was Ali.29 After three previous but unfulfilled aspirations to gain the office, however, Ali was now reluctant to accept the responsibility of leading a community so badly entangled in the question of regicide, and thus to implicate himself in the murder. Ibn Abd Rabbih has preserved for us Ali's own statement on the situation in the form of an address delivered at the time of the battle of Al-Jamal. In it, Ali says:

“After 'Uthman was killed, you came to me saying that you wanted to pay homage to me. I said, 'I do not want it.' I pulled back my hand, but you stretched it forth. I tried to snatch it [my hand] away from you, but you seized it You said, “We will accept no other than you, and we would not have gathered together except around you.' You thronged around me like thirsty camels on their watering day, set loose by their keeper who had unfastened their tethers, until I thought you would kill me [by rushing upon me] or that some one of you would kill the other [by jumping one over the other]. In this way all of you paid me your homage, and so did Talha and Zubayr.”30

Pressed by the demands from almost all quarters, Ali finally agreed to accept the office, but he specified that he would rule strictly according to the Qur'an and the Sunna of the Prophet and that he would enforce justice and law regardless of any criticism or clash with the interests of any group. Talha and Zubayr, though they both had some followings from Basra and Kufa, realized that they had no chance of mustering enough support to contest Ali's candidacy, and they were the first to swear allegiance to him. The Medinese, joined by multitudes of those from the provinces present in the capital, acclaimed Ali as caliph.31 Through this election, Ali became the first and the only caliph in whose selection a great majority of the community took an active part. He was also the first among the caliphs who, because of the circumstances of his birth, combined in his person both the dynastic and the theocratic principles of succession.

From the very start, Ali inherited great problems which none of his three predecessors had had to face. Marwan b. al-Hakam, 'Uthman's secretary, along with some other members of the clan of Umayya, managed to escape to Syria to join Mu'awiya, carrying 'Uthman's blood-stained shirt and the severed fingers of Na'ila, the murdered caliph's widow, to use for propaganda purposes. From Syria then came the call for vengeance for 'Uthman's death and a continuous propaganda campaign against Ali.

The murder of 'Uthman was not a simple assassination committed by an individual to settle personal grievances, as had been the case in 'Umar's death. 'Uthman's murder was the result of a popular revolt of the poor, discontented, suppressed, and deprived people against the economic, political, and feudalist domination of an old aristocratic family. The more religiously-minded people revolted to safeguard the Islamic ideals of socio- economic justice and equality taught by the Qur'an, enforced by the Prophet, and jealously maintained by Abu Bakr and 'Umar. Ali's role as the mediator between the rebel qurra' and the Caliph demonstrates that, on the one hand, he himself was convinced that the resistance movement had been based on just and right demands (and thus asked the Caliph to redress their grievances), while, on the other hand, he had tried his best to save the Caliph from the hands of the unruly mob. Tempers had flared beyond anyone's control, however, and the Caliph was killed by extremists who escaped in the midst of the utter confusion that followed. Ali found himself in a hopeless situation. The actual murderers had fled, and it was impossible for him to locate them for punishment; yet the fact remained that many of the qurra' around Ali had been nearly as responsible for the tragedy as the murderers themselves. Ali himself repeatedly declared that:

“. . the murder of 'Uthman was an act of the days of ignorance [al-Jahiliya: the common term for the pre- Islamic period in Arabia]. I am not indifferent to the demand [of 'Uthman's blood], but at present [the murderers] are beyond my power. As soon as I get hold of them, I will not hesitate to punish them.”32

Even Talha and Zubayr agreed on this point and said “the insolent and imprudent people overcame the gentle and sober ones and killed ['Uthman].”33 In vain, however, did Ali try to find a peaceful solution to the problem. The paradoxical position of deploring the murder of 'Uthman while supporting the justified demands of the qurra', and cursing the murderers of the Caliph while surrounding himself with their associates, would have been a serious challenge to even the shrewdest and most cunning politician, and this was even more so in the case of Ali, whose rigid adherence to principles so often prevented him from adopting a practical political policy.

Before long, it became obvious that Ali's attempts to resolve the crisis by peaceful means had failed. Challenges to his authority included even 'A'isha, who refused to return to Medina from the ‘Umra (lesser pilgrimage) and turned back to Mecca when informed of the nomination of Ali. Some time later, Talha and Zubayr saw an opportunity to dissociate themselves from Ali, and asked permission to perform the ‘Umra. Though aware of their plans, Ali granted their request. The two joined 'A'isha in the Holy City and then announced that they had been compelled to swear allegiance to Ali under duress.34 Though both men were ambitious for the caliphate, neither of them had been a real leader of the masses with great popular support at his command; they could never have concerted their efforts had it not been for 'A'isha, who now shifted from the position of an extreme critic of 'Uthman to assume the role of his avenger. By marching to Basra in 36/656, the triumvirate threatened to cut Ali off from the east and compound the problem of a rebellious Syria by creating a similar problem in Iraq. After much hesitation, Ali finally marched to Kufa, where he succeeded in gathering a force strong enough to defeat A'isha and her associates in the battle of Al- Jamal. Talha and Zubayr were slain, and 'A'isha was taken prisoner and sent safely back to Medina.

Having secured his position in Iraq for the moment, Ali then turned to deal with the much more dangerous problem of Mu'awiya, who, as 'Uthman's kinsman, called for vengeance,35 a protest which Ali rejected on the grounds that the sons of 'Uthman were more entitled to this right.36 Mu'awiya realized that if Ali managed to consolidate his authority he would dislodge the former from his position as governor of Syria. The only way to avoid this was to question the validity of Ali's title to the caliphate; given the circumstances in which the new caliph had been installed in office, this was not difficult. Ali's supporters, especially the qurra', were vigorously opposed to any compromise with Mu'awiya, and Malik al-Ashtar advised the Caliph not to enter into correspondence with the governor of Syria. Nevertheless, Ali tried peaceful means in dealing with his adversary; only when this failed and it became obvious that Mu'awiya had resolved to fight did Ali march with his forces to meet the Syrians.

The conflict of Siffin and the resulting arbitration have been thoroughly and critically studied by a number of scholars, and it is not our purpose here to re-cover well trodden ground. It will suffice to note that Ali's position rapidly became critical as the emergence of the Kharijites and the arbitration of Adhruh steadily eroded his strength. While he was preparing for a final struggle against Syria, a Kharijite fanatic, Abd ar-Rahman b. al-Muljam, struck him with a poisoned sword in the mosque of Kufa. The fourth caliph died on 21 Ramadan 40/25 January 661.

This entire period is discussed by Ali in the last part of his speech of Shaqshiqiyya, and his own comments are useful in examining this confused era:,

“In the end, the third of them ['Uthman] stood up shrugging his shoulders arrogantly. and there stood with him the sons of his father, eating up the property of God as the camels eat up the springtide verdure, until what he had twisted became untwisted. His destruction was complete, and his greediness made him fall to the ground. Then all of a sudden I was frightened to see a crowd of people around myself, thick as the hyena's mane, thronging towards me from every direction until [my sons] Hasan and Husayn were mobbed and my two sides were split, gathering around me like a herd of goats.

“But when I took up the government, one group broke its pledge, another rebelled, and some others transgressed, as if they had not heard the words of God, who says: “That is the abode hereafter which we allot to those who do not seek greatness and corruption on the earth, and the end is for those who fear.' (XXVIII, 83) Nay, by God, they have heard these words and comprehend them, but the world is sweet in their eyes and they are pleased by its gaudiness.

“Nay, by Him who has split the seed and created the soul, but for the presence of those who are present and the establishment of the arguments by the existence of the helpers, as also the fact that God has disliked for the knowing ones to watch idly the fullness of the oppressor and the hunger of the oppressed, I would have thrown back its [the caliphate's] rope on its shoulder and made its last drink from the cup of the first one, and you would have found that your world is as distasteful to me as the dripping from the nose of a goat.”37

With this brief summary as a foundation, we will attempt to analyse the causes and consequences of the major events of Ali's short-lived caliphate. It must be remembered that his succession was greatly resisted by some of the Companions of the Prophet and resulted in the first civil war in Islam; but at the same time, his so-called “failures” proved to be epoch making in the history of the development of Shi'ism. The bitterness of the supporters of Ali created by his defeats and disappointments provided a n historical foundation for the development of their sectarian tendencies, and the destruction done to him gave the later Shi'a enough material for the formation of their own discipline within the body of Islam.

An attempt to grasp the situation as a coherent whole reveals the fact that the selection of Ali was at once a triumph for a particular view of succession hitherto frustrated, and a great shock to all those who had successfully adopted a principle of leadership devoid of notions of primacy based on hereditary sanctity after the death of the Prophet. With the succession of Ali, these two rival views came into genuine conflict for the first time and crystallized into definite forms. The former view, soon defeated again, was to find expression in a separatist tendency towards a, so to speak, sectarian organization; the latter re-emerged victoriously and more vigorously, and eventually shaped itself in such a way as to become the centre of the Islamic Umma, or Jama'a.

Ya'qubi records for us those speeches with which Ali was hailed by his enthusiastic supporters, mostly from the Ansar, on the occasion of his installation, and which illustrate those tendencies and sentiments with which he was viewed by this group. For example, Malik b. al-Harith al-Ashtar pledged his allegiance with the declaration that Ali was the wasi alawsiya', the legatee from among the legatees [of the prophets], and the warith 'ilm al-anbiya', heir to the knowledge of the prophets.38 Hodgson doubts whether these terms were really used in reference to Ali at such an early date.39 In the first place, we must bear in mind that Malik b. al- Ashtar was of Yemenite origin. South Arabia was a land of ancient civilization where for a thousand years kings had succeeded one another according to a dynastic principle and had been regarded as having extraordinary qualities. Even if the seventh-century Arabs had no personal experience of kingship, they must have been unconsciously influenced by this continuing tradition.40 In this case, the use of terms like wasi and warith by a man of Yemenite origin occurs as a natural and spontaneous corollary of a deep-seated cultural tradition.

In the second place, there are numerous references in contemporary writings which reflect the same spirit. In praise of. Ali, Abu'l- Aswad ad-Du'ali sings:

“Thou art the noblest of the Quraysh in merit and religion.

I see God arid the future state through my love for Ali.

Ali is the Aaron, Ali is the wasi.”41

Still more informative is the fact that the term warith appears frequently in the Qur'an, especially in connection with the family of 'Imran and Isma'il, and Muhammad uses it as a proof in his efforts to attract the “peoples of the book”.42 It is thus very likely that some of the partisans of Ali could have used the same terminology to express their views.

Moreover, in reading the accounts of the battles of Al-Jamal and Siffin, one encounters a great bulk of war poetry exchanged between combatants of both sides in which wasi and such expressions are repeated by the partisans of Ali. Extensive quotations here would be cumbersome, and it will suffice to refer the reader to Ibn Abi'l-Hadid, who collected the verses describing Ali as the wasi43 from the Kitab al-Jamal of Abu Mikhnaf44 (died 157/774). Another very early work wherein these verses are abundantly quoted is the Kitab Waq'at Siffin by Nasr b. Muzahim (died 212/827), who also frequently quotes Abu Mikhnaf in addition to other early sources.45

Apart from these considerations, we have already seen that there had been a devoted party which from the very beginning had expressed personal enthusiasm for Ali largely based on religious considerations. That this group should express its allegiance in appropriately religious terms is only to be expected. Later generations of Shi'i poets, best represented by Kumayt, Kuthayyir, Sayyid al-Himyari, and Farazdaq, frequently used the terms wasi and the like in reference to Ali, especially when describing the battles of Al- Jamal and Siffin.

The purpose of the preceding discussion has been to demonstrate that there was a party who viewed Ali's accession to the caliphate from an angle quite different from the viewpoint of the rest of the community. His rise to power was a great victory for his party, which held a particular conception regarding the leadership of the community, and thus it raised questions that had not arisen under the three previous caliphs, therefore causing him to face serious opposition from various quarters almost right from the start. The initial resistance came from 'A'isha, Talha and Zubayr, who raised the call for vengeance and offered themselves as the agents for exacting satisfaction for the murder of 'Uthman. But the question to be raised here is whether this was really the reason for their revolt. How could Ali alone be held responsible for the killing when Talha and Zubayr themselves had been equally active in supporting the grievances of the people? Was A'isha not an equal participant in arousing people against 'Uthman?46 For the highly emotional and violent atmosphere in Medina at that time, we can do no more and no less than hold all the dissident groups and critics of the Caliph about equally responsible. In one of his speeches, Ali questions these pretenders, saying:

“By God, they have shown their dislike against me for anything unpleasant and have not appointed an arbitrator between me and themselves; yet they are demanding a right which they had themselves given up and revenge for a blood for which they themselves are responsible. Even if I had a share in it with them, they would still have a share of it; but if they were held responsible for it without me, the blame lies only with them: thus their strongest argument goes only against them. They are still suckling a mother who has already weaned them, and they are reviving an innovation which had been made to die.”47

In the final analysis, it would appear that the vengeance for 'Uthman was made an easy pretext both by the triumvirate and later by Mu'awiya for efforts to check the obvious danger of the rule of the ascetic group in Islam, supported by the lower classes of society and by some of the Ansar of Medina, of whom Ali happened to be the representative. The emergence of these groups was a real threat to the old Meccan aristocracy, which had been suppressed by Muhammad's victory and his concept of society and had been kept under strict control by Abu Bakr and 'Umar. When Uthman, a member of the wealthiest clan of Umayya, came to power, the old aristocratic ideals of his clan and other ruling families of Mecca found an opportunity to re-establish their power and aristocracy. Ironically enough, the impetus given to the ideas of unity and organization by Islam were brought to the service of this group to revitalize itself and re-emerge in power. The revolt of the triumvirate represents Talha and Zubayr's last struggle to protect their interests. 'A'isha served as a symbol behind which they could unify their forces, and it certainly was not difficult to involve her in an attack on Ali. Her dislike for him is said to have been based on several factors, one of which was Ali's advice to Muhammad that he inquire with A'isha's slave girl concerning an incident wherein A'isha's late return after having been left behind on a journey caused people to start talking maliciously about her.48 ‘A'isha's quarrels with Fatima and Ali's questioning of the election of Abu Bakr, ‘A'isha's father, also contributed to the hostility.49 It is therefore clear that in the battle of Al-Jamal the triumvirate was fighting for personal reasons rather than for the blood of 'Uthman, which was only a convenient pretext. Though they failed in their objectives, they made the task of Mu'awiya, the unseating of , Ali and the reassertion of the ideals threatened by his succession, much easier. The fact that the claim of Mu'awiya for the blood of Uthman was only an excuse to enable him to remove Ali from power is further evident from a conversation between Amr b. al-'As and A'isha soon after the battle of Al-Jamal. Amr said to 'A'isha:

“I wish you could have been killed on the day of Jamal, and thereby you would have entered Paradise and we would have used your death as our strongest means for reviling and defaming Ali.”50

The conflict at the battle of Al-Jamal brought about a serious split in the Muslim community. All of our sources reporting on these events use a number of particular designations to express the position adopted henceforth by different groups. These designations are important in that they indicate how the religious outlook, personal loyalties, regional interests, and politico- economic considerations became involved with one another. Those who supported Ali at the battle of Al-Jamal and later at Siffin were at first called the “people of Iraq” (ahl al-'Iraq) as well as the “party of Ali' (shi'at Ali or al-'Alawiya). Their opponents were called shiat 'Uthman, or more commonly al-'Uthmaniya. They included the faction of 'A'isha, Talha, and Zubayr (called the “people of the camel,” or ashab al-jamal) and the Syrians (ahl ash-Sham), who were also known as the shi'at Mu'awiya.

According to the tendency of the epoch, their positions were also described in more religiously oriented terms through the use of the word din, which was used in reference to both Ali and 'Uthman in expressions such as din Ali and din ‘Uthman. Another way of expressing this was to assert that one held the Alawi or 'Uthmani opinion, ra'y al-'Alawiya or ra'y al-'Uthmaniya.51 However, besides these general terms used to describe opposing factions, the more precise titles of Shi'at Ahl al-Bayt and Shi'at Al Muhammad were frequently used from this time onwards by the religiously enthusiastic followers of Ali. Occasionally the nickname at-Turabiya was also used. This title was derived from Ali's kunya Abu Turab, Father of Dust, given to him by Muhammad.52 More revealing is the fact that Ali himself called his opponents by names which indicated their being misled from the true religious path. Those who fought against him at Al-Jamal he referred to as An- Nakithun, “those who break their allegiance”. This is a derivation from the Qur'anic verse which says: “Then anyone who violates his oath (nakatha) does so to the harm of his soul.”53 Ali named his opponents at Siffin Al- Qasitun, “those who act wrongfully”, taken from the Qur'anic verse which reads: “Those who swerve (al-qasitun) are fuel for Hell-fire.”54 Lastly, referring to a tradition of the Prophet, Ali referred to the Kharijttes of Nahrawan as al-Mariqun, “those who missed the truth of religion”.55 Obviously these names became common among Ali's followers to describe their opponents.

Throughout this period, however, the followers of Ali were developing a continuously broadening base of support. Until the battle of Al-Jamal, the Shi'at Ali consisted only of a small personal following who from the very beginning regarded him as the most worthy person for the office of the caliphate to lead the community after the death of the Prophet After the battle of Al-Jamal the term Shi'at Ali came to include all those who had supported Ali against 'A'isha, and from this point onwards the original Shi'a group was confusingly included with other groups and individuals who supported Ali for other than religious reasons. It was in this wider sense that the term Shi'a was used in the document of arbitration at Siffin.56 A few decades later, when the Shi'a started to formulate their official position, some attempts were made to sort out the various groups of Ali's supporters which had been so confusingly mixed up at that earlier stage. The ranks of the Shi'a were divided into four categories: Al-Asfiya, the “sincere friends”; Al- Awliya, the “devoted friends”; Al-Ashab the “companions”; and the Shurtat al- Khamis, the “picked division”.57 To whom the first three terms refer is not quite clear, though various Shi'i sources indicate the group of earlier followers-Miqdad, Salman, Ammar, Hudhayfa, Abu Hamza, Abu Sasan, and Shutayr-as belonging to the Asfiya.

The idea of these classes is certainly of a later date. Nevertheless, we must make some distinction between those followers of Ali who emphasized the religious factor of his succession as the wasi and those who supported his cause mainly on political grounds, especially after he made Kufa his capital. In addition to a large political following, Ali left behind him a zealous personal party which had sworn to him that they would be “friends to those whom he befriended, and enemies of those to whom he was hostile.”58 Insisting that Ali was “in accordance with truth and guidance” ('ala'l-haqq wa'lhuda) and his opponents consequently in error, they maintained that Ali, by the circumstances of his birth, was specially qualified to bear supreme authority in the community. The existence of this devoted band of religious supporters largely explains how Shi'ism managed to survive the multitude of decisive political defeats inflicted on the movement over the years.