Except that it was not. Mu’awiya, withdrawing from the Euphrates, coolly began to proclaim a message of victory identical to that of his rival. Even more threatening to Ali’s position, however, there were many now in his own ranks who likewise refused to accept him as Amir. His opening of negotiations with Mu’awiya, and his patching together of a treaty, was behaviour that smacked, in their opinion, less of an “imam” than of some arrogant and self-serving monarch. A true Believer, so they argued, would have trusted his fate, not to diplomacy, but to ongoing warfare and the will of God. The charge was a crippling one. All very well for the Umayyads to pose as the heirs of the Ghassanid kings; but Ali was a blood relative of Muhammad. Nothing, then, could have been more damaging to his prestige than to be dismissed as merely a latter-day Lakhmid—“the Amir of Hira.”144
As Ali made his way back to Kufa, many of his soldiers seem simply to have melted away. Kharijites, these deserters were called—“those who go out.” What they were decidedly not, however, were deserters from the teachings of the Prophet. Instead, it was Ali whom the Kharijites condemned as the unbeliever, as the man who had strayed from the Straight Path. The fact that he was Muhammad’s nephew only confirmed them in the militancy of their egalitarianism: that the true aristocracy was one of piety, and not of blood. Even a Companion of the Prophet, if he did not pray until he developed marks on his forehead “comparable to the calluses of a camel,”145 if he did not look pale and haggard from regular fasting, if he did not live like a lion by day and a monk by night, ranked, in the opinion of the Kharijites, as no better than an apostate. “Those who reject God after believing in Him,” so the Prophet had warned, “and open their hearts to disbelief, will have the wrath of God upon them, and a grievous punishment awaiting them.”146 Here was a ruling that the Kharijites were more than willing to help enforce. So it was, for instance, that a band of them, meeting an aged Companion of the Prophet outside Basra, were said to have demanded that he renounce his loyalty to Ali; and when the Companion refused, they butchered him over the carcass of a pig, slit open the belly of his pregnant concubine, and murdered her three attendants. Other Kharijites, so it was reported, might “go out with their swords into the markets while people would stand around not realising what was happening; they would shout ‘no judgement except God!’ and plunge their blades into whomever they could reach, and go on killing until they themselves were killed.”147 A militant devotion to the Prophet’s teachings indeed; and fit for that reason, in the opinion of many of their fellow Muhajirun, profoundly to be admired. But not in the opinion of Ali. Abandoning his attempt to bring Mu’awiya to heel, he made it his priority instead to extirpate the Kharijites. In 658, he won a victory over them as crushing as it was to prove pyrrhic: for all he had done, in effect, was to fertilise the soil of Iraq with the blood of their martyrs. Three years later, and there came the inevitable blowback: a Kharijite assassin struck him down while he was praying in Kufa.h The Prophet’s dream of brotherhood, of a shared community of believers, seemed dealt a fatal blow, too.
Into the breach, with great smoothness, stepped Mu’awiya. With Ali gone, no one in Iraq now had the resources to oppose him. Even Hasan, Ali’s eldest son and his obvious heir as imam, was persuaded to retract his claim and retire on a pension to Medina. With him too went his younger brother, Husayn—who as a boy, so it was said, had been a particular favourite of the Prophet, and been dangled lovingly on his knee. True, the removal from Kufa of the two grandsons of Muhammad did not neutralise all opposition to Mu’awiya. The Kharijites, on principle, remained obdurately opposed to Umayyad rule. So too did many Kufans, who preserved a ferocious loyalty to their murdered Amir. Yet Mu’awiya, who had not the slightest intention of basing himself in Kufa, could afford to ignore both the Kharijites and the Shi’a—or “Party”—of Ali. Annoyances they might be—but only in the manner of distantly buzzing wasps. The gaze of Mu’awiya was fixed, not upon a scurvy ragbag of desert Arabs, but upon altogether worthier opponents.
Even though the last hint of resistance from the House of Sasan had been crushed back in 651, with the murder of Yazdegird in that great eastern stronghold of his dynasty, Merv, the Romans, despite all their losses, still stood defiant. Mu’awiya, looking to keep the Muhajirun busy, duly renewed the onslaught against the Christian empire with a vengeance. In 674, he even sponsored a siege of Constantinople itself. In the event, after a blockade of four years, the effort to capture the New Rome had to be abandoned; yet what was striking, perhaps, was not its failure but how close it had come to success. Certainly, there could be no denying that Mu’awiya—in the scope and sweep of his achievements, in the awesome scale of his authority, and in the radiant splendour of his name—was patently a favourite of God.
But which God, precisely? Shrewd and calculating as he was in all his dealings with mortal powers, Mu’awiya seems to have practised a certain opportunism in his dealings with the heavens, too. Although he termed himself “Commander of the Faithful,” in succession to Umar and Uthman, his definition of who actually ranked as members of the “Faithful” was altogether more subtle and ambiguous than theirs had been. Rather than gathering to hail his accession at Medina, the Arabs had assembled in the shadow of the Temple Mount: for Mu’awiya had “refused to go to the seat of Muhammad.”148 Not even Umar, the Amir whose attentions to the sacred rock had seen him hailed by Jews as their “redeemer,” had thought to demonstrate to quite such flamboyant effect the abiding status of Jerusalem as the holiest city in the world. Mu’awiya, however, in providing this reassurance, was concerned principally to woo, not his Jewish but his Christian subjects. That the Arabs, in their original assault upon Palestine, had fought in alliance with Jews was now, to the new “King of the Holy Land,” something of an embarrassment. Both his tax base and his bureaucracy, after all, were composed primarily of Christians. The Jews could hardly compare. So it was, in addition to receiving the submission of the Arabs, that he had made sure to mark his investiture as Commander of the Faithful by going on pilgrimage around Jerusalem in the footsteps of Christ—“and he went up and sat down on Golgotha, and prayed there.”149 Evidently, that the Prophet had declared the crucifixion a fraud bothered Mu’awiya not a bit.
In fact, there is precious little evidence that Mu’awiya paid much attention to the Prophet at all. Nowhere in his inscriptions, nor on his coins, nor in any of the documents preserved from his reign, is there so much as a single mention of Muhammad. Nor, despite the much later tradition that would attribute the compilation of the Prophet’s revelations to Uthman, are there any Qur’ans—or even fragments of Qur’ans—datable to Mu’awiya’s lifetime either. Records of the words spoken by Muhammad—“twigs of the burning bush, aflame with God”150—must surely have been preserved by those who still tended the light of his memory: the Muhajirun of Kufa, the Shi’a of Ali, the Kharijites. But the flame was guttering. Like Mani and Mazdak before him, Muhammad was a prophet whose memory had begun to fade before the encroaching shadow of the years. What value the example of his makeshift desert state, after all, to the ruler of an empire that had swallowed up the world? It was not the Prophet whom Mu’awiya cast as the interpreter of God to man, but himself. “Let the faithful profit by him”151—such was the prayer raised by his servants. Christians too, and Jews, and Samaritans, and Manichaeans: all of them, in Mu’awiya’s opinion, were to be ranked as “the faithful,” and all of them duly joined in the praise. Savagely though Mu’awiya prosecuted his wars against the Romans, yet his subjects, no longer trampled by rival armies, no longer divided by hostile watchtowers, knew only peace at last. Perhaps it is hardly surprising, then, that they seem not to have begrudged the Amir his immodest claim to stand between humanity and God. “Justice flourished in his time, and there was great peace in the regions under his control. He allowed everyone to live as they wanted.”152