Siege of the house of ʿUthman ﵁ (Dhul-Hijjah 35 AH)

From political conflict to a besieged house

In the preceding article we followed the build-up of the fitna as az-Zuhri ﵀ and Saʿid ibn al-Musayyab ﵀ had summarised it for Suyuti ﵀. We followed the grievances of Banu Hudhayl and Banu Zuhrah on account of Ibn Masʿud ﵁, of Banu Ghifar on account of Abu Dharr ﵁, of Banu Makhzum on account of ʿAmmar ibn Yasir ﵁, and we followed the seven hundred Egyptians who encamped in the Masjid an-Nabawi to seek redress against ʿAbdullah ibn Saʿd ibn Abi Sarh ﵁. We followed the sharp address of Talha ibn ʿUbaydullah ﵁ from the minbar, the voice of ʿAʾishah ﵂ who called the Caliph to justice, and the mediation of ʿAli ibn Abi Talib ﵁ who had Muhammad ibn Abi Bakr appointed as the new governor of Egypt. We followed the black slave with the broken flask on the road to Egypt, and we read with the delegation the letter that lay hidden within it: an instruction to murder, written by the hand of Marwan ibn al-Hakam ﵁, sealed with the seal of ʿUthman ﵁. We followed the oath of the Caliph that he had no knowledge of the letter and his refusal to hand Marwan ﵁ over to the crowd.

In this article we follow what came to pass thereafter. Saʿid ibn al-Musayyab ﵀ sums up the transition in a single sentence that stands in the work of Suyuti ﵀ as a turning point: “The people besieged ʿUthman ﵁ in the year thirty-five, and Muhammad ibn Abi Bakr incited Banu Taym and others against him.” With that sentence the history leaves the phase of political discord and enters the phase of the siege. We follow it in its days, in its doors, in its dialogues. We follow ʿAli ﵁ who stationed his sons al-Hasan ﵁ and al-Husayn ﵁ at the door with their swords, and we follow the arrows that rained upon the door until al-Hasan ﵁ was drenched in blood and Marwan ﵁ was struck within the house by a shaft. We follow the water cut off and the three water-skins that ʿAli ﵁ had sent, the three ways out that al-Mughirah ibn Shuʿbah ﵁ proposed to the Caliph and the three refusals with which ʿUthman ﵁ turned them all down. We follow the ten virtues he enumerated to the crowd from the upper storey, and the men who climbed over the wall through a neighbour’s garden because they could no longer approach the gate. And we stop, in this article, at the threshold of the moment when the siege passed into an assassination; for what happened in the house itself, and for who ʿUthman ﵁ was in the full life that had preceded this siege, a second article is reserved.

The encirclement

When Muhammad ibn Abi Bakr had read the letter aloud to Talha ﵁, az-Zubayr ﵁, ʿAli ﵁, Saʿd ﵁ and the remaining Companions ﵃ who were present in Medina, and when the story of the black slave had been conveyed to them word for word, not one of the inhabitants of Medina was calm any longer. Whoever was already angry on account of Ibn Masʿud ﵁, of Abu Dharr ﵁, of ʿAmmar ﵁, found in the letter the confirmation that the Caliph had no longer merely committed injustice through his governors but had personally had an order to murder set down in writing. The Companions ﵃ of the Prophet ﷺ rose and withdrew into their houses, and not one of them, Suyuti ﵀ writes, was calm enough to read the letter coldly.

The Egyptians, and with them the Kufans and the Basrans who in those same days had lodged their own governor-complaints in Medina, kept to their houses no longer. They surrounded the house of ʿUthman ﵁, they posted watches at every door, and they prevented anyone from going in or out. It is the sentence of Suyuti ﵀ himself, short and without embellishment: “The people besieged ʿUthman ﵁ in the year thirty-five, and Muhammad ibn Abi Bakr incited Banu Taym and others against him.”

What that siege meant in its first form was not immediately an attempt on the life of the Caliph. It was a political pressure, exerted by a crowd that had settled at his gate and that by its presence alone made a demand. The demand was simple: to hand Marwan ﵁ over. If Marwan ﵁ had written the letter, he had to be given into the hands of the community for interrogation; if he had written it at the command of ʿUthman ﵁, the Caliph had either to relinquish his office or to continue holding it under the conditions that the community now imposed on him. For the besiegers the matter was juridically clear; for ʿUthman ﵁ it was an impossible choice between betraying a kinsman and bowing to a means of pressure.

The refusal to hand Marwan ﵁ over

ʿUthman ﵁ refused, as was already noted in the preceding article, to hand Marwan ﵁ over. Suyuti ﵀ repeats the reason why: he feared that Marwan ﵁ would be killed by the crowd without due process. For the Caliph his refusal was no injustice but protection of a relative who had not yet been tried, while for the community it was the proof that he was not willing to subject his family to the procedure that he would indeed have followed for others. Between those two positions there was no bridging, and Marwan ﵁ remained in the house of the Caliph.

A strange situation arose in the house thereby, for the Caliph was at once host and prisoner. His door was guarded from outside by the besiegers and from within by his own relatives and servants who did not wish to let him go. Through the halls of the house moved Marwan ﵁ and the other Banu Umayya who had formed around the Caliph, all fully aware that if the gate fell, not only ʿUthman ﵁ but they too would fall into the hands of the crowd. Naʾila bint al-Furafisa ﵂, the wife of the Caliph, shared the days with her husband and served him in the household matters.

The three ways out of al-Mughirah ibn Shuʿbah ﵁

In the first days of the siege al-Mughirah ibn Shuʿbah ﵁ came to the Caliph. He was not, Suyuti ﵀ writes, in his presence for the first time: he was the former governor of Kufa, a man who had been converted in the first years of the Hijra and who mastered the political art of the possible better than most of his contemporaries. He addressed ʿUthman ﵁ with the kind of openness that only a politician can use with a politician, and he laid three ways open before him. The conversation is transmitted by Suyuti ﵀ on page one hundred and seventy-four on the authority of Ahmad ﵀:

Three political ways out, each sensible in its own logic. The first made use of the fact that ʿUthman ﵁ had in the house a number of armed men and that among his protectors mawlas of Banu Hashim and Banu Umayya had joined, so that a sally outward would have been an ordinary battle in which numerically and juridically the right lay with the Caliph. The second was the way out to Mecca, where the sacred ground forbade the shedding of blood and the Egyptians could not carry out their murder without cursing themselves. The third was the way out to Sham, to the loyal province where Muʿawiyah ﵁ sat firmly in the saddle and where any army that marched against the Caliph would run up against the walls of Damascus.

The Caliph refused all three ways out, and his refusals, transmitted word for word, are the finest statement he ever made about his own conscience:

In a single brief statement the Caliph set out his principles. He did not wish to be the first Caliph to let his own Ummah bleed in order to save his office, he did not wish to end up in Mecca as the prophesied man whose fitna took upon itself half the punishment of the world, and he did not wish to leave the city of the Hijra, the city in which the Messenger ﷺ was buried, the city in which he himself had been confirmed in his office. He chose the siege over the shedding of blood, the prophetic covenant over the provincial flight, the neighbourhood of the Messenger ﷺ over the loyal armies of Sham.

The address from the upper storey

In those same days, and possibly more than once, ʿUthman ﵁ climbed to the upper storey of his house and from there addressed the people who surrounded his gate. Of such addresses Suyuti ﵀ has preserved two examples. The one was the appeal to the veterans of Badr who were still among the crowd or stood near it, and in it he invoked two specific deeds of his younger years whose witnesses he asked to make themselves known. The text stands on page one hundred and sixty-two and is taken up by Suyuti ﵀ on the authority of Abu ʿAbd ar-Rahman as-Sulami ﵀, on the authority of al-Bukhari ﵀:

Those present confirmed what he said, and not one of the veterans of Badr who heard it could deny the history. The Army of Tabuk, the jaysh al-ʿusra whose shortfall threatened in the ninth year of the Hijra, had been equipped by ʿUthman ﵁ when he donated three hundred camels with their saddles and blankets, as is repeated in a later passage of Suyuti ﵀. The well of Rumah, the only freshwater source in Medina that in the first years of the Hijra was in the hands of a Jew who rented it out at high prices, had been bought by ʿUthman ﵁ from his own means and given as waqf to the Muslims. For both deeds the Garden had been promised to him by the Prophet ﷺ personally, and the witnesses among the veterans of Badr were now present in his encirclement to confirm it.

In another passage, on page one hundred and seventy-four, ʿUthman ﵁ gave a still more extensive enumeration of his merits. Abu Thawr al-Fahmi ﵁ relates:

Ten virtues, enumerated from the upper storey to a crowd that surrounded his door. It was not an address to move the crowd to surrender, but the reckoning that a man renders before his Lord ﷻ on the threshold of what he suspected would be his death. The fourth-of-four in Islam: after Abu Bakr ﵁, ʿAli ﵁ and Zayd ibn Harithah ﵁ he was, according to Ibn Ishaq ﵀, the first. The Army of Hardship: his three hundred camels. The two daughters of the Messenger ﷺ: Ruqayya ﵂ in the years before Badr, Umm Kulthum ﵂ in the ninth year of the Hijra. The weekly freeing of a slave: a habit of ʿUthman ﵁ without known parallel among the Companions ﵃. The memorisation of the Qur’an in the time of the Prophet ﷺ: a merit that in later years qualified him to commission the Mushaf project.

The Prophet ﷺ had foretold it

What gave ʿUthman ﵁ an unshakeable calm during the siege was not only the certainty of his own conscience but also the awareness that the Prophet ﷺ had personally foretold him this trial. Aisha ﵂ transmits, according to at-Tirmidhi ﵀ and al-Hakim ﵀, that the Prophet ﷺ said to ʿUthman ﵁:

The garment was the Caliphate, the stripping was the deposition that the crowd now asked of him, and the taking off was the abdication that al-Mughirah ﵁ had proposed to him as an alternative. The Prophet’s ﷺ instruction was: do not take it off, remain in the office, even if it costs your life. ʿUthman ﵁ recalled the command in the days of his siege and knew that he was not permitted to leave the office because it was Allah ﷻ Himself who, through His Messenger ﷺ, had disposed concerning his succession.

In another transmission, captured by at-Tirmidhi ﵀, ʿUthman ﵁ spoke on the Day of the House, that is the day of his siege, the words that most sharply sum up his steadfastness:

The covenant, the pact, the agreement that the Messenger ﷺ had personally made with his son-in-law, that in the fitna which would descend upon his Caliphate he would not yield. ʿUthman ﵁ was not a man who lost his hold in the twilight of the siege; he was a man who in the twilight of the siege recalled the instruction of his Messenger ﷺ and acted upon it. What the crowd took for resistance and what al-Mughirah ﵁ took for a lack of political strength was in reality the obedience of a Companion ﵁ to a promise that he had made in his young years and that he did not wish to break in his old age.

The water cut off

As the siege continued, the crowd tightened its measures, and what had begun with an encirclement became over the course of the days a blockade that withheld even the necessary. Suyuti ﵀ transmits it in a passage that ʿAli ﵁ heard and on the basis of which he himself acted: “The people kept besieging ʿUthman ﵁ and they prevented the water from reaching him. He looked out over the people and said: ‘Is ʿAli ﵁ among you?’ They said: ‘No.’ He said: ‘Is Saʿd ﵁ among you?’ They said: ‘No.’ He was silent and then said: ‘Will no one reach ʿAli ﵁ and ask him to bring us drinking water?’ That reached ʿAli ﵁.”

The scene deserves a moment’s pause. The Caliph of the Messenger of Allah ﷺ, in his own house in Medina, in the neighbourhood of the grave of the Prophet ﷺ, can obtain no more water because his gate is closed from outside and his supply is exhausted. He climbs upward, he looks out over the crowd, he asks not for release but for water, and he names not the Egyptians but two names of his Companions ﵃, two of the six from the Shura of ʿUmar ﵁ in whose nearness he seeks the assurance that he has not been left alone. The crowd says that they are not there, and he asks for help.

The message reached ʿAli ﵁, and he sent three water-skins full of water in the direction of the house. But even the bringing of those skins was not without violence, for they almost did not reach him. Suyuti ﵀ records: “A number of the freedmen of Banu Hashim and Banu Umayya were wounded in the course of the water reaching him.” Three water-skins, and mawlas who took wounds to get them through, show how tense the position between the guards of the door and the guards of the Caliph had become, and how narrow the margin within which ʿAli ﵁ could intervene without himself being held to account for the siege.

The words of ʿAli ﵁: “Marwan ﵁ from him, but not his death”

In those same days the report reached ʿAli ﵁ that the intent had become to kill ʿUthman ﵁. What until then had been a political pressure to extract Marwan ﵁ had shifted, in the minds of the most embittered ringleaders, into a demand that the Caliph himself disappear from office, and among some into the demand that he also disappear from life. ʿAli ﵁ responded to that report with words that drew the dividing line he would thereafter never relinquish:

Three sentences, sharp as a sword-stroke. The demand was lawful, for the matter of Marwan ﵁ had to be subjected to a procedure, and if it were proven that he had written the letter on his own authority using the seal of the Caliph, he would have to be punished according to the rules of the shariʿa. But to kill the Caliph, that was no procedure, that was rebellion. ʿAli ﵁ rejected it and thereby drew the line that from now on he would actively guard.

Al-Hasan ﵁ and al-Husayn ﵁ at the door

Immediately thereafter ʿAli ﵁ gave his two sons a command that they obeyed without asking questions. Suyuti ﵀ transmits it in the same passage: “He said to al-Hasan ﵁ and al-Husayn ﵁: ‘Go with your two swords and stand at the door of ʿUthman ﵁ and let no one come to him.’”

The two grandsons of the Prophet ﷺ, both in the bloom of their youth, took their swords and posted themselves at the door of the house of ʿUthman ﵁. Their presence was not only military, it was symbolic. Whoever would have the courage to attempt to force a passage by violence at a door guarded by the two grandsons of the Messenger ﷺ would thereby attack not only the Caliph but the prophetic family itself. For most of the besiegers that was a line they did not wish to cross, and their presence was the first strong barrier the siege still knew in its final phase.

Their presence was not the only one. Az-Zubayr ibn al-ʿAwwam ﵁ sent his son ʿAbdullah ibn az-Zubayr ﵁, Talha ibn ʿUbaydullah ﵁ sent his son Muhammad ibn Talha ﵁, and a number of other Companions ﵃ of the Prophet ﷺ sent their sons to stand at the door, to prevent the crowd from reaching ʿUthman ﵁, and to support the demand for the surrender of Marwan ﵁. At the door of the Caliph there gathered thereby a guard of sons of the most authoritative Companions ﵃ of the Prophet ﷺ: the son of Fatima ﵂, the sons of two of the ten to whom the Garden was promised, and the sons of other veterans of Badr. They stood, in the words of Suyuti ﵀, with their swords, and they stood to let no one reach the Caliph.

The arrows on the door

What the crowd could no longer exact by face-to-face force against the guard of the sons, its more enraged ringleaders sought to attain by other means. Suyuti ﵀ relates on page one hundred and seventy-two what happened when the besiegers saw the composition of the guard: “When the people saw that, they shot arrows against the door of ʿUthman ﵁ until al-Hasan ibn ʿAli ﵁ was drenched in blood at his door. An arrow struck Marwan ﵁ while he was in the house. Muhammad ibn Talha ﵁ was smeared with blood, and Qanbar, the mawla of ʿAli ﵁, was wounded in the head.”

Blood at the door of the Caliph of the Messenger of Allah ﷺ: the blood of the grandson of the Prophet ﷺ, the blood of a Companion ﵁, the blood of a mawla of the cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet ﷺ. In the masjid in which the Messenger ﷺ had led his last prayer, and in its immediate vicinity, for the first time in the history of the Caliphate arrows fell upon houses of the prophetic family. What the siege in its first days had known of political rhetoric broke, in this skirmish, into a violence that until then had been unthinkable in Medina.

Marwan ﵁ in the house had been struck. He survived the arrow, but the wound was heavy enough to put him out of the fight. For the besiegers that was an occasion to cry out that the cause for which they had come had been accomplished, but for the most enraged among them Marwan’s wound was no longer enough; they had, over the course of the days, fixed themselves in the demand that the Caliph too should be taken away.

The resolve of the delegation

In the twilight of what will not be further followed in this article, a decision was taken by Muhammad ibn Abi Bakr that marked a break between what the siege had been until then and what it would become. Suyuti ﵀ transmits his own words, spoken to two men whom he had taken into his confidence:

It is the first time in the whole account that the words for the killing of the Caliph are uttered by one of the leaders. Until then it had been a political pressure that had passed into a siege and thereafter into arrows on the door; now it became an assassination plan that had to bypass the guard of al-Hasan ﵁ and the sons of the Companions ﵃ by entering the house along the side of a neighbour. What was not possible under the watch of the prophetic door would be done under the silence of a back garden.

At this threshold we let the story stand in this article. What followed at this threshold, and who ʿUthman ﵁ was in the full life that had preceded this threshold, will be followed in the next article. There we shall see him read the Book of Allah ﷻ in his lap in his last moments, there we shall see Naʾila ﵂ have her fingers cut off in an attempt to turn aside the sword that comes toward her husband, there we shall see the blood of the third Caliph fall upon the pages of the Mushaf that he himself had had compiled for the Ummah, and there we shall pause at the man whose body lay unburied for three nights before a handful of men could carry him in the darkness between the salah of Maghrib and the salah of ʿIsha to Hash Kawkab on al-Baqiʿ, where he was the first to be laid in that part of the cemetery.

The foretelling of the martyrdom

What was borne in silence by ʿUthman ﵁ in these days was not only the awareness that he had to remain in his office because the Prophet ﷺ had charged him with it. It was also the awareness that in the fitna which surrounded him he was going to meet his death. At-Tirmidhi ﵀ transmits on the authority of Ibn ʿUmar ﵁ that the Messenger of Allah ﷺ had spoken of a fitna and had said about it: “This one will be killed unjustly in it,” meaning ʿUthman ﵁. At-Tirmidhi ﵀, al-Hakim ﵀ and Ibn Maja ﵀ transmit from Murra ibn Kaʿb ﵁: “I heard the Prophet ﷺ mention a trial that he thought was near. A man passed by, wrapped in his garment, and he ﷺ said: ‘This man will be upon the guidance on that day.’ I rose and went to him, and it was ʿUthman ibn ʿAffan ﵁. I turned back to him ﷺ and said: ‘This one?’ He said: ‘Yes.’”

Zayd ibn Thabit ﵁ transmitted: “I heard the Prophet ﷺ say: ʿUthman ﵁ passed by me while one of the angels ﵇ was with me, and he said: ‘A martyr whose people will kill him. We are in awe for him.’” Three different chains, all gathered by Suyuti ﵀, confirm the same thing: ʿUthman’s martyrdom in his own house had been foretold by the Prophet ﷺ himself, and the angels ﵇ knew of it before history knew it. What the besiegers supposed they were setting in motion was, in the knowledge of heaven, already written.

The last sign from the dream

In the days of the siege, as is transmitted by at-Tirmidhi ﵀ on the authority of ʿUthman ﵁ himself, the Caliph recalled his pact with the Messenger ﷺ in the exact words that the Prophet ﷺ had given him on the Day of the House, that is the day of his siege:

With this sentence in his heart he continued to perform his salah, to recite his Mushaf from memory, and to keep his wife Naʾila ﵂ at his side. He knew that the fitna stretched about his gate would reach its end not through his flight and not through his attack, but through his patience, and what was written in heaven was not given to his hands to alter.

The wounds at the gate reconsidered

Suyuti ﵀ takes one more moment to emphasise how grave the skirmish at the door had become in its conclusion. Al-Hasan ibn ʿAli ﵁, the son of Fatima ﵂ and the grandson of the Prophet ﷺ, was drenched in blood, Marwan ﵁ was struck within the house by an arrow, Muhammad ibn Talha ﵁ was smeared with blood, and Qanbar, the mawla of ʿAli ﵁, was wounded in the head. Four men at the gate of the Caliph were wounded in a single skirmish, and among them was the grandson of the Messenger ﷺ. What the skirmish had become was no longer a political pressure but a fight of directed violence, and the wounds were grave enough to raise an alarm in the houses of Banu Hashim.

It was this wound to the face of al-Hasan ﵁ that made Muhammad ibn Abi Bakr resolve to carry out his plan for the wall. He feared that if Banu Hashim saw the blood of the grandson of the Prophet ﷺ, they would march out armed and drive away the whole crowd from around the house. It is an observation revealing of the psychology of the siege: the leaders knew that their position depended on the absence of Banu Hashim from the field, and as soon as the prophetic clan should personally intervene to defend its son, the whole occupation of the house would be dismantled. The moment before that intervention was the moment at which the deed had to be carried out.

ʿAbdullah ibn Salam ﵁ warns

At a moment that in the transmission of Suyuti ﵀ is not precisely dated but that fell during the siege, ʿAbdullah ibn Salam ﵁, the former rabbi who had been converted to Islam in Medina and whose knowledge of the religions of the Book the Prophet ﷺ had honoured, came to the besiegers and addressed them. Suyuti ﵀ transmits his words at full length:

A warning from one who knew the religions of the Book from within and who knew what consequences the killing of a prophetic successor had had in the history of the communities. Thirty-five thousand would be killed for his sake, and it was a number that in the years after his death would be borne out in the Battle of the Camel, in the Battle of Siffin, in the struggle for the Caliphate between ʿAli ﵁ and Muʿawiyah ﵁, and in the many subsequent years of bloodshed in which the Ummah would be torn apart over the inheritance of the office of its third Caliph.

The warning was cast to the wind by the most enraged besiegers. What ʿAbdullah ibn Salam ﵁ had foretold them was not clear enough to them to turn them from their intent, and in the hour in which Muhammad ibn Abi Bakr charged his two men to enter the house along the wall, the voice of ʿAbdullah ﵁ had died away from the conversations.

The legacy of the siege

Before we close this article, one observation must be made that Suyuti ﵀ himself takes up on page one hundred and seventy-seven and that gives the last word on the nature of the siege. ʿAbd ar-Rahman ibn Mahdi ﵀ transmits: “There were two qualities that ʿUthman ﵁ had that neither Abu Bakr ﵁ nor ʿUmar ﵁ had: his self-restraint until he was killed, and his uniting of the people upon a single Mushaf.”

Two qualities, summed up in a single sentence by a later scholar. The uniting of the Ummah upon one Mushaf we had already followed in an earlier article, in the work of Zayd ibn Thabit ﵁ and the delegation of Suhayl ibn ʿAmr ﵁, ʿAbdullah ibn az-Zubayr ﵁ and ʿAbd ar-Rahman ibn al-Harith ﵁ who had collected the Qur’an in the dialect of Quraysh and had burned the other copies. The self-restraint to the point of being killed is what was told in this article: twelve days, or in some transmissions fifty days of siege, in which the Caliph raised no weapon against his besiegers, in which he did not cease to perform his salah, in which he committed no betrayal of Marwan ﵁ and no betrayal of the Messenger ﷺ whose promise he kept in his heart.

Az-Zuhri ﵀, whose summary we followed in the preceding article, closed his verdict with the acknowledgment that this was ʿUthman’s ijtihad. And Saʿid ibn al-Musayyab ﵀, in his answer to az-Zuhri’s ﵀ question, drew the threefold dividing line: “ʿUthman ﵁ was killed unjustly. Whoever killed him did wrong, and whoever did not help him is free of blame.” The Caliph who was besieged in this article was not a man who held his office unlawfully; he was a man whose office was surrounded by a fitna and who in that fitna remained faithful to two things: to the covenant that the Prophet ﷺ had made with him, and to the neighbourhood of the Messenger ﷺ that he did not wish to leave.

What follows in the next article is therefore not a continuation of the political history but the conclusion of a life and the summary of a life’s course. We shall accompany ʿUthman ﵁ to his grave, and we shall come to know the man who rests in this grave in his full virtues: who he was in his youth, what he meant in his maturity, the two daughters of the Prophet ﷺ to whom he was married, the Army of Hardship that he equipped, the well of Rumah that he bought, the Mushaf that he united, and the composed modesty with which in his last moment he would receive the sword that came toward his throat.