Conflict with Talha ﵁, Zubayr ﵁ and Aisha ﵂

Two months after the bayʿah, Talha ﵁ and Zubayr ﵁ requested of ʿAli ﵁ leave to go to Mecca for the ʿumrah. What began as a pilgrimage became, in the desert between Mecca and Basra, an army of six hundred horsemen, with the Mother of the Believers as their symbol.

The request for leave

Talha ibn ʿUbaydillah ﵁ and az-Zubayr ibn al-ʿAwwam ﵁ had not been silent in the first weeks after the bayʿah. Both had placed their hands upon that of ʿAli ﵁ on the Friday in the mosque, and both had expected that ʿAli ﵁ would, after his accession, invest them with administrative responsibility; Talha ﵁ had hoped for the governorship of Basra and Zubayr ﵁ for that of Kufa, or, in another reading, both for one of those provinces. ʿAli ﵁ had not fulfilled that hope for them. He had given Basra to ʿUthman ibn Hunayf ﵁ and Kufa to ʿUmarah ﵁, and he had kept Talha ﵁ and Zubayr ﵁ in Medina, in proximity to his working circle, in a position of counsel without an office of their own.

A second grievance had soon attached itself to this. Both demanded, insistently, that ʿAli ﵁ seize the men who had killed ʿUthman ﵁ and carry out the hadd upon them. ʿAli ﵁ answered that he could not do so in the present state of affairs, because the army at his disposal consisted to a considerable extent of those very men, and that an attempt to seize them at once would inevitably lead to bloody scenes in the streets of Medina without their having been tried by a competent court. He wished, he said, first to fix the bayʿah in all the provinces and only then to bring the matter of the murderers before a judicial decision at a calm moment. Talha ﵁ and Zubayr ﵁ did not accept this explanation, for to them the demand for blood-vengeance for the third khalifah was an obligation that brooked no delay.

In this state of affairs both came to him in the second month of the khilafat of ʿAli ﵁ with a request that sounded innocent in its words:

ʿAli ﵁ listened, and he understood what was spoken and what was left unsaid. He knew that the Mother of the Believers was staying in Mecca, that she had learned of the murder of ʿUthman ﵁ during her hajj, that she had voiced bewilderment at the first report and anger at the second, and that in her anger she had loudly declared her wish that the murderers be punished. He knew that the coming together of Talha ﵁, Zubayr ﵁ and the Mother of the Believers in Mecca could become a political collaboration that could no longer be brought back under his authority in Medina. But he also knew that he had no lawful grounds to keep the two Sahabah ﵃ within Medina against their will, and he let them go. The report that Suyuti ﵀ preserves in summary adds that he asked them in doing so whether they intended to rise against him, and that they both swore by Allah ﷻ that they were plotting nothing of the kind.

Mecca as a gathering point

When Talha ﵁ and Zubayr ﵁ reached Mecca, they found the Mother of the Believers there in a state in which the first anger had passed into a fixed resolve. ʿAʾisha bint Abi Bakr ﵂ had, in the weeks before their arrival, consulted with those of her kin from Banu Taym and with those of the Meccan notables who had not given the bayʿah to ʿAli ﵁. She had decided that the community would not rest as long as the murderers of ʿUthman ﵁ were not punished. She had, moreover, a political reading of the events that was rooted in her personal sense of things, and which lay summed up in a single scene in the report that Suyuti ﵀ preserves through Ibn ʿAsakir ﵀. When she was informed that ʿAli ﵁ had accepted the bayʿah, she spoke:

With the arrival of Talha ﵁ and Zubayr ﵁, the Meccan party gained what it had not until then possessed: two senior Sahabah ﵃ who had given bayʿah in Medina and who now, on the grounds of the demand for blood-vengeance, held in their own conscience that the bayʿah was not binding under the present circumstances. The three sat in counsel, and they resolved upon a political-military undertaking that had no precedent in the history of Islam. They would equip a joint column and advance upon Basra, and there they would replace the governor of ʿAli ﵁, ʿUthman ibn Hunayf ﵁, with an appointment of their own. From there they would call for a general punishment of those who had killed ʿUthman ﵁, and from Basra they would form an army that would force ʿAli ﵁ into a single course of action.

On the road to Basra

Six hundred horsemen set out from Mecca in Jumada al-Akhirah of the year 36. The harshness of the enterprise was not the same for each of them. Talha ﵁ and Zubayr ﵁ rationalised their participation as a restoration of order, and ʿAʾisha ﵂ as the demand of a Mother of the Believers who could not leave the murder of her kinsman in clan and faith unpunished. There were men among the horsemen who plainly sought power, and there were also men who rode in the silent hope that in the desert a negotiator of ʿAli ﵁ would meet them and might turn the whole plan into a peace settlement.

At a halt by a well, in the territory of Banu ʿAmir, the column heard the barking of dogs. It was night. ʿAʾisha ﵂ called out to the guide to ask the name of the well, and the guide answered: it is the well of al-Hawʾab. At hearing that name she shuddered. She called for the column to stop, for she wished to return to Mecca. She asked for water and sat upon her camel until the grey of dawn.

What ʿAʾisha ﵂ recalled in that moment was a word the Messenger ﷺ had spoken to his wives years before. He had said, in a hadith preserved in later sources through various chains, that one of his wives would be barked at by the dogs of al-Hawʾab, and that she would be in a state of public strife. Whoever knew the hadith could not possibly hear the name al-Hawʾab without thinking of it. ʿAʾisha ﵂ was not a woman to take such indications lightly; she sat in her tent and she wept, and she wished to turn back. Talha ﵁ and Zubayr ﵁ came to her, and with them came many others, and they brought her witnesses who, of their own willingness or under pressure, swore that the well was not al-Hawʾab but another that sounded something like it. One of the senior narrators, ʿAbdullah ibn az-Zubayr ﵁, her nephew, brought one man after another to swear about this name. It became, by what the historians later recorded, the first collective oath in Islam that was judged false by those who knew the faces.

ʿAʾisha ﵂ allowed herself, after many hours, to be persuaded to go on. But the hesitation she had voiced on that night would stay with her to her last day, and she would later, in her later years in Medina, return to it in silence.

The arrival before Basra

The column reached Basra in Rabi ath-Thani of the year 36. The city was still under the governorship of ʿUthman ibn Hunayf ﵁. He had come out before the gate, with the senior men of the city, to receive the greeting of the visitors. He knew that the Mother of the Believers rode among the visitors, and he knew that in his office he would raise no weapon against her. But he also knew that his office was to keep Basra for ʿAli ﵁, and that he could not surrender himself without deliberation to a column whose aim left him in uncertainty.

There followed negotiations that dragged on over several days. Talha ﵁ and Zubayr ﵁ concluded a truce with ʿUthman ibn Hunayf ﵁: he would continue to govern Basra, and they would remain in a camp outside the city, until ʿAli ﵁ should arrive in person and the matter be pronounced upon in an assembly. But the truce did not hold. In a nocturnal action, in which a handful of men of the column overpowered the governor’s sentries, ʿUthman ibn Hunayf ﵁ was seized. His beard was cut off, in a gesture that counted in the Arab culture of the century as an indelible insult. He was driven from his office and restored to his freedom, but without rank and without authority. The column occupied the administrative building, and Talha ﵁ and Zubayr ﵁ took the authority over the city into their hands. A number of men from Basra who had taken part in the murder of ʿUthman ﵁ in Medina, and who had now returned to Basra, were seized by the column and killed without judicial procedure. The numbers preserved in later sources vary, but the figure of six hundred dead in this first action is named by several narrators.

The report to Medina

When the tidings of what had happened in Basra reached Medina, ʿAli ﵁ called his council together. He spoke to those of the senior Muhajirun and Ansar still in the city, and he asked them their opinion. There was unanimity in the council that the advance of an armed column under the leadership of two Sahabah ﵃ against a governor appointed by the bayʿah of Medina was an act that could not be passed over in silence. There was also unanimity that it was the duty of the khalifah to turn back this act in its early phase, for were it tolerated, then every governor in every province would feel free to detach himself from the central appointment, and the community would fall apart into clan-based fragments.

But there was no unanimity over the manner in which this was to be done. Some in the council held that ʿAli ﵁ himself should remain and send an army under an appointed commander, so that the caliphate would keep its senior face for those of the provinces who looked toward Medina. Others held that ʿAli ﵁ should ride out in person, because only his presence and his direct negotiation with Talha ﵁ and Zubayr ﵁ offered the chance that no blood would be shed. ʿAli ﵁ chose the second. He was, as he said in a well-known sentence preserved in later sources, unwilling to set his kinsman in a pitched battle against his kinswoman without standing in the field himself to move them toward peace.

The joining of Kufa

The army that ʿAli ﵁ could mobilise from Medina was of modest size. The city had no standing garrison, and its population was not of a military profile. He knew that for a truly operational force he would have to count on Kufa, the great garrison centre that ʿUmar ﵁ had founded and which in the years of the conquests had grown into a military city of many tens of thousands. He sent his own son Hasan ﵁ and Ammar ibn Yasir ﵁ ahead from Medina to Kufa, with a letter to Abu Musa al-Ashʿari ﵁, whom he had left in office, to mobilise the Kufan troops.

Abu Musa ﵁ proved reluctant. He was a man of peace and he delivered a khutbah in the mosque of Kufa in which he counselled the believers to abstain from the fitnah and to remain at home, and he did not carry out the call of ʿAli ﵁. It was Ammar ibn Yasir ﵁, with his moral authority as an old Sahabi ﵁ of the earliest hour, and Hasan ﵁ with his standing as the eldest grandson of the Messenger ﷺ, who moved the people in the mosque of Kufa to a counter-call. Nine thousand Kufans came forward. With this contingent, joined to those whom ʿAli ﵁ had brought from Medina and to the Ansari who joined on the march, he stood after some weeks on the edge of Basra with an army of about twenty thousand horsemen and foot soldiers.

On the threshold of a battle

When ʿAli ﵁ approached Basra with his army, he sent ahead to the column of Talha ﵁ and Zubayr ﵁ Qaʿqaʿ ibn ʿAmr ﵁, a man who had made a name in the battles of Iraq under ʿUmar ﵁ and in whose negotiating skill he trusted. Qaʿqaʿ ﵁ spoke with the Mother of the Believers, with Talha ﵁ and with Zubayr ﵁. He asked them what they desired, and he heard that they desired the punishment of the murderers of ʿUthman ﵁. He answered that ʿAli ﵁ desired this punishment as well, but that he could carry it out only when the state of the community was calm enough to conduct a court of law, and that he asked them to unite with him against the true source of the fitnah, not to raise their hands against one another in a pitched battle.

The three accepted this answer, at first. An evening of counsel followed between the camps, in which ʿAli ﵁ and Zubayr ﵁ met one another in private and the old kinship returned for some hours into their conversation. ʿAli ﵁ recalled to Zubayr ﵁ a saying of the Messenger ﷺ, which he had once uttered in the presence of them all, that Zubayr ﵁ would fight ʿAli ﵁ while wronging him. Zubayr ﵁ remembered the word, his eyes filled, and he declared that he would not fight. He returned to his camp with the intention of withdrawing, and the matter seemed to be coming to a peaceful unravelling.

But in both camps there were men who could not await the outcome. In the camp of the column were men who had seen their kinsmen killed in Basra in the sham trials that had followed the occupation. In the camp of ʿAli ﵁ were men who had themselves helped to kill ʿUthman ﵁ in Medina, and who knew that a truce most likely meant a death sentence for them. Deep in the night, in an action suspected in later sources, on both sides, of deliberate design, a group of unknown men opened fire upon the sentries of the other camp. The one sentry answered, the other sentry answered, and before the sun of the day rose, the truce was broken and two armies stood facing one another in battle order, without either of their commanders having ordered the fight.

The mood in Medina during their departure

When Talha ﵁ and Zubayr ﵁ left Medina for Mecca, the mood in Medina was not unanimous. A considerable part of the senior Sahabah ﵃ who had remained in the city lamented their departure. Saʿd ibn Abi Waqqas ﵁, ʿAbdullah ibn ʿUmar ﵁, Usama ibn Zayd ﵁, Muhammad ibn Maslamah ﵁ and others came to ʿAli ﵁ in his working circle and voiced their concern. They held that the departure of two senior members of the ten in this phase of the caliphate could have political consequences that none of them could foresee at that moment. ʿAli ﵁ answered with the resignation of a man who in his own conscience had no means to hold the two back without setting a precedent of which he would repent in the coming years.

This attitude of ʿAli ﵁ in the first week after their departure was judged in various ways in later sources. Some narrators saw in it a lack of political alertness, while others saw in it the strict conscience of a man who wished to employ no instrument of compulsion that was not warranted in the Sunnah of the Messenger ﷺ. The narration itself, in the summary of Suyuti ﵀, seems rather to align with the second reading.

The letter of ʿAʾisha ﵂ to Umm Salama ﵂

In the weeks in Mecca, before the departure of the column to Basra, ʿAʾisha ﵂ wrote a letter to her fellow Mother of the Believers Umm Salama ﵂, who was staying in Medina. She asked Umm Salama ﵂ to join her in Mecca for what she described as an undertaking that was to avenge the blood of ʿUthman ﵁. Umm Salama ﵂ answered with a letter that is broadly preserved in later sources and that in its content offered a counter-voice to the Meccan party. She declared that the Messenger ﷺ had, in his lifetime, charged his wives to remain in their houses, and that in her own conscience she was not going to violate that charge for a political undertaking whose outcome she could not foresee. She advised ʿAʾisha ﵂ to return to Medina and to hold to the same charge. ʿAʾisha ﵂ received the letter, but she did not follow the advice. It is a fragment often cited in later narrations as proof that the Mother of the Believers had, even before her departure from Mecca, received from her fellow Mother of the Believers a contrary reading of the duty.

The couriers who passed one another in the desert

In the weeks before the arrival of the Meccan column before Basra, a number of couriers rode back and forth in the desert between Mecca and Basra with letters from both sides. ʿAli ﵁ sought, through couriers, to summon the senior leaders in Basra, who had risen as notables of the city in the years under ʿUthman ﵁, to loyalty to his governor ʿUthman ibn Hunayf ﵁. The Meccan column sent couriers with similar messages to the same men, with the contrary call to loyalty to those who marched in the name of avenging the third khalifah. Two of these couriers met, according to one report, by chance at a halt at the same well in the Najd, and they sat together for some hours before each rode on in the opposite direction, in a fragment cited in later sources as a symbol of the paradox of a community that already, in its inner correspondence, spoke in two opposing lines.

The mediation of Umm Salama ﵂

In the weeks after the departure of ʿAʾisha ﵂, Talha ﵁ and Zubayr ﵁ from Mecca in the direction of Basra, Umm Salama ﵂ wrote from Medina a second letter to her fellow Mother of the Believers, this time in a tone in which she set out the consequences of the Meccan decision in clear terms. She warned ʿAʾisha ﵂ that her presence in a military column, however sincere her motivation might be, would set a precedent in the community whose consequences could no longer be undone. She adduced the narration that the Messenger ﷺ had charged his wives to remain in their houses, and she pointed out that this charge was in its essence no light recommendation but an urgent admonition. The letter reached ʿAʾisha ﵂ in the camp of the column on the way to Basra. She read it and she wrote no reply. It is a fragment preserved in later sources as proof that the Mother of the Believers had, in the execution of the Meccan plan, received in her own conscience the warning of her fellow Mother and had ignored it, and that her later regret after the Battle of the Camel had called this warning to mind.

The seclusion of Saʿd ibn Abi Waqqas ﵁

In the weeks before the mobilisation to Basra, Saʿd ibn Abi Waqqas ﵁, one of the six members of the Shura of ʿUmar ﵁ and one of the ten to whom the Messenger ﷺ had promised paradise, withdrew from all political action. He declared in a conversation with one who asked him his position that in his own conscience he did not wish to raise a weapon against a Muslim, and that in a time of fitnah he would remain in his own house. He refused to confirm the bayʿah to ʿAli ﵁, but he also refused to go with Talha ﵁ and Zubayr ﵁, or to attach himself in any way to Muʿawiya ﵁. His seclusion was noted in Medina and broadly preserved in later sources. ʿAli ﵁ left him undisturbed in his seclusion; he sent no couriers to compel him to take part and he spoke no ill of him in his khutbahs. Saʿd ﵁ would remain in this seclusion until his death in the year 55, in Medina, having outlived the whole first fitnah without having drawn a sword in any battle whatsoever.

Sources

• Jalal ad-Din as-Suyuti ﵀, Tarikh al-Khulafa (trans. Abdassamad Clarke, Ta-Ha Publishers, 3rd ed. 1995), pp. 184–186 (request for leave, the Meccan party, advance on Basra), p. 185 (well of al-Hawʾab and the oath of her companions), p. 186 (occupation of Basra and the action against ʿUthman ibn Hunayf ﵁), p. 186 (mobilisation of Kufa via Hasan ﵁ and Ammar ﵁), p. 187 (conversation between ʿAli ﵁ and Zubayr ﵁ on the eve of the battle).