The Battle of the Camel

On a day in Jumada al-Akhirah of the year 36, two armies of Muslims stood facing one another outside the gates of Basra. The centre of the one camp was a red camel with an armoured litter upon its back, and in that litter sat the Mother of the Believers. The battle that would be named after this animal would remain, deep into the centuries, the emblem of the first fitnah.

The breaking of the truce

The sentry who opened fire in the night had received no command. In both camps, after the conversation of ʿAli ﵁ and Zubayr ﵁, the tone had been one of peaceful accord, yet in both camps there were also men whose personal interest turned against the peace. In the camp of Basra were senior Basrans whose kinsmen had been killed in the sham trials that had followed the occupation, and they desired retaliation. In the camp of ʿAli ﵁ were men, among them ʿAbdullah ibn Sabaʾ and his followers and certain Egyptians who had helped to kill ʿUthman ﵁ in Medina, and they knew that a peaceful agreement between the two commanders would most likely hand them over to a court before which they could expect the death penalty. In the night, before the grey of dawn, a handful of men from this latter group opened fire upon the sentries of the column of Talha ﵁ and Zubayr ﵁. The sentries answered, the volleys of arrows passed back and forth, and by the rising of the sun each camp was convinced that the other had broken the truce, so that both commanders had to set their men in battle order to prevent further dead among their own ranks.

ʿAli ﵁ rode, in a final attempt, along the ranks. He called to his men that they were not to act offensively, that they were to loose no arrow except in answer to an arrow from the other side, that they were to finish off no wounded man and pursue no one who fled. He called that whoever cast away his weapon was to be spared, and that whoever hid in his house was not to be hunted down. He spoke the old formula that had been uttered in the battles against Mecca under the Messenger ﷺ, that he had not wished for the fight and that he implored of Allah ﷻ the averting of this blood.

The riding away of Zubayr ﵁

When the battle order was formed and the first arrows had been loosed, Zubayr ibn al-ʿAwwam ﵁ rode away from the camp of the column. He held his horse at a distance from the battlefield, he turned his back to the fight, and he began to follow the road northward. After the conversation of the night before with ʿAli ﵁ he had decided that he would raise no weapon against his kinsman, and what he wished was to withdraw to Medina and to leave the further fate of the battle to those who had begun it.

He was followed by a group of men who had not pursued him with good intent. ʿAmr ibn Jurmuz, a man of the tribe of Tamim, came upon him in the afternoon in a valley called Wadi as-Sibaʿ. Zubayr ﵁ had dismounted from his horse to pray. Ibn Jurmuz waited until he was in tashahhud, and then killed him with a stroke of the sword. He took the horse and the sword of Zubayr ﵁, and he rode to the camp of ʿAli ﵁ in the expectation that he would receive a considerable reward for this deed, for he knew that ʿAli ﵁ had been the man in the opposing party. ʿAli ﵁ received him in his tent, recognised the sword, and spoke in the words that Suyuti ﵀ takes up somewhere in his summary:

Ibn Jurmuz slunk away, and his name was preserved in the tradition as a warning to every man who imagines that the death of a Sahabi ﵁ of the ten is a political currency.

The death of Talha ﵁

Talha ibn ʿUbaydillah ﵁, who stood in the battle order of the column among the men of Quraysh, held his position. The fighting had by now begun in the centre, and the arrows flew in both directions. In the tumult Marwan ibn al-Hakam, who was in the camp of the column under the cover of an ally but who in his own conscience still suspected Talha ﵁ of complicity in the murder of ʿUthman ﵁, sent an arrow from his bow. The arrow struck Talha ﵁ in the calf, and a later narration relates that the wound pierced an artery and could no longer be staunched. A man carried Talha ﵁ away from the battlefield and brought him into the house of a Basran, where he lost consciousness before the evening prayer and died. The men who had received him in that house buried him outside Basra in a humble grave. Marwan, in the narration that later recorded the event, afterwards spoke with a grim satisfaction that he had at any rate accomplished the blood-vengeance for ʿUthman ﵁ upon one of the accomplices.

In these two deaths, of Zubayr ﵁ and Talha ﵁, the battle had its tragic heart. Two men of the ten, two men who had given ʿAli ﵁ the bayʿah in the mosque of Medina, two men who had fought around the Messenger ﷺ at Uhud like a shield, fell on a single day against one another without either of them having ordered the battle, and without either of them being killed by ʿAli ﵁ himself or by anyone of his innermost circle.

The camel

The centre of the camp of the column was, from the beginning to the end of the battle, the red camel with the armoured litter in which the Mother of the Believers sat. As long as the camel stood upright, its presence served the men of the column as their standard. Who was the commander, who held command, who shifted the battle order: all these things were subordinate to the one reality that the Mother of the Believers remained in their midst. Whoever advanced against the camel advanced against her.

By the end of the afternoon the fighting had been going on so long that the battlefield lay strewn with dead from both camps. The men of ʿAli ﵁ had at last understood that as long as the camel stood, the camp of the column would not give way, and that the only way to end the battle was to bring the camel down. A succession of assaults upon the leg-guards of the animal was begun. Seventy-three hands, by the count preserved in later sources, took hold in turn of the camel’s rein and were one after another struck off by the attackers. Only when ʿAli ﵁ gave the command in person to cut the hamstrings of the animal, and those of his men who were nearest carried out this command with effort, did the camel fall upon its flank, and with it fell the litter with the Mother of the Believers. She was not wounded, for the litter was heavily armoured and broke her fall. Men of ʿAli ﵁ hastened to guard her and to bring her out of the tumult to a place of safety. With the falling of the camel, the camp of the column fell.

What ʿAli ﵁ did afterwards

The first thing ʿAli ﵁ did after the battle was to treat the Mother of the Believers with the highest conceivable honour. He had her tent set up again in a quiet place outside Basra. He sent his son Hasan ﵁ and Muhammad ibn Abi Bakr ﵁, the brother of ʿAisha ﵂ and the stepson who had grown up in the house of ʿAli ﵁, for his mother Asma bint ʿUmays ﵂ had been married first to Jaʿfar ibn Abi Talib ﵁, after his martyrdom to Abu Bakr ﵁, and after his death to ʿAli ﵁ himself, to visit her, to look to her wounds and her exhaustion, and to bring her the message that he would have her escorted back to Medina under an escort worthy of her rank as Mother of the Believers. He had her cared for by the women of Basra, and he forbade any male soldier to approach her tent at a distance shorter than a spear’s throw. On the third day he visited her in person. The Mother of the Believers received him in her tent with the respect due to the office of the khalifah, and she spoke with him in a tone in which she did not recant her earlier position but, in awaiting the settlement of the fitnah, proved her personal obedience.

The return to Medina

ʿAli ﵁ had the Mother of the Believers make the journey to Medina in a camel palanquin, with thirty women as her escort dressed in men’s clothing to give, as guards, the appearance of a military column, and with her own brother Muhammad ibn Abi Bakr ﵁ as her personal escort. When she arrived in Medina, the women of Medina entered her house and greeted her as they were wont to greet her each year on her return from the hajj. She went into her house, and she remained there. In the years that remained to her she seldom left it, and when she spoke of the Battle of the Camel, she spoke with regret. She would even, at her death, by what is preserved in later sources, request that she not be buried beside the Messenger ﷺ, because she held that after the Battle of the Camel she was no longer worthy of that nearness. Her request was granted and she was buried in al-Baqiʿ, beside Umm Salama ﵂.

What the battle declared

The Battle of the Camel was the first pitched battle in the history of Islam in which Muslims had fought Muslims with raised swords. Those who recorded the counts of the fallen spoke of between six and twenty thousand dead, with the heaviest losses among the men of Basra who had gathered around the camel. Among the dead were men who had fought at Badr and Uhud under the Messenger ﷺ, men who had taken the Quran in its earliest revelations from his mouth, men whose children would later become eminent scholars. Both camps had their martyrs, and both camps were convinced in their own conscience that they fought for what was right.

For ʿAli ﵁ the battle was, despite the victory, a wound that would never heal. He had lost two men of the ten. He had brought the Mother of the Believers, against whose camel he had led his men, back to her house in honour, yet within his own circle he had weighed the price of this act. He had not killed his kinsman Talha ﵁ himself, nor his kinsman Zubayr ﵁, yet in the history of the community he would from then on be associated with their deaths. He had confirmed Basra in his authority, but at a price that no battle in the history of Islam had until then exacted.

For the community the battle was a rupture whose consequences are felt to this day. Whoever placed ʿAli ﵁ on the side of right placed the Mother of the Believers on the side of wrong, and the reverse. Whoever wished to take no side, and that was the great majority among the senior Sahabah ﵃ who had not fought on either side, kept to his own house and spoke of a fitnah of which silence was the best answer. Saʿd ibn Abi Waqqas ﵁ and ʿAbdullah ibn ʿUmar ﵁ kept silent. Usama ibn Zayd ﵁ kept silent. Muhammad ibn Maslamah ﵁ broke his sword and hung it upon his gable.

The situation after the battle

ʿAli ﵁ remained in Basra for some weeks. He appointed a new governor, ʿAbdullah ibn ʿAbbas ﵁, and he charged him with the rebuilding of the administration, the payment of blood-money to the Basran families whose men had fallen on both sides of the battle, and the care that no man be prosecuted out of political vengeance. He had ʿUthman ibn Hunayf ﵁, whose beard had been cut off during the occupation, return to Medina in honour, and he charged him with no further mandate that might prolong his shame.

He himself prepared for the next phase. He knew that in Damascus Muʿawiya ﵁ had watched how in Basra the caliphate had had to defend itself in a pitched battle, and he knew that Muʿawiya ﵁ would receive from this battle no moral shock but a political encouragement. He knew that the office that had fallen into his hands could not be kept in Medina without his moving in person to the east, to be nearer to Sham and to the contending provinces. He chose Kufa, the garrison centre that had sent him the nine thousand in the battle, and in Rajab of the year 36 he began the preparations for the move.

The conversation between Hasan ﵁ and his father before the battle

In the night before the battle, by what is preserved in later sources, Hasan ibn ʿAli ﵁ had not been able to sleep. He had come out of his tent and found his father in an open space among the tents, in silent prayer. He waited until his father was finished, and he spoke to him.

The prohibition of pursuit

After the battle, while the Iraqi army still walked over the battlefield to tend the wounds and count the dead, ʿAli ﵁ issued a prohibition that is broadly preserved in later sources. He forbade any pursuit of those who had fled the battlefield. He forbade any finishing off of those who lay wounded on the ground. He forbade any seizure of the weapons and clothing of the fallen except what stood in the established regulations for the bait al-mal. He forbade any taking captive of women or children. He declared expressly that in this battle, because it was a battle of fitnah between Muslims and not a battle against unbelieving opponents, no spoils of war would be divided and no prisoners of war would be bound. Whoever cast away his weapon was free. Whoever fled to his house was free. Whoever had hidden in a corner of the battlefield and was found there was free.

This measure was no procedural side-matter. It set a precedent for what in the centuries that followed would be established among the scholars of Islam as the rule for the struggle of fitnah: that the struggle against rebellious Muslims was not equivalent to the jihad against unbelieving opponents, and that in such a struggle the spoils and the prisoners could not be treated in the manner in which an ordinary war was conducted. The works of fiqh of Abu Hanifah ﵀, of Malik ﵀, of as-Shafiʿi ﵀ and of Ahmad ﵀ would all, in their treatment of the matter of rebellious Muslims, hark back to the precedent that ʿAli ﵁ had set in the Battle of the Camel.

The words of ʿAʾisha ﵂ in her later years

In her later years, back in Medina, ʿAʾisha ﵂ spoke of the Battle of the Camel with a regret that is broadly preserved in later sources. When a visitor addressed her about the battle, she was wont to weep and to say through her tears that she wished she had died twenty years before that day, so that she would not have had to play a part in that battle. When in a gathering her companions discussed the events of the battle, she was wont to turn the conversation toward subjects that touched no wound within her. In her household she cared for the daughters of Muhammad ibn Abi Bakr ﵁ with a devotion that was seen in the community as proof of her wish to atone, in the care of the survivors, for what had happened in the past. When at her end the question of her place of burial was raised, she chose al-Baqiʿ instead of the chamber beside the Messenger ﷺ, with the express motivation that in her own conscience she held that after the Battle of the Camel she was no longer worthy of that nearness.

The question of the legal status of the fallen

After the battle a legal question arose in the community that would in later generations yield much ink: what was the legal status of those who had fallen on the side of the column? Were they martyrs in the sense of those who die in war in the battles against unbelieving opponents, or were they rebellious Muslims whose death in a struggle of fitnah did not possess the same legal rank? ʿAli ﵁ gave a ruling in this matter that is broadly preserved in later sources. He declared that those who had fallen on the side of the column had, in the legal sense, been Muslims who had stood in a position of ijtihad in which they believed in their own conscience that they were marching against those who harboured the murderers of ʿUthman ﵁. Their ijtihad had, in his judgement, been mistaken, yet they had not departed from the faith. They could therefore not be buried as unbelieving opponents, and their descendants inherited their property according to the ordinary provisions of Islamic inheritance law. At the same time they were not shahid in the sense of those who die in war in a legitimate jihad against unbelieving opponents. They occupied, in his legal reading, an intermediate position that would be established in later fiqh as the position of those who fall in a struggle of fitnah.

This ruling was taken up by the scholars of all four Sunni madhhabs in later generations. Abu Hanifah ﵀ treated it in his work on the provisions of the fitnah. Malik ﵀ treated it in his work on the legal consequences of internal Muslim strife. As-Shafiʿi ﵀ treated it in his work on the imamate. Ahmad ibn Hanbal ﵀ treated it in his work on the matters brought before the qadi in the time of fitnah. It was a ruling of ʿAli ﵁ that in its sober discernment showed the subtlety for which he would be praised in the legal community in every generation.

The prayers over the fallen

After the battle ʿAli ﵁ had the funeral prayers conducted over the fallen on both sides of the fight. He himself stood for the prayers over those of his own men who had fallen, and he had his son Hasan ﵁ lead the prayers over those of the opposing party who had fallen, with the express declaration that in his legal reading there was no difference between the manner in which the prayers were to be conducted for those who had fallen on either side of a fitnah. The prayers were conducted in a calm that stood in sharp contrast to the tumultuous hours of the battle. Those of the Basran families of the fallen on the side of the column who held in their own conscience that their men should not be buried under the funeral prayers of the Iraqi commander were permitted to bury their men themselves and to conduct their own funeral prayers; ʿAli ﵁ left them this latitude. But whoever wished to join the Iraqi side for the common prayers was welcome.

Sources

• Jalal ad-Din as-Suyuti ﵀, Tarikh al-Khulafa (trans. Abdassamad Clarke, Ta-Ha Publishers, 3rd ed. 1995), pp. 186–188 (course of the Battle of the Camel), p. 187 (death of Talha ﵁ by Marwan’s arrow; death of Zubayr ﵁ by Ibn Jurmuz and the word of ʿAli ﵁ on the murderer of Ibn Safiyyah), p. 188 (return of ʿAʾisha ﵂ to Medina with escort), p. 188 (appointment of Ibn ʿAbbas ﵁ over Basra).