The Move of the Capital to Kufa

In Rajab of the year 36, ʿAli ﵁ left Medina for the last time as khalifah. He set out for Kufa, and the city of the Prophet ﷺ lost, for the first time since the hijra, its function as the capital of the caliphate.

Why Kufa

The choice of Kufa was no sudden impulse. Already in the preparations for the Battle of the Camel, ʿAli ﵁ had understood that governing the vast caliphate from Medina, which in the years after the victories over Persia and Byzantium had become a remote oasis in relation to the true military and economic centres of the community, was no longer practical. The great mass of the army was in Kufa, and the great mass of the young generation that had grown up in the conquests was in Kufa and Basra. The revenues of the bait al-mal flowed from Iraq and Egypt, no longer from the Hijaz. The letters from Damascus, when they came at all, took weeks to reach Medina, and the replies likewise.

ʿAli ﵁ had, moreover, experienced in the Battle of the Camel that Kufa was the only city that had answered him, at his first call, with nine thousand mobilised men. Basra had been brought under him after the battle, but its population had not been united enough to serve as a military base for what was to come. Medina could furnish him no army. Sham was Muʿawiya ﵁‘s home base and stood against him. Egypt was indeed under his appointment, but Egypt was many days’ journey away and its population was politically not of one mind. Kufa, by contrast, had given him an army, and in Kufa lay his only operational power.

The quiet journey

When ʿAli ﵁ left Medina, he did so without ceremony. He climbed no minbar to deliver a farewell address, and he had no public procession to the gate of the city arranged. He greeted the senior Sahabah ﵃ whom he left behind in the city in a private circle, and he appointed a modest deputyship for the affairs of Medina, in the hands of Qutham ibn al-ʿAbbas ﵁ and of Sahl ibn Hunayf ﵁ in successive phases. He gave instruction that in his absence the matters that arose in Medina were to be forwarded to Kufa for his decision, except in matters of the hadd punishments, which had to be settled in the city itself.

He rode with a small company. His sons Hasan ﵁ and Husayn ﵁ accompanied him, and his cousin Ibn ʿAbbas ﵁ travelled with him for a part of the road and then returned to Basra, where he was governor. A number of his earliest companions, among them ʿAmmar ibn Yasir ﵁ and Malik ibn al-Harith al-Ashtar ﵁, rode near him. The rest of the company consisted of his own household, a number of Hashimi kinsmen, and an escort of those who joined along the way.

Along the road he passed through the same places where he had once, in the lifetime of the Messenger ﷺ, travelled with the young community. He passed by Badr, where in his early years he had fought beneath the white-feathered angels beside Hamza ﵁ and the Messenger ﷺ. He passed by the places where the Battle of Uhud was later fought. Whoever recorded in the old sources what was uttered during the journey preserved no long laments from his side, only a brief sigh as he rode through the outskirts of Medina:

The arrival in Kufa

The city of Kufa was, in the year 36, a military garrison centre of well over half a century since its founding. ʿUmar ﵁ had founded it after the victory at Qadisiyyah, and in the years between that battle and the arrival of ʿAli ﵁ it had grown into a city with a rich number of mosques, a market of its own, an aristocracy of its own of Yemeni, Mudari and Rabiʿi tribes, and a population in which the second generation of the sons of the Sahabah already outnumbered that of the original veterans. It had a great public square, the Maydan al-Kunasah, and its mosque, the Masjid al-Aʿzam, could receive more believers than any mosque in the Hijaz except that of the Prophet ﷺ and that of Mecca.

ʿAli ﵁ moved into no new building in the city. He refused to accept a palace or to occupy a governor’s house that was in his eyes more than a dwelling. He chose a simple house near the main mosque, and he had his daughters set up their own households in similar houses in the quarters around it. In Kufa he resumed the custom he had kept in Medina: he held his working circle in the mosque, he slept with a thin cloak as a blanket, and he ate what was prepared in his household without his meals differing from what the ordinary Kufan had on his table.

In the Masjid al-Aʿzam he delivered, in the first week after his arrival, a khutbah that was long remembered in Kufa. He began with the praise of Allah ﷻ and with the tashahhud, and he then spoke of the history that had been written in this city in the past years, of the men who had fought from its ranks under Saʿd ﵁ at Qadisiyyah, of the revenues that had returned from its conquests. He spoke of the duty of a community that had been at war not to unleash a war within its own midst, and he called upon the Kufans not to let go of their calm and their justice in this phase of the fitnah. He ended, by the summary preserved in later sources, with a sigh:

The administration of Kufa as capital

In the weeks after his arrival, ʿAli ﵁ restructured the administration. He established a diwan for the fiscal affairs of Iraq, with a director who reported directly to him. He charged ʿAdiy ibn Hatim ﵁, the old companion who had now become a notable in Kufa, with the organisation of the watches and the markets. He had Hujr ibn ʿAdiy ﵁ see to the coordination between the tribal units in the army. He charged Malik al-Ashtar ﵁ with the general military command organisation. For the legal affairs he kept Shurayh al-Qadi ﵀ in office, who had already been appointed judge in Kufa under ʿUmar ﵁ and whose judicial subtlety and impartiality would become a byword for all the centuries.

In this period the city had a scene that was gladly told in later sources. ʿAli ﵁ had lost a piece of armour on his journey from Medina to Kufa, a coat of mail that would yet serve him before the battle against the Khawarij. He had assumed that it had been left behind on the road, but when he was in Kufa, he found the armour in the hands of a Jewish man. He went to this man and said that it was his armour. The man answered that it was his armour and in his hand. ʿAli ﵁ proposed to go to the qadi, and they went to Shurayh ﵀. ʿAli ﵁ arrived first, sat beside Shurayh ﵀, and spoke:

Shurayh ﵀ pronounced, in the name of the law, judgement in favour of the Jew, and ʿAli ﵁ accepted the verdict without protest. The Jew, struck by what he had seen in this trial, namely a khalifah who stood beside him before an ordinary judge and who in his own case accepted the unfavourable verdict, pronounced the shahada and brought him back the armour as a gift. ʿAli ﵁ gave him, in a further generosity, a new horse and a stipend from the bait al-mal.

The tension with Sham from Kufa

When the administration of Kufa was on track, ʿAli ﵁ resumed the correspondence with Muʿawiya ﵁ in Damascus. He wrote him a lengthy letter in which he set out the history of the bayʿah, the procedures from the Saqifa to the Shura, the position of Medina as the source of the caliphate, and the duty of every Muslim to accept the bayʿah of the city of the Prophet ﷺ. He pointed out to Muʿawiya ﵁ that the demand for blood-vengeance for ʿUthman ﵁ could not be raised by the governor of Sham as long as no judicial procedure had been conducted, and that the court of the caliphate was seated in Kufa. He asked, a second time, for the bayʿah.

Muʿawiya ﵁ answered with a letter written in a hasty hand and which in essence repeated the position of the first empty letter: a bayʿah could be spoken of only after the murderers of ʿUthman ﵁ had been handed over, and to those to whom the identity of these murderers was made known. He did not expressly claim the khilafat for himself, but he categorically refused to recognise ʿAli ﵁'s claim without prior satisfaction for the blood of his kinsman.

In Kufa the letter was read in the working circle. Ammar ibn Yasir ﵁ spoke first:

ʿAli ﵁ still held back, for he wished one last attempt at mediation. He sent Jarir ibn ʿAbdillah al-Bajali ﵁ to Damascus with an oral message. But in his heart he knew that the war that had been a domestic interlude in the Battle of the Camel would become, in the direction of Sham, a pitched battle of an entirely different magnitude.

What the move meant

The move from Medina to Kufa was a political and military necessity, but it was also a symbolic rupture. For the first time since the hijra, the khalifah no longer sat in the city where the Messenger ﷺ had lived, preached, and been buried. The mosque in which the first prayers of the community had been performed stood without the presence of the khalifah who was responsible for it. The bait al-mal was still managed in Medina for local affairs, but the chief treasury now lay in Kufa. The legal matters brought before the khalifah were heard in the Masjid al-Aʿzam of Kufa. The letters from Yemen and Bahrain and Egypt no longer arrived in Medina but in Kufa.

For Medina this change was a loss that it would never again recover in the centuries that followed. Under the Umayyads the capital would move to Damascus, under the Abbasids to Baghdad, in the Andalusi century to Córdoba, in the Fatimid century to Cairo, in the Ottoman century to Istanbul. None of these capitals would ever return to the Hijaz. The move of ʿAli ﵁ was the first step on this road, and he was the only one of the four khalifahs to take it.

For ʿAli ﵁ himself, Kufa was the city in which he would govern, in which he would pray, in which he would gather his only operational army, and from which he would in the years that followed set out to Siffin and to Nahrawan, never in the end to return. The city would, for many centuries after his death, bear the byname of the Kufa of ʿAli ﵁, and the place where he would be struck in the Masjid al-Aʿzam during his last fajr prayer would become a place of pilgrimage for those who honoured his memory.

The arrival of Ibn ʿAbbas ﵁ as counsellor

In the first weeks in Kufa, Ibn ʿAbbas ﵁ came from Basra to his cousin. He wished to go over the state of the caliphate in private counsel with ʿAli ﵁, and he wished to bring forward what was alive in Basra in the administration and in the community. The two men sat together in the simple dwelling that ʿAli ﵁ had taken in Kufa, and they spoke of the matter of Sham, the matter of Egypt, the fiscal flows, and the mood in the provinces. Ibn ʿAbbas ﵁ advised ʿAli ﵁ to confirm Egypt first in his appointment, before a second campaign against Sham, so that he would have a second province alongside Iraq to support his rear. ʿAli ﵁ listened, but he wished to keep his first eye on Sham, for he believed that Egypt would remain stable in his appointment without a Shami striking force, and that Sham constituted the true political and military threat. The events would later, in the Shami invasion of Egypt under ʿAmr ﵁, confirm the insight of Ibn ʿAbbas ﵁.

The calm of Kufa as a byword for crisis

What appeared as calm in the first months in Kufa was in fact a state in which the city still had to adapt to its new role as capital. The mosques of Kufa, which in the years under Saʿd ﵁ and the later governors had functioned as places of prayer and legal decision, now became places where the khalifah came in person from the prayer to hear, in a neighbouring corner, the petitions that came to him from every province of the caliphate. Letters from Yemen and Bahrain and Egypt arrived daily. The diwan of Kufa, which under the previous governors had been a local fiscal administration, now had to be expanded into a central administration that had to process the fiscal flows of the whole east of the caliphate. The effort that lay in this adaptation was, for whoever had an eye for it, not inconsiderable, and it explained in part why ʿAli ﵁ could undertake no military campaign to Sham in these first months despite the insistence that came from ʿAmmar ﵁ and others.

The building of the new diwan

One of the first administrative acts of ʿAli ﵁ in Kufa was the expansion of the diwan into a central administration that could process the fiscal flows of the east of the caliphate. He had a number of rooms in a building near the mosque fitted out for the clerks, and he appointed a director who reported directly to him. The director was ʿUbaydullah ibn Abi Rafiʿ ﵁, a son of the freed slave of the Messenger ﷺ, a man who in his early youth had learned the Arabic script in a circle around Zayd ibn Thabit ﵁ in Medina and who in his legal competence and in his fiscal subtlety was eminently suited to the position. He kept the books of the diwan in an order that would be cited as a reference in later generations, and he introduced a style of correspondence in which every letter from a province received a reply from Kufa within three days.

The mosque of Kufa and its significance

The Masjid al-Aʿzam of Kufa, in which ʿAli ﵁ would hold his working circle in these years, was one of the largest mosques of the caliphate of that time. It had been founded in the years under ʿUmar ﵁ after the founding of the city itself, and it was in its architectural form a simple roofed prayer hall with an open courtyard that opened toward the Qiblah. Its minbar was of simple construction, and it was not furnished with the architectural ornamentation that would become customary in mosques of that rank in later centuries under the Umayyads and the Abbasids. Whoever entered it in this time found a spacious, austere space in which the communal prayer was conducted in an order that, in its sensitivity to the Sunnah of the Messenger ﷺ, had no equal in any other mosque of the east of the caliphate.

In this mosque the working circle of ʿAli ﵁ was no office in the sense in which a palace administrator would have an office. He sat on a mat beside the minbar, with a few clerks beside him and with the petitions placed in a simple box near him. Whoever wished to submit a petition came to him without an intermediary secretary and addressed him directly. He declared, already in the first months of his arrival, that he wished for no secret chamber and no private audience, and that every matter brought before him in his office would be heard and decided in the presence of those of the community present in the mosque. It was a form of administration that in its transparency was a direct continuation of what ʿUmar ﵁ had practised in Medina, and it made an impression on the people of Kufa that is broadly preserved in later sources.

The purchase of a cloak

A narration long preserved in Kufa concerned a simple transaction in the market of the city. ʿAli ﵁ came in his working circle to the realisation that his only cloak was worn out, and he sent his slave Qanbar to the market to buy a new cloak. Qanbar brought two cloaks: one of four dirhams and one of three dirhams. ʿAli ﵁ chose the cloak of three dirhams and said to Qanbar that the cloak of four dirhams made his rank as khalifah no more just than the cloak of three dirhams, and that the extra dirham was to be given to a poor man in the city. Qanbar carried out the instruction. The narration was cited in later sources as one of many anecdotes about the simplicity with which ʿAli ﵁ bore his office, and it stood in sharp contrast to the manner in which in later centuries khalifahs would live in their palaces in clothing that represented hundreds of times the value of a labourer’s yearly income.

Sources

• Jalal ad-Din as-Suyuti ﵀, Tarikh al-Khulafa (trans. Abdassamad Clarke, Ta-Ha Publishers, 3rd ed. 1995), p. 188 (move to Kufa), pp. 204–205 (the trial before Shurayh ﵀ over the armour and the conversion of the Jew), p. 188 (correspondence with Muʿawiya ﵁ in the early phase).