Negotiations with Muʿawiya ﵁

Between Kufa and Damascus, in the winter of 36–37, couriers rode with letters and delegations, in a final series of attempts to bring about the bayʿah to ʿAli ﵁ in Sham without a battle becoming necessary. It did not succeed.

The delegation of Jarir ﵁

For his first personal envoy to Damascus, ʿAli ﵁ chose a man who enjoyed standing in Sham. Jarir ibn ʿAbdillah al-Bajali ﵁ was a Sahabi ﵁ of the older generation, a leader of the tribe of Bajilah, a man who in the time of ʿUmar ﵁ had taken part in conquests in Iraq and Persia and whose face was no stranger in the mosque of Damascus. He was sent by ʿAli ﵁ to Sham with a lengthy letter and with the oral instruction to concede nothing in negotiations concerning the bayʿah, but to be willing to make any procedural arrangement that would enable Muʿawiya ﵁ to give his bayʿah without loss of face.

Jarir ﵁ reached Damascus and was received in the palace. Muʿawiya ﵁ heard him out in an audience of some hours, but he gave no answer that day. He had Jarir ﵁ lodged in guest quarters and sent his best advisers to the guest. Among them were ʿAmr ibn al-ʿAs ﵁, who had just come to Damascus from Palestine, and a number of the senior men of Sham. In the evenings of that week they held conversations with Jarir ﵁ that had the form of negotiations, but that in essence served to gain time. Muʿawiya ﵁ was occupied with the mobilisation of Sham, and he knew that every day Jarir ﵁ sat in Damascus was a day on which ʿAli ﵁ did not march, and he used those days to form his army into battle order.

After some weeks Muʿawiya ﵁ gave his answer. He refused to give the bayʿah without the prior handing over of the murderers of ʿUthman ﵁. He was, he said, willing, upon that handing over and upon their punishment before the court, to suspend his own act of vengeance and to seek a new starting point with the community, but the bayʿah, in the present state of affairs, was not possible for him. Jarir ﵁ returned to Kufa with this message.

ʿAmmar ﵁ and the resistance to further negotiation

When Jarir ﵁ delivered his message in the working circle of Kufa, Ammar ibn Yasir ﵁ was the first to rise. He was now a man of well over ninety years, a Sahabi ﵁ whose mother Sumayyah ﵂ had been the first martyr of Islam, a man who had served the Messenger ﷺ in Mecca in his earliest years and who had fought in every battle of Medina. His moral authority in Kufa was, alongside that of ʿAli ﵁ himself, unmatched. He spoke in a tone preserved in later sources:

ʿAli ﵁ was inclined to follow Ammar ﵁, but he chose one last attempt. He summoned a second delegation. He sent men who were known in Sham and who could tap their own networks in the province, and he sent letters to the senior Sahabah ﵃ who still lived in Damascus, with the request to intervene with the governor. The answers were disappointing. Those of the senior Sahabah ﵃ still living in Damascus were few in number, and their voice was drowned out by the majority of Sham. The mourning for ʿUthman ﵁ had been transformed in the province into a general mobilisation, and whoever spoke openly against it could no longer move about in freedom.

Sham as a distinct political form

What became slowly visible in these months of negotiation was that Sham under Muʿawiya ﵁ had, in the twenty years between the victory at Yarmuk and the year 37, taken on a political form that had no equal in any other province of the caliphate. ʿUmar ﵁ had sent Muʿawiya ﵁ to Sham after the death of his brother Yazid ﵁, with the instruction to govern the province according to the same principles that held for the other provinces. But Sham was particular. It was the province with the most Byzantine infrastructure, the province in which the Christian majority of the population still had a cultural weight that the Arab administration had to reckon with in its dealings, the province that by its geographical position maintained a permanent military frontier with the Byzantines. Muʿawiya ﵁ had, in his long term of office, learned how to govern this province, and he had bound the population to himself through a combination of military competence, personal generosity, and shrewd handling of the tribes of Quda’a and Kalb who furnished him military power.

When ʿUthman ﵁ was murdered and the bayʿah was given to ʿAli ﵁, Muʿawiya ﵁ possessed an instrument that no other governor of the caliphate held: an army of his own that was personally loyal to him, a tribal coalition of his own that had accepted his rule as the natural order of Sham, and a fiscal independence that enabled him to hold out for years without needing a subsidy from the central bait al-mal. He was, in short, the only governor of the caliphate who could refuse the central appointment in military self-sufficiency.

The couriers between Kufa and Damascus

The correspondence between the two capitals continued with regularity in the winter of 36–37, and on each side every word was weighed carefully. On ʿAli ﵁'s side there was a matter of principle: he could not negotiate the bayʿah as a political agreement, because in his reading it was the unanimous recognition of the caliphate by the community, and no subject of bargaining between two parties. On Muʿawiya ﵁'s side there was a political problem: he could give no bayʿah as long as the population of Sham saw him as the avenger of ʿUthman ﵁, and he could not deprive the population of this position without undermining his own base of support.

In one of the letters preserved in later sources, ʿAli ﵁ wrote to Muʿawiya ﵁ a sentence that in its brevity summed up the whole matter:

Muʿawiya ﵁ answered, in a letter formulated by his own chancellor ʿAbd ar-Rahman ibn Ghanm ﵁, with the demand he had set from the beginning: the blood of ʿUthman ﵁ had to be avenged. As long as that had not happened, and as long as ʿAli ﵁ harboured in his surroundings men who were involved in the murder, Sham could offer no bayʿah.

The role of ʿAmr ibn al-ʿAs ﵁

In these months ʿAmr ibn al-ʿAs ﵁, the man who in the years of ʿUmar ﵁ had conquered Egypt and who in the years of ʿUthman ﵁ had been removed from his governorship, entered the service of Muʿawiya ﵁. He came from his seclusion in Palestine to Damascus and sought an audience. He spoke with Muʿawiya ﵁ in a conversation that was depicted with some cynical tints by those who later wrote about it, and in which Muʿawiya ﵁ promised him the governorship of Egypt once the struggle against ʿAli ﵁ should be fought out. ʿAmr ﵁ accepted the agreement and placed himself under Muʿawiya ﵁ as his foremost adviser and as his right hand in military and political affairs.

With the joining of ʿAmr ﵁ to his side, Muʿawiya ﵁ gained a man whose political intuition and whose military knowledge lay at the level of the best of his time. ʿAmr ﵁ had gained experience in Egypt as governor and as military commander that no one in Sham equalled. He had, moreover, a rank in the community as a Sahabi ﵁ that lent standing in negotiations, and he was, in his personal tone, a man who complemented the sensitivity of Muʿawiya ﵁ with a more direct and, in tactics, more calculated approach.

The last attempt

In Safar of the year 37, ʿAli ﵁ sent a final delegation to Sham. At its head stood Shabath ibn Ribʿi ﵁, a man from Kufa who had fought in the battles of Iraq under ʿUmar ﵁. With him rode ʿAdiy ibn Hatim ﵁, Yazid ibn Qays ﵁ and a few others. They were received in audience in Damascus, and they uttered their message: ʿAli ﵁ was willing to give any guarantee that Muʿawiya ﵁ might ask concerning a judicial procedure against the murderers of ʿUthman ﵁ as soon as the bayʿah had been given and the central state had been restored to a state of calm. Muʿawiya ﵁ answered that he wished first the murderers and only then the procedure. The delegation pointed out that the identification of the murderers was itself a judicial matter that had to be conducted before the central court, and that no commander of a province had the right to take this identification away from the central state. Muʿawiya ﵁ repeated his position, and the delegation returned to Kufa.

The mobilisation

When the last delegation had returned without an answer, ʿAli ﵁ called his council together. He spoke in a tone that left no room for further delay. He made clear that the caliphate was threatened in its essence, not by a heresy or by a revolt of Bedouin, but by the attempt of a province to withdraw from the central appointment without having a judicial ground for it. If this attempt succeeded, so he reasoned, every other province could do the same in the future, and the caliphate would cease to exist as a united community under one leadership.

He gave the command to mobilise the Kufan troops for a campaign to Sham. He had messages go out to Basra, to Yemen, to Egypt and to the Hijaz, with the call to each province to send to Kufa whoever wished to volunteer. He appointed Malik al-Ashtar ﵁ commander-in-chief of the cavalry. He appointed ʿAmmar ibn Yasir ﵁, despite his advanced age, as the symbolic leader of the old Muhajirun in the battle order. He appointed Hashim ibn ʿUtbah al-Mirqal ﵁, a kinsman of Saʿd ibn Abi Waqqas ﵁ who had fought at Qadisiyyah, as the standard-bearer of the central column.

In Rabi al-Awwal of the year 37 the army set out from Kufa, in the direction of the Euphrates valley, with the city of Madaʾin as a stopping point and as its destination the plain south of Raqqa, where it would meet the army of Sham that had advanced from Damascus under Muʿawiya ﵁. The terrain where the two armies would come to face one another was a broad field along the right bank of the Euphrates, near the old village of Siffin.

The last call

Before his departure from Kufa, ʿAli ﵁ delivered a final address in the Masjid al-Aʿzam. He spoke of the battle that awaited them as of a trial they had not known in the history of the community. He called upon his men to hold, in the fight, to the old rules of the Messenger ﷺ: no finishing off of the wounded, no pursuit of those who fled, no attacks on those who cast away their weapons. He spoke a word that was long remembered in Kufa:

He knew, and his men knew with him, that the battle awaiting them would become the greatest in the history of Islam among Muslims. What they would find on the battlefield of Siffin would change the community forever.

The position of Sahl ibn Hunayf ﵁ in Iraq

Alongside the delegations sent to Damascus, ʿAli ﵁ also held intensive counsel in these months with the governors and commanders he had appointed in his own circle. Sahl ibn Hunayf ﵁, whom he had originally wished to send to Sham to take over Muʿawiya ﵁'s position and who had instead returned to Medina when Muʿawiya ﵁ had had him turned back on the road, came in these months to Kufa to bring his counsel. He pointed out to ʿAli ﵁ that in Sham the mobilisation had already advanced widely and that a negotiated solution without prior military pressure was no longer realistic. He advised ʿAli ﵁ to mobilise the Kufan troops earlier than he had originally planned, in order to put Muʿawiya ﵁ into a military imbalance that would force him into swift negotiations.

ʿAli ﵁ listened, but he did not wish to anticipate a mobilisation as long as there still existed a procedural possibility for a solution without a battle. He sent another delegation, and the delegation returned empty-handed. He sent another letter, and the letter was answered without any change in the Shami position. Only when the last of his diplomatic means was exhausted did he give the command to mobilise.

The mobilisation of the Basran volunteers

For the mobilisation of the army that would march to Siffin, ʿAli ﵁ appealed in Basra to his cousin Ibn ʿAbbas ﵁. Ibn ʿAbbas ﵁ called upon the Sahabah ﵃ and the second-generation warriors in the mosque of Basra to volunteer for the campaign. The response was substantial, and Basra furnished about twelve thousand men for the march to Siffin. Among them were senior figures such as al-Ahnaf ibn Qays ﵁, a man whose political wisdom had no equal in the city and who would gain a weighty voice in the policy discussions of Kufa.

The Basran contingent joined the Kufan main force at a halting place on the road to Madaʾin. The combined formation marched in columns through the Euphrates valley, in an order broadly preserved in the narrations: the vanguard under ʿAmmar ibn Yasir ﵁, behind it the central column under Hashim al-Mirqal ﵁, and then the cavalry under Malik al-Ashtar ﵁, and as rearguard the Basran volunteers. It was a marching formation that had refined the technique of the conquests under ʿUmar ﵁ in the marches to Qadisiyyah and Yarmuk, and that in the discipline of its execution showed an army that in its military competence had no Roman or Persian opposition to fear.

The secret correspondents in Damascus

In Damascus ʿAli ﵁ had a number of secret correspondents who furnished him, through trusted couriers, with information about the state of the Shami mobilisation and about the mood in the palace of Muʿawiya ﵁. Among them were a number of the senior Sahabah ﵃ who still lived in Sham but who in their own conscience had given the bayʿah to ʿAli ﵁. They kept him informed of the troop movements, of the tribal coalitions gathering around Muʿawiya ﵁, of the working of the mosques of Sham where the bloodstained mushaf of ʿUthman ﵁ was displayed and the demand for blood-vengeance was uttered in every khutbah. The information was precious, but it was not enough to turn back the mobilisation of Sham. What ʿAli ﵁ knew from this correspondence gave him insight into the nature of what he would encounter at Siffin, but it gave him no means to neutralise what he knew before the two armies would stand facing one another.

The tribal chiefs who passed in silence to Sham

In the months of negotiation between Kufa and Damascus there was an undercurrent of silent crossings of tribal chiefs from Iraq to the Shami side. These were not mass defections, but individual decisions of men who in their political disposition felt more affinity with the Umayyad coalition than with the Hashimi-oriented coalition of ʿAli ﵁. They left their tribal territories in silence, travelled by separate routes to Sham, and presented themselves in Damascus at the court of Muʿawiya ﵁. Their numbers were not great, but their presence in Damascus gave the Shami side a political argument with which they could claim in their own propaganda that even in Iraq, among the senior men of the tribes, not all voices were for ʿAli ﵁. ʿAli ﵁ left these crossings undisturbed. He was not minded to exert compulsion upon those who held in their own conscience that they belonged more elsewhere, and he set more store by the voluntariness of the bayʿah than by the numbers he could hold in his province.

The arguments of both parties

In the correspondence between Kufa and Damascus, arguments were brought forward by both parties that would be analysed in the legal discussions of later centuries. ʿAli ﵁ argued that the bayʿah in Medina, in the mosque of the Messenger ﷺ, had been given in its legal completeness by the senior of the Sahabah ﵃, and that no governor in a province could ignore the bayʿah given in the capital of the caliphate without himself rising in revolt against the central appointment. Muʿawiya ﵁ argued that the demand for blood-vengeance for ʿUthman ﵁ had in the fiqh a priority character that did not contest the bayʿah in its validity but suspended it in its operation until the blood-vengeance had been accomplished. Both arguments had support in the fiqh of that time. ʿAli ﵁'s argument was in line with the general doctrine of the bayʿah as the source of the caliphate, while Muʿawiya ﵁'s argument was in line with the general doctrine of the priority of restoring the right of blood in a community. In the legal discussions of later generations, ʿAli ﵁'s argument would receive the defensive framework that anchored his position in the Sunni tradition, while Muʿawiya ﵁'s argument was qualified as a political rhetoric that in its own conscience held less legal weight.

Sources

• Jalal ad-Din as-Suyuti ﵀, Tarikh al-Khulafa (trans. Abdassamad Clarke, Ta-Ha Publishers, 3rd ed. 1995), p. 188 (delegation of Jarir ﵁), p. 188 (correspondence with Muʿawiya ﵁), p. 189 (mobilisation and appointment of Malik al-Ashtar ﵁, Ammar ﵁ and Hashim al-Mirqal ﵁), pp. 189–190 (departure from Kufa toward Siffin).