The Arbitration and the First Fitna

Months after the battle of Siffin the two arbiters met at Dumat al-Jandal. What began as a religious procedure according to the Book of Allah ﷻ ended in a humiliating political trick from which the whole Muslim community could read its undoing in unity.

The months between the battle and the arbitration

Between the truce that had been signed upon the battlefield of Siffin and the meeting of the two arbiters at Dumat al-Jandal lay about six months, and in these months both armies withdrew into their own provinces. The Iraqi army returned to Kufa, neither as victor nor as loser, but in a state of political paralysis, while the Shami army returned to Damascus, not as a defeated party but as a military force that through a rhetorical move had turned a defeat into a negotiation.

In these months the opposition in the camp of ʿAli ﵁ split off further. The men who had withdrawn to Harura after the acceptance of the truce developed, in their isolation, a political and theological reading of the events that in its consequences excluded the entire caliphal unity. For them the acceptance of the arbitration by ʿAli ﵁ had been a surrender of the judgement of Allah ﷻ to the judgement of men, and for them the slogan la hukma illa li-Llah (judgement belongs to Allah ﷻ alone) was an exclusive principle, so that whoever transgressed it was a grave sinner who fell back into the standing of an unbeliever. Under this reasoning there fell, for them, not only Muʿawiya ﵁ and his arbiter ʿAmr ﵁, but also ʿAli ﵁ and his arbiter Abu Musa ﵁, into the standing of men who could lay no claim to the caliphate.

In these same months ʿAli ﵁ entered personally into negotiation with this split-off group. He sent Ibn ʿAbbas ﵁ to Harura to debate with them, and Ibn ʿAbbas ﵁ conducted with them a long disputation over the nature of the arbitration, over the position of the qadi in the Quran, and over the statements in Surah al-Hujurat concerning reconciliation between warring parties of believers. He brought a considerable number of them back to the camp of ʿAli ﵁; about two thousand returned to Kufa under his influence. But the core of the split-off group held firm in their position, and after some time they departed from Harura to Nahrawan, a village to the east of Kufa, and there set up their own military camp.

The arrival at Dumat al-Jandal

In Ramadan of the year 37, by the most accepted reckonings, the two arbiters met at Dumat al-Jandal. Dumat al-Jandal was an oasis-town about halfway between Kufa and Damascus, in a region that had of old served as a neutral meeting-place of Arab tribes. Abu Musa al-Ashʿari ﵁ came in the company of an Iraqi delegation, and ʿAmr ibn al-ʿAs ﵁ came in the company of a Shami delegation. On both sides witnesses were present: Ibn ʿAbbas ﵁ for Iraq, ʿAbdullah ibn Khalid ibn Asid ﵁ for Sham.

The first days were filled with formalities. The two arbiters studied together the document of the truce and discussed in mutual conversations the matter laid before them. What, asked ʿAmr ﵁ of Abu Musa ﵁, was the matter on which they were to decide? Abu Musa ﵁ answered: the matter of the resolution of the fitnah of the community, and the appointment of a khalifah who could be accepted by all parties. ʿAmr ﵁ assented.

What was told in later sources about the first week of deliberation is that ʿAmr ﵁ showed great courtesy towards Abu Musa ﵁. He addressed him with respect, he let him go first in every joint act, and he brought him the first portion at every meal. He was, as a fragment that Suyuti ﵀ preserves through a chain of transmitters relates, a man who had taken the measure of his counterpart before he made his own proposal.

The proposal

On a day in the second week of the negotiations ʿAmr ﵁ came to Abu Musa ﵁ with a proposal. He spoke in a tone in which he addressed Abu Musa ﵁ as his senior and wished to set him, in this whole matter, upon the path of wisdom.

Abu Musa ﵁ listened, and the proposal sounded just to his ears. He thought of ʿAbdullah ibn ʿUmar ﵁, a man who had taken the side of neither of the two camps and who in a new Shura might become the appointed candidate; he thought of ʿAbdullah ibn az-Zubayr ﵁ as an alternative; he thought of Saʿd ibn Abi Waqqas ﵁. He held, in this phase, that in a community ravaged by fitnah he might with this proposal open the best path, and he accepted the agreement. It was set down that both arbiters would, on the following day in the public assembly, in the presence of the delegations, pronounce their declarations.

The assembly

On the appointed day the two delegations gathered in the central square of Dumat al-Jandal. ʿAmr ﵁ invited Abu Musa ﵁ to speak first, with the customary courtesy he had displayed throughout the negotiation:

Abu Musa ﵁ stepped before the crowd and spoke the words as they had been agreed. He declared that in this arbitration he had come to the decision that ʿAli ﵁ should no longer bear the caliphate, that he removed him from the office with his hand as a man takes a ring from his finger, and that he opened the matter to a new Shura. He spoke with the dignity and the sincerity of a man who held that he had paved the way to peace, and he returned to his place.

ʿAmr ibn al-ʿAs ﵁ stepped before the crowd. He began with the praise of Allah ﷻ and with the tashahhud, and he then declared, with the same formal dignity, that in this arbitration he had come to the decision that Abu Musa ﵁ had removed ʿAli ﵁ from the caliphate, and that he, ʿAmr ﵁, in his arbitration upheld Muʿawiya ﵁ in the caliphate, because Muʿawiya ﵁ was the avenger of ʿUthman ﵁, because he had been recognised by the people of Sham, and because in the present state of the community no other candidate presented himself. He returned to his place.

A silence of a few moments fell over the assembly. Abu Musa ﵁ rose, in an anger he had not uttered before in his long life, and he cried that ʿAmr ﵁ had broken the agreement, that he had committed deceit in the compact, and that his arbitration in this matter was invalid. He cried out, according to what is preserved in later sources, a whole string of epithets upon ʿAmr ﵁ in which he likened him to animals that in their behaviour merited no trust. ʿAmr ﵁ listened with the silent satisfaction of a man whose plan had worked out exactly as he had devised it. The Shami delegation took up its tents and departed for Damascus, and the Iraqi delegation rode back to Kufa.

What the arbitration had pronounced

With this outcome the arbitration that was to have had its foundation in the Book of Allah ﷻ was turned into a political trick in which the one arbiter had deceived the other. Muʿawiya ﵁ returned from the arbitration with a political position he had not held before Siffin: he was, in the public declaration of Sham, no longer merely the governor of a rebellious province but the khalifah of the community recognised by arbitration. That ʿAli ﵁ did not accept this arbitration and was in his own conscience still the lawful khalifah took nothing away from the Shami position, and what Muʿawiya ﵁ had gained in rhetorical coin could no longer be undone.

For ʿAli ﵁ the outcome of the arbitration was the gravest political defeat of his caliphate. He had stood at Siffin upon the point of a military victory and lost it under the pressure of his own men, and he should now have been able to count, at Dumat al-Jandal, upon a valid outcome of the arbitration, but saw it inverted by a rhetorical trick. He requested, in a declaration in the mosque of Kufa, that the arbitration not be recognised by his own camp, and that he was in his own conscience and in the bayʿah of the community still the lawful khalifah. He called upon his men to mobilise anew for a renewed campaign against Sham. But his men were weary: they were exhausted from the campaign of Siffin, they were divided among themselves in the fitnah, and they were weakened in particular by the splitting-off of the Khawarij, who now formed a rival army in Nahrawan.

The Khawarij as a problem in his own house

It became clear to ʿAli ﵁ that he could not undertake a second campaign against Sham so long as the Khawarij stood at his back. He had against him in Nahrawan an army of about four thousand men, and this army was directed not by an ordinary governor but by a man who had set himself up, in his own conscience, as caliphal judge of both Sham and Iraq. ʿAbdullah ibn Wahb al-Rasibi had been chosen as their commander, and he led them with the severity of a man who tolerated no contradiction within his own party. The Khawarij had undergone a theological development of their own in which they placed in the standing of an unbeliever not only whoever had accepted the arbitration, but also whoever accepted it in his own conscience. They declared that whoever recognised the caliphate of ʿAli ﵁ fell into unprotected blood, and they declared the same of whoever recognised the caliphate of Muʿawiya ﵁.

In practice this theology led to deeds that drew attention in the streets of Iraq. The Khawarij in Nahrawan began to stop travellers on the road and to question them about their opinion concerning the arbitration, and whoever defended the caliphate of ʿAli ﵁ was killed on the spot. In the most infamous of these episodes they stopped ʿAbdullah ibn Khabbab ibn al-Aratt ﵁, the son of an early Sahabi ﵁ from Mecca, on a road outside Nahrawan. They questioned him about his opinion, and he spoke with respect of ʿAli ﵁. They cut him and his pregnant wife down with the sword, and they cut the unborn foetus from the belly of his wife as a slaughterer empties an animal. The deed became known in Kufa and set the whole city in motion, and this was the deed that compelled ʿAli ﵁ to march first against the Khawarij, before he could consider further campaigns against Sham.

The question of leadership

In the months between the failed arbitration and the mobilisation against Nahrawan, ʿAli ﵁ faced a question he had never foreseen. He was no longer the undisputed khalifah of the community: he was no longer recognised in Sham, he was weakened in Iraq, he was assailed in Egypt by a new Shami intervention that was in preparation, he was under pressure in Yemen from Muʿawiya ﵁'s correspondence, and within Iraq itself he was confronted by an armed opposition of the Khawarij. He had, in his own household, in the form of his sons Hasan ﵁ and Husayn ﵁, men about him who were anxious for his safety and his rest.

He spoke, in these months, in one of his khutbahs in the mosque of Kufa, a word that was often repeated in later sources:

He knew that the fitnah that had broken out in his caliphate would no longer be healed within his lifetime. He hoped only that in the time still granted him he might limit the blood of the Muslims, restore the provinces to their safety, and hand on the caliphate as an office to whoever should come after him without its falling, in the handing-on, into new pieces.

The tension within the Iraqi camp

In the months between Siffin and the arbitration of Dumat al-Jandal, ʿAli ﵁ stood in Kufa between three groups that all three made different demands of him. The first group were his most loyal veterans, among them Malik al-Ashtar ﵁ and ʿAdiy ibn Hatim ﵁, who held in their own conscience that the acceptance of the truce upon the battlefield had been a political disaster and that the renewed campaign against Sham should be undertaken as soon as possible. The second group were the men who had seen in the acceptance of the Mushaf-leaves upon the spearpoints a religious sincerity and who saw in the arbitration a last chance for a peaceful resolution; they wished for no military action until the arbitration had been pronounced. The third group were the men who had departed to Harura and who, in their isolation, were developing the Khariji theology.

ʿAli ﵁ could fully satisfy none of the three groups. To the first group he said that in his own conscience he had regretted the acceptance of the truce but that he could not take into his own hands the oath his arbiter would swear at Dumat al-Jandal before the procedure had been carried out. To the second group he said that he would accept the arbitration in his own conscience if it were carried out according to the agreement. To the third group he said, through the envoy Ibn ʿAbbas ﵁, that the acceptance of a human arbitration in a political question between Muslims was not in itself an act of unbelief, and that the act of walking out of the camp of the caliphate which they had carried out could not be justified on the basis of the slogan they had advanced in justification.

The opposition of Saʿsaʿah ibn Sawhan ﵁

Among the senior Iraqi members of the council around ʿAli ﵁ in these months Saʿsaʿah ibn Sawhan ﵁ distinguished himself, an eloquent man of the tribe of ʿAbd al-Qays. He delivered in the mosque a khutbah that is widely preserved in later sources, a warning against the Khariji current, and he predicted that the acceptance of their theology in the community, if it were not refuted by wisdom and patient disputation, would in the centuries to follow grow into a lasting source of division. He counselled ʿAli ﵁ to bring into the disputation with the Khawarij in Harura not only Ibn ʿAbbas ﵁ but also other learned Sahabah ﵃, so as to achieve in a collective refutation an effect that a single disputation could not achieve.

ʿAli ﵁ listened, but he chose to deploy Ibn ʿAbbas ﵁ alone, in the conviction that the juridical depth of his cousin was sufficient for the disputation. The deployment had, as has already been mentioned, the effect that about two thousand men returned from Harura to Kufa, but the core of the Khariji current remained untouched, and would in the years that followed grow once more into an armed opposition at Nahrawan.

The recurring question of the spoils

One of the three criticisms that the Khawarij at Harura brought against ʿAli ﵁ concerned the non-distribution of the spoils of the Shami fallen at Siffin. Their reasoning was that, if the Shami opponents had been treated as lawful combatants in the sense that their blood could be shed in the battle, their goods too could be distributed as lawful spoils of war. That ʿAli ﵁ had not permitted this distribution was for them an indication that in his own conscience he had not recognised the Shami opponents as lawful combatants, and that the battle itself had been fought upon an incoherent basis. Ibn ʿAbbas ﵁ answered that the Sunnah of the Messenger ﷺ prescribed in fitnah-battles between Muslims a different regime for the spoils than in wars against unbelieving opponents, and that the prohibition of distribution in this case implied no contradiction with the lawfulness of the fighting but rather a delicacy of fiqh that had its source precisely in the Sunnah of the Messenger ﷺ. The reasoning was accepted by one part of the Khawarij and not by another, and the division in their reaction to Ibn ʿAbbas ﵁'s answers would be carried forward in the years that followed in their further theological development.

The warnings of those who kept silent in these months

In the months between the failed arbitration and the mobilisation against Nahrawan, a considerable portion of the senior Sahabah ﵃ in Medina were in a state of silence that was widely described in later sources. ʿAbdullah ibn ʿUmar ﵁, Saʿd ibn Abi Waqqas ﵁, Usama ibn Zayd ﵁, and a number of others had withdrawn from the start of the fitnah from every political act and refused to take part, in any camp whatever, in a military or administrative sense. They kept to the mosque, to the hajj, to the juridical matters laid before them in their vicinity, and to whoever asked them about their political position they gave answers in which they defended their choice of neutrality as the only defensible ijtihad in a time of fitnah. They based their position upon a number of traditions of the Messenger ﷺ concerning the time of fitnah, in which he had counselled the putting-away of the sword and the withdrawal into the mosque.

For ʿAli ﵁ the silence of these men was no comfort. He had hoped that they would contribute in his caliphate, whether in military functions or in advisory functions, and their silence deprived him of a layer of senior authority that might have strengthened his office in the community. But he respected their choice: he sent no couriers to Medina to compel them to participate, he did not speak unfavourably of them in his khutbahs in Kufa, he left them in their position and he hoped that in a later phase they might yet join him. That later phase did not come, as far as they were concerned, within his lifetime.

The fragmentary state of the caliphate after the arbitration

After the arbitration of Dumat al-Jandal the caliphate was in a fragmentary state that until then had no precedent in the history of Islam. Sham recognised Muʿawiya ﵁ as khalifah, while Iraq, Yemen, Bahrain and Mecca recognised ʿAli ﵁ as khalifah. Egypt was still in an intermediate position but would fall under Muʿawiya ﵁ in the year 38, and the Khawarij at Nahrawan recognised neither of the two caliphs and waited for an opportunity to establish their own Khariji caliphate. This was not a form of state in the sense in which the first three khalifahs had conducted the caliphate; it was a divided community in which different commanders laid claim to the office, and in which the ordinary believer in his province followed the appointment of his local governor without recognising an unambiguous central authority. In the works of Ibn Khaldun ﵀ in a later century this fragmentary state would be described as the first appearance of the pattern of political division that in the history of Islam would later recur in every generation in other forms.

Sources

• Jalal ad-Din as-Suyuti ﵀, Tarikh al-Khulafa (trans. Abdassamad Clarke, Ta-Ha Publishers, 3rd ed. 1995), p. 190 (the arbitration at Dumat al-Jandal), p. 190 (the trick of ʿAmr ﵁ against Abu Musa ﵁), p. 190 (the splitting-off of the Khawarij to Harura and then Nahrawan), p. 191 (the murder of ʿAbdullah ibn Khabbab ﵁ by the Khawarij).