The Battle of Nahrawan

In a one-sided confrontation to the east of the Tigris, the Khawarij lost in a few hours almost their entire army. Among the fallen was found a man with a deformed arm whose presence confirmed a hadith of the Messenger ﷺ that had been uttered about this group years before.

The attack

When the men of Ibn Wahb advanced in battle array against the camp of ʿAli ﵁, the Iraqi army did an unusual thing: it stood still. ʿAli ﵁ had given the command before the battle that his men were not to loose an arrow first and not to thrust a lance first, for he wished, in a final gesture, that the Khawarij themselves should commit the first act, so that in every later tradition the guilt for the blood would not lie on his side.

The Khawarij approached under raised battle order, with Ibn Wahb at their head. When they were within ten spear-lengths of the Iraqi lines, they loosed their arrows and hurled themselves with the sword upon the foremost ranks. The Iraqi army answered with the technique for which it was known from the battles of Qadisiyyah and Yarmuk: a firm line of shields, a coordinated counter-thrust of spear-throwers, and an encircling movement by the cavalry on the flanks. In less than an hour the main force of the Khawarij was enclosed in a half-circle and, in a fight that knew no quarter, destroyed.

The counts

The counts preserved in later sources diverge, but they agree in their order of magnitude. Of the main force of the Khawarij that had advanced in battle array, between two thousand and twenty-two hundred fell upon the battlefield. Among the fallen was their commander ʿAbdullah ibn Wahb al-Rasibi, who according to the traditions fought in the foremost rank with the sword in his hand to the very end, and among the fallen were also the foremost of their leaders: Hurqus ibn Zuhayr, who in his own conscience had in his younger years visited the Messenger ﷺ and who in later years had grown into a commander of what would become the Khariji movement, and a dozen other senior figures whose names are preserved in later sources.

On the side of ʿAli ﵁ there fell, according to the count preserved in later sources, between seven and nine men. It was, in the history of the Islamic battles, one of the most one-sided confrontations ever fought. The superior military training of the Iraqi army, combined with the fragmentary battle order of the Khawarij, who had no experience of the coordinated tactics of the great army, yielded an outcome that in its ratio of losses resembled a punitive expedition more than a battle.

The search for Dhu al-Thudayya

After the battle ʿAli ﵁ walked over the battlefield, accompanied by a number of his closest companions, and he searched among the fallen for a man with a deformed arm.

In his younger years the Messenger ﷺ had, in a tradition widely preserved in the Sahih sources, made statements about a group of men who would arise in the community after him, and he had named one specific sign. Among them, he had said, there would be a man with an arm that hung in the shape of a woman’s breast, with a nipple in the place where the other arm would have a hand. The man was called Dhu al-Thudayya, the one with the nipple-arm. ʿAli ﵁ had never forgotten this tradition in his own conscience, and he had in his leading of the battle expressly called this tradition to mind.

What is widely preserved in later sources, and what Suyuti ﵀ takes up in his summary, is that after the battle of Nahrawan a search was made among the fallen for this man. He was not found at once, and ʿAli ﵁ himself was asked by those who surrounded him whether he had perhaps been deceived in his trust in the tradition. He answered, with a calm that admitted no doubt:

A second search was undertaken, in a ravine where some of the fallen lay beneath a heap of dead camel-horses, and there he was found: a man with an arm that resembled a woman’s breast, with a nipple in the place where the hand would have been. When ʿAli ﵁ saw him, he fell into prostration of gratitude, and he uttered a tahmid to Allah ﷻ who had safeguarded the words of His Messenger ﷺ in this confirmation. The words of the Messenger ﷺ were confirmed, and the tradition, in its fulfilment upon the floor of a ravine in the east of Iraq, could no longer be denied.

What the battle pronounced

For ʿAli ﵁ the battle of Nahrawan was, in the military sense, an unambiguous victory. He had destroyed the armed opposition at his innermost back in an action that had barely lasted a day, he had brought to justice in the camp of Ibn Wahb the men who had killed ʿAbdullah ibn Khabbab ﵁ without individual names needing to be preserved in later sources, and he had seen the warning of the Messenger ﷺ concerning the rebellious party fulfilled before his own eyes in the man-with-the-deformed-arm.

But for the community the battle was less unambiguous. The existence of the Khawarij was not effaced by the battle of Nahrawan; in its few years of existence the current had already built up so much theological-political heritage that in the years after Nahrawan it would return in other formations, under other commanders and with other strategies. In Basra and in Ahwaz new Khariji groups were already active in the years after 38, sprung from the men who had not taken part in the battle of Nahrawan and who were now regrouping. Under the Umayyads the Khariji movement would become a permanent factor in the political landscape, and its influence would be felt as far as Oman and Algeria in the centuries thereafter.

Moreover the battle of Nahrawan, despite its success, was in its political consequences for ʿAli ﵁ not without harm. The Khawarij he had slain had not been, in their own conscience, mercenaries, nor common bandits, nor unbelieving rebels; they had been Muslims who had strayed in a mistaken reading, and in the community of Kufa there were relatives of the fallen who would develop in their loss a political position against ʿAli ﵁. The rancour of the families of the fallen Khawarij, and in particular the rancour of those of their remaining members who went over to ʿAbd ar-Rahman ibn Muljam, would issue within two years in an assassination of which ʿAli ﵁ would personally be the victim.

The return to Kufa

After the battle ʿAli ﵁ remained some days at Nahrawan to have the wounds of his own men tended and to oversee the burials of the fallen on both sides. He had the Khawarij dead buried according to the Muslim funeral rite, despite the severe theological reading in which they had placed whoever buried them in the standing of an unbeliever. He held to the Sunnah of the Messenger ﷺ, who had taught him no distinction in the manner of burial between those who had lived upon the straight path and those who had strayed from it, so long as the Shahadah had not been expressly rejected.

He sent an escort with the wounded back to Kufa, and he himself remained in a tent outside Nahrawan with a small staff to prepare in his own circle the further campaign against Sham. For his original plan, which had been interrupted by the mobilisation against the Khawarij, was to march on immediately after Nahrawan to Sham, to take up the renewed war against Muʿawiya ﵁, and to bring what had not been completed at Siffin to a military conclusion in a second campaign.

The army’s refusal

When, however, he gave his men the command to resume the march to Sham, he met a refusal that struck him more deeply than any victory had ever gladdened him. The Kufans were weary; they were exhausted from months of campaign, from the mobilisation for the Battle of the Camel, from the weeks at Siffin, from the skirmishes between the two camps, from the weeks of waiting for the arbitration, and from the short, swift mobilisation against Nahrawan. They wished to return to Kufa, they wished to return to their wives and their children, and they wished for some weeks of rest before they were thrown into a new campaign.

ʿAli ﵁ tried to convince them. He addressed them in a speech preserved in later sources, and he pointed out that a day of delay was a day in which Muʿawiya ﵁ further strengthened his position in Sham, and that the courage they had shown at Nahrawan would wither away in a long withdrawal. He called upon them to remain in his vicinity, to set out with him upon the road to Sham, and to bring their fitnah to an end in the glory of a common victory.

The men listened, but they did not answer, and one by one they began to ride back to Kufa. When ʿAli ﵁ saw that he would be left behind without an army, he gave with great reluctance the command for a general return. He rode in the central section of the line of march back to Kufa with the knowledge that the resumption of the campaign against Sham, which in his own eyes was the first priority of his office, would have to be postponed indefinitely.

The last word

In a khutbah he delivered in the mosque of Kufa after his return, he spoke words that are widely preserved in later sources and that in their brevity sum up the whole state of his caliphate:

With these words in the mosque, and with the reluctance of his men in his innermost being, the last phase of his caliphate began. He knew that, so long as Kufa remained his only operational base, he would not be able to resume the campaign against Sham, and he hoped that in the months or years still to be granted him he might hold the caliphate in his office and in a better conjuncture undertake a second march. But he did not know how much longer his office would last, and he did not know from what direction the blow would come that would end it.

The lament of the families

After the battle of Nahrawan the families of the fallen Khawarij returned to Kufa in mourning. It was a matter of several hundred households whose men, brothers or sons had fallen on the side of Ibn Wahb, and the mourning was voiced in the streets of the city in loud laments, in a number of cases mingled with political expressions in which ʿAli ﵁ was designated the murderer of those who in their own conviction had acted. ʿAli ﵁ left the families undisturbed; he gave orders that no prosecution be instituted against whoever uttered politically unfriendly statements in their mourning, and he had the customary blood-money payments delivered to the families of the fallen, the kind made by the bait al-mal in the case of casualties in a fitnah-struggle. In a number of cases the blood-money was refused by the families on the conviction that accepting it would imply a recognition of the lawful nature of the battle, and ʿAli ﵁ left these refusals undisturbed and sent the sums back to the bait al-mal.

The deliberation over the second campaign

In the weeks after the return from Nahrawan, ʿAli ﵁ several times called his council together to discuss the possibility of a second campaign against Sham. The council counted Malik al-Ashtar ﵁ among its foremost members, and at his side ʿAdiy ibn Hatim ﵁, al-Ahnaf ibn Qays ﵁, and a number of other senior figures. Malik al-Ashtar ﵁ urged on every occasion that the mobilisation be begun within weeks, with the warning that every month of delay was a month in which Muʿawiya ﵁ further entrenched his position. The other members of the council were more cautious; they pointed out that the Kufan troops had indeed achieved an unambiguous victory in the Battle of Nahrawan, but that the toil of the earlier campaigns had not yet been effaced in their weariness and that a mobilisation in the short term would meet with resistance.

ʿAli ﵁ took the counsel of his council under consideration, but he held back from a command to mobilise. He wished first to sound out the mood in the city through couriers to the tribal chiefs and through personal meetings in the mosque, and the mood, as far as he could ascertain in these weeks, was not unanimous enough for a swift mobilisation. He decided upon postponement, in the hope that in a better conjuncture the mobilisation might be carried out unanimously. The conjuncture did not come: in the months that followed Egypt would be lost, Malik al-Ashtar ﵁ would be poisoned at Qulzum, and the Iraqi position would be so weakened that a second campaign against Sham was no longer feasible.

The return of those who had abstained from the battle

A number of the Khawarij who had split off from the main force on the eve of the battle of Nahrawan and who had kept to the side of the battle without taking part on either side, returned to Kufa in the weeks after the battle. They were in an intermediate position in which they still rejected the acceptance of the arbitration in their own conscience, but only to the extent that they had not wished to take part in the bloody conflict. ʿAli ﵁ received them in his office and spoke with them in a conversation preserved in later sources. He asked them whether they were willing to renew the bayʿah and to place themselves under his office, and they asked for some time to deliberate, which he granted them. In the months that followed most of them returned and renewed the bayʿah, while a handful remained in isolation in tribal villages around Kufa and in the years that followed formed a latent Khariji presence that never wholly disappeared from Kufa.

The juridical status of the Khariji dead

After the battle of Nahrawan a juridical question arose in the community that was parallel to the question that had arisen after the Battle of the Camel: what was the juridical status of those who had fallen on the side of the Khawarij? ʿAli ﵁ gave in this matter a ruling that would be analysed in the juridical works of later generations. He declared that the Khawarij in their splitting-off had strayed in an ijtihad-error of an order that had not placed them outside the faith; they were rebellious Muslims, not unbelieving opponents. Their blood in the battle was not, for whoever had attacked them in the battle, laden with the blood-guilt that would apply to the murder of an innocent Muslim, but their burial had to take place according to the ordinary Muslim funeral rite, their descendants inherited their property according to the ordinary provisions of Islamic inheritance law, and their women were not taken captive.

This ruling was elaborated in later generations by the scholars of all four of the Sunni madhhabs. The Hanafi school treated it in its works on the fitnah, the Maliki school in its works on the directives for the qadi, the Shafiʿi school in its works on the imamate, and the Hanbali school in its works on the provisions for war against rebellious Muslims. In every madhhab the ruling of ʿAli ﵁ was accepted as binding precedent, and it formed the juridical foundation for the treatment of similar fitnah-struggles in the centuries thereafter.

The cautionary lesson for later generations

The battle of Nahrawan was cited in later generations as a cautionary lesson for whoever held, in his own conscience, that a political position could be uttered in extremely pious wording without the wording leading, in its consequences, to the shedding of the blood of whoever did not share the position. The Khawarij at Nahrawan had been unsurpassable in their personal piety: their night-prayers were longer than those of whoever stood against them, their recitation of the Quran was of a devotion that is mentioned in later sources not without reverence, and their abstention from wine, from adultery and from theft was without any exception. And yet their political conviction led them to the murder of a Sahabi’s son ﵁ and his pregnant wife on a road outside their camp, because the Sahabi’s son ﵁ had spoken respectfully of ʿAli ﵁ in his answer to their questioning. The combination of extreme personal piety with extreme laxity in the protection of the blood of others has been cited in later generations as the classic pitfall of the extremist religious position, and the Khawarij of Nahrawan are the paradigmatic example in this warning.

Sources

• Jalal ad-Din as-Suyuti ﵀, Tarikh al-Khulafa (trans. Abdassamad Clarke, Ta-Ha Publishers, 3rd ed. 1995), p. 191 (the battle of Nahrawan), p. 191 (the search for Dhu al-Thudayya and the hadith concerning the man with the deformed arm), p. 191 (the refusal of the Kufan army to march on to Sham).