The Loss of Egypt and the Death of Muhammad ibn Abi Bakr ﵁

While ʿAli ﵁ in Kufa strove in vain to move his army to a renewed campaign against Sham, Muʿawiya ﵁ sent ʿAmr ibn al-ʿAs ﵁ with a Shami column to Egypt. The governor whom ʿAli ﵁ had appointed there fell, and in the year 38 he lost the province.

The change in Egypt

When ʿAli ﵁ had sent his letters from Medina in the year 35, he had assigned Egypt to Qays ibn Saʿd ﵁. Qays ﵁ had governed the province for well over a year with a sensitive hand, he had worked in confidence with the senior men of the old Egyptian administration, and he had let the Coptic community function in its dhimmi status without friction. But Muʿawiya ﵁ had stretched out his hands towards Egypt: he had sent letters to a number of tribal chiefs in Fustat with offers of fiscal advantages if they would place themselves under his appointment, and he had spread rumours that Qays ﵁ had in his own conscience already given a secret bayʿah to Sham. The rumours had done their work, and letters arrived in Kufa warning ʿAli ﵁ that Qays ﵁ was no longer trustworthy. He had at first given no credence to the rumours, but in a later phase, under the pressure of those who surrounded him in Kufa, he had recalled Qays ﵁ and in his place sent Muhammad ibn Abi Bakr ﵁ as governor to Fustat.

Muhammad ibn Abi Bakr ﵁ was, in his lineage, an extraordinary figure in the history of the first fitnah. He was the son of Abu Bakr as-Siddiq ﵁, the first khalifah, and of Asma bint ʿUmays ﵂, the woman who had first been married to Jaʿfar ibn Abi Talib ﵁ and, after his martyrdom, to Abu Bakr ﵁. Through this mother he was in direct line a half-brother of Muhammad ibn Jaʿfar ﵁, and he had grown up in the house of his mother, who in a second marriage after the death of Abu Bakr ﵁ had been taken into the household of ʿAli ﵁. Thus in his upbringing he had been more a son of ʿAli ﵁ than a son of Abu Bakr ﵁. He had in the years under ʿUthman ﵁ been one of the senior figures among the opposition to the third khalifah, and he had played a direct role in the siege of his house, a role whose details are variously transmitted in later sources but whose participation in the opposition is disputed by no source.

The arrival in Fustat

Muhammad ibn Abi Bakr ﵁ arrived in Fustat with a political handicap that would hamper him in his office. To those of the old administration of Egypt who sat in Fustat, he was not the seasoned administrator that Qays ﵁ had been; to those of the senior men of the tribes of Lakhm and Judham in Egypt, he was a newcomer whose tribal coalitions lay outside Egypt; and to those who in their own conscience had attached themselves to ʿUthman ﵁ as khalifah, he was a man who had been involved in the murder of the third khalifah. This last memory worked against him in Fustat. A number of the tribal chiefs who had joined the government order under Qays ﵁ withdrew under Muhammad ﵁, a number openly sympathised with the Shami position, and the fiscal flows from Upper Egypt to Fustat began to fall into irregularity.

In this state Muhammad ﵁ wrote to ʿAli ﵁ in Kufa with the report that he needed reinforcement in the governance of Egypt. ʿAli ﵁ answered that he would send Malik al-Ashtar ﵁ as governor to Egypt, and that Muhammad ﵁ would serve under Malik ﵁ as subordinate. It was a political and military choice whose wisdom was not disputed, for Malik al-Ashtar ﵁ had commanded the cavalry at Siffin and he was in military competence and in political insight the most suitable man for the difficult position. But the fate of this appointment was short and grim. Malik al-Ashtar ﵁ travelled through Iraq in the direction of Egypt and lodged for the night at Qulzum, a port-town on the Red Sea, where honey was offered to him by a local official. The honey was poisoned, according to what is widely preserved in later sources, on the orders of Muʿawiya ﵁ through an intermediary secret agent who had identified the position of Malik ﵁ as the most dangerous military competence of ʿAli ﵁ in Sham’s eyes. Malik al-Ashtar ﵁ died in the night of that lodging, and when the news reached Damascus, Muʿawiya ﵁ uttered a word preserved in later sources: that Allah ﷻ has armies of honey.

The Shami invasion

With Malik al-Ashtar ﵁ dead and with Muhammad ibn Abi Bakr ﵁ in Fustat in a weakened position, Muʿawiya ﵁ judged the moment ripe to conquer Egypt. He sent ʿAmr ibn al-ʿAs ﵁, the man who had served him faithfully in the arbitration and to whom before the arbitration he had promised the governorship of Egypt as reward, with a column of six thousand men from Sham. They were seasoned veterans of the Shami conquests under Khalid ﵁ and Yazid ﵁, men experienced in long marches through desert and in coordinated assaults upon cities, and they marched through the Sinai and reached Egypt in Safar of the year 38.

Muhammad ibn Abi Bakr ﵁ tried to organise a defence. He mobilised what loyal troops he had in Fustat and he placed a vanguard under Kinanah ibn Bishr in an advanced position outside the capital. But the numbers were against him. ʿAmr ﵁ spread through couriers in the tribal regions of Egypt the message that whoever placed himself under his appointment would retain his fiscal rights, and within weeks he won to his side a number of tribes that in the first months under Muhammad ﵁ had remained in uncertainty. The vanguard under Kinanah was destroyed in an unequal skirmish, ʿAmr ﵁ advanced upon Fustat, and Muhammad ibn Abi Bakr ﵁ could not hold the capital. He withdrew with a handful of loyalists into a ruin in the outskirts of Fustat, in the hope of taking shelter there until a relieving army from Iraq might reach him.

The death of Muhammad ﵁

The ruin was found. A Shami patrol came upon him in the afternoon. Muhammad ibn Abi Bakr ﵁ came out from his hiding-place and spoke with his pursuers, and he asked for water before he was seized by them. A man of the patrol, Muʿawiya ibn Hudayj, remembered that Muhammad ﵁ had been personally involved in the siege of ʿUthman ﵁, and he refused to give him water. He killed him on the spot and placed, in a gesture preserved in later sources in its brutality, the body inside the belly of a dead donkey that they had found nearby and that they then set alight. The burning of a Muslim body was in itself an act expressly forbidden in the Sunnah of the Messenger ﷺ, and the news of it caused in Kufa a shock that was voiced in the streets of the city in loud wailing.

When the news of his death and the manner of it reached ʿAʾisha ﵂ in Medina, she proclaimed for the duration of a year a daily fast in remembrance of her brother. She received his daughters into her house and raised them there, and she spoke in the years that followed of Muhammad ibn Abi Bakr ﵁ with a love and a grief that formed an exception in her otherwise politically strained relation with the Banu Hashim circle.

When the news reached ʿAli ﵁ in Kufa, he uttered a word that is widely preserved in later sources. He said that Muhammad ﵁ had been as a son to him, that his death struck him more deeply than a loss within his own household, and that for the loss of Egypt he would pay a political price that would resound through the ages. To this lament he joined a sigh preserved in a number of sources:

What the loss of Egypt pronounced

With the loss of Egypt the fiscal balance of the caliphate of ʿAli ﵁ was severely weakened. Egypt was, after Iraq, the second great source of fiscal income of the caliphate, and its loss meant that ʿAli ﵁ came to stand, for his military campaigns, in a growing dependence upon Iraq alone, and that his capacity to pay wages to his troops fell into a pattern of delay and discontent in Kufa. Politically the loss of Egypt meant that the Shami position in the caliphate was no longer confined to one province but extended to two, and that Muʿawiya ﵁ had gained in his claim to the caliphate a second fiscal and military base that he would consolidate in the years that followed.

For ʿAli ﵁ personally the loss of Egypt was a wound in two respects. He had lost Malik al-Ashtar ﵁, his most competent military commander, in a poisoning carried out without a battle, and he had lost Muhammad ibn Abi Bakr ﵁, a man he had raised in his own household, in a gruesome death whose manner stirred horror in every pious conscience. He had moreover seen in these two deaths the clear indication that the war against Sham was no longer waged only in battles, but also in poisonings, in murders, in secret operations against those whom he appointed in his innermost circle.

The months after the loss

In the months after the loss of Egypt ʿAli ﵁ reoriented his policy. He gave the Egyptian governorship, in a symbolic act limited in its effectiveness, to ʿUbaydullah ﵁, the brother of ʿAbdullah ibn ʿAbbas ﵁, and he attached to this hopes of a return in better times. He sent in his correspondence with Muʿawiya ﵁ a protest against the murder of Muhammad ﵁ in the form in which it had been carried out, and he asked for the identification and surrender of Ibn Hudayj. Muʿawiya ﵁ did not answer; he gave orders in Egypt for the further consolidation of the Shami administration and he gave ʿAmr ﵁ free rein to govern the province as he had governed it in the years under ʿUmar ﵁, with the same sensitivity towards the Coptic community and with the same fiscal calm that ʿAmr ﵁ had maintained in his earlier administration.

In Kufa ʿAli ﵁ resumed his attempt to mobilise the Kufan troops for a second campaign against Sham. He spoke in the mosque, he held military reviews, and he sent letters to the tribal chiefs to move them to participate, but the response remained disappointing. The troops in their weariness could not be persuaded to a new long march, and the tribal chiefs in their political withdrawal were not willing for a mobilisation that in its breadth would attain a scale comparable to Siffin. The city returned to its daily life, with the markets and the mosques and the houses, and the khalifah returned to his office in the Masjid al-Aʿzam, and the fitnah that had broken out in his office would no longer be resolved within his office.

The position of Qays ibn Saʿd ﵁ after his recall

Qays ibn Saʿd ﵁, the governor who had held office in Egypt before Muhammad ibn Abi Bakr ﵁, returned after his recall to Medina, in a state in which in his own conscience he could hardly make sense of the treatment he had undergone. He had governed Egypt with a sensitive hand, he had given no occasion for the rumours that had been spread from Sham about his loyalty, and his recall was in his own feeling a political injustice. When he arrived in Medina, he met ʿAli ﵁ in a correspondence that connected them through couriers, and ʿAli ﵁ acknowledged, in a letter preserved in later sources, that in his recall of Qays ﵁, under the pressure of those who surrounded him in Kufa, he had made a choice he regretted in later months. He asked Qays ﵁ to remain in Medina and to hold himself available for future appointments.

Qays ﵁ accepted the reconciliation. He later returned to Iraq and served in the last years of ʿAli ﵁'s caliphate as adviser and as a military commander of middling rank. After the abdication of Hasan ﵁ in the year 41 he would, in his rejected position against the Umayyads, return to his long withdrawal in Medina, and he would in the first years of Muʿawiya ﵁'s khilafa remain one of the senior Medinan voices that spoke out against the Umayyad administration.

The letter of ʿAli ﵁ to ʿAmr ﵁

After the loss of Egypt ʿAli ﵁ wrote a letter to ʿAmr ibn al-ʿAs ﵁ in Fustat. In the letter, of which a portion is preserved in later sources, he admonished his old acquaintance from the Meccan years over the manner in which he had acted in this fitnah. He pointed him to the tradition of the Messenger ﷺ concerning those who act in an internal fitnah for worldly advantages, he pointed him to the Quran-verses on the duty to reach mediation rather than war in a dispute between believers, and he asked him to reconsider his position in Egypt and to place himself under the central appointment.

ʿAmr ﵁ answered with a letter that was friendly in its tone but irreconcilable in its content. He declared that in his joining with Muʿawiya ﵁ he had followed no worldly interest but his conscience in the matter of the murder of ʿUthman ﵁, and that in his own conscience he saw ʿAli ﵁ in this fitnah as the party that, in his acceptance of those who had slain ʿUthman ﵁, had failed to carry out a lawful punishment of those murderers within his innermost circle. The exchange of letters was broken off after a few exchanges: ʿAmr ﵁ remained in Egypt as governor, and ʿAli ﵁ returned in Kufa to his office in the mosque, with the knowledge that in the matter of Egypt he could expect no recovery before the end of his caliphate.

The esteem of the Egyptian dhimmis for Qays ﵁

In the tradition that ʿAmr ibn al-ʿAs ﵁ sent in his later correspondence as governor of Egypt, a passage is preserved in which he remarks that the Coptic community in Egypt showed in his line of administration a slight resistance that reached back to the esteem they had developed for Qays ibn Saʿd ﵁ in his short period as governor. Qays ﵁ had in his administration stood in friendly consultation with the Coptic patriarchs, and he had in his fiscal policy kept the jizyah-rates in force as ʿUmar ﵁ had set them, without the additions that had crept into some other provinces in the course of the years. The Copts lamented his departure. It is a fragment that throws light upon the way in which the governors of ʿAli ﵁ had set their stamp in their short period of appointment in the provinces, and how this stamp remained in remembrance in the years under the Umayyads.

The spiritual trial of ʿAli ﵁

In the months after the loss of Egypt and the death of Malik al-Ashtar ﵁ and Muhammad ibn Abi Bakr ﵁, ʿAli ﵁ entered into a phase of spiritual trial that is perceived in his khutbahs and in his confidential conversations in later sources. He spoke in a number of his khutbahs about the nature of the loss and about the way in which the believer in a time of fitnah must hold fast in his innermost being to what is transmitted in the Quran and in the Sunnah, without letting himself be swept along by the shifting outcomes of political events. He spoke about the duty of the commander not to lose, in his own conscience, the awareness of the reckoning before Allah ﷻ, even when in his office the events turn against him, and he spoke, in a fragment widely preserved in later sources, about the transience of worldly power and about the abiding value of what is held fast as truth in one’s own conscience.

In his confidential conversations with his sons and with his nephews he spoke in these months about his own anticipation of his deathbed in a tone that astonished them. He gave them instructions about what they should do after his death, about the way in which they should deal with Muʿawiya ﵁, and about the protection of the blood of the Muslims in every decision they took. He spoke as if he knew that the time still granted him was short. When they asked him about this, he answered in a fragment preserved in later sources that man does not know when his time comes but that the wise man prepares himself, in every phase of his life, for the possibility that it comes now. His preparation for his own death had in these months become a daily practice, despite the fact that he bore no illness in his own body and went on as usual in his daily life.

The consequences for the fiscal balance of Iraq

With the loss of Egypt, which under ʿUthman ﵁ had contributed about a fifth of the total income in its fiscal contribution to the central bait al-mal, Iraq came into a fiscally weakened position. The bait al-mal of Kufa, which since the move of ʿAli ﵁ had become the central treasury of the caliphate of Iraq, could not bear without strain the expenditures for the Kufan garrison, for the stipends of the senior Sahabah ﵃ in Medina, for the annual stipends of the Hashimi kinsmen of ʿAli ﵁, and for the general costs of administration. ʿAli ﵁ took in this phase a number of measures to restore the fiscal balance: he reduced his own stipend to the minimum on which his household could live, he stopped the payment of the stipends to his closest kinsmen who were sufficiently provided for in their own means, he asked the governors of Bahrain and of Yemen to increase their fiscal contributions to the central treasury, and he had an audit carried out in Basra of the fiscal flows to trace any leaks in the system. The measures kept the fiscal balance in a precarious stability, but they could not fully compensate for the loss of Egypt.

Sources

• Jalal ad-Din as-Suyuti ﵀, Tarikh al-Khulafa (trans. Abdassamad Clarke, Ta-Ha Publishers, 3rd ed. 1995), pp. 191–192 (loss of Egypt to ʿAmr ibn al-ʿAs ﵁), p. 191 (death of Malik al-Ashtar ﵁ by poisoning at Qulzum and the word of Muʿawiya ﵁ about the armies of honey), p. 192 (death of Muhammad ibn Abi Bakr ﵁ and the act of Ibn Hudayj), p. 192 (mourning of ʿAʾisha ﵂ over her brother).