The Battle of Nahrawan

After the arbitration of Dumat al-Jandal in Ramadan 37 AH, which had produced no ruling in favor of ʿAli ﵁, the rift in ʿAli ﵁'s army broke fully open. The Khariji faction, a mixed group of about twelve thousand men from Kufa and Basra, declared that arbitration between men over what Allah had already decided was kufr. Their slogan became “la hukma illa li-llah”, no judgment but Allah’s.

They demanded of ʿAli ﵁ that he acknowledge that by accepting arbitration he had committed kufr, and that he repent anew. ʿAli ﵁ refused. He had accepted the arbitration under duress, at the insistence of the very men who had now become the Khawarij. He held his position: the arbitration had to run its course, and afterward the matter could be resumed.

The Khawarij marched out of Kufa to Harura, then further east, and finally occupied a position on the Nahrawan canal, an old Sasanian irrigation canal east of Mada’in. They chose their own amir, Abdullah ibn Wahb al-Rasibi, and from their position on the canal began stopping Muslims on the roads and interrogating them about their beliefs. Whoever defended the arbitration decision or defended ʿAli ﵁ was killed. A pregnant woman too, Umm Sinan, was murdered by them when she did not answer to their satisfaction.

This last incident forced ʿAli ﵁ to act. He broke camp from Kufa with his army, which was on its way to Syria for a second campaign against Muʿawiya ﵁. He diverted the entire force eastward and arrived opposite the Khariji position on the Nahrawan canal in mid-Safar 38 AH.

Before ʿAli ﵁ opened the battle, he did what he had also done at the Camel and at Siffin: he sent an envoy with a white flag. He chose Abu Ayyub al-Ansari ﵁, the Ansari veteran in whose house the Prophet ﷺ had lodged upon arriving in Medina. A man whose voice and authority were not easily ignored in any circle of Muslims.

Abu Ayyub ﵁ rode to the Khariji line with the white flag. He called out across the line. The message was clear. Whoever among them gathered under the white flag was safe. Whoever among them wished to return to his home in Kufa or Basra could go without a hand being laid on him. Whoever would hand over the murderers of Umm Sinan and the other victims could leave the ranks facing ʿAli ﵁'s army without reprisal. The battle was not inevitable.

The effect was greater than ʿAli ﵁ had dared to hope. Of the twelve thousand men under Abdullah ibn Wahb al-Rasibi, an estimated eight thousand stepped under the white flag or departed for Kufa without a fight. Some openly asked forgiveness. Others set conditions, and those conditions were granted. The Khariji position on the canal shrank from twelve thousand to about four thousand men.

The four thousand who remained refused. Ibn Wahb al-Rasibi addressed them from the center of the Khariji camp and swore that whoever placed himself under the white flag was choosing the world over reunion with Allah. They raised their battle cry “la hukma illa li-llah” and swore that they would either bring down the caliphate or fall before Allah. ʿAli ﵁ received this report from Abu Ayyub ﵁ on his return. He looked at the men under the white flag, and he looked at the position on the canal, and he said that he had loved them as he had loved no other enemy army. But the order was given to take up battle formation.

The Khariji position on the canal had one essential weakness: between their camp and ʿAli ﵁'s line lay a natural ditch where the canal made a bend. To reach ʿAli ﵁'s army, they had either to cross the ditch at a shallow point further north, or to attack it head-on. Ibn Wahb al-Rasibi chose the second option.

Early in the morning of 9 Safar 38 AH the four thousand remaining Khawarij launched their sortie. It was a desperate act. They were almost all infantrymen, their ranks crowded with the keenest qurra of the first Islamic generation, men who recited the Quran by day and by night and who in their night prayers could read the entire Quran in a single rakʿa. They stormed across the ditch in loose order, trusting that their cause was so pure that Allah would grant them victory.

ʿAli ﵁'s army had had time to deploy. It was nominally six times the size of the Khariji force, and consisted largely of cavalry, with heavy lancers in the first line and archers in the second. ʿAli ﵁ had arranged the center and the two flanks so that the Khariji charge would run into a half-encirclement the moment they were across the ditch.

The first Khariji waves were hit hard by arrow and spear fire from the Ali line before they reached the Muslim ranks. Even so, several hundred reached the first line and threw themselves into a furious melee. ʿAli ﵁ himself raised the battle cry and drove forward from the center. The Khariji attackers, hopelessly outnumbered, fought without any thought of retreat. Half of them fell in the first half hour.

When the Khariji charge had been brought to a standstill before the center, the encirclement closed. The flanks of ʿAli ﵁'s cavalry swung inward and cut the Khawarij off from every path of retreat across the ditch. The Khariji attackers were now completely enclosed in an oval of Muslim troops, their backs to the canal, no possibility of withdrawal.

ʿAli ﵁ ordered the center to press forward. The armored center line of heavy lancers pushed ahead. The flanks closed in steadily. The Khawarij fought where they stood, without command and without formation, each man for himself and for what he believed. It was no longer a battle; it was an annihilation.

Tabari records the numbers with improbable precision. Of the four thousand Khawarij who launched the attack, nine men escaped. Nine. They fled over a lip of the canal that ʿAli ﵁'s flanks had not sealed off, and scattered across Khurasan and the Hijaz. Of ʿAli ﵁'s army, according to the same traditions, about seven or eight fell.

The entire Khariji force on the canal had been destroyed. Among the dead lay Abdullah ibn Wahb al-Rasibi with the banner of the Khawarij still gripped in his fist. Beside him lay dozens of the foremost qurra of the first generation, men who knew the Quran in its entirety by heart. The symbolism was heartbreaking. ʿAli ﵁ wept as he walked among the bodies. Beside him a companion said that they should praise God for the victory. ʿAli ﵁ replied: “By Allah, were there among them one who seeks Allah and not himself, then even one of them could be worth more to me than a thousand of my troops.”

When the battle was over, ʿAli ﵁ did what he had announced to his companions beforehand. He gave the order to search among the bodies for one specific man. A man with a deformed body: a short arm whose hand had the appearance of a woman’s breast, the result of a congenital defect. The Prophet ﷺ had foretold years earlier that a group would arise with deviant doctrine, and that among them would be a man with this specific mark. The presence of that man among the fallen would confirm that this was the group the Prophet ﷺ had warned against.

The search lasted hours. Men walked from body to body, turned over fallen Khawarij, checked arms and hands. Several men came to report to ʿAli ﵁ that they could find no body matching the description. Some around him began to suggest that the description was perhaps not exact, or that the man in question might be among the nine who had escaped. ʿAli ﵁ stood up and said they must keep searching.

At last the body was found, half buried under other corpses, near the place where Ibn Wahb al-Rasibi had fallen. Men carried it to ʿAli ﵁. The short arm was there, with at its end the protrusion that resembled a woman’s breast, complete with strands of hair. ʿAli ﵁ looked at the body. He raised his hands and said: “Allahu akbar. By Allah, I have not lied and the Messenger ﷺ has not lied.”

Men who witnessed the moment later told that the silence over the battlefield was deep. ʿAli ﵁ gave orders for the bodies of the Khawarij to be buried, without distinction. The fallen of his own army were carried back to Kufa for janazah. The Nahrawan canal lay quiet in the afternoon sun. The first organized Khariji rebellion had been settled, but the movement had not been eradicated. Nine men had escaped; they would be the seeds from which Ibn Muljam would rise years later to strike down ʿAli ﵁ himself in the mosque of Kufa.