Martyrdom and legacy

In Ramadan of the year 40, ʿAli ibn Abi Talib ﵁ stepped out of his house for the fajr prayer in the Masjid al-Aʿzam of Kufa. At the door of the mosque stood a man with a poisoned sword. The blow that struck him at the crown of his forehead brought him two days later to Allah ﷻ, and with his death the era of the Rightly Guided caliphs came to an end.

The council in Mecca

In the summer of the year 39, in the shadow of the Kaʿba in Mecca, a council took place between three men who regarded themselves as the remaining adherents of the Khariji cause. They were ʿAbd ar-Rahman ibn Muljam al-Muradi, an Egyptian who in Egypt had belonged to the Khawarij of Nahrawan and who had survived the battle by escaping the field at the last moment; al-Burak ibn ʿAbdillah at-Tamimi, an Iraqi Khariji; and ʿAmr ibn Bakr at-Tamimi, a third man of the same tribe. In their own consciences they had concluded that the fitnah of the community could not be healed so long as the three leaders of the age remained alive, namely ʿAli ﵁ in Kufa, Muʿawiya ﵁ in Damascus, and ʿAmr ibn al-ʿAs ﵁ in Fustat. They resolved upon a threefold assassination, to be carried out on the same night in the same month, and they divided the attacks among themselves. Ibn Muljam took upon himself the attack on ʿAli ﵁, al-Burak took Muʿawiya ﵁, and ʿAmr ibn Bakr took ʿAmr ibn al-ʿAs ﵁. They chose the seventeenth night of Ramadan in the year 40 as their common date, then separated and travelled to their respective destinations.

Qatam in Kufa

Once he had arrived in Kufa, Ibn Muljam found lodging among his kinsmen of the tribe. In the mosques of the city he crossed paths with a woman who caught his attention. Her name was Qatam, and she came from the Khariji circle. Her father and her brother had both fallen at Nahrawan, in the battle in which ʿAli ﵁ had defeated them, and she carried the loss of her family with a settled rancour that had become her one wellspring of action. Ibn Muljam, in an act broadly preserved in the later sources, let it be known that he wished to take her as his wife. She set out her conditions: she demanded a bridal gift fixed, in one particular account, at three thousand dirhams, a male slave and a female slave, and, as the final portion of the mahr, the head of ʿAli ibn Abi Talib. Suyuti ﵀ preserves the report that as-Suddi takes from Ibn al-Mustadrak and that in later generations was repeated as a proverb, and he then cites the verses of al-Farazdaq that were composed about this marriage condition:

I have seen no bridal gift sent by a generous man,
Like the bridal gift of Qatam, of people (slaves) and beasts:

Three thousand, a slave, a serving maid,
And the striking down of ʿAli ﵁ with the piercing sword.

There is no bridal gift dearer than ʿAli ﵁, however costly it was,
And no assassination but that it is less than the assassination by Ibn Muljam.

(Surah-verse attestation not applicable; this is poetry of al-Farazdaq as cited by Suyuti ﵀.)

The night of the attack

Ibn Muljam agreed to Qatam’s condition under the bayʿah he gave her. He waited for the seventeenth night of Ramadan, and for the attack he chose a poisoned sword for which he had travelled to the east of Kufa. In the hours before the fajr prayer he stationed himself at the door of the Masjid al-Aʿzam, in the company of two other Kharijis who were complicit in his attack, and there he waited for the coming of the Amir al-Muʾminin.

ʿAli ﵁ came out of his house. As was his habit, he walked to the mosque without escort, calling out, according to what is preserved in the later sources, with the summons to the prayer:

At the door stood Ibn Muljam. He stepped before him, raised the sword, and struck him at the crown of his forehead, and the blow penetrated to the brain. People rushed toward the attack from every side, and Ibn Muljam was seized and bound.

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The two days

ʿAli ﵁ lived on until the Jumuʿah prayer and until the Saturday, and he died in the night before the Sunday. Al-Hasan ﵁, al-Husayn ﵁ and ʿAbdullah ibn Jaʿfar ﵁ washed his body, al-Hasan ﵁ led the prayer over him, and he was buried in the night in the house of the Amirate in Kufa. Later the limbs of Ibn Muljam were cut off, he was placed in a reed basket, and he was burned in a fire.

Between the blow and the death lay two days in which, from his sickbed, he still spoke a few words to his sons. According to the report that Suyuti ﵀ preserves, he gave the instruction that Ibn Muljam was not to be mutilated so long as he himself lived, that he was to be brought to justice, and that if he died only Ibn Muljam and not his kinsmen should be punished. He spoke a word to his younger brother in the report that Ibn Saʿd ﵀ preserves, in which he expressed the hope that if his suspicion about the identity of the one who had handed him the poisoned drink should prove mistaken, no innocent man might be killed in retaliation for him. He also spoke words that revealed his resignation to Allah’s decree, and he spoke conditionally of the reunion with the Messenger ﷺ in a form that the spiritual literature of the generations after him preserved in reverence.

When he died he was, according to the reckoning most often held to in the later sources, sixty-three years old, while other reckonings give sixty-four, sixty-five, fifty-seven or fifty-eight years.

The attacks in Damascus and Fustat

On the same night in Ramadan of the year 40, al-Burak carried out his attack in Damascus on Muʿawiya ﵁. He struck in the mosque, but he caught him in the hip and the wound was not fatal, and Muʿawiya ﵁ recovered. Al-Burak was seized and killed. In Fustat it went otherwise. ʿAmr ibn Bakr had gone to the mosque for the fajr prayer and waited for ʿAmr ibn al-ʿAs ﵁. But that morning, according to what is preserved in the later sources, ʿAmr ﵁ had a fever, and he had sent word that he would not lead the prayer. In his place Kharijah ibn Hudhayfah ﵁, a senior figure in the Egyptian administration, led the prayer. ʿAmr ibn Bakr struck in the conviction that he was striking ʿAmr ibn al-ʿAs ﵁, and he killed Kharijah ﵁. When, after the blow, he understood that he had struck the wrong man, he uttered a word that is preserved in the later sources:

ʿAmr ibn Bakr was seized and put to death, and ʿAmr ibn al-ʿAs ﵁ remained in office as governor of Egypt.

Thus the threefold assassination ended in one confirmed death, one leader saved, and one innocent victim. Of the three leaders of the age, only ʿAli ﵁ had fallen.

The grave in Kufa

ʿAli ﵁ was buried in the night from Saturday to Sunday in the house of the Amirate in Kufa. The grave was kept hidden, so that the Khawarij would not dig it up. In the later sources various reports are preserved about the place of his true grave. Some transmitters held to the site in Kufa. Others related that his body was carried in a nocturnal journey by his son Hasan ﵁ to Medina, to be buried in al-Baqiʿ beside Fatima ﵂. A third report, represented by certain Iraqi sources, records that the camel bearing his body bolted in the desert, and that his resting place remained unknown somewhere in the desert between Iraq and the Hijaz. In the centuries that followed, a site in Najaf, some distance from Kufa, would be identified as the grave of ʿAli ﵁ and would grow into an important place of pilgrimage.

The questions he left behind

With the death of ʿAli ﵁, the community faced a number of questions that his successors in the generations after him would have to answer. The most pressing was the question of who would succeed him. In Kufa the notables of the city at once gave the bayʿah to his eldest son Hasan ﵁. Hasan ﵁ held the bayʿah for six months, a period in which he conducted negotiations with Muʿawiya ﵁ over an arrangement that would at last bring the bloody fitnah to an end. In Rabi al-Awwal of the year 41, according to what Suyuti ﵀ preserves, he ceded his claim to the caliphate to Muʿawiya ﵁ on the condition that no man from Medina, the Hijaz or Iraq would be punished for his part in what had taken place under his father. With this cession the first fitnah was formally closed, and what the later sources call the Umayyad period began. The prophetic saying that the Messenger ﷺ had made in his lifetime about Hasan ﵁, that Allah ﷻ would through him bring two groups of Muslims to peace, was fulfilled in this cession.

The judgement of Suyuti ﵀

Suyuti ﵀ rounds off his summary of the caliphate of ʿAli ﵁ with a concluding judgement. He affirms that ʿAli ﵁ had met every condition of the imamate: in his early conversion, in his direct blood kinship with the Messenger ﷺ as cousin and as son-in-law, in his nearness to the Messenger ﷺ throughout the whole of his prophethood, in his juristic competence that was acknowledged by every generation of companions, and in his military skill that in the battles of Badr, Uhud, Khaybar and after them was beyond dispute. He cites Ibn Juzayy al-Kalbi, who in his work of fiqh affirms that in the disputes between ʿAli ﵁ and Muʿawiya ﵁, ʿAli ﵁ was in the right and correct in his ijtihad, while Muʿawiya ﵁ erred in his ijtihad and was excusable for it. He closes the summary with the admonition that the Sahabah ﵃ on both sides of the caliphate of ʿAli ﵁ must be held in high esteem, and that in none of them may the verdict of the source be pronounced without the best interpretation of their conduct.

The words the generations preserved

In the centuries after his death, the words of ʿAli ﵁ were preserved in every generation. His juristic pronouncements were cited as precedent in the works of the qadis of Iraq, his exhortations were taken up as a source in the works of zuhd and tasawwuf, and his poetry, which according to what ash-Shaʿbi ﵀ preserves in a fragment of Suyuti ﵀ surpassed in its skill that of Abu Bakr ﵁, ʿUmar ﵁ and ʿUthman ﵁, was included in the anthologies of Arabic verse. A number of his terse sayings were recorded in the work that later became known under the title Nahj al-Balaghah, a collection whose original core goes back to authentic reports.

In the preserved fragment of a long saying that Suyuti ﵀ transmits through Said ibn Mansur ﵀, he set out five principles for whoever seeks spiritual guidance:

The place of his caliphate in history

The caliphate of ʿAli ﵁ lasted nearly five years, from Dhul-Hijjah 35 to Ramadan 40. It was, by the reckonings of those who recorded it in the later sources, the most tumultuous of the four caliphates of the Rashidun period. It knew three battles among Muslims, the Battle of the Camel, the Battle of Siffin and the Battle of Nahrawan. It knew the ruse of the Mushaf, the arbitration of Dumat al-Jandal, the loss of Egypt to Sham, and the poisoning of Malik al-Ashtar ﵁. It ended in the mosque of Kufa with the sword-stroke of a man who believed himself, in his attack, to be carrying a Khariji bridal gift toward a marriage.

With the end of the caliphate of ʿAli ﵁, what the later sources called the Khilafat ar-Rashidun came to an end. What came after was, in the words of a hadith that the Messenger ﷺ had uttered in his lifetime and that Hasan ﵁ fulfilled in his cession, mulk: kingship. The Umayyad state under Muʿawiya ﵁ was no longer a caliphate in the sense of the way Abu Bakr ﵁, ʿUmar ﵁, ʿUthman ﵁ and ʿAli ﵁ had fulfilled the office. It was a state with dynastic features, with a capital in Damascus, and with a fiscal and military infrastructure that drew as much from the Byzantine tradition as from the Medinan. The city of the Messenger ﷺ would never again become the capital of the caliphate, and the Hijaz would gradually become a religious heartland without political form.

Yet within the community the memory of the four Rightly Guided caliphs would remain as the standard against which every later government would be measured. Their rule, in its nearness to the Sunnah of the Messenger ﷺ, in its simplicity of living, in its strictness in fiscal justice, and in its direct dealing with the community, would remain the point of reference for every later scholar, every later reformer, and every later call to return to the origin. And among the four, ʿAli ibn Abi Talib ﵁, in his juristic depth, in his military valour, in his eloquence, and in his nearness to the House of the Messenger ﷺ, would take a place of his own that won him new readers and new admirers in every generation.

In the words of Abu al-Aswad ad-Duʾali ﵀, who spoke in his lament over ʿAli ﵁ that Suyuti ﵀ preserves:

It is as though, when the people lost ʿAli ﵁,
They were ostriches, wandering in a land for years.

(Poetry of Abu al-Aswad ad-Duʾali ﵀ as preserved by Suyuti ﵀.)

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The conversation of ʿAli ﵁ with al-Hasan ﵁ on the sickbed

In the two days between the blow and his death, ʿAli ﵁ received Hasan ﵁ at his sickbed and addressed him in an exhortation of which a number of fragments are preserved in the later sources. He gave him directions about the way he was to deal in the coming months with the bayʿah of Kufa, about his position toward Muʿawiya ﵁, and about the protection of the blood of the Muslims. He spoke in a tone in which he addressed his son not as his successor in a dynastic sense but as a man who in his own ijtihad had to judge the condition of the community.

This fragment of his exhortation Hasan ﵁ would hold as a guide in his own conscience in his cession of the caliphate to Muʿawiya ﵁ in the year 41. Whoever in the later sources analysed the cession of Hasan ﵁ saw in his action the direct fulfilment of the counsel that his father had given him on his sickbed.

The way Suyuti ﵀ places the attack within the Sunnah

In his summary, after the report of the attack, Suyuti ﵀ cites a hadith that he considers fitting for the manner in which the community should preserve this event. The hadith comes from his general passage on the way the Messenger ﷺ spoke about the Sahabah ﵃:

With this hadith, Suyuti ﵀ places the attack on ʿAli ﵁ within the broader context of the high esteem with which the community must speak of the Sahabah ﵃. He adds that Ibn Saʿd ﵀, on whose summary he relies for a considerable part of the events of Ali’s caliphate, gave no extensive interpretations in his recording of these events but preserved the facts in their sober succession. Suyuti ﵀ considers this soberness of Ibn Saʿd ﵀ in so sensitive a matter to be more in keeping with the counsel of the Messenger ﷺ than a more extensive treatise would be.

The continuation under Hasan ﵁

In the six months after the death of ʿAli ﵁, Hasan ﵁ held the caliphate in Kufa. The bayʿah to him was given directly after the washing and the prayer over his father by the senior men of Kufa. He received it in the mosque in a short ceremony, and he spoke a brief khutbah in which he thanked the community of Kufa for their loyalty to his father and invited them to remain in the same loyalty to him in the coming months. In his nature and in his tone he was a man who resembled his mother Fatima ﵂ more than his father: he was gentler in dealing, more cautious in decision, and more inclined to peace than to strife.

In the first weeks after his bayʿah he opened correspondence with Muʿawiya ﵁ in Damascus. He proposed that in a gathering of senior Sahabah ﵃ from both camps they should reach an arrangement that would at last bring the fitnah to an end. Muʿawiya ﵁ responded with the demand that he be recognised in this arrangement as caliph, with the guarantee that after his death the caliphate would return to Hasan ﵁. Hasan ﵁ consulted with his younger brother Husayn ﵁ and with the council of Kufa. Husayn ﵁ was against the surrender, holding that with the mobilisation of the Iraqi army Sham could still be subdued. But the council of Kufa was not of one voice, and its tribal chiefs, in their weariness, were no longer willing for a long campaign. Hasan ﵁ resolved upon the cession. In Rabi al-Awwal of the year 41 he formally stepped down in Kufa, and the bayʿah to Muʿawiya ﵁ was given to him by the Iraqi senior men in a ceremony. With this action, in fulfilment of the prophetic saying that the Messenger ﷺ had made about Hasan ﵁, peace was made between two groups of the Muslims.

The judgement of the generations

In the centuries that followed, the caliphate of ʿAli ﵁ would be written of in different directions. The Sunni tradition, in its recording by Suyuti ﵀ and those who preceded him, preserved the Qur’anic verses of reverence for the Sahabah and placed ʿAli ﵁ in a line of four Rightly Guided caliphs without distinction in precedence save in the chronological order of their office. The Shia tradition, in its recording by those who gathered around the descendants of the House of the Prophet ﷺ, gave ʿAli ﵁ a first place in the chronological reckoning and built around him a political and spiritual doctrine that set the first three caliphs in a second place. The Khariji tradition, in its recording by those who developed out of the splinter at Harura, continued in its own conscience to regard ʿAli ﵁ as an unbeliever on the ground of his acceptance of the arbitration.

What remained beyond dispute in these three traditions, however, was the juristic depth, the eloquence, the military valour and the personal piety of ʿAli ibn Abi Talib ﵁. No scholar of any tradition in the history of Islam would venture to contest him in these four qualities. In his fragments of wisdom preserved in the later sources, in his juristic pronouncements cited in every madhhab, in his poetry included in every anthology of Arabic verse, and in his nightly prayer that became an example in every generation of Sufis and followers of zuhd, he lived on in a way in which the bayʿah of Kufa in Dhul-Hijjah of the year 35 was never erased.

The position of Husayn ﵁ after his brother’s cession

After the cession of Hasan ﵁ to Muʿawiya ﵁ in the year 41, Husayn ibn ʿAli ﵁ returned with his brother to Medina. In his own conscience he had been against the cession, but he accepted the decision of his elder brother as head of the House of ʿAli ﵁ after the death of their father. In Medina he lived the twenty years that followed in a restraint in which he did not speak out against the Umayyad government so long as Muʿawiya ﵁ lived. He received in his house the senior men of the Hashimi circle who still remained in Medina, and he kept a circle around him of those of the younger generation who wished to preserve in their consciences the learning of his father. He awaited events. In the year 60, after the death of Muʿawiya ﵁ and the accession of Yazid ﵁ ibn Muʿawiya to the Umayyad caliphate, there came the situation in which, in his own conscience, he considered that he could no longer remain in silence. What would take place at Karbala belongs to another article in another epoch, and that article will find its place in the history of the Umayyad era. But the roots of what took place at Karbala lie in the years of his father’s caliphate, in his brother’s cession, and in the twenty years of waiting in Medina that followed upon that cession.

The stipend of Hasan ﵁

After his cession, Hasan ﵁ lived in Medina on a stipend of one hundred thousand dirhams a year, granted to him by Muʿawiya ﵁ in a fragmentary account of one year. One year this stipend was withheld from him. He used to have in his sleep a vision in which the Messenger ﷺ came to him and counselled him to a supplication that is broadly preserved in the later sources. He used the supplication, and within a week afterward the stipend came with an increase of one million five hundred thousand dirhams. It is a fragment that was preserved in the later sources as proof of prayer as a means in place of the direct petition to the leader. Hasan ﵁ died in Medina in the year 49, or in another reckoning in the year 50 or 51, presumably by poisoning by his wife Jaʿdah bint al-Ashʿath ibn Qays, who according to one report had been moved to this deed by Yazid ibn Muʿawiya, though Suyuti ﵀ himself remarks that the report here is taken up without his usual isnad-care and that the matter lies in an unknown domain of history. He was buried in al-Baqiʿ, beside his mother Fatima ﵂.

The later pronouncements in fiqh on the first fitnah

In the centuries after the first fitnah, the juristic community of the Sunni tradition would develop a number of settled positions on how the events of Ali’s caliphate were to be appraised. The scholars of all four madhhabs arrived at a number of shared conclusions. First, that ʿAli ﵁ had been rightful in his office and that his bayʿah in Medina had possessed its full juristic validity. Second, that the Sahabah ﵃ on both sides of the fitnah were to be held in high esteem and that in none of them may the verdict of the source be pronounced without the best interpretation of their conduct. Third, that the battles of the Camel, Siffin and Nahrawan were intra-communal fitnah conflicts in which the ordinary provisions of jihad against unbelieving opponents did not apply. Fourth, that the cession of Hasan ﵁ to Muʿawiya ﵁ in the year 41 had been a politically acceptable outcome that had spared the blood of the Muslims and that had found its fulfilment in the prophetic saying about Hasan ﵁ as mediator between two parties of the Muslims.

The close of the Rashidun period

With the cession of Hasan ﵁ in Rabi al-Awwal 41, the Rashidun period was formally at an end. Four caliphs had, over a total span of about thirty years, continued the caliphate of the Messenger ﷺ in a form that, in its own distinction from what came after, later generations would regard as the purest form of Islamic government. Abu Bakr ﵁ had held the community together in the first two years after the death of the Messenger ﷺ through the wars against those who refused the zakat and through the dispatch of the first expeditions against the Byzantines. ʿUmar ﵁ had in ten years expanded the community into a world power encompassing Iraq, Sham, Egypt and Iran, and he had worked out the administrative system in its diwan form that would form the basis of Islamic government for centuries to come. ʿUthman ﵁ had in twelve years held the community together in its vast extent, and in his compilation of the Mushaf he had performed an act from which every generation of Muslims to this day would derive its Qur’anic text. ʿAli ﵁ had in four years and nine months held the caliphate in its office throughout a state of fitnah, and by his refusal to turn in that state to dynastic political actions he had preserved the principle of the bayʿah as consensual appointment in its purity.

Of the four, ʿAli ﵁ had ruled in the most difficult circumstances. He was the only one of the four who had come to office in a time of fitnah, and he was the only one of the four who had died in a time of fitnah. Yet his office was in its essence one with that of the three who preceded him. In his bayʿah, in his juristic pronouncements, in his military commands, in his fiscal policy, and in his dealing with the community, he had continued the pattern of Abu Bakr ﵁, ʿUmar ﵁ and ʿUthman ﵁. In the words of Ibn Juzayy al-Kalbi ﵀, whom Suyuti ﵀ cites in his appendix: he was, after ʿUthman ﵁, the man with the most right to the caliphate, on account of his noble rank and his exalted virtues. From this appraisal the community in the centuries that followed refrained from any counter-argument.

The saying that found an echo in every generation

Among the transmissions of his sayings that were preserved by the juristic and the spiritual community in the centuries after his death, there was one saying that found an echo in every generation and that in its brevity summed up the whole pattern of his caliphate. He spoke it, according to what is preserved in the later sources, in one of his khutbahs in the mosque of Kufa, in answer to a question from a man who had visited him and had praised him in a manner in which the praise had gone beyond what he in his own conscience accepted of himself. He turned to the man and said:

In this one sentence was contained the self-knowledge of a leader who in his office sought no advantage for himself, and who in his office had not lost the awareness of his own shortcomings despite the high esteem in which the community held him. It was a saying that in the spiritual literature of the generations after him was included in every collection of wisdom, and it belongs among the fragments of wisdom to which ʿAli ﵁ owes his enduring name in the juristic and spiritual community in the centuries after his death.

The mention of those who died in his time

Suyuti ﵀ closes his summary of the caliphate of ʿAli ﵁ with a list of senior Sahabah ﵃ who died in his time, whether by natural death or by wounds in one of the battles or by political violence. The list numbers, among others: Hudhayfah ibn al-Yaman ﵁, who at the beginning of the office of ʿAli ﵁ died in Mada’in after a long life as a companion of the Messenger ﷺ in the revelation and as a military commander in the conquests under ʿUmar ﵁; az-Zubayr ibn al-ʿAwwam ﵁, fallen at the hand of Ibn Jurmuz after his departure from the field of the Camel; Talhah ibn ʿUbaydillah ﵁, fallen by an arrow of Marwan on that same field; Zayd ibn Suhan ﵁; Salman al-Farisi ﵁, the Persian of Madaʾin who in the years of ʿUmar ﵁ had risen to the rank of a veteran; Hind ibn Abi Halah ﵁; Uways al-Qarani ﵁, who met his death in the battle of Siffin in the Iraqi ranks; Khabbab ibn al-Aratt ﵁; ʿAmmar ibn al-Yasir ﵁, fallen at Siffin as a confirmation of the hadith of the Messenger ﷺ about the rebellious group; Sahl ibn Hunayf ﵁; Suhayb ar-Rumi ﵁; Muhammad ibn Abi Bakr as-Siddiq ﵁, fallen in Egypt at the hand of Ibn Hudayj; Tamim ad-Dari ﵁; Khawwat ibn Jubayr ﵁; Shurahbil ibn as-Samt ﵁; Abu Maysurah al-Badri ﵁; Safwan ibn ʿAssal ﵁; ʿAmr ibn ʿAnbasah ﵁; Hisham ibn Hakim ﵁; Abu Rafiʿ ﵁, the freedman of the Messenger ﷺ; and others.

The list, in its length, is an indication of the extent of what the community had lost in these five years. Senior Sahabah ﵃ of the oldest standing, men whose first-hand memory of the Messenger ﷺ could still be seen in their voice and in their gesture, were lost one by one in these years. With each loss the generation of direct nearness to the Messenger ﷺ grew thinner, and the community drew closer to the moment when the second generation would have access, only through transmission, to what the first generation had learned in direct contact with the Messenger ﷺ.

The end of the era

With the death of ʿAli ibn Abi Talib ﵁ in Ramadan 40 and the cession of Hasan ﵁ in Rabi al-Awwal 41, the era in which the community had been led by those who had lived in direct nearness to the Messenger ﷺ came to a close. What came after was, however later generations described it, another era. The leaders no longer came from the direct inner circle of the Sahabah ﵃; they came from the second generation, and in later centuries from still further generations. The capital moved from Kufa to Damascus, and later to Baghdad, to Córdoba, to Cairo, to Istanbul. The form of government changed from a consensual appointment among the senior men of Medina to dynastic successions within ruling families. But in every generation the memory of the four Rightly Guided caliphs would remain, and in every generation a scholar or a reformer would return to their example as a source for what in his own time had to be realised anew.

ʿAli ibn Abi Talib ﵁ was, in the chronological reckoning of the four, the last. In the juristic rank of his ijtihad, in the depth of his spiritual legacy, and in the eloquence of his words that were included in every anthology of the Arabic language, he was contested in no generation. With his death the Khilafat ar-Rashidun came to an end. With his remembrance it continued to endure.

Sources

• Jalal ad-Din as-Suyuti ﵀, Tarikh al-Khulafa (trans. Abdassamad Clarke, Ta-Ha Publishers, 3rd edition 1995), pp. 192–193 (council of the three Kharijis in Mecca, marriage of Ibn Muljam to Qatam, condition of the bridal gift, attack in the mosque of Kufa), p. 193 (Hasan ﵁, Husayn ﵁ and ʿAbdullah ibn Jaʿfar ﵁ as washers of the body; al-Hasan ﵁ as imam of the prayer; burning of Ibn Muljam), pp. 193–194 (various reports about the place of the grave; age at death), pp. 194–195 (the saying of ʿAli ﵁ from his sickbed and his request that no innocent man be punished in retaliation for him), pp. 207–208 (elegy of Abu al-Aswad ad-Duʾali ﵀), p. 206 (the five-principles saying via Said ibn Mansur ﵀), pp. 228–229 (judgement of Ibn Juzayy al-Kalbi ﵀ on the disputes between ʿAli ﵁ and Muʿawiya ﵁); for the cession of Hasan ﵁ to Muʿawiya ﵁ in the year 41 see pp. 214–215.