#  Video: Battle of Siffin: The Intrigues Against Imam Ali's Statebuilding Project & Its Legacy in the Modern Middle East 

 





June 21, 2024

 

 

     ![Dr. Mohammad Sagha](/sites/g/files/omnuum5526/files/styles/hwp_16_9__480x270/public/hds2/files/untitled_600_x_400_px_23.png?itok=_Ev0ZlW4) 

 



 

 This talk explores the politics and legacy of the Battle of Siffin — a foundational moment in the early political memory and history of Islam that pitted Imam Ali ibn Abi Talib against a rebellion in Syria led by Mu'awiya ibn Abi Sufyan. As the first Shi'a Imam and fourth Sunni Caliph, the figure of Ali looms large in the consciousness of Muslims from the very early Islamic period until today. The talk is divided into two sections. The first explores the dialogue and politics between Ali and the diverse battle factions in his army at the Battle of Siffin. It analyzes Imam Ali's state building project, the interests of various elite generals and divisions within Imam Ali’s army, the context behind internal Muslim conflict and the political order of the early Islamic state, and the distinctions made by Ali regarding the roots and reasons behind internal civil conflict within the Muslim body politic. The second section analyzes how contemporary thinkers and scholars in the modern Middle East have interpreted the legacy of Imam Ali, the Battle of Siffin, and the "First Muslim Civil War” as a lens through which to understand the intersection between early Islamic history and modern political theology as well as debates over governance and statecraft in contemporary Islamic intellectual thought.

 Speaker: Dr. Mohammad Sagha, Lecturer in the Modern Middle East, Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations (NELC), Harvard University

 This event took place on April 29, 2024.



 

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 SPEAKER 1: Harvard Divinity School.

 SPEAKER 2: Battle of Siffin-- The intrigues against Imam Ali's Statebuilding Project and Its Legacy in the Modern Middle East. April 29th, 2024.

 PAYAM MOHSENI: Hello, everyone. Welcome to our final event of the semester. Battle of Siffin-- The Intrigues against Imam Ali's Statebuilding project and Its Legacy in the Modern Middle East.

 We're very delighted to be hosting this event alongside other events throughout the past year on The Life and Legacy of Imam Ali, our new research track here at the project on Shi'ism global affairs at the Harvard Divinity School, which is in parallel to our older track, The Life and Legacy of Imam Hussein, both of which are generously sponsored by the Jaffer Family Foundation of New York here at the project on Shi'ism and global affairs. We're very privileged and honored to be able to study the life of the imams and the House of Mohammad, the Ahlebait, as one of our significant research tracks and academic areas of focus.

 Now the talk here today on Battle of Siffin, a very important battle, at the beginning of Islamic history is a central element in the consciousness and the political experience of the Shia community, and forms an important component of Shia memory. So we're very much interested in looking forward to hearing this talk by Dr. Mohamed Sagha here, a lecturer at Harvard University.

 And Mohammad has been with us for many years on helping with this project, and we're happy that he is here to speak with us on the Battle of Siffin. Mohammad, of course, a lecturer in modern Middle East the NELC Department here at Harvard College. And his focus is on both early Islam, or Islamic history, sectarianism, and denominations, and pluralism within Islam, as well as contemporary Middle East politics in Islam. So with that--

 MOHAMMAD SAGHA: Thank you, Professor Mohseni, for the very kind introduction. Good afternoon to everyone, it's great to see you all here on this very sunny spring day. Glad to see many students here. You see, right after the semester, I don't know if you're happy to see me, but one last lecture.

 And it's actually very nice to have the opportunity to talk here, because as professor Mohseni mentioned, I focused both on early as well as contemporary Middle East, which has actually been quite, I think, fascinating given everything that's happening in the region. And also to historically be able to have these conversations and root them in both the early history of Islam, but then also bring that through to contemporary challenges.

 And that's one of the things that I really try to emphasize, both in my courses, as well as larger conversations with students, is that we oftentimes look at things in a historical vacuum, and we are lucky to even go back 20 years, or even in recent history. And so it's nice to have this opportunity to talk about the legacy of the Battle of Siffin and the intrigues against Imam Ali's Statebuilding project.

 One of the questions we might ask at the outset and the start is, why do we even focus on Imam Ali, why is Imam Ali important? And oftentimes, you'll hear in the Muslim Middle East, or among people that are looking, let's say, at the Shia and Sunni split in the early period. This is something that happened 1,400 years ago. why do we need to care about this.

 But I think maybe the more interesting question to ask is why has it stayed important for so long? How often do we remember things that happened 10, 20, 30, 100 years ago, 300 years ago, even. But we're still talking about something that happened 1,400 years ago.

 And muslims, when they talk about the caliphate of Imam Ali and that early Islamic period, it's very near and dear to their hearts, and it's something that they feel very close to them. So I think the better question to ask is, why and how has it been important for so long? And that's one of the objectives of the lecture today.

 Let me share a screen here. And before I start again, I just want to thank the project and Chisholm for hosting me here today, Professor Mohseni and the team at the Harvard Divinity School, as well as the Jaffer Family Foundation for helping support the research on the life of Imam Ali, as well as the life of Imam Hussein. So this is part of a larger focus on the imams at the Harvard Divinity School, which is a great initiative, and hopefully will be quite fruitful as it already has been, I would say. Thank you.

 So the Battle of Siffin-- The Intrigues Against Imam Ali's Statebuilding Project and its Legacy in the Modern Middle East. Now, the presentation today is, there's a lot to cover when it comes to the life of Imam Ali. So it's always a very daunting challenge, but also very rich and fulfilling to study the life of Imam Ali, because it serves as an archetype for all Muslims afterwards, so it's not limited to sectarian divides. This is one of the things about Imam Ali is that he's the first Shia imam in all of the Shia denominations, but he's also the fourth caliph in mainstream Sunni Islam. So all Muslims look to this period as a very important and critical period.

 So today's lecture will be divided into two parts. The first is on the road to Siffin. So the first part of the lecture will provide a historical context to imam Ali's caliphate and the background to the Battle of Siffin, what different factors led to the Battle taking place, and what were some of the main debates and factors that were important at that time period, including the very important debate around the succession to the prophet Muhammad, and what were some of the competing political logics among the early Muslim and Arab elite?

 And what this lecture will try to center, as I will argue, is the project of state building, which is oftentimes glossed over in favor of either theological arguments, most of which the theological arguments are there from the very beginning in terms of who succeeds the prophet Muhammad. But oftentimes, they tend to be a typology from later periods and later medieval Muslim scholars that are looking back at the early period and trying to come to different conclusions given their madhhab or their legal obligations. But often, usually even in the contemporary scholarship, Islamic State Building Empire isn't really connected at all. I'll try to talk about that at length.

 And so we'll revisit also the Battle of Siffin itself, and so the road to siffin and the Battle of Siffin. At the Battle of Siffin, what the other main theme of the lecture will be to look at and rethink about the battle lines and the battle fronts in the Muslim world. Usually when we think about the Battle of Siffin, or we think about the first Muslim Civil War, this is another reason that setting this is very important is that, this is the first Muslim Civil War. It's the first time you have large amounts of Muslims facing off against each other on the battlefield, high numbers of death, and civil conflict, which was very traumatic, and is still one of the most sensitive issues in the Muslim community until today. And for many Muslims, it's highly encouraged not to even talk about this time period, because of the fact that it can potentially cause factionalism.

 So the factionalism of that period has not been resolved. So we oftentimes we think that we're in the modern period, that happened 1,400 years ago, we have our Shia and Sunni identities, they're set. But are they actually set? Why do we assume that what we have today is going to be stable? How do we know that won't change, just as it has in the past when you had confessional ambiguity?

 And second, this issue is still alive, so it hasn't yet been solved, and it still provokes factionalism. So one of the reasons I would say that is the case is also because of looking at how political factions were not defined based on whose army you belong to. And that's one of the primary features of the Islamic Civil War and fitna in the Arabic, is that you would assume that if someone isn't Muawiyah's army, and someone who is in Imam Ali's army, those are two separate factions.

 But what I will show throughout this lecture is that the political and theological factions cut across army lines. This is both the challenge and the tragedy of Islamic politics, especially from a Shia understanding. So for them, and that will be the other main focus of the discussion today, is to understand Shia authors and Muslim authors overall. Oftentimes we say it's just Shia, but it's beyond Shia.

 But how, especially within the Shia world, how they understand and look at what happened at Siffin, both from a battlefield perspective, but more importantly, from a political support perspective of Imam Ali, and how those generals who were supposed to support Imam Ali, actually were working with the enemy. And how you have basically hypocrites or traitors within your own ranks. That is kind of the main theme, right, that you'll see within the Shia understandings.

 And as I mentioned, so I'll be centering State Building in the context of tribal expansion in the early Muslim period and non-tribal loyalty as well. We can broadly say that these are the two main features of State Building. One is, how do we think about the early Islamic State? So I'll make the caveat a little bit later, but by state here, medieval scholars that study the medieval Muslim period oftentimes get very paranoid about using modern terminology, what they think is modern terminology. So you can never use the word state, state only emerges in 19th-century Europe or something like this.

 But if by state we just mean political order, states are the most ancient institution in human history. There's always organization and state. So here by state building, we don't mean the modern state, but this I'll talk about. But in the context of the early Muslim empire, state is the tribe. It's the tribe and it's Islam. So how do tribal connections, marriage networks, and the idea of a tribal confederation intersect with the idea of Islam and conquest and settlement, as I'll explain.

 And the organizing framework, theoretically, is that the early Islamic State is the consequence of two to three main competing logics. At the top, what you have is, what I would call the corporation of Quraysh, which means that the Quraysh is a tribe that claims descent from Ishmael, so they're Abrahamic. They don't consider themselves Arabs, as genealogically they don't trace their roots in Southern Arabia. These are the Quraysh are migrants to the area that have Arabized over time.

 And so the Quraysh, they have this tribal affinity, but they have different subclans within them, which are, as we'll see in the civil war, fiercely opposed to each other to the extent that they're killing each other and the different clans of which. The Quraysh also largely rejects the prophet outside of \[NON-ENGLISH\], and so you see a resurgence, that I'll talk about in following decades.

 So you have at the top elite of the Islamic empire, and the expansion of, as we know, from the early Islamic period, when you just have Mecca and Medina during the time of the prophet Muhammad, and then other areas of Arabia, and the Arabian Peninsula, quickly expands within just a few decades to basically the heartlands of what today is the Muslim world, from North Africa all the way through to Central Asia, Iran, and elsewhere.

 Now that corporation of Quraysh now has to intersect with other layers of both Arabic speaking tribes in the Arabian Peninsula that are not Quraysh. So you have Yemeni tribes, you have other Northern Arabian tribes beyond them, but other, like many tribes. So what's the relationship of Quraysh to these other Arabic speaking tribes?

 And then two, how do different clans and elites within Quraysh make allies. because there's not enough people within your one clan, or if you have a few hundred soldiers, youth that can fight for you maximum. How do you feel against potentially tens of thousands of other Arabs? So how do you make your coalition with your allies, and also increasingly, this is something that Imam Ali emphasizes more, the Mawali, which are non-Arabs, or they can be lower or other Arab tribes, but generally referring to non-Arabs in this early period and their relationship to the \[NON-ENGLISH\]. Do you intermarry with them, how do you bring them into your army. Are Arab superiors, non-Arabs here. By Arab, I mean Arabic speaking, part of the \[INAUDIBLE\].

 And then finally, in the last part of the lecture, I'll talk about modern discussions of Imam Ali in the Middle East between different Muslim scholars writing in both Arabic and Persian, Sunni and Shia. And we'll look at some of the media as well, hopefully if we have time.

 So who is Imam Ali. Why was he important? According to many accounts, Imam Ali was the first Muslim after the prophet Muhammad. If we look at the early historical biographical accounts of Muhammad, some sayings or reports even place Imam Ali with prophet Muhammad at Ghar Hira. So you see this in \[NON-ENGLISH\].

 Ali says, I heard the moan of Satan when the first revelation came down of his despair. That means that he was with Muhammad at the cave. But there are different narrations. But that he was either the first Muslim, or the first male Muslim, depending on which narration, as in the first Muslim in some accounts is Khadijah, the wife of the prophet Muhammad.

 But then you also have a lot of reports that the first household of Islam were three, so Muhammad, Ali, Khadijah. And Islam spreads from that. Shiism spreads from that one small household to the household. It's always about the household.

 Imam Ali, in many accounts, none of these are actually purely sectarian accounts, as you'll find these across Sunni Shia early release reports. There's incident of doubt with Ashira, which is when the prophet Muhammad invited the key leaders of Quraysh for a dinner and basically asked who will be-- among other things, he invited them to Islam. But also to recognize who will basically be his strongest supporter, and what many \[INAUDIBLE\] believe is successor. After Ali ibn Abi was very young at this period, but he was the only one that stood up to say that that will be me.

 Now Ali is very important in the Muslim consciousness, because he is undefeated on the battlefield. This is one of the misnomers from Ali is that this caliphate did he lose, what happened to the battlefield? They won all the battles that they fought. He never lost a battle. And he was known for his bravery on the battlefield. So here at Badr. The first three are the major battles and turning points in early Islamic history during the lifetime of the prophet Muhammad. The Battle of Badr, the Battle of Uhud, the Battle of Khandaq, and then later on you have Khaybar as well.

 At Uhud, when the rest of the Muslim army fled, Imam Ali was with a small ring of final defenders. Maybe just a small handful, Maybe even under five that stayed with the prophet Muhammad and saved his life from the Quraysh's that wanted to murder him, because the majority of the Quraysh did not like the prophet Muhammad, the elites.

 Imam Ali also helped convert many Arabs to Islam, including large numbers of what later became the strategic Yemeni tribes. We'll talk about the front lines between \[INAUDIBLE\] and Ali. Oftentimes, they're distinguished among geographical lines, Iraqis versus Syrians, the Da'wat al-Shira. But a lot of these tribes are migrant tribes settled in the frontline cities of the expanding Muslim empire.

 So Imam Ali's base was in Ira, and some of the core supporters were these Southern Arab tribes, the Yemeni tribes. Imam Ali's is also known to be a master orator and speech giver. And so if we see Nahj al-Balagha, which is a very famous compilation by Shaykh \[INAUDIBLE\] about the \[INAUDIBLE\] period and student of Shaykh Mufid.

 Imam Ali was renowned for his oration. And when you go and read his speeches, especially in the original Arabic, you can see a clear distinction between his level of oration, how he spoke, references that he gave. It's very clear that this is Ali speaking. And he became known for that in the Muslim world among the Arabs who had a particular, when the Islamic empire and when Islam first came onto the scene, Arabic was not a written language as then, you didn't have a literature like other world languages had at that time.

 So oration, orality poetry, this was all very near and dear to the Arabs especially. And that's why the Quran is miraculous in the way that it universally appealed to all the Arabic speakers at that time. You have a similar type of thing with Imam Ali in the sense that there is a unique understanding of his speeches. And there's a reason for that \[INAUDIBLE\].

 Ali also, in addition to all of these mainly historical discussions, he also has a very high spiritual significance, an esoteric significance. In many hadiths and narrations he is the second light that was created, or split off, from the light of Muhammad, the Muhammad and light is the first light that was created according to many understandings of Islamic cosmology.

 All Sufi orders trace their lineage through to Ali. So he is, esoterically, important for all Muslims. And then, of course, he's also the fourth caliph. He has important contributions to early Islamic State building project as we'll discuss and political legacy of governance.

 Today Imam Ali is very important still. His shrine in Najaf receives millions of pilgrims every year, and it's around the sacred space of his tomb. And the spiritual energy that you see around the tomb that attracted one of the oldest educational institutions in the Muslim world, the seminary of Najaf. And today, led by grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, but one of the line of.

 Hundreds of eminent scholars that were settled in that space because Imam Ali's tomb is there. So it has pilgrimage. You have millions of pilgrims every year today going, but this is well over 1,000 years, you have recorded history of continual pilgrimage, before trains and cars and planes have people coming, making very arduous journeys from all around the world to Najaf, and not just to go and visit the shrine of Imam Ali, to be buried there. So this is biopower.

 The people, after their death, while Islam today is the largest cemetery in the world. It's in Najaf, because generations of Shias and Muslims have wanted to be buried in that Holy land, so the land itself is very pure. This is supposedly before nationalism, when nationalism is supposed to be. Borders are very important, land is very holy, and this is

 Holy land, centuries before nations, that people want to be entered into that lands, and that the dirt from that land has very special significance. There's just some pictures from Najaf during a trip there last year. You can see the intricate and ornate nature of the shrine. Is there a way to maybe turn off this light over here, so the \[INAUDIBLE\] can be seen. Let's maybe if we can. There's just one light. Yes, thank you.

 So you can see the intricate nature of the mirrorwork by \[INAUDIBLE\]. The 99 names of Allah on the marble pillars, each reflecting all having its own particular cosmology and \[INAUDIBLE\]. When you enter the Holy space of the shrine, you see yourself in a million different tiny mirrors, that's the cosmos. These are just other pictures from inside the shrine.

 And here, Najaf. Anyone know what this is? \[INAUDIBLE\], that's very good. And \[INAUDIBLE\] is a famous sword of Imam Ali. It's a symbol of justice, of strength. And here you see the bazaar in Najaf. Here you see a portrait of Imam Ali hanging over the bazaar. And here, this is referring to one of his main characteristics \[INAUDIBLE\]. He is the father of the orphans.

 So he's undefeated on the battlefield, but also the kindness and most attention toward the orphans, those who need the protection. So they have a lot of narrations that the orphans were crying when Ali was killed, because they didn't have a protector anymore. And he would visit their homes, face covered in the middle of the night, bringing provisions, talking to the being, a father to them.

 So the state for him as we'll see was a challenge and an opportunity to get closer to God, and that was the main purpose. So what makes Ali very unique and different. Is that you'll be in the middle of a battle, someone will ask him a question of theology, and he'll stop.

 And others will be like, hey, is this the right time to be asking this question, maybe we shouldn't be asking about a detail about resurrection when we're in the middle of battle. Ali would say, actually, no, this is the time to actually talk about it. That's the whole reason we're fighting is for the afterlife. So it's a very-- he's operating on a very different logic. And we'll see this later with economic ideas or the civil wars as well.

 A lot of people, they're scared. They don't want to fight their cousins and the other tribes. And all of these-- they want to like step aside and they're worried about their assets or their family. And for Imam Ali says, OK, but this is a chance for you to get closer to God. This is the opportunity.

 So fitna, civil strife, it should be avoided. But when it does rear its head, this is the opportunity to shine, because this is the toughest battle that you will face as a civil conflict. When the front lines are not clear between right and wrong, when you have companions of the Prophet Muhammad, all of whom accepted Islam, turning against each other, accusing each other of very high crimes.

 So how do we categorize political difference? One of the things, just a quick caveat, is that when we use the labels of Shi'a and Sunni, these oftentimes can be anachronistic, even if we loosely accept them as early. And they're not early origins, of course, of these terms. They're moving definitions, and so that's just something to keep in mind.

 And that's not just for Shi'a and Sunni. We can see this for the terms Muslim, Islam, Arab. All of these in the early period can often have a sense of back projection. And that's a universal issue that we have in historical studies, is how do you know that the way that you're talking about your identities today is how people talked about them in the past or believed in them in the past. So that's one of the things to consider.

 So even when we say like the early Arab armies, some scholars have mentioned that there probably were as many Arabs, if not more Arabs in the Byzantine armies that were fighting the early Muslims than there were in the Muslim Arab armies. So we oftentimes see this as an Arab conquest or it does have those elements. But then that doesn't mean that these were ethnic split, ethnic splitting, or even sectarian or Islam.

 So what does Islam mean? So we can look at some of the works of Fred Donner and Peter Buchanan and others that look especially like Donner was my advisor at Chicago, had a very influential book on this about how the term Muslim and Islam is oftentimes misunderstood in the early period. It's more of a monotheistic reform movement rather than a strict religious boundary between a new category of Islam, what did it mean to actually be a Muslim.

 So this is just a caveat I want to mention here. So when I use these terms, we should just keep that in mind. We can't escape them because we don't have something else to replace it for now at least, but that's just something to keep in mind.

 And again, and final caveat, statebuilding refers to the state and context, state in context. It's not the modern state. Obviously there's different aspects to the bureaucracies of the modern state and other factors that have changed the modern state. So if we look at the early Islamic period, there's large debates over what this means, but the key areas of the state are not disputed. And in the literature, there is some debate over how the conquests were run or the chronology of these are disputed. But the fact that they happened are not.

 So this includes conquest. So there's no debate that there was an early Islamic conquest or early expansion of the Arab tribes that converted to Islam or to follow the message of the Prophet Muhammad. We know that there's issues of distribution over war spoils, the khums and different types of taxes that were part of the early Islamic bureaucracy, Faid, Quraysh and other terms as well. And we know about the garrison cities. These are new cities that are built by the Arabs and Muslim Arabs in their conquests, including Kufa and Basra, as two of the main ones that we'll see become very important for Ali and his statebuilding project. And then we also know that we see rich discussion of inter-tribal disputes and some type of Islamic ideals and identity.

 These are just some of the literature for those who are interested, but these are all excellent works that touch on a lot of the themes that I'll be talking about today. Madelung's Succession to Muhammad, SH Jafri's Origins of an Early Development of Shi'a Islam, Fred Donner, Early Believers Movement, Hugh Kennedy, Prophet and Age of the Caliphs, Mahmoud Ayoub, Crisis of Muslim History. These are all survey histories. So for the most part, Madelung's stance in the terms of detail and source work is-- I mean, I don't think anyone since then has been able to match that level of detailed engagement with the sources. Each footnote itself take you days to go through. As I found out, as I was preparing for this lecture. But it's a deep expanse into the early Islamic sources.

 And then you also have excellent work by Article and chap long chapter by Mohammad Ali Amir-Moezzi's Reflection on the Expression of din Ali, which is an edited volume by Daftary and Miskinzoda, Maria Dakake's Charismatic Community, there are many others there, just a sample of some of the main texts.

 Primary sources as well, for those who are interested, there are many. These are just some of the main ones that I relied on in this presentation and what many of the scholars also rely on. Waqa'at Siffin, Tarikh Tabari, of course, m Ibn Sa'd, Shaykh Mufid has one work, Kitab al-Jamal. Thaqafi, Kitab Qaraat is a very important work on the fight between Ali and Mu'awiyah, especially in the period after Siffin. And then Sharh Nahj al-Balagha, a multi-volume works, 12 volumes or something like that, Ibn Adi Hadid. That is a commentary on the text, Nahj al-Balagha, but also an excellent historical source that provides commentary and so on. OK.

 So compared to everything else, the other literature that has been presented, what is a study contribute? Generally-- and I'll move very fast here, but, generally, the literature is very rich in the details. That's drawn from the Arabic sources and discussing the larger dividing lines between the different waves of believers, the Meccans, the Quraysh, their tensions with the Medinans, the Aws and Khazraj tribes in Medina, the subdivisions within Quraysh. And most of the scholarship tends to go chronologically, reconstruct the events stage by stage or chapter by chapter. And they'll usually follow the narrative reconstructions that are found in the debates in the primary sources.

 This is where the literature does a pretty good job. And this is where the classical Islamic studies and philology does well is that it reconstructs the debates in the primary sources. So that's very good. However, what this study adds and what I'll be talking about today is centering statebuilding initiatives. And how incentives of joining the state and positions by the Caliph or the Amir al-Mu'minin could disrupt and reorder the social dividing lines such as tribal affiliation.

 So here, what I'm interested in, and then I'll be talking about, is the creation of new categories of social and political identity that are intrinsically tied in with the succession dispute, leadership claims and caliphate and imamate. So because the the, the scholarship tends to reconstruct for the most part, the narrative debates within the primary sources. They will look at what was important to the scholars at that time as they were compiling their works.

 They won't look as much in the debates around how statebuilding and access to state resources redefined identities and led in and of itself to a new Muslim body politic. That's where the emphasis of the study is, that it's not just about a commitment to Muhammad and his message. It's more than that. It's about joining an actual political organization that then could change your entire life and lifestyle in terms of where you settle with your family, the stipends that you get from the state, the economic activities that you participate in, your daily life, the Friday prayers. It's a whole new understanding.

 And so what we see factions emerge at and the interesting thing about this is that the importance of leadership. We see factions that emerge as succession points. These are the inflection points, the Shi'at Uthman and Shi'at Ali, the followers or the partisans of each of these. You also see the terms Din Ali and Din Uthman, which could have a reference like the religion or the path or the way of Din Uthman that become also important. So these are interconnected in that sense.

 So one of the driving factors of civil conflict was access to the state and state resources as a subgroup protector and simultaneously a ladder for advancement, prestige and even defining belonging to the Muslim community itself. So what I will focus on a lot in the remainder of the presentation is who did Ali choose as an army commander? Who did Umar Uthman, Abu Bakr-- how did they choose their army commanders? On what basis was that?

 Because each appointment in the state would have consequences and reverberations for rival groups and factions, or even more importantly, create or redefine factional sectarian identity. So the state and the battles aren't just means for existing factions to fight it out. It's a way to redefine what the front lines are and what the different factions become. And so you have to-- so what I Look at are the potential pool of commanders and governors that could be drawn.

 And how did this alienate or incorporate those who are included or excluded? This is where you see-- even when you look at the sources, this is where the-- I don't know if the majority, but a large amount of the debates focus around is about why did you appoint this person as a governor. This is where the most of the civil conflict is. It's almost all about that. It's misappropriation of state resources and it's about who you appoint. Those are not how we think about theological disputes. Those are what we would call today purely political decisions about who the governor is and why does this person leading the raids into Iran or why is this person a governor of this city. Almost all of the debates are about that.

 And here is a map just to give a sense of the wide expanse and the quick expanse of the early Islamic State. You see, it covers a wide territory and a new empire that these borders had not been achieved before that. If you look at the Romans, for example, they had at the height, they would have maybe the western half of this right through from Egypt and parts of the Levant and Syria. The Persian empires would have the Arabian-- parts of the Arabian Peninsula, Iran and basically from the Levant to the Central Asia.

 To connect these two had not happened before and since. So the early and you see. So in the orange you see during the time of the Prophet Muhammad, then you see during the caliphs and basically the Abbasid and Umayyad dynasty, the dynasties, which you see the large extent of the Islamic empire. So these are you have a lot of money at stake. You have a lot of power, prestige, empire, elite standing. There's a lot there's a lot at stake here. And people took this very seriously.

 OK, I think I'm going to discuss that. So skipping to the middle here, the other dimensions of the conflict, if it's not just theological, what are the other areas of the conflict and how can we think about how to define politics. Other dimensions of the conflict outside of just theological, who has precedence in Islam, is Umar better than Uthman and Ali. Then there's also these areas, tribal affiliation and sense of communal identity, how you define what your primary political community is.

 Settling is a conquest meant isn't just fighting and conquering new areas, it's actual settlements. So you move your community or subgroups of your tribe to different parts of the world. So you have mass migration. And so you're settling in new cities and there's lucrative conquest spoils. You have patronage networks of local governors that I mentioned that were very important because the local governor would basically determine the Islamic local state. So because of the lack of centralization, it was very difficult to administer all these places in a central way. So the local governors have a huge amount of swaying power.

 So now you have divisions in the new Muslim body politic are al-Quraysh, equally going to get stipends from the state. The muhajirun, those early-- the small group of Quraysh that accepted Islam and moved with the prophet to Medina, do they get a higher stipend than the ansar, the people of Medina that actually supported and fought with the mass of the armies of Muhammad, other tribes? And then you have other tribes that are basically they exist in concentric circles around.

 So if you look around, like if you expand outwards, like towards Yemen or contemporary Yemen, Oman, Bahrain and so on, what role do they have? They weren't they weren't early adopters of Islam. So then how do they figure into the equation?

 All of these discussions are embedded in early statebuilding. The state then becomes the ultimate arbiter and authority of the site where you see the clash and hopes and aspirations of all of these various groups. So the state becomes very important in that sense.

 According to some scholars here, I'll read the-- this is a quote from Kennedy's work, Prophet and the age of the Caliphates, the launching of the conquest gave the Muslim leadership great powers of patronage. Only those who are Muslims could participate in the conquest and share the rewards, which were to be determined by the Medinan government. Many a tribesman must have felt that joining the armies of Islam was a way to earthly as well as heavenly paradise. The conquests were, in short, a necessary consequence of the unification of Arabia under Muhammad and Abu Bakr. Without this external opportunity, the hold of Medina over the Arab tribes would have inevitably disintegrated. Expand and survive was a political philosophy.

 So the whole idea was if you're not able to continually expand the Arab tribalism is very destructive in the sense that any commander, and we'll see this, any commander that you want to choose from one tribe can upset the other commanders from other tribes. That's how tribalism works. Why are you choosing this guy? Why are you choosing Northern Arabian over Southern Arabian? Within the Northern Arabian, there's a bunch of different clans.

 So the idea was have to keep you have to keep expanding and providing so many resources and cycling people through to create some sense of balance, or at least that's how the early \[INAUDIBLE\] Umar worked. Uthman was a bit different, as we'll see. Ali challenges that. He has a different understanding, as we'll look at. But the idea and the Abbasids and the Umayyads, when they-- especially in their early periods, they also have to respond to these.

 The conquests were also organized among these very important urban institutions, urban political institutions, the amsar. So you oftentimes will see in Imam Ali talking about \[? Mis. ?\] Mis here's not Egypt a lot of times. Mis are the cities of-- this could be referring to Basra and Kufa.

 This can be very confusing if you're reading sources and aren't tuned into that. But the amsar, they're basically garrison cities. They're military garrison cities that are forward bases for expansion and invasion. Here's Kufa and Basra in southern. And at the mouth of the Persian Gulf is where Basra is. Kufa is historically close to where Ctesiphon and the Persian capitals were, as we'll look at. It's where the Euphrates and Tigris are very close to each other.

 And these are the superhighways, in which you can basically dominate the Middle Mesopotamia and what the Persians call iranshah, which is the heart of the Persian empire, which was Iraq. And then for those in class, we talked about Iraq early and in the early medieval sources as \[? Teharib ?\] of Iran, meaning that Iraq is the arabized word for Iran. So the Iraq and Iran are the same word. They're just-- and that's how people saw it at that time, because they're part of one block.

 That's why Ali went to Kufa. He had the strongest resources, the strongest supporters. Everything was there. So he had a lot of assets and strategic depth there.

 And that is where the Islamic conquest also has strategic depth was in these frontline cities. Kufa and Basra are the main garrison cities. So sometimes you'll see in the early Islamic sources the reference to \[? Aral-ein ?\] Aral-ein is-- it can mean Persian Iraq and Arab Iraq in later contexts, but it can also mean Kufa and Basra in the very early period, because this is-- Aral-ein is where you control the whole region.

 Outlets for progress, settlement, wealth, security and patronage of the state, so these are the armies of \[? Hadir ?\] from basically Kufa and Basra. Mu'awiyah is from Damascus. So this has a very-- so this also, on the one sense, the expansionism is helpful, but on the other sense, it can also create perverse logics for conquest and spoils.

 And Ali has to deal with this because people are expecting, as we'll see the Khawarij that later leave Ali's camp. They're expecting when they go fight Mu'awiyah, they're going to take his women as slaves. And Ali says, no, these are Muslims, you cannot do that. And then they call basically Ali a \[? kafa ?\] for not allowing them to have access to the enemies' women and to their spoils and so on. So he has to deal with these tribal elements as well.

 I'm going to go very quickly through here, but just some of the very quick inflection points in the early Islamic period under different regimes. So the Prophet Muhammad proclaimed his message in Mecca in the year 610. He was rejected by the vast majority of the Quraysh. The people that rejected Muhammad are the same, basically for the most part, the same ones that rejected Ali, except you also have-- what makes it more complicated is you also have Aisha, one of the wives of the Prophet Muhammad, Ali and Zubayr, which are early adopters of Islam.

 Zubayr is the first full, first-- not full. He's the first. He's a maternal first cousin of the Prophet Muhammad and Imam Ali. So he has a big stake to the claims of leadership of Quraysh. He has a powerful claim. And his son, Abdullah Ibn Zubayr, is the nephew of Aisha.

 But you'll see in the Quran is oftentimes quite harsh on the Quraysh as well, in part because they reject the prophet. \[NON-ENGLISH\]. This is a version that the prophet is-- oftentimes prophets will complain at the khum. It's different than Ummah. Khum is like the tribe is rejecting the Quran, or they're taking it heedless, \[NON-ENGLISH\]. My khum has taken the Quran and heedless.

 And so oftentimes you'll see. So Noah, for example, Prophet Noah, 950 years with his people, the khum is oftentimes rejected. This is a big tension point in Quran.

 The Quraysh claimed descent from Ishmael, the son of the Prophet Adam. As such, while they were Arabized and spoke Arabic, their genealogy and sense of self was non-Arab. It's linked to the lineage of monotheistic prophets. And this is something that, as we'll look at a good article by Mohsen Goudarzi, who's here in the Divinity School, talks about how this larger category of like Isma'ili or Isma'ili in the sense of lineage from Ishmael, was something that other early Muslims also wanted to adopt as their identities as well, in that they were the Abrahamic monotheistic lineage. But Quraysh had a special claim to that because they were the bloodline lineage, which becomes very important.

 As you can see, there's a good article with the Muslim here by Goudarzi that I mentioned, as well as Madelung has a great discussion at the beginning pages six to 18, I think, of Madelung, Succession to Muhammad. That has a very good section on the families and the points of the families. Here's another map of the earliest known conquests. And so this is just to give a sense-- I'm talking about all of these in terms of statebuilding, why the importance of statebuilding.

 Saqifa Banu Sa'ida, when Prophet Mohammad passed away, his body was being washed by Ali and the Banu Hashim, the Ansar, the original Medina supporters, gathered to choose a new leader or what would happen to the political order after the death of the prophet. This was an open question. People didn't really know what to do. You have a whole section in Baladhuri's Ansab al-Ashraf. We're just looking at this yesterday just on the Hashemites washing the body of Ali.

 So because they had-- this was the Hashemites here. The Banu Hashim is a close friend, so Quraysh has like 10 clans or however many clans. And then the Banu Hashim are the closest clan of the Prophet Muhammad. So this is where the Abbasids later come from. And the traditional al-Bayt, Hassan, Hussein and their descendants.

 Abu Bakr and Umar, so they go-- basically there's a minority of Quraysh that go in, but they're prominent companions. Abu Bakr and Umar who later became the first and second caliphs and their father-in-law's, the Prophet Muhammad. Their daughters are married to the Prophet Muhammad, Aisha, Hafsa, along with Abu Ubayd al-Jarrah rushed to the meeting and they were able to convince the group to pledge allegiance to Abu Bakr. This is why the Quraysh is a family corporation, were the first caliphs. Go back, Umar, father and Uthman, also father-in-law, although they intermarry with the Prophet Muhammad.

 Imam Ali is married to Fatima, so he has also a special privilege, probably the only child of the Prophet Muhammad is married to Ali, and as we know the only surviving bloodline goes through Fatima. So the line of the Prophet Muhammad is there. So it's a family corporation. It's those people who can claim to be close to the Prophet Muhammad.

 That's the whole argument that Abu Bakr and Umar make at zarifa is that, ansar, you cannot-- the people of Medina, you're not from Quraysh, you're not from the Abrahamic line. The Arabs will only accept the Quraysh because we have the highest prestige with the clan of Muhammad and we're the descendants of Abraham, basically. That's the basic idea.

 Later on that turns out to be mainly in Ali's favor in the sense that Ali has the closest. He's the full first cousin. They're raised in the same house. As in all the things, he's the first Muslim. All of these discussions end up being in Ali's favor, but that's largely-- that's the logic that everyone accepted going down.

 The idea, so this is-- again, I'm just going through the brief history in terms of the political logics of statebuilding. The basic idea was to split the responsibilities and distribution of power at Banu Saqifa-- sorry, Saqifa Banu Sa'ida, was to split the responsibilities and distribution of power between the elite sub clans of the Quraysh. So Abu Bakr is from-- we'll see. Each of the early caliphs is from a different subclan of Quraysh The idea is to switch to subclans around, and then use their lineage from Prophet Abraham and their shared blood with the Prophet Muhammad.

 Later, sources report that Caliph Umar reporting that if the prophethood and caliphate were combined in Banu Hashim, it would be impossible to separate from them in the future. So if we allow Ali to become the caliph afterwards. This means one clan of Quraysh will monopolize power at the top because they have the Prophet Muhammad and they have the successor to the Prophet Muhammad.

 So one of the strategies of Umar that you see specifically, and this under Abu Bakr as well, but Abu Bakr ruled for only two years and Umar for a longer period of time, about 10 years. His strategy was to empower the Umayyad clan-- sorry, it's a empowered different clans of the Quraysh, including the Umayyad clan as one of other clans to balance the larger distribution of power.

 So the Umayyads are not Mu'awiyah. One of the things that makes him strong in the civil war is that he is the consistent governor for decades in one of those richest areas of the empire, Damascus and Sharm, which is today, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, all that area.

 So Mu'awiyah was originally appointed by Umar Uthman, his decades-long tenure there. And that wasn't because Umar wanted to empower the Umayyads. Umar was from another branch of the Quraysh. It's that they were one of the many other ones. It's just that, as we'll see, because Uthman happened to be the third caliph, he entrenched the Umayyads even more.

 And this is where the civil conflict basically erupts, which is that Aisha, Talha, Zubayr, Malik al-Ashtar, Ali, basically everyone outside of the Umayyads universally have some level of criticism towards Uthman. Why? Because Uthman, where he broke the rules of the original game, which was that you powershare between clans, he was monopolizing within his own clan, according to the criticisms against. And again, this is to put respect theologically, this is not to disrespect any type of theological argument. And then there's a complete-- here, I'm just looking at the historical discussions and claims that are within Sunni sources or not Shi'a sources.

 When Abu Sufyan was a leader of the Quraysh, the biggest opponent to the Prophet Muhammad, Abu Sufyan is an Umayyad. The Umayyads, so initially, Abu Bakr and Umar, to an extent even, they didn't want the Umayyads to resurge because they were the early opponents. But under Uthman, they're able to come back because of the power sharing purposes, because they were one of the prominent clans of Quraysh. You couldn't ignore them.

 The clan of Abu Sufyan, Banu Umayya, is able to get back into power through the selection of Uthman about 12 years after the death of the Prophet Muhammad. Uthman heavily favors his clan by placing them in key positions of the state. And there are widespread reports of corruption and misappropriation of state revenues, people like Marwan, Mu'awiyah and others, and these are usually not treated very-- as in Aisha has a very staunch critiques of all of these individuals and Uthman himself. The other clans of Quraysh start to get increasingly nervous because they seem they're locked out of power, basically, and the revenues.

 So Aisha should calls for the removal of Uthman. Talha is one of the early other Quraysh that we'll see as a prominent companion linked into some potentially even violent agitation against Uthman. Violent protests, however, is opposed by Ali. Ali, in many reports, even sends his sons, Hassan and Hussein, to protect Uthman's house when it's besieged in Medina by opposition protesters.

 However, when Uthman is killed, even though Ali opposed any type of violent action against uthman, he doesn't necessarily condemn the killing and that he says that I have to deal with this on my own terms and in accordance to a more calm period when I can then treat the people who killed Uthman and look at the claims. So he doesn't necessarily-- he also critiqued Uthman. However he wanted he did not want Muslim blood to be spilled, and he wanted peaceful means through which to address grievances.

 After Uthman was killed, the consensus of the people of Medina converges on Ali as the next caliph. So he has a popular election, which was-- the way that he was elected or selected as caliph becomes a debate. But it's one of the important discussions of early Islam.

 So let's look at some of the social and political background of early Islamic rulers. We know the Prophet Muhammad is from Quraysh. As we talked about, he's from the Banu Hashim clan. Abu Bakr, also Quraysh, Banu Taym, b. Murra, branch, Umar, Quraysh, Banu Adi clan. So you see, there are all different clans right now at the beginning. Uthman, also different clans, Umayyad. Uthman, he's actually Banu Hashim from his mother's side. But patrilineally, he's from a different he's from \[INAUDIBLE\].

 Ali, Quraysh Banu Hashim, now finally goes back to the close clan of the Prophet Muhammad. Mu'awiyah, Quraysh, Umayyad. So then from Mu'awiyah and then Yazid, who Mu'awiyah appointed as successor, Umayyad, then you have the Umayyad dynasty. So you have a lot of classical Sunni theology, stops at khulafa Rashidun, the first four caliphs. Why? Because they don't accept the way that Mu'awiyah became caliph and then the Umayyad dynasty afterwards, because it doesn't fit the way their idea of how justice should be approached. And then, for example, you have other future ones, \[INAUDIBLE\].

 These are the different-- just some of the-- so you have to actually know these clans when you study early Islamic history. It can be very confusing but you have to know these, because when the sources, when you read them, they're usually talking about how choosing one of these subbranches is making other branch upset. So these are all important.

 So lineage blood is the state of early Islam. Your bloodline is your statebuilding. So who you marry and who you make tribal confederations with is the state.

 Here you see, this is from Marshall Hodgson's book here. These are all-- usually, when you see these are abridged. They're not the full things. They're just choosing some of the main people because these are huge family clans.

 So Abd Manaf, you see, is basically the-- is like the forefather of the Umayyads, the Abbasids, the Ahl al-Bayt. So then you see the Hashemites clan is where you see Abdullah, the father of Prophet Muhammad, as well as Abu Talib, the father of Ali and Abbas. So these three basically become one of-- the lines from these become the different branches of the early Islamic State. And so therefore, marriage becomes very important because that's where your lineage reproduces and that's how you make matrilineal alliances for the imam.

 So as I mentioned, the early Muslim states, a family corporation at the top with competition between various clans of Quraysh who could then leverage their elite blood status into positions of state and marriage that could work in cultivating networks of supporters and ideally statebuilding access. At the top, Quraysh power consensus is the marginalized Banu Hashim. But it's not just the marginalized Banu Hashim. They also don't want any other group to get hegemony, including the Umayyads. So that's why you see a lot of opposition to them.

 When Ali was pledged allegiance in Medina, many of the heads of Quraysh demurred and the main ones erupted. And the leaders of Quraysh erupted in open rebellion in Basra, Southern Iraq. And so Imam Ali fought three major battles alongside a range of different intrigues in a famous speech that's in \[INAUDIBLE\] group, referred to in different places. It's the nakithin or qasitin or mariqin. It's the oath breakers, those who fought him in Basra, the qasitin, the opponents and Syria, Mu'awiyah, and then the defectors, maraqin, in Khawarij, which won't talk about too much today, but these are the three main groups that opposed Ali, Jamal, Siffin and Nahrawan, these are the three major battles.

 The green areas or the areas that are under Imam Ali's reign. And for large parts of his empire, too, Egypt was also under his domain. So you see he actually has the power advantages against Mu'awiyah.

 Mu'awiyah initially does not claim caliphate. He just doesn't want to be taken away from his governorship position in Syria. So he's basically defending his position and trying to force the hand of Ali to make sure that he does not get removed then. It's only later when the factions within Ali start to crumble that then Mu'awiyah we can move into the power vacuum and eventually to caliphate, which was probably not something that they wanted to do because Abu Sufyan was the biggest opponent of the Prophet Muhammad. Like his claim to the caliphate with Ali is not really like comparable for the early Muslim community.

 But because the Qurayshis themselves didn't like Banu Hashim generally, Mu'awiyah can also take advantage of that. So it's an alliance between the fragility of the Quraysh and the opposition of Quraysh to Imam Ali that then Imam Ali has able to take advantage of.

 A group of Meccan Qurayshi rebels, they go to Basra, they seize it there. So this is Aisha, Talha and Zubayr. These are the three major leaders. Talha and some of the Hadith are one of the 10 promised paradise. So as in he's-- according to some of the Sunni Hadith, he has a high station. He's Quraysh. Aisha will be the same. Aisha, the daughter of Abu Bakr, Zubayr, first cousin of the Prophet Muhammad.

 I'll read this quickly. This is from Madelung page 162. So the army of these Qurayshis led by Aisha, Talha and Zubayr, they moved to Basra. And this is talking about they then go-- there's a battle then between the rebels and Imam Ali's governor in Basra.

 The next morning, the governor of Ali moved to attack them and there was a fierce but inconclusive fighting in which many were killed. Then a truce was agreed until Ali should arrive. Uthman Ibn Hunayf, who was Imam Ali's governor, was to retain the governor's palace, the treasury and control the mosque while the intruders were allowed to stay wherever they wished in the town and were to have free access to the markets and watering places.

 Aisha, Talha and Zubayr now decided to stay among the Banu Tahiya of Azd. The agreement to wait for Ali's arrival was clearly unfavorable for the rebels. Why? Because Ali's in Medina, he has to move the army from Medina to Basra.

 It's unfavorable to the rebels. And Talha persuaded al-Zubayr to break it and take Ibn Hunayf by surprise. On a windy and dark night, they attacked and seized him as he was leading the evening prayer in the mosque. So during a time of prayer, the rebels go and they seize the mosque.

 According to the Khazrajite Sahl b. Sa'd, they sent Aban b. Uthman-- sorry, Aban b. Uthman to Aisha to consult her on what to do. She first advised to kill Ibn Hunayf, but a woman interceded, reminding her of Ibn Hunayf's companionship to the prophet. And Ibn Hunayf, Ali's governor, was a prominent companion of the prophet Muhammad. She called Aban and told him, imprison him and do not kill him. Aban answered that had he known why she had recalled him, he would not have come back, meaning that he wanted to kill the companion of the Prophet Muhammad and his governor.

 Ibn Mas'ud, Mujashi Mas'ud, a Basran of Banu Sulaym, now advised the captors, beat him and pluck his beard. So they gave him 40 lashes, plucked out his hair on his head, his eyebrows and put him in prison. So they tortured and sent him back. They didn't kill.

 One of the reasons they also didn't kill him is that his brother was the governor in Medina tribes. Your brother is a governor in another key city. That means that city will be locked out to you and you'll have another army that can come towards you.

 So, Ali, in order to defeat the rebels in Nahrawan, he first has to remove Abu Musa al-Ash'ari from the governorship in Kufa. Abu Musa al-Ash'ari is another prominent companion of the Prophet Muhammad. And in order to do so, Ali sends Ammar Ibn Yasir, one of the first Muslims whose parents are the first martyrs of Islam, Sumayya and Yasir. They are killed because they don't renounce Islam.

 And Malik al-Ashtar, who was the leader of the Nakh'a tribe, Malik al-Ashtar is a very famous in Shi'i memory, because he's basically a battlefield genius or strategist in Ali's army. And he's a leader of probably the strongest tribe, if not one of the strongest tribes of Kufa and the Yemenis, the Nakh'a tribe, Southern Arabians.

 So they have to-- Abu Musa al-Ash'ari rejects, basically doesn't follow Imam Ali's orders. And so Imam Ali first has to take him aside. And then once he does that, he's able to raise 6,000 or 7,000 tribal fighters in the city. And then the Battle of Jamal takes place, which was a Swift defeat for the Rebels. And Ali is-- they're able to capture Aisha but Talha and Zubayr were killed in the fighting.

 The way Talha was killed by Marwan ibn Hakam, shot from behind by an arrow while he was fighting. They are supposed to be a part of the same coalition, but Marwan shoots the arrow towards Talha because Talha was one of the people agitated against Uthman. Marwan Ibn Hakam is a relative of Uthman, so he took tribal revenge right there. Zubayr fled from the battle, but he was killed by some of the Banu Sa'd Tamim.

 One of the main strategies of Ali is pre-battle negotiations, which he undertook with the utmost seriousness, and he convinced thousands of would-be rebels to disarm and either join his army or retire from the battle. This is a consistent strategy that Ali does that some of the more hardline elements in his army usually are like, why are you going and talking and giving speeches about Islam now, let's go fight.

 But the strategy that he does, and oftentimes it can be very tedious because it can take in Siffin, as we'll see, it actually can take weeks or months, usually the effect of tipping the balance or scales. Why? Because Ali will provide opportunities also for anyone that is discontent with some of the strategies of the other enemy to then pull aside or join his arm.

 So in Nahrawan, in Jamal, and other battles, and Nahrawan-- this is also very effective, Nahrawan, their former army men of Ali, and he's able to split away hundreds of them from before the battle and swiftly defeat the enemy there. And Ali says after Nahrawan, al-Fata'ih to \[INAUDIBLE\] fitna, that I've blinded the eye of fitna.

 Ali's sedition. Ali's critics in his own army say he's delaying war, he's afraid of death. He responds that, by God, I'm neither afraid of death and would embrace it. Rather-- so this is the quotes from Nahj al-balagha and other places, he would engage in order to guide people from all sides. Again, this is also-- he doesn't look at the armies as different factions. He's looking at it as one Muslim body politic and re-guiding people towards the truth and avoiding error. And you can see this heavily in a series on Imam Ali that was made in Iran, Shahid-e Kufa, and it shows it quite well.

 Some of the fighters, and after the Battle of Nahrawan, some of the fighters around Aisha. It's called the Battle of the Camel because there was an armor plated camel that Aisha was placed on and people would rally around, defend Umm al-Mu'minin. They're attacking the wife of the Prophet Muhammad. So she became a very potent symbol for the battle.

 Some of the fighters around Aisha had Qurans tied around their necks. In some reports, when the battle had started, Imam Ali sent a man with the Quran raised to appeal to arbitration. Let's talk but let us resolve this by what is in the Quran, not by the sword. The response was they shot him with arrows. And once he was shot and killed, the battle begun. So Ali did not like to ever start a battle. And Imam Hussein in Karbala does the same thing, because I'm not going to shoot the first, I'm not going to start the conflict. Even though we're surrounded, we're attacked, you do not like to ever start bloodshed.

 After the battle, Ali saw the corpse of Ka'b Sur, who had a Quran tied around his neck, and he was killed defending the camel of Aisha. Ali ordered the body to be set up and spoke, I found what you promised by my Lord to be true, what was promised by my Lord to be true. Have you found what your Lord promised true? Then Ka'b was laid down again.

 So it says, \[NON-ENGLISH\]. He respects the body. He sits up and talks to it. Because why? The soul is still alive. The soul can see after death, according to Islamic cosmology. And they're seeing the reality of their actions and what happens.

 So he's showing it on the battlefield that it's still like, why are you talking to a corpse? In our modern conception, it might seem weird, but he sits it up in terms of when you address someone you're not laying down, you're sitting. And he has a conversation. He has a put on around your neck. I found what my Lord promised me to be true. Did you find what your Lord promise you to be true? You're using the Quran in the civil conflict to oppose many.

 Another aspect of Imam Ali was that, within the civil wars, Ali would not authorize the identity of the enemy within civil confusion. This is a quote from al-Tabari, Jarir al-Tabari. Ali's conduct towards those who fought him on the day of the camel, according to Asad. I think it's a study from safe-- this is the chain of transmission. It was part of Ali's practice not to kill those who fled or finish off the wounded or dishonor the women or take money. So on that day, some men were asked what allows us to kill them but forbids us to take their money. Those who fought us are like you, replied Ali.

 Those who make peace with us are with us and we are one with them. But for those who persist until they get struck by us, I'll fight them to the death. You're in no need of their fifth, the war spoils. It's called the khums.

 It was on that day that the Khawarij began talking amongst themselves. Why can't we? Their enemies were killing them to take all their assets. And he said, no, you're looking at that as the enemy. But that could be in your heart, too. How do you wouldn't join the other side? If they're muslims, we have to give them a chance to join again. But if they insist on fighting, then we have to fight. Security is the highest priority.

 So in this instance, it's called the first civil war, in part because of how he dealt with the enemies, which is different from the Ridda Wars and Abu Bakr's reign. A lot of the Arab tribes had either refused or were not sure whether to pay their taxes to Abu Bakr. They didn't renounce Islam for the most part but they didn't necessarily want to pay sadaqah or taxes to the state. And for that they were called murtadd or non-Muslims and had to be reconverted to Islam through war. So what Ali did was different than the early \[INAUDIBLE\].

 This is another speech by Ali. This entire period is discussed by Ali in the last part of his speech of Sheikh Shatila. This is a very famous chutzpah or speech of Imam Ali, and his own comments are useful in examining this confused era. In the end, the third of them, Uthman stood up, shrugging his shoulders arrogantly, and he stood with the sons of his father eating up the property of God as the camels ate up the springtide verdure. Until what he had twisted became untwisted. His destruction was complete and his greediness made him fall to the ground.

 Then all of a sudden, I was frightened to see a crowd of people around myself, thick as a hyenas mane, throwing towards me in every direction until my sons, Hassan and Hussein, were mob. My two sides are split, gathering around me like a herd of goats. But when I took up the government, one group broke its pledge, another rebelled and others transgressed as if they had not heard the words of God, who says that is the abode of the hereafter, and which we allow to those who do not seek greatness and corruption on Earth. And the end is for those who fear.

 Nay by God they have heard these words and comprehend them. But the world is sweet in their eyes and they are pleased by its guidance. And so this is for Ali. Oftentimes, you see this hyper spiritual politics. This is all for him about actualizing the Quran. And it's all about trying to understand what motivates people.

 So moving to the caliphate of Ali, sorry, the first pledges of allegiance to Imam Ali, according to sources, so after Uthman was killed, occurred in the house of Amr b. Mihsan al-Ansari, a veteran of the Battle of Badr, the first major battle of Islam before the public pledge in the Mosque of the prophet Muhammad. This is from a website, lifeofimam.com, which you can read a narrative of the life of Imam Hussein through the caliphate, through different stages of the Prophet Muhammad's life, the Imam Ali's life.

 Imam Ali received the first pledges of allegiance in the house of Amr Mihsan on the 18th of Dhu-l Hijja before a public gathering in the Mosque of the Prophet \[INAUDIBLE\]. The day was, in fact, the same day as al-Ghadir, which is also 18th of the Dhu-l Hijja. Al-Ghadir is a day that Imam Ali, that Prophet Muhammad, said, \[NON-ENGLISH\], whoever takes me as his mawla, will take Ali as his mawla here, being object of debate. But basically Shi'is believed this is like the either-- is like the spiritual, sovereign and successor and political successor as well, all comprehensive.

 Let me actually get this. The pledge of allegiance, according to some sources, occurred in the house of Amra Mihsan al-Ansari. Mahmoud Ayoub states, Ali was the first-- al-Ansari is also very famous because of donations of the plot of land. And also we'll see others that rallied around Ali were the early ones that had the Prophet Muhammad stay in their house in Medina.

 But here Mahmoud Ayoub states, Ali was the first and only popularly elected caliph in Muslim history. Why? Because there was a convergence of everyone basically in Medina around Ali. So this wasn't-- so what makes Ali different is that the first, Abu Bakr, is chosen by a council of Ansar, Medinans, with maybe three or four Meccans present.

 Umar is chosen directly by Abu Bakr, no council. So it's a direct election. Uthman is selected by a council of six people that are chosen by Umar. And according to Tabari and other sources, if I think it's two of them are in the minority, they'll be killed, so it has to be consensus position. But he chose. But the way he was chosen was basically to pretty much push it towards Uthman, probably.

 Ali is chosen through the people of Medina. So in some senses, it's new in the sense that it's like a mass thing from the city. It's not a private council in Saqifa Banu Sa'ida. But it's also similar in the sense that these are the same Ansar that basically chose Abu bakr, now choosing Ali. So it's also not new in that sense.

 Ali took his capital to Kufa for several reasons. One, it had a large base of supporters, and the Shi'a, including among the Yemeni tribes, settled in the city. Many of the elite were his partisans. It had strategic depth, as I called. It's the closest place we'll see in this-- you can see here, it's one of the closest places, this is Kufa today, between \[INAUDIBLE\], like the Euphrates and the Tigris. And then, strategically, it avoids strategically-vulnerable Medina, which Medina relied on a lot of imports for food and other places in the middle of Arabia is hard to get to.

 When Imam Ali enters Kufa, he refuses to settle in what's the pernicious palace or the castle of corruption, as Imam Ali says, qasr khibaal. Khibaal can be found in the Quran usually meaning confusion or trouble, Surah Tawbah. So he doesn't go to the governor's palace.

 This is another aspect of Ali. He is an ascetic. He will live at the same \[INAUDIBLE\]. He was at the most-- he will live as the hardest people or the people most in need will live in society. And you can see that as a continual sort of aspect that he does. So he spurs the spoils of empire.

 Here you see another. This is a map showing-- you can't really read it that well, but all the different tribes, which were largely Bedouin tribes or semi-settled in the conquest when they moved to Kufa. Each of them is given a different neighborhood inside the city. This is a big part of the urban politics. So Kinda has a part, \[? Hameem ?\] has a part, all these other different tribes. And each of these quarters then has a tribal leader that is chosen by the caliph as the one who will distribute the war spoils and the vast revenue of the state. So, Ali, if he chooses one person out of Kinda over another, this causes a conflict, as we'll see, one of the tribes.

 From the beginning of his stay in the city, Ali was forced to try and assemble a coalition strong enough to coerce Mu'awiyah into accepting his authority. The problem was to persuade the Kufans that it was in their interest to march on Syria. This becomes one of the main things that Imam Ali has to struggle with is raising the amount of army. Even though he has a lot of advantages there, he has to convince them that it's in their-- that's in the interest of Islam and the Islamic State to go and take care of this rebellion rather than they wanted to go and raid other parts of Iran or other places because they could get more war spoils. So how does he how does he do that? He has to deal with the Ashraf or the tribal leaders and others.

 OK. So what are some of the statebuilding initiatives under Imam Ali? What makes him a bit different than those who came before or makes him unique? Well, this should be-- sorry, there's a lot of text that once I thought it was bullet point, but OK. One, the first thing that Imam Ali did, one of the first objectives that he has is establishing authority and order over his own governors and officials.

 So first thing that he has to do, he has to remove all of Uthman's officials and governors, which he does, with the exception of Abu Musa al-Ash'ari, because Malik al-Ashtar and others advocated for al-Ash'ari and then later called him a hypocrite because they thought he was with Ali, but in reality, he was undermining. And Abu Musa al-Ash'ari later became the chief diplomatic negotiator for Imam Ali at the negotiations for Siffin, which we'll get to. So a lot of people supported him even though Ali didn't like him. This is like in Shi'a politics. Later on, Abu Musa al-Ash'ari is the diplomatic traitor and let him in their rhetoric.

 People like Abu Musa al-Ash'ari, their companion of the Prophet Muhammad, he's installed as a governor in Kufa by Uthman. He refuses to carry out Imam Ali's orders when Imam Ali orders an army to be raised. And then Imam Ali, as I mentioned, he has to send his son, Hassan, and Ammar Ibn Yasir to push him out. And then Ammar Ibn Yasir-- Malik al-Ashtar seizes the palace and is able to then push Abu Musa aside and then raise an army to go fight in Jamal.

 And Imam Ali says, if you do good-- and this is a letter that is in Kitab al-Jamal. That's in Shaykh Mufid. If you do so, like if you follow my orders, Abu Musa, good. Otherwise, I ordered them, Hassan, Ammar and Qays \[? Sinsal, ?\] who is another very famous tribal leader, to fight you as hard as possible for verily Allah does not love the traitors, kha'inin. So he calls Abu Musa al-Ashari kha'inin, a traitor, as they manifest before you, and they will tear you up piece by piece if you do not follow the order. So this is a very serious issue of the state.

 So imam Ali, he always avoids violence. He's trying to start war. But in certain critical issues, you see a very strong also force that is right. It's not all just let's just talk and hug and stuff. So also this \[? element. ?\]

 Two, protect the overall Islamic body politic and the overall core of Islam. You see, this is a consistent thing that Ali does from Saqifa through to his caliphate. So even though his rhetoric is consistent over four decades, he says that I'm the legitimate successor. However, in order to make sure that the Islamic body politic overall does not fragment, I will abide by the new rules. So it's to protect Islam overall, not just his partisans. Why? Because if Islam is destroyed from the top, his partisans will also be destroyed.

 Simultaneous to this, another part of this, is to protect the core seeds of the true partisans of Muhammad, Ali and Ahl al-Bayt. He remained consistent in this messaging from the very beginning, and his narrative did not change. What makes Ali different from the other leaders and his emphasis on Ahl al-Bayt is his messaging about Islam overlap largely with the others. But his emphasis on Ahl al-Bayt is one of the key differences, meaning that from the beginning, what makes him different \[INAUDIBLE\] and Umar is that the emphasis on Ahl al-Bayt, the Hashemite lineage of the Prophet Muhammad. So this is like the famous hadith \[INAUDIBLE\], that I left for you two heavy things, the Quran and the family of the prophet. So you emphasize the family prophet very much.

 The fourth thing, the statebuilding objective under Imam Ali is imamate, which is oftentimes seen in the early Islamic sources under the discussion of Walaya or the wali and the wasi, establishing the principles of imamate and its early indivisible attachment to leadership and guide of the Prophet Muhammad. So no Shia authors afterwards. There's a consensus that no Shia authors afterwards say that the imam does not have rights over the state. This is something that he consistently says. The only issue in the time of the occultation can you take the state or not. It's not around the authority of it being around the imam.

 And what this also does is that this creates a polarization around Ali. So the figure of Ali provoked this deep, internal battles within people. And this is what Professor Mohseni calls and many of his lectures, the Tawhidi dualism, that Imam Ali and his politics is the same as his cosmological politics that he oftentimes in his speeches and rhetoric that you will see that he'll talk about theological issues in the middle of battle or at the key issues is the distinction of right and wrong and the victory of truth or falsehood, whatever form it might take. So this idea of making sure that they're consistently staying with the message of the Prophet Muhammad creates a hard line that for others they're willing to potentially work around, especially as we see in Ali from Madelung's.

 The exact wording and the state of a sermon that he mentions is open to question. The tenor and contents, however, clearly reflect the style of Ali's speeches and public statements throughout his reign. It's likely that he sets the tone right from the beginning. It's one of the early speeches of Imam Ali. Blunt rebukes and harsh charges of disloyalty, lack of sincere devotion, failure to respond to the summons the evident just cause and occasional warm praise for acts of loyalty, where characteristics of his pronouncements, they tended to alienate many of his lukewarm supporters, but to also arouse enthusiastic backing and fervor of a minority of pious followers. He left them in no doubt that they could find true religious guidance only through him and the family of the Prophet Muhammad and reproached him for having turned away from them.

 So here, another aspect of Ali is that he devotes a core elite following that will ideologically is committed to him well beyond his reign. That is Shi'ism. So the seeds of Shi'ism are up here. You have an ideological, and this is what Maria Dakake writes in her book. You have the Walaya and the early community of love and devotion to Ali as special after the Prophet Muhammad.

 So his rhetoric can seem harsh and non-diplomatic or non-political. Why? Because he's not playing the same diplomatic game as others. His diplomatic game is for cosmological politics, the Tawhidi dualism. But what that does is that means that he has a core of hardline supporters, the ideological guard, the vanguard, the ideological vanguard of Imam Ali that we'll talk about, the Shurtat al-Khamis.

 At the same time, his so-called failures, the failures of Imam Ali, proved to be epoch-making in the history of the development of Shi'ism. The bitterness of the supporters of Ali created by his defeats and disappointments proved a historical foundation for the development of their sectarian tendencies. And the destruction done to him gave the later Shia enough material for the formation of their own discipline within the body of Islam.

 So attempt to grasp the situation as a coherent whole reveals the fact that the selection of Ali was at once a triumph for a particular view of succession, a hitherto frustrated and a great shock to all those who successfully adopted a principle of leadership devoid of notions of primacy based on hereditary sanctity after the death of the prophet. With a succession of Ali, his two rival views came into genuine conflict for the first time and crystallized into definite forms. The former view soon defeated again was to find expression as separatist tendency towards a, so to speak, sectarian organization. The later reemerge victoriously and more vigorously and eventually shaped the self in such a way as to become the center of the Islamic Umma or Jama'a. So here, in defeat, the bitterness of defeat creates the grounds to which you have the devotion to Ali and the narratives around Ali, and as Jafri argues here, the sect of Shi'ism as well, so who actually failed.

 You see so early, sources saying, calling Ali the wasi and al-wasiya, the legatee among the legatees. Warith ilm al-anbiya to Ali is seen like the level of knowledge and closeness. And the way that he spoke created an energy and a charisma around him that attracted those that were around him to remember the time of the Prophet Muhammad. I'm going to skip this for a second time.

 So who are this elite vanguard? And the sources are oftentimes they're called Shurtat al-Khamis. This is the fifth. This is the elite. This is the ideological core of Imam Ali's army and the core idea of the Shia. They're the loyalist of Ali. This elite Vanguard differentiated Ali from other rival contenders.

 You see some aspects of loyalty around Aisha and Umm al-Mu'mineen, around the camel, at the Battle of the Camel. But it didn't turn into similar sovereign leadership claims, like wasi and wali, which you don't see applied to Aisha. Later, Shia authors divided internal groups of Ali followers into four different groups, al-Asfiya, the sincere friends, and al-Awliya the devoted friends, al-Ashab, companions, and Shurtat al-Khamis, the picked division, the elite Vanguard.

 Some of the distinctions between the different groups isn't fully clear, but it's-- and it's possible that it's not totally hierarchical, but it's rather a three dimensional spectrum between these groups, potentially. But we see different ways of understanding what the Shia are with the Shurtat al-Khamis the picked division, being the Vanguard at the battle. So they had some of his subcommanders. They weren't just tribal groups from Kufa that were masked. This was the 20% elite that would stay with Ali till the end, whatever Ali said. So they accepted his Walaya, not just him as an amir or an army commander.

 Quickly, just-- we're running short of time, but Ali's governor in Egypt. I'm just going to show just pick picking some of the key commanders. In Egypt, it's Qays ibn Sa'd ibn Ubade, his prominent Ansari companion. Sorry, his father was a prominent Ansar, elite leader of the Khazraj in Medina, later becomes the governor of Egypt.

 In Basra, Uthman bin Hunayf, we read about earlier of the Aws tribe, another Medinan companion to the Prophet Muhammad. In Kufa, Abu Musa al-Ash'ari, the leader of the Fazari, the prominent companion and a very sharp and brave battlefield soldier, very known for his strategic skill. In Yemen, Ubaydallah ibn Abbas, a Hashemite, the cousin of Imam Ali.

 And the commanders and fighters, you also see different Abu Qatada al-Nu'man al-Khazraji, prominent Medina companion, Umar ibn Abi Salama, al-Makhzumi, a Qurayshi, Sa'id ibn Ubayd al-Ta'i, Banu Tayyi The flag banner of Jamal also has a son, Muhammad ibn al-Hanafiyya, from another mother other than Fatima. And so he see his sons, Muhammad ibn al-Hanafiyya, Hassan and Hussein, also participating in these early battles.

 These are all taken from another session. But here I want to show that Imam Ali also had to be cognizant and aware of how he had to, to an extent, play by the rules of the game that were set up. So he couldn't escape it even if he would preach against it. I can skip this.

 So sociologically, these tribes were not associated with each other just through lineage. Geographical splits between tribes could create differences as well. So large tribes, so that spanned across Iraq and Syria, would oftentimes fight each other, would fight each other at Siffin. So just because you were a part of one tribe and had a single lineage, the geographical distinction, and this is the significance of Islamic statebuilding, created different incentives for where you settled, your city was and who your commander was over your city, Mu'awiyah or Ali, became more important than your tribal lineage. So you see, this is-- what you see many cousins fighting and killing each other across.

 And these are just a couple of the examples that you see Kufans of the tribe fighting in the Battle of Jamal. And it's said that the person that cut down the camel of Aisha did so, because as long as the camel was up, people would come, all the Quraysh would come and defend, and they had lost the battle. But Aisha-- when they saw Aisha, they had to defend Umm ul-Mu'minin, they would go defend. And then finally, Ali says, just cut down the camel. Because as long as the camel is up, all the Quraysh are going to get slaughtered.

 The person that cut it down was someone from Kufa who saw all of his kinsmen in Basra who were following Aisha getting slaughtered. And so he was concerned that if he doesn't cut down the camel, all his Basran cousins will be killed. You see similar instances of this in Siffin as well.

 OK. He ordered at the beginning of the battle, whoever is wounded or captured should not be killed. If you throw away your arms and retreated, you should not be fought. Only captured weapons and animals are considered war booty. After the battle, there's an order that no war prisoners, women or children will be enslaved. Property of the slain enemies was go to the legal Muslim heirs. And then he paid out of the Treasury of Basra to his soldiers instead of having them loot the city or take it, which was the norm of these places.

 \[ARABIC\]. Hear me! Satan has roared to his followers and herded his camels in order to return oppression to his homeland and restore evil to its roost. By God, they have no cause to fault me or seek redress. Rather, they demand from me a right they abandon and vengeance for the blood they spilt. If I had been their partner in this affair, they would still have their share of culpability.

 And then here's talking about the assassination of Uthman. But if they have undertaken it on their own, which they have without me, then they keep all the blame and their main allegations rebalance to them. In truth, they suckle at the breasts of a woman who has weaned her young and resurrect a heresy that has been put to death. Losers, every one of them, the issuers of this call! Who is it, pray, who calls, and to what purpose do they expect me to answer? I am satisfied with God's proof against them and his knowledge of their deeds. If they persist, I will consign them to my blade that will cure the wrong and instate the right.

 This is from the-- the Arabic edition is \[INAUDIBLE\] of Ibn Abi'l Hadid from Sayed Ali Abbas al-Musawi, and this is the translation by Taha that was published in the age. OK.

 This is the final part. I know we're nearing towards the end, but the Battle of Siffin, the first blitz of the Euphrates and the Iraq-Syria border. The battle is around the Euphrates and there's incident over who gets access to the water. So the water politics is very important. And this is the front line between today Iraq and Syria.

 So this corridor is very important because if you can grab this, as we're seeing tense today between Iran and the US. So this is a strategic point between these two areas. They open up highways that go through. So if you can take Siffin, you have open corridor into Syria and vice versa, as we'll see Mu'awiyah takes advantage of later.

 After defeating the battles, the rebels in Basra, Ali pivoted to Syria with a large army mainly drawn from the settled tribesmen in Iraq. Mu'awiyah refused to pledge allegiance. He was using the state coffers. He represented a type of politics that opposed opposition to Uthman.

 Ali first engaged in long diplomatic effort before the start of hostilities. And we see the battles, as I mentioned, we see them two armies facing off. But in reality, Ali had to engage in these discussions because he's not just talking to Mu'awiyah. He's talking to his own army, too. This is one of the main things that's also missed is that he has to convince his own army to be united and fight. Why? Because Mu'awiyah's side remained firm in their loyalty to him, but Ali's side, you see factions that emerge.

 I'm going to skip this. But this is a quote from Ayoub saying that Ali still-- he was on the way to Siffin. He had very strict orders for his army. Do not pillage anything that is along your way. Don't disturb any of the women along the way as well. As in basically respect people's properties, rights and so on. So this was a very important aspect of his war-making.

 I'll skip this for the-- But Tabari further reports that Ali enjoined his fighters not to initiate hostilities. Fight only in self-defense when attacked for you, he said, are by God's grace in the right. And refraining from attacking your opponents is another argument for you against them. They are the ones starting this war.

 I'm the caliph. They have to respond to my authority. But if they force and they're starting the war, then we can fight them. If you engage in battle and defeat them, do not kill anyone who runs away. Don't attack a wounded man or expose the nakedness of anyone. Don't desecrate any of the bodies. Do not mutilate a dead person.

 If you make your way into the tents of people, do not violate their privacy or enter a home except by permission of its owner, nor should you seize as booty anything of their wealth except what you find in the military camp. Do not harm women, even if they disgrace their family honor and insult your leaders and upright man.

 So what are some of these factions within Imam Ali's army? It's not just the Shurtat al-Khamis were ideologically committed. You have several different factions. These are the main ones.

 One of the most powerful factions are the land-owning elite. These are the entrenched aristocracy led by a person known as Ash'ath ibn Qays. He is the leader of one of the leaders of the Kinda tribe that had attempted-- the Kinda had attempted to establish a state before the rise of Islam. And so they had a lot of power and prestige as well. And they weren't part of the inner circle of the Quraysh realm.

 You have also proto-Khawarij, extremists who wish to enslave other Muslims. They didn't understand or believe in the concept of expediency, as in, if this enemy, they are your full enemy. It's like this \[? Tenouhabi ?\] or ISIS mentality to an extent. So how do you take those down and prevent that from rising? This is how Ali had to deal with these type of tribal mentality.

 You have also tribal middle forces, mainly from Iraq, that are settled from Arabia and Yemen that would follow their senior leaders. And this is one of the challenges of Siffin is how do you deal with the Ashraf, the tribal leaders. Each of your army is basically you have dozens of Commanders. Each of them are leading their clans into battle. So you have to somehow be able to push, pull these all together.

 And so this tribal middle would follow their senior leaders and they're part of the larger mass mobilization. And then, of course, you have, as I mentioned, the Shurtat al-Khamis, the elite Vanguard. These are the ideologically divided core.

 Especially for later Shia commentators, the inability and paralysis of Ali's army stems from the fog of war, not being able to tell the difference between the faithful believers and the hypocrites, not seeing the enemies within one's own faction. This is where Shi'ism really focuses on the Battle of Siffin, how do you tell the enemies inside your camp?

 We know that Mu'awiyah is fighting the-- how do you know Ash'ath isn't a traitor? This is a general of Imam Ali. The general of Imam Ali is the one, as we'll see later, gives Ibn Muljam, the killer of Imam Ali, a safe house and weapons to kill Imam Ali. So the killer of Imam Ali is one of his main generals at Siffin. This is Shi'a politics, the challenge of coalition building. The good and bad are mixed in the side of the good.

 I'll skip this. These are some of the different commanders. I'll skip this for the sake of time. But the main tribal divisions that you see, like northern and southern tribes, the Mudari, which is where the Quraysh also have connections, and the Rabi'a tribes, the Southern Arabians, which are Kinda and Nakha'i.

 I'm going to skip this for the sake of time. But basically, Imam Ali, sometimes when he chooses a commander over another one, there's protests from the-- so some from Kenda is chosen, then the Rabi'a tribes will say something and vice versa. So this becomes very hard to deal with.

 Mahmoud Ayoub sees this as one of the weaknesses of Ali's side is a Bedouin radically individualistic culture of his followers versus the urbane nature of Mu'awiyah subjects that are settled in Sham or Yemen and Syria, as well as the religiously scrupulous nature of Ali's army. Quote the radical individualism, which often expresses itself in spontaneous and hasty emotional actions, was an important component of the clash of narrow tribal politics with religious morality in early Islam.

 Mu'awiyah's army gets to Siffin first. They captured the water around the Euphrates. And they said that we're not going to let you get to this water, which shocked a lot of the companions and so on, because you're denying a basic humanitarian right of water to other Muslims.

 Imam Ali's army quickly takes the river. They push Mu'awiyah's forces back and then Mu'awiyah gets scared, says they're going to reverse it back. And then Marwan says, don't worry, Ali is not going to do what you do. He's not going to cut off the humanitarian.

 This is again a quote from Ayoub. The Siffin civil war did not represent a conflict among different Arab tribes, but a clash between two religious, social and political ideologies. It was a conflict between the caliphate as an old Arab and Islamic institution represented by Ali and oligarchic rule represented by Mu'awiyah. The shift toward this new and unpopular form of government was initiated by Uthman and developed into an autocratic authority by his Umayyad and Abbasid successors. Ali's caliphate may therefore be regarded as a brief but violent interruption of this inevitable development.

 I'm going to skip this for a second time. How could Ali rally and unite his army? How do you escape the nepotism of the tribal chiefs and an imperial wealth and politics of the expanding Muslim body politic?

 One of the answers of Ali is the person of Ali. Ali is also the state. It's not just who he marries. The imam is the state. His person exemplified the best model of a Muslim. He's the first Muslim after the Prophet Muhammad, most brave Muslim, he's known in Khaybar and so on and killed many of the big warriors that opposed him, the Prophet Muhammad.

 He's undefeated on the battlefield Muslim, kind to orphans Muslim, ascetic Muslim, wealthy Muslim who spent on others. So these are all adjectives of Muslim that Ali brought up to make a differentiation between other types of Muslim. So if you just have the name Muslim, you can still be aristocratic Muslim, you can still be a greedy Muslim, you can still be a miserly Muslim. Ali was the exact opposite. He was the best model of Muslim.

 In a letter to his uncle, Aqil, while he was a caliph in Kufa, my view is to fight the corrupt plotters until I meet Allah in martyrdom, and the greater the number of people with me will not increase glory, izza, and they will not make fear go away from me, because I am in the right, muhiqq, and Allah is with the truth, Allah ma al-haqq, \[INAUDIBLE\]. And there's no goodness after death except he who was in the right.

 So their people are saying, we want to join your army and so on. He says, if I have a larger army, that is not going to actually change my position. I know I'm with the truth. This is for you. This isn't for me. It's not going to make fear go away from me. I'm going to still fight. I'm in the right and I know God will back me.

 Many sources, including al-Tabari, say that Ali wanted Siffin. Malik al-Ashtar, his main general, was in striking distance of Mu'awiyah's tent. This is, again, taking from Life of Imam. I'm going to skip this, but-- for the sake of time, I'm going to skip this.

 But basically, Malik al-Ashtar is there and he is able-- he sees Mu'awiyah's tent. Mu'awiyah is about to get killed on the battlefield. Right at that moment, and this is after a night called Laylat al-Harir. It's a night during the Battle of Siffin when Malik al-Ashtar proved his genius and marshaled the battle of the army of Ali to the brink of battlefield victory.

 The Laylat al-Harir, the night of howling, is when you hear the clash of the swords, the breaking of the spears and so on. It is a night when Ali's army put the battlefield behind them. Meaning that you have-- Mu'awiyah is there, the army is here, you have to put the battlefield behind you in order to get to Mu'awiyah. So you push them back. And basically we're about to finish off Mu'awiyah's army.

 At that moment, Ash'ath ibn Qays says the idea that if you do not accept a diplomatic agreement, I'm going to kill you, basically, inside. So they make a move to kill-- so this is basically saying that if you don't make it, you've actually gotten the victory, but on the other side, Ash'ath does not want Ali to win the war. He's imam, at least one of his main generals, he doesn't want him to win. Why? Because he doesn't like Ali. He doesn't like this form of politics to rule. He wants to be governor of Isfahan and so on.

 So the tragedy here is not that-- it's not about Ash'ath. The tragedy is people following Ash'ath and for the Shia not to follow Imam Ali. So there's a famous we have a scene here. Malik al-Ashtar is going-- this is an Imam Ali series produced in Iran by Davood Mirbagheri.

 He sees the camp of Mu'awiyah and he says that I'm going to strike the camp of sedition. I'm going to take it down. And then the others say, well, look the other side, Mu'awiyah's side, is raising Quran on the spears. We don't want to fight other Muslims. We don't want to fight the Quran.

 I think that's just as Ali as a \[INAUDIBLE\]. He has speaking problem. And you're afraid of the-- Ali's telling you to finish the fight. No, we don't want to fight. They didn't follow Imam Ali.

 They didn't. This is the whole issue of Shia politics. It's about the personality of Imam Ali and following his directions. Therefore, Ali was forced at sword point and rebellion by some of his leading generals to enter into arbitration with Mu'awiyah. And they forced them to choose as his diplomat, Abu Musa al-Ash'ari, who was forced out of power by Ali himself.

 And then the other layer of tragedy from the Shia perspective is that the rank and file and elites that forced him into negotiations with Mu'awiyah then called him an unbeliever for entering the negotiations. Because I didn't want to enter into these negotiations, like, yeah, well, you did and you're a kafa and you're going to hell. Like, OK, I told you guys don't do this.

 So this is a moral affront to Ali and then also oppose everything he stood for, which later he says when he kills a lot of these people in the Battle of Nahrawan, they eventually drew swords against him for doing something that they told him and they forced him to do at sword point and then they fought him for it. When he kills most of them, he says, \[NON-ENGLISH\], I blinded the eye \[INAUDIBLE\].

 Mu'awiyah also after the-- this is another chapter of the importance of Shia politics, which is if you enter into a negotiation with someone who is corrupt, he's going to break the agreement. Don't trust diplomacy with those people that are after power and wealth. You can't trust their words.

 After Siffin, Mu'awiyah uses the instability that has been created from the Battle of Siffin and the divisions in Imam Ali's army to carry out all these raids. This is taken from Madelung. Mu'awiyah called al-Dahhak ibn Qays and instructed him to attack the Bedouin Arabs loyal to Ali in the desert west of Kufa to fight minor troop detachments of the enemy army. So he's creating disorder, but to avoid any major force sent against him, because he knows he can't fight, Mu'awiyah, you can't win in a pitched battle against Ali.

 He gave him 3,000 and 4,000 horsemen, Mu'awiyah di. Al-Dahhak crossed the desert, killing the Bedouins he met, carrying off their property and reached Tha'labiyya on the pilgrimage route from Kufa to Mecca. He attacked the pilgrims, presumably as they were returning from Mecca, robbed them of their belongings.

 They turned north on the route. He murdered the nephew of Abdullah bin Mas'ud. Ali then basically has-- Hujn ibn Adi was later is called the first political martyr because Mu'awiyah later kills him for just political speech dissent. But he's a famous tribal commander. He basically defeats this force. But the raiders that were sent by Mu'awiyah, they don't want to actually fight. They flee, because they're just there to kill pilgrims, create disorder and then blame it on Ali. This is all from that.

 So the whole question is, where is the frontline? So some authors, like Kennedy, see Ali's position as gradually weakening before his assassination. But Ali still had a lot of partisan support. Ali did not fail in any of his policies.

 He won all the battles. He was doing economic reforms. He was assassinated. He was not defeated.

 On the eve of his assassination, Ali was assembling a large campaign against Mu'awiyah. A source is saying 10,000 men were appointed to Qays ibn Sa'd, tribal commander, to 10,000 men to Hussein, his son, and Abu Ayyub al-Ansari, 10,000 men each. You can find this in Ibn Abd al-Barr.

 So this led commentators, including Shi'a ones, to see the failure of Ali's caliphate not as a failure of Ali's policies but as a conspiracy and coup against him from his own state. He was assassinated and killed and not killed in battle or overthrown by the people. The seditionists and betrayal in the elite ranks colluded for conspiracy to strike down Ali while he was prostrating in prayer, in sajdah, what many commentators see as a fitting end for the only person born in the Ka'ba. The Ka'ba is where all Muslims prostrate in their daily prayers to pray. Ali was born the only person born inside the Ka'ba and he was killed in sajdah while he was prostrating to the ground.

 The man who killed Imam Ali, the Khariji ibn Muljam, I'm wrapping up here, was furnished with a safe house and arms by none other than Ash'ath ibn Qays, who forced Ali into negotiations to begin with and then assassinated. Ash'ath's daughter, by the way, is married to Imam Hassan. She also poisoned him through a bribe by Mu'awiyah.

 So this is Shi'a politics. Your father-in-law will poison you for dinner. And your close family and friends, like people that say that they're with you, it's not just a family connection. It is a loyalty to the goodness of the imam. In your heart, if you have hate against the imam, it will show itself as hypocrisy, will show itself to poisoning, to conspiracy, to doing anything you can to bring down the leader. And here you see, this is a screenshot from Imam Ali at the Battle of Siffin from the Shahid-e Kufa series.

 Abd al-Rahman bin Muljam al-Muradi, the ally of the tribe of Kinda, along with two Kufan accomplices, ambushed Ali as he was entering the main mosque of Kufa to lead the morning prayers. Ibn Muljam struck Ali on the head with a poisoned sword. Ali is reported to have exclaimed as he received a fatal blow, \[NON-ENGLISH\]. I have achieved my goal the martyrdom, by the Lord of the Ka'ba.

 Ibn Abi'l Hadid reports on the authority of the well-known literature and historian, Abu Faraj al-Isfahani, that Ash'ath ibn Qays had a hand in Ali's assassination. He said to have met secretly with Ibn Muljam the night before in order to finalize the fateful plot. During a sharp confrontation between Ali and Ash'ath's, the latter warned Ali of his impending death.

 Ali is said to have angrily retorted. Is it with death that you threaten me? By God, I care not whether I fall upon death or death falls upon me.

 OK, I have another section on-- I think we're probably short on time. I have another section on the modern Middle east, but maybe I think we should have hopefully part two because we will go through Shahid-e Kufa series and some of the discussions by Ayatollah Khomeini and as well as Ayatollah al-Fayadh in Iraq currently that talk about Siffin and Imam Ali. But I think we'll probably short on time, probably just to wrap up now.

 So thank you for your patience. And I don't know if we have time for questions and answers, but thank you.

 PAYAM MOHSENI: Thank you. Thank you, Mohammad, for a very rich and thorough presentation. We're actually quite short on time, so maybe we can have only a couple of questions, but let me just perhaps begin. For those on Zoom, please feel to write your questions on the chat. And then, of course, here, when we open to Q&A, please raise your hand if you have a question.

 But, Mohammad Sagha, I want to come back to this main theme that you've been discussing, statebuilding and the family, as the statebuilding project. So we see basically or what I understood from your presentation was that Imam Ali was undertaking or a cross-coalition, is building a coalition. He was doing negotiations, building a cross-factional coalition for the purposes of Islamic State building, which is Islam centered around himself and the family of the prophet and that he had a difficulty or a challenge of producing good coalition members.

 The other side have this. This side have it. Maybe speaking more broadly, what does this teach us about the politics of statebuilding? And why was this coalition building so difficult?

 Is this natural in human history? Is this not natural in human history? Is this a rare phenomenon or no? Is this a typical universal phenomenon. And how can we then understand the imam and our basic research focus here?

 Well, how can we understand imamology? Who is the imam? What is imamology, bringing theology, bringing the philosophy of the imam? And maybe just as the last part of this question, what pathways do you see for future research in this? \[INAUDIBLE\].

 MOHAMMAD SAGHA: Thank you, Professor, for the questions. They're very good questions. I don't know if I can fully answer those, but I think there is a lot to study and a lot still to be covered in general.

 Going to the first question about the challenges of statebuilding and the family as statebuilding. The other side does have the same problems. But in terms of coalition building, there's always challenges on the side of Mu'awiyah or later if you see on the side of Yasid, for example. There are some things that drive them together, which is a shared sense of hierarchy in terms of how do you split war spoils and it's more of a classical trade off in negotiation that you'll see.

 So Mu'awiyah, for example, gives \[? Amna ?\] \[? Nawaz, ?\] who was a famous companion, governorship of Egypt. It's a clear as-- and it's a clear thing. It's a give and take.

 Ali doesn't really engage in that. He explicitly refuses to do this many times when he's even offered the caliphate between Uthman-- before Uthman was given it, the council actually offered it to Ali. If he made it, he cut a deal with them. And if you follow up on what Umar and Abu Bakr did, then we'll give it to you. But if not, it'll go to someone else.

 And he said that I will do what the Prophet Muhammad did in his sunnah. And basically if Umar did good things, I'll do that too. But I will and govern how I see fit because I am legitimate and am the correct person to do that. So it was about his judgment, his choices.

 So he wasn't played by the rules of the politics. He didn't play by the rules of the politics of the empire that others had established. He refused to do that. He played by the rules of some politics in a sense that he couldn't escape the superstructure of Arab tribal society. There's no way.

 So he was embedded in that. And he had to make certain concessions in terms of-- they weren't core concessions that he had to make, but he had to sometimes make compromises in the generals and so on, because his core supporters were also pushing him to do that. So Abu Musa al-Ash'ari, he could only put him in because his main people that were openly with him were pushing for that. Otherwise he wouldn't. He was clearly opposed to these type of things.

 So the way that he-- the coalition challenge is, I think, around personality, politics, which is also Shi'ism. It's following the imam and which is part of the Ahl al-Bayt. This is not the same challenge of others. It's not about they don't demand loyalty like spiritual, theological loyalty. So Mu'awiyah didn't demand that.

 So I think that's some of the challenges \[INAUDIBLE\].

 PAYAM MOHSENI: \[INAUDIBLE\]

 SPEAKER 1: So can we understand the-- just to restate or let me think about what you're saying. The game or the players of the game and the map of the game were constant, as in when we say that he was playing with his condition, the tribes were-- he had to play in the context of the tribe. So the players in the game and the map of the game were constant. But he had his own rules of the game versus the others.

 MOHAMMAD SAGHA: Yes, he had his own rules, which he believed that the game should be played and that he encouraged others to understand that what-- through the opportunity of the state and through his leadership, how to proceed. So it wasn't about the state.

 SPEAKER 1: And then it seems that his way of playing the game or the rules of his own politics was one of education. So how can we get \[INAUDIBLE\] on education, philosophy and education?

 MOHAMMAD SAGHA: Yes, so that's a great point.

 SPEAKER 1: And role of the imam and concept of imamology \[INAUDIBLE\].

 MOHAMMAD SAGHA: Yeah, I think that's a great point. So the imam here really does play a role as an educator and as a guide. And he says this in many places too, that it's to encourage people to develop the capacities within themselves to get to the right answer without having to resort to blindly following their tribal leaders, so on. So he provide escape routes and opportunities for people to hear the speech of guidance and to continue with the path of the Prophet Muhammad, which is what the Prophet Muhammad did as well as, to escape the jahiliyyah, the tribal politics, the ignorance that had been attached in society.

 Did that mean that he did not see the state as important? No. The Prophet Muhammad and Imam Ali all saw the state is important, but for one reason. He wasn't the state in and of itself to get the spoils of the state and keep on trying and balance out the tribe. That wasn't a point for him. What was important is, is keeping the core supporters, the \[? Hosya, ?\] the Hasfiya, the Shurtat Khamis and protecting the core, what I would argue is the core of Islam, which is for Imam Ali, the overall Islam, the body politic, has to exist in order for the core supporters also exist and to continue the message of imam and reach higher and higher levels.

 So it's about getting the best and the brightest and keeping them safe and secure in order to continue that message. So getting defeated on the battlefield is less important than keeping the Shia and the Shia of Ali and the Shia of Muhammad, \[? life. ?\]

 SPEAKER 1: As part of your research, were you able to look into the different strategies or methods that such education was undertaken, how the imam undertakes such educational programs, and how did his follower, like Ammar ibn yasir, what was their role in education and illumination and creating greater awareness?

 MOHAMMAD SAGHA: The very interesting thing is that Imam Ali, in the middle of the battles, he would send Ammar ibn Yasir, Malik al-Ashtar, others to speak to people and as representatives, or even Abbas, for example, his cousin. So he would basically enable a core set of very well respected and highly educated supporters that also had high level of respect and prestige. And those would be his front guard basically for convincing.

 So he sends Hassan and Ammar ibn Yasir to push Abu Musa because no one in Kufa can. Abu Musa is like a big companion of the prophet. So you have to get someone at that level but that also are fully committed to it. So he had basically a cadre of small supporters. There were very few but they were eloquent, they could speak. They would say what the imam would basically say to their level. Of course, they couldn't reach the level of imam, to their level. And that was very convincing for many people.

 Also, Imam Ali had a marriage and tribal building strategy. So his fathers-in-law. a lot of these areas would be able to sometimes support him. Although when he married Hassan's \[INAUDIBLE\], this was a strategy to try to bring him closer. But sometimes those people that came close could also betray if they didn't follow the message. So it really was a moral conundrum in the front line.

 The others were able to escape through making deals or cutting deals. But it wasn't for that. It wasn't about that in my reading of this.

 SPEAKER 1: Maybe in the question on the state, so if you say that the state, the family is the state or the state is all family politics, the whole race or appropriation, what is your thought on making a statement such as the Ahl al-Bayt, the house of Muhammad is the state?

 MOHAMMAD SAGHA: I think that's largely true.

 SPEAKER 1: What does that mean and how does that change our perhaps perspectives on the Ahl al-Bayt if the Ahl al-Bayt is the state?

 MOHAMMAD SAGHA: Modern conceptions of the state are-- they tend to be bureaucratic mass education, rote memorization, like these type of things. So it's about mass citizenship. Whereas if you look at the policies of the Prophet Muhammad, and what I would argue the Quran itself also encourages is the following of the truth and righteousness of the minority against all of the challenges of the oppressive majority or the pharaonic systems. So it's always stories of small groups of believers being triumphant over the challenges of the state, over the challenges of corrupt politics.

 So the state here in terms of statebuilding is about sovereignty and loyalty. So if you're loyal, so you can't-- you can join the family of the Prophet Muhammad through loyalty as the Shurtat al-Khamis or as, basically, you join the family. And we have Hadith that you can join the family of the prophet.

 SPEAKER 1: Prophet Muhammad?

 MOHAMMAD SAGHA: Prophet Muhammad, yes, instead of--

 SPEAKER 1: Salawat?

 MOHAMMAD SAGHA: Yeah.

 SPEAKER 1: The Salawat is sending in on the broader family.

 MOHAMMAD SAGHA: Yes. So the distinction potentially between Muhammad and \[? Ethenal ?\] can have different meanings. So the \[? Al ?\] here can mean like the general generic category of people who take on the color of Ali. This is what Ali was trying to do, the color of Ali to be taken on by others, which is saying in Persian as well. But take on the color and the smell of Ali.

 So the state here is about-- I would say, if the state is Ahl al-Bayt--

 SPEAKER 1: The \[? current ?\] state and we understand that there's an esoteric state, we must love the esoteric state.

 MOHAMMAD SAGHA: Of course.

 SPEAKER 1: Be the esoteric state, the Kingdom of God on Earth. And the imam is the custodian of the Kingdom of God.

 MOHAMMAD SAGHA: Of course, they're always-- as in Shi'i thought, they're always-- so the current state. So even if the imam is in occultation, it's because we are blind. We are in occultation from the imam. Not the opposite. Imam's not.

 So there always is a state and Allah says in many of the Hadith that there always will be-- this is all the divine game. So we're talking about the state. But the esoteric game is that you think that imam is in power. You think that the pharaoh is in power. You think that these from the Shia perspective here. That's just a false-- that's a test because that's not actually where real power lies.

 This is the other point that I wanted to mention about Hadith, too, in his economics. We weren't able to get to that. He says in many of the places that wealth is a test, war is a test. So you think you have power, you think you have money. That's all a way for you to get close to God by rejecting and doing what God wants you to do with that wealth, not the things that, well, just you think you can hold onto it forever. The world is like nothing. It's nothing for him.

 There's a famous Hadith, to say less worthy than the shoe or a sneeze of an animal or something like that. It doesn't mean in and of itself, because it's like for a few days you die, and then that's eternal life. The scenes of a donkey, that's not a donkey.

 Yeah, so the state as the state. There means that if you have loyalty to Muhammad and Ali and Muhammad and Ahl al-Bayt, that is the grounds through which you can build continual institutions. So in some sense, this is also going back to my dissertation that I wrote at Chicago is hidden empire. There's always a hidden empire in a hidden state that can emerge, and that is also Shi'ism, too.

 So Shi'ism also has always claims to want to have justice through the state and to have the Mahdi. When he comes back, he has to have global government, because there has to be justice on earth, just like the Messiah and from other religious traditions as well. It's a universal thing. So therefore, the state is always latent there. It rejects totally the false divisions between religion, politics and personal domain and all these things.

 SPEAKER 1: And I know we're out of time. Just one final question. So you spoke about how modern versus pre-modern understanding or Shi'i understanding of state differs. How should we understand, then religion and politics, separation of religion and politics as domains are not, how can we even think about this question or the subject area?

 MOHAMMAD SAGHA: Sorry, could you repeat that last phrase? \[INAUDIBLE\], yes, sir. Could you repeat that one more time?

 SPEAKER 1: Yeah. So we spoke about the difference on the modern concept of the state and perhaps a Shi'i or esoteric concept of the state. How should we, based on your research, think about religion and politics and even questions such as are religion and politics together or should they be separate?

 MOHAMMAD SAGHA: Yeah. So religion and politics, in this early period, they don't really seem to have much differentiation. As far as I can read in the sources, when you read the early Arabic sources, there are different translations or words that you can potentially use. But generally, I don't see any type of distinction that-- in fact, its exact opposite. The power reaching power and distributing money, justice, war-making, like civil rights, all of these types of things, that is religion.

 SPEAKER 1: Functions of politics?

 MOHAMMAD SAGHA: Functions of politics is religion. It's the highest state of religion. Why? Because you have sovereignty over people's lives. You're determining their everything from the moment they're born to the moment they-- that's \[INAUDIBLE\], worldly and afterlife.

 So all of that is politics is like there's no-- it's impossible to distinguish these. Some of the distinctions that come later is about Aqli and Naqli. These are some of the intellectual sciences that are-- I won't touch those. But generally, if you talk about the ethos and the political theology, everything is talking about the illegitimacy of the coup that's happening from the Shi'a sources of the coup that's happening, how it's delaying justice, how corruption is spreading. That is religion. There's no other way to think about it.

 How is it possible that if you have, you can raise an army, if you can tax people, if you can-- those aren't religions, so we wouldn't. Then religion means that it's 5% of your life if you go into a room and you're isolated from someone and you read a book, which is that it can't be holistic in every day and everything that you see. So I would say it's exact inverse, opposite. Thank you.

 PAYAM MOHSENI: Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you for all your time to all the audience, unfortunately, to get two more questions. But maybe as a final thing, I wanted to again, reiterate that the Project on Shi'ism and Global Affairs will be hosting multiple workshops online free throughout the summer, like courses. We have a course, Shia Islam and politics that many of you may be interested on. And we have another one, Ashura our Ashura workshop, Life and Legacy of Imam Hussein. We also will be having a new workshop on knowing the imam, so an imamology workshop that will be offered for the first time this summer alongside an Iranian politics one.

 So please keep an eye out for our email messages and we hope that you can continue following our works, whether our events, such as these, or whether our actual workshops, which are like courses or series of free online classes with lectures, with readings, with ability to meet over Zoom and to ask questions, have discussions. And again, our work on the Life and Legacy of Imam Ali and Life and Legacy of Imam Hussein, supported by the work of Jaffer Family Foundation.

 Thank you again, Mohammad.

 MOHAMMAD SAGHA: Thank you. Thank you so much.

 PAYAM MOHSENI: Thank you, everyone. Have a good day.

 SPEAKER 2: Sponsor, Project on Shi'ism and Global Affairs.

 SPEAKER 3: Copyright 2024 the President and Fellows of Harvard College.



 

 

 



 

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