Free After the Prophet: The Epic Story of the Shia-Sunni Split in Islam by Lesley Hazleton Page B

kin. In gratitude, Muhammad had honored him with the hand of his second daughter in marriage and then, when she died, with that of his third. Othman thus had the unique distinction of being the double son-in-law of the Prophet. His voice would be essential if Omar and Abu Bakr were to prevail.
    He had not been there in the sickroom in the final days of Muhammad’s illness; as is the way of the aristocrat, he exercised the prerogative of wealth and spent most of the midsummer months in his mountain estate outside Medina, where the air was fresher and cooler. But his presence was vital now, and word was sent to him posthaste. With or without invitation, the Emigrants were going to the shura, and Othman should join them there as quickly as he could.
    Led by Omar and Abu Bakr, they turned up in force and muscled their way in. Essentially, they gate-crashed the meeting, outnumbering those already there. Only one person with a direct interest in the proceedings would remain absent, but for many, that absence would deprive the shura of all legitimacy.
    Ali was the one Emigrant whom the native Medinans would havefreely acknowledged as their leader. They saw him more as one of theirs than as a Meccan. Since Muhammad was their kin because of his grandmother, so too was Ali, Muhammad’s closest male relative. Yet it was precisely because he was the closest male relative that Ali would remain absent.
    He must certainly have heard about the shura. His uncle Abbas—the same uncle who had pleaded with him just that morning to go back to Muhammad and clarify the succession—surely urged him to leave his vigil over the Prophet’s body, and offered to keep watch in his place. With so much at stake, it was vital that Ali assert his right to leadership.
    If Abbas made the argument, though, he made it in vain. One can see Ali shaking his head—in sorrow? in disgust?—not at the idea of the shura but at its being held with such unseemly haste. Before the Prophet had even been buried? To leave the man who had been father and mentor to him before consigning him back to the earth from which he had come? However dire the circumstances, that was out of the question. Ali was above all a man of faith; he would stay with the body, in the faith that the Medinans would support him.
    It would not be the last time he would suffer from misplaced faith in others.
    To Sunnis, the shura would be the perfect example of the wisdom of consensus, of a community newly empowered to resolve its disputes and to find the right solution. The Prophet trusted them to find the right leader, they maintained. In fact that was precisely what he had intended all along. They would quote a later tradition in which Muhammad said, “My community will never agree in error.” The Islamic community was sacred, that is, and thus by definition free of error. But in centuries to come, this statement came to serve as a self-fulfilling argument against the Shia. It would be taken to mean that any Muslims who disagreed with the Sunni majority could only be in error; the Shia, by force of theirdisagreement, were not part of the true community of Islam as defined by Sunnis.
    For the Shia, it was not the community but the leadership that was sacred. The Sunnis had abrogated divinely ordained power by determining it among themselves, they would argue, and this usurpation of the divine had begun right there, in the first Islamic shura. The Prophet’s will had been clear: Ali was the only true, legitimate successor to the Prophet. To acclaim anyone else as Caliph was a betrayal not only of Muhammad but of Islam itself.
    It seems clear that the shura began with the best intentions, but even as unity was the one thing people most wanted, it was also the one thing that seemed impossible to achieve. The moment the crowd of Meccan Emigrants burst in, the Medinan Helpers knew that their bid to claim leadership for one of their own was doomed. In an attempt at compromise, they proposed separate