Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes

by Tamim Ansary

The members of the Umayyad clan, Othman’s close relatives, had fled to Damascus, where their kinsman Mu’awiya had quietly been assembling his military force. Mu’awiya began touring his province with a professional storyteller. At each stop, the storyteller aroused the crowd with a dramatic account of the murder in Medina. At the climactic moment, Mu’awiya himself would burst onstage, waving a bloody shirt, the very shirt in which (he claimed) the khalifa had been murdered. It was masterful political theater. Mu’awiya would then call upon the new khalifa to arrest and punish Othman’s murderers or step down. But how could Ali arrest the assassins? No one knew exactly who in that mob had dealt the actual blows. In any real sense, the whole mob was “the assassin.” To meet Mu’awiya’s demands, Ali would have had to arrest and punish the whole mob. This would never have been practical, but in the circumstances, it was utterly impossible: the mob still ruled the streets of Medina. Ali simply did not have the power to do as Mu’awiya demanded, and the governor knew it.