The First Fitna

The community that Muhammad left was united in a way it never was again. Within twenty-five years the third caliph, Uthman, had been killed by rebels in his own house at Medina over grievances about governance and the distribution of offices among his kin. Ali was acclaimed caliph in the aftermath, and the question of whether he should first punish the killers, and whether he could, produced the first civil war among Muslims.

It ran through three phases. At the Battle of the Camel near Basra in 656, Ali defeated a force gathered by Aisha, the Prophet's widow, with Talha and Zubayr, both senior companions. At Siffin the following year he faced Muawiya, the governor of Syria and a kinsman of Uthman, in an inconclusive confrontation ended by an agreement to arbitrate. That agreement split Ali's own army: a party held that judgment belongs to God alone and that submitting the caliphate to human arbitration was itself apostasy, and they left him. These were the Kharijites, whom Ali defeated at Nahrawan and one of whom killed him in 661.

Muawiya took the caliphate and moved the capital to Damascus. Three parties emerge from these five years: those who held the succession belonged to Ali and his house, those who accepted the community's settlement, and those who judged rulers by conduct and were prepared to unchurch them.

Everything known about these events comes from narrative compilations assembled a century and a half or more later, under dynasties with a stake in how the story came out, drawing on reports transmitted through partisans of one side or another. The compilers themselves were often scrupulous, setting variant accounts side by side with their chains of transmission, which is a service to later historians and also an admission that they could not always tell which was right.

Modern scholarship divides on what to do about this. Some historians reconstruct a coherent narrative from the reports, weighing the transmitters much as the tradition itself did. Others hold that the material has been shaped too thoroughly by later doctrinal concerns to support that kind of reconstruction, and argue that the accounts tell us more about the third century of Islam than about the first. Wilferd Madelung's study of the succession is a sustained argument for taking the early material more seriously than the sceptical position allows.

The atlas records the war, its phases and its outcome, because these are attested across sources with different sympathies and the general course is not seriously in doubt. It does not adjudicate the questions the sources were written to settle: who was right about Uthman, whether Ali should have arbitrated, and whether the community's choice was legitimate. Those are the questions that made the divisions, and no historian settles them from outside.