Prophet's Dilemma: The Sunni Shia Split Part 2
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Hello and welcome to Conflicted, the history podcast where we talk about the struggles that shaped us, the tough questions that they pose, and why we should care about any of it.

Conflicted is a member of the Evergreen Podcast Network, and as always, I'm your host, Zach Cornwell. You are listening to Part 2 of a series on the origins of the Sunni-Shia divide. If you haven't listened to Part 1, it might be a good idea to go back and do that. But just a quick recap for those who need it, when we last left off, it was the year 632 AD, and the Prophet Muhammad had just died.

Two years earlier, he had unified virtually the entire Arabian Peninsula under his interpretation of monotheism, which we now call Islam. When the Prophet died, he left behind a huge community of believers, multiple wives and family members, and a legion of lethal warriors dedicated to his every command. Last episode, we examined the story through the eyes of two very important figures in Muhammad's life.

Aisha, the Prophet's favorite wife, and Ali, his son-in-law. Unfortunately for him, Aisha and Ali had briefly clashed during the Prophet's lifetime, primarily over a false rumor of infidelity leveled at Aisha.

At the time, it was just family drama, but it would prove to be an important crack in a series of fault lines that would eventually result in a civil war and the so-called Sunni-Shia divide. This episode, we're going to examine the aftermath of the Prophet's death and the rise of the Islamic empire, beginning with the critical issue of who would succeed him.

Muhammad had never explicitly designated a successor, and the community was divided on who it should be. Many assumed it would be Ali, the so-called Lion of God, but there were others who had different ideas. And as promised, our cast is expanding a bit. Aisha and Ali will still be the primary perspectives, but a new character is making his debut, an ambitious young climber named Muawiyah,

who had his own role to play and schemes to unravel in this epic human drama. Again, if all of these names and references kind of have you scratching your head, go back and listen to part one. But for those who are all caught up and ready to roll, welcome to episode 19, Prophet's Dilemma, The Sunni-Shia Split, part two. When Aisha was a teenager, she had a recurring dream.

It was a short dream with simple imagery but despite its simplicity she did not understand what it meant. In the dream Aisha is sitting on the floor and suddenly light fills the room and three full moons glowing and luminous are hanging in the air.

And they're small, only about the size of a lemon or an apple, and they hang in the air like that for a second. And then one by one, these three softly glowing moons drop into her lap. One, two, three. Then she wakes up.

Dreams were not frivolous things in the medieval world. They were truths, or omens, or warnings concealed in a mysterious wrapper of symbolism. And the riddle of the three moons bothered Aisha. What did it mean? Was it a promise of good luck or a warning of something more sinister? She could have asked her husband Muhammad what he thought. They could tell each other anything, and often did.

But like many teenage girls seeking wisdom, she turned to her father instead, Abu Bakr. So Aisha goes to her dad, Abu Bakr, and tells him about the three moons, how they fell into her lap, not all at once, but one at a time. It was like they suddenly died in orbit and plummeted to Earth.

Abu Bakr was considered a wise man. A genealogist and a merchant by trade, he had a sharp mind and an eye for hidden meaning. And he listened to his daughter explain her dream. And then he told her what he thought it meant. Quote, End quote.

What her dad told her scared Aisha. What he meant was that three people she loved would die. Three good people, important people, and they would die in short succession one after another, and they would all be buried in the room where she slept. It was a cryptic explanation, and Abu Bakr did not elaborate further. Aisha tried as best she could to push the riddle of the three moons out of her mind.

In those days, so much was happening, and it was easy to forget something as trivial as a weird dream. But on Monday morning, June 8th, 632, Abu Bakr's explanation of her dream came back to her like a lightning bolt. After ten days of an agonizing bout with bacterial meningitis, the Prophet Muhammad died in Aisha's arms, according to Sunni tradition. And as she cradled his head against her chest, she remembered the first moon dropping into her lap.

Her father looked at her gravely and said, quote, Aisha, this is one of your moons. That Monday morning, Ali was on the other side of the oasis in Medina, praying. He was praying for his father-in-law Muhammad's recovery. He was praying for the well-being of his wife, Fatima, who was pregnant with their third child, and for their two sons, Hassan and Hussein. He was praying for peace and good fortune and prosperity.

But most of all, he might have been praying for guidance. As the Prophet's health had deteriorated rapidly over the last week and a half, more than a few people had raised the issue of succession. If Muhammad actually died, someone would need to lead the Ummah or community of Islam. But the Prophet had not explicitly designated anyone as his heir.

And sensing the end was near, one man had urged Ali to press his rights of succession and get clarification from the Prophet himself in case the worst happened. "Let us go back and ask. If authority be with us, we shall know it. And if it be with others, we will ask him to direct them to treat us well." But part of Ali feared what Muhammad might say in his sweat-soaked delirium. What if the Prophet said the wrong thing?

What if he said something he didn't mean? It was better to assume that everyone knew the Prophet's true wishes in their hearts anyway. Ali was the rightful heir to Muhammad's legacy. That was obvious, right? In response to the people insisting he ask the sick old man for clarification, Ali said, "...by God I will not. If it is withheld from us, none after him will give it to us." End quote.

But that Monday morning, something snapped Ali out of his prayer trance. It was screaming. Shrieking, really. And not just one person, but an entire city wailing in grief. It was in that moment that Ali knew that his father-in-law, the man who he had looked up to his entire life, was gone. Scholar Leslie Hazleton describes the rapid spread of these expressions of grief once the people in Aisha's room realized the prophet had finally passed away.

And side note, I realize that I've been quoting Leslie Hazelton a lot, but it is for good reason. I have not been able to find anyone who writes as beautifully or cinematically in the English language about the early days of Islam as Leslie Hazelton. And if you find yourself craving more information or detail about this story, you should check out her books on the subject. Just FYI, they are listed in the sources section of the show notes.

Anyway, Hazleton writes the following in regard to the immediate reaction to Muhammad's death. Quote,

First Aisha, and then all the other wives broke into a terrible, piercing howl that sounded for all the world like a wounded animal hiding in the bush to die. It spoke of ultimate agony, of pain and sorrow beyond all comprehension, and it spread through the oasis at the speed of sound. Men and women, old and young, everyone took up the wail and surrendered themselves to it. They slapped their faces with both hands, a rapid...

End quote.

When Muhammad's heart stopped, Abu Bakr's blood ran cold. As you'll remember, Abu Bakr was one of Muhammad's oldest friends and confidants.

And when he saw his dead friend sprawled in the lap of his daughter Aisha, he knew that this was the end of an era and the beginning of a dangerous new period of uncertainty. While Aisha wailed in despair, Abu Bakr's mind began to race. A successor would need to be chosen immediately. Islam was still an extremely fragile institution. Muhammad had pulled off a spectacular achievement, uniting the tribes and clans of Arabia under a single belief system.

Whether Islam lived beyond the lifespan of its prophet or collapsed back into chaotic polytheism would depend entirely on what happened in the next handful of hours. But Abu Bakr wasn't just thinking in broad terms of religious continuity. He was very, very worried about what would happen to his daughter.

Aisha was the Prophet's favorite wife and had been promised a comfortable life in the event of his death. But at the end of the day, those promises were just words. Aisha's influence, and by extension Abu Bakr's own, had always flowed from their preferred place in Muhammad's court, so to speak.

After the Prophet died, any adjustments to that arrangement were on the table. This power vacuum presented dangerous possibilities, and the number one person Abu Bakr and Aisha were worried about was, you guessed it, Ali.

The honor of their family was still freshly stung by the accusations of infidelity leveled at Aisha just a few years earlier. And just a quick reminder of what I'm talking about there, Aisha had lost her necklace and fallen behind one day out in the desert. She had hitched a ride with a handsome young warrior and when she got back into town, rumors swirled about possible adultery on Aisha's part.

She was eventually exonerated but Ali had urged Muhammad to divorce her and rid himself of the trouble. Neither Aisha nor her father Abu Bakr forgot that slight on her honor and they had been at odds with Ali ever since. With Muhammad dead, there was a strong possibility that Ali would be chosen by the community and if that happened, Abu Bakr worried that his daughter's position would be drastically downgraded.

There was no way of knowing if Ali would honor Muhammad's wishes or if he would provide for them. Maybe his personal contempt for Aisha would override his better instincts. Because as we all know too well, a taste of power can do strange things to a man's brain, even an honorable one like Ali.

The truth is, Abu Bakr could never know for sure. All he knew was that he had to move quickly. Not only for his daughter's sake, but for his own. As historian Wilford Matalung writes in his book, The Succession of Muhammad, quote, End quote.

The first moon for Maisha's dream had fallen, and it had turned out to be Muhammad himself. There was no way of knowing when the next one would drop or who it would be.

The Monday that Muhammad died was a long day, and for Ali it was especially long. As Muhammad's closest male relative, it was his job to wash the Prophet's body and prepare it for burial. As he cleaned the dirt and grime off of his father-in-law's body, he might have been reminded of a happy memory that they had shared together when the community had first fled Mecca and moved to Medina.

Ali and Muhammad had been building a house, moving bricks and toiling under the sun. During the process, Ali had become covered in layers of brick dust. And for some reason, this really cracked Muhammad up and he jokingly nicknamed his son-in-law Ali Abu Turab, or the father of dust. For Ali, it was a good memory of a good man.

But now, he was gone. Ali washed Muhammad's body, rubbed his skin with sweet-smelling herbs, and wrapped his head in a clean shroud. But while he was grieving, the wheels of political necessity were turning elsewhere. And they were turning at a secret meeting, one to which Ali had not been invited. This meeting, which was called a shura, consisted of about 15 people, all men, all close companions or confidants of the deceased prophet.

And the reason for their meeting was simple, they had to decide who would lead the Muslim community now that the prophet was gone, and no one could leave the room until they were all in unanimous agreement. As Muhammad himself had often told them, quote, my community will never agree in error, end quote. Most of these guys were illiterate, so there was no writing or even supporting documents to bolster their claims. But

But each of these men was an exceptionally gifted orator. Because medieval Arabia was largely an illiterate society, they relied on the power of verbal communication for everything. As a result, their command of language and powers of argument were superb.

To be a fly on the wall in this room full of brilliant public speakers must have been a masterclass in oral argument and homespun eloquence. But despite their skills, this meeting drags on and on into Monday night and then Tuesday morning, all through the next day. And for the life of them, they cannot decide who should be the leader. Finally, someone breaks through the deadlock.

Abu Bakr was a small guy. He was old and elderly. He was about the same age as the Prophet. He wasn't a skilled warrior like Ali, or a poet like Muhammad, or a charmer like Aisha, but he was in possession of a keen intellect, and he put it to good use at this meeting. Obviously, the push and pull and issues of this Shura are contested to this very day, but the chronology of what happened next is pretty clear-cut. Abu Bakr does something very crafty.

He nominates a man for the position that he knew the group would never unanimously agree to. This man's name was Umar. And like Abu Bakr, Umar was one of the Prophet's original companions. But Umar had a hot temper, and he was prone to emotionality, and that was considered a big drawback. The Shura says, no way, this is not the guy. Well, Umar, in turn, nominates another man, a guy named Uthman. Well, he too is rejected as unworthy.

That left one obvious choice. Umar turns around and nominates Abu Bakr himself for the position.

After all, Abu Bakr was the wisest, the oldest, he was the late Muhammad's closest friend and the father of the Prophet's favorite wife. He was the most respected of all of them. As Umar narrated years later, quote, End quote.

One by one, the other men at this meeting agree and pledge allegiance to Abu Bakr. On Tuesday, June 9th, 632 AD, Abu Bakr became the first caliph, or successor, to Muhammad's community. And the only other person who had an equally strong claim to the position was not even at the meeting.

At some point on Tuesday, a messenger sprinted to Ali to tell him what had happened. The Lion of God had been holding a vigil over Muhammad's body per tradition and he had resisted the urge to crash the Shura and assert his claim to position of Caliph. Part of him just felt it was in bad taste. The Prophet's body wasn't even cold and they were already fighting amongst themselves over who would rule the Ummah.

It is hard to know how Ali felt when he realized that the chance had slipped through his fingers. Was he disappointed? Maybe he was relieved. Maybe he was angry. Well, his supporters certainly were angry.

"Abu Bakr?" they asked, "are you kidding me? That old man is halfway in the grave himself. Islam needs a young caliph, a strong caliph." Ali was the perfect and obvious choice, they said. Had he not been the very first man to accept Islam all those years ago, as an awkward 13-year-old boy? Had he not spilled gallons of blood on the battlefields of Arabia for the faith? Was he not married to the Prophet's daughter Fatima and related to him by blood?

If anyone carried the divine spark and charisma that had guided Muhammad, surely it was Ali. As one pro-Ali poet wrote at the time, quote, "...we have been cheated in the most monstrous way."

In his book, The Great Arab Conquest, historian Hugh Kennedy even goes so far as to call it a coup d'etat. And it's easy to forget that as younger men, Abu Bakr and Ali had worked together to save Muhammad's life from assassins, one playing the smuggler, the other playing the body double.

But now they found themselves at odds, on opposite sides of a looming schism. This disagreement between the supporters of Abu Bakr and the supporters of Ali is the embryonic form of the Sunni-Shia divide. Between the devotees to the Sunnah, or the way of the Prophet, and to the Shi'at Ali, or the party of Ali.

Sunni vs Shia Abu Bakr's people argued that the caliph should be someone chosen democratically, by consensus based on experience and merit. They would become the Sunnis. Ali's people, on the other hand, argued that the prophet's bloodline was sacred and his descendants were naturally the most well-equipped to lead the Islamic community. They would become the Shias.

And that, folks, this succession crisis, is the crux of the entire Sunni-Shia issue. It's not really about differences in theology or dogma or rituals. It all boils down to a very large family fighting over who would be the top dog.

And without the tension between Ali, Aisha, and Abu Bakr, there arguably is no Sunni-Shia divide. Muhammad had not even been dead for 48 hours and it already looked like his life's work was about to implode. And no one realized that more clearly than Ali. He knew that if he pressed his claim, if he refused to acknowledge Abu Bakr as caliph, the Ummah would most likely be destroyed by infighting in a matter of months.

All their struggles, all their years of toil and hardship and pain would be for nothing. It would be like it never happened at all. Medina would unravel, then Mecca would revolt, then the whole Arabian Peninsula. People would forget the recitations, they would forget the teachings. The Prophet's message would be just one more failed movement atop the scrap heap of history. As much as he believed he had the right to rule, Ali believed in the Prophet's mission more.

And if he had to put his pride aside to preserve Muhammad's life work, then as much as it stung, he would do it. So, a short time later, Ali and his supporters grudgingly swore allegiance to Abu Bakr. And that was that. The entire Ummah collectively breathed a sigh of relief. Civil war had been averted, for now.

And with this internal crisis assuaged, the eyes of the new caliphate could turn outward towards expansion, conquest, and the weakened empires of Byzantium and Persia.

I'm Ken Harbaugh, host of Burn the Boats from Evergreen Podcasts. I interview political leaders and influencers, folks like award-winning journalist Soledad O'Brien and conservative columnist Bill Kristol about the choices they confront when failure is not an option. I won't agree with everyone I talk to, but I respect anyone who believes in something enough to risk everything for it. Because history belongs to those willing to burn the boats. Episodes are out every other week, wherever you get your podcasts.

Muawiyah was 30 years old when his hometown fell to invaders. He watched as outsiders flooded into the city and raised banners of victory over the town he had known his entire life. But these invaders did not come for blood or butchery, they came with flags of peace and poetry. It was a spiritual invasion.

An invasion of the soul. Two years before Muhammad's death, the city of Mecca, which I'm sure you remember very well from part one, surrendered to the armies of Islam. After years of bitter desert warfare, the city fell without a single life lost, at least according to Muslim historical tradition. Now we talked a lot about the winners of that war, Muhammad and his followers. But the losers of the Mecca-Medina feud would have a very special role to play in the future of the Caliphate.

And that's why we need to expand our cast a little bit and meet a brand new figure. His name is, like I said, Muawiyah. That's M-U-A-W-I-Y-A. Sometimes it's just easier for me to remember a name if I can actually visualize the spelling, so maybe that'll help you too. Anyway, this 30-year-old man, Muawiyah, had grown up during Muhammad's wars of unification. He was the exact same age as Ali, in fact.

Which means he was just a teenager when the Prophet first started preaching in Mecca, and a young adult when the Muslims fled to the oasis of Medina. But while Ali had enthusiastically accepted Muhammad's message, Muawiyah's family had not.

They were a very wealthy family, and the Prophet's message of egalitarianism and monotheism threatened to upend the very system that had given them their prosperity. So when Muhammad began raiding trade caravans from his headquarters at Medina, Muawiyah's family went to war to preserve both their traditions and their bank account. That war cost Muawiyah dearly.

Before it was over he had lost a brother, an uncle, a grandfather, and a great uncle to Muhammad's forces. The 20-something Muawiyah managed to survive those battles and he may very well have been a wrong step or two from crossing swords with the infamous Lion of God, Ali. But fate cut him a break and he did not die out in the desert. Now before we go any further I have to tell you what Muawiyah's nickname is and how he got it. Because honestly it's pretty cool.

Moawi was known in his time as, quote, the son of the liver eater.

And the reason he is called the "Son of the Liver-Eater" is because in the aftermath of one of these battles against the Prophet's army, Muawiyah's mother, a woman named Hind, found the corpse of a Muslim warrior she didn't like on the battlefield. This warrior had killed a member of their family, and in a gesture of revenge, she desecrated the man's body. She takes a knife, she cuts out his liver, and takes a bite of it raw in front of everyone as kind of a symbolic demonstration of retribution.

Now, when your mom has a reputation for spontaneous cannibalism, that tends to follow you around. Which is why Muawiyah was often called "Son of the Liver Eater". And he hated this nickname, absolutely hated it. So, people used it as an insult or called him that behind his back, but to his annoyance, it stuck. That's just the Cliff Notes version of the anecdote, it's not

Not all that relevant to the story, but it's such a colorful detail I could not deprive you of it. So anyway, moving on. So when Mecca eventually surrendered to Muhammad in 630 AD, Muawiyah and the surviving members of his family were faced with a hard choice. They could cling to their polytheistic traditions and the old way of doing things, or they could play ball and convert to Islam, the religion of the man whom they had hated so much for so long.

Now, Muawiyah was technically free to continue practicing his polytheistic beliefs, but what kind of future was that? To be ostracized, shunned, slurred as an unbeliever.

According to most monotheistic religions, then and now, unbelievers were sent to hell when they died, to suffer forever in a quote, casket of flames, as the Quran put it. Well, Muawiyah definitely did not want to go to hell, but there was a kind of earthly purgatory that he feared even more. Irrelevance, isolation, and poverty. That was a fate worse than death for a privileged young aristocrat like Muawiyah.

So, in the end, he decides to accept Islam and dedicate his life to Muhammad's new order. It was as much about survival as it was spirituality. As historian Stephen Humphreys puts it, quote, it was a conversion of convenience, end quote. And he goes on to say that Muawiyah was even, quote, indifferent to Islam. And this was about prospects, nothing more.

But what kind of role could Muawiyah expect to have in the Ummah? He and his family had been trying to kill these people for years. Surely they'd keep him at an arm's length, always suspecting him of treacherous motives no matter how many times he swore allegiance. Well, Muawiyah had an advantage that many of his fellow Meccans did not. We've talked about how most Arabs at the time were not literate. Well, Muawiyah was. He could read and write.

And the exact number is up for debate, but he was only one of like 17 people in the entire city of Mecca who could read and write at this time. As a result, he became one of the Prophet's personal secretaries, and he wrote down many of the recitations Muhammad received in the last two years of his life. Muawiyah, in a way, was partly responsible for bringing the Qur'an itself into existence.

This allows us to draw a few inferences about who Muawiyah was as a person. He was very, very smart, for one. He was also patient, curious, and resourceful. And all of these early Islamic figures have a defining trait, if you look closely. Muhammad was charismatic. Ali was honorable. Aisha was brave. Abu Bakr was shrewd.

Well, Muawiyah was incredibly intelligent and cunning, and he would put that intelligence to good use in the years to come. Fast forward to 632, just two years after Muawiyah's conversion to Islam. The prophet has just died, and Abu Bakr has been proclaimed the new caliph.

If the Islamic community thought that they had seen the last of war, they were sadly mistaken. One of Abu Bakr's very first challenges as caliph was dealing with the Arabian tribes who used Muhammad's death as an opportunity to stop paying taxes to Medina. Their logic was, look, we signed a deal with Muhammad, and now he's dead, so by extension, our arrangement is over. We don't have to pay you anything.

Abu Bakr was by all accounts a pretty mild-mannered guy, but he took a very, very hard stance on anyone who reneged on the client agreements that Muhammad had spent years hammering out.

The future of Islam rested on the survival of this pan-Arabic confederation the Prophet had built and Abu Bakr would be damned if he was going to let it fall apart on his watch. As he said at the time, quote, "If they withhold only a hobbling cord of what they gave the Prophet, I will fight them for it." And he did fight them for it. For two years, these wars raged across Arabia. They were called the Ridda Wars or the Wars of Apostasy.

It was one of the most fragile times in the early caliphate's history, and I could write an entire episode about them, but we gotta keep moving. The big thing to know about the Wars of Apostasy is that they fully consolidated all of Arabia, once and for all, under the power of Islam. And that newfound stability at home allowed the caliphate to start expanding outwards.

Now, we need to take just a second and zoom out for a bit to understand the wider geopolitical context in which the new Islamic empire was developing. At this time, the broader Middle East was dominated by two warring superpowers. The Persians in the east, who ruled over modern-day Iran and Iraq, and the Byzantines, the latter-day incarnation of the old Roman Empire. They ruled in the west over Anatolia, that's Turkey, Syria, Egypt, and Palestine.

These two massive empires had been locked in a bitter struggle for the better part of a couple centuries. To use an old Dan Carlin analogy, they were like two prize fighters, right, who punched each other into a state of complete exhaustion. Their resources and manpower had been so drastically depleted by the wars with each other that they were both extremely vulnerable to attack from an outside invader.

And to make matters worse, both those empires had been ravaged by a nasty strain of bubonic plague the previous century. All somebody had to do was step into the ring and deliver the knockout blow. Abu Bakr, newly crowned as caliph, realized that to keep the Islamic community from devolving into competing factions, they needed an external goal.

And what higher purpose could he call the young men of Islam to than the mission of spreading the Prophet's message into these old, decadent, decrepit empires? As Hugh Kennedy writes, quote, That's Persian. Empires.

The only way of avoiding an implosion was to direct the Muslims against the non-Muslim world. End quote. It's actually not that dissimilar from a situation that we've talked about before in one of our older episodes about the Imjin War, in which the Japanese warlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi had to direct the energies of the freshly united samurai outwards towards Korea to keep them from tearing themselves apart at home. It's kind of a similar dynamic.

Now to oversee this endeavor, Abu Bakr recruited some of the smartest, most capable guys in Arabia. And wouldn't you know it, our new friend Muawiyah was right at the top of that list. So, in the mid-630s, Muawiyah found himself crossing the desert with thousands upon thousands of Arabian warriors into the lands of the Byzantines.

Muawiyah, of course, was no stranger to war and soldiers on the move, but a united Arab army driven forward by a single grandiose purpose

was beyond anything you'd ever imagined. The armies of seventh century Islam were simple but efficient. As Hugh Kennedy writes, quote: "The early Muslims had no secret weapons, no mastery of new military technology with which to overpower their enemies. Their advantages were simply those of mobility, good leadership, and, perhaps most important of all, motivation and high morale."

So the Muslims explode out of Arabia and push in three directions almost simultaneously. North, towards Palestine and Syria, West, towards Egypt, and East, towards Iraq and Iran. Muslim emissaries gave terse and, in their minds, fair ultimatums to the rulers of these new lands. And we actually have a record of one of those proposals, although it's most likely apocryphal and heavily edited.

The towns, cities, and principalities in the Arabs' path were encouraged to accept Islam, but they had other, less attractive choices too. "If you refuse, you must pay tribute. This is a bad thing, but not as bad as the alternative. If you refuse to pay, it will be war. If you respond positively and embrace our religion, we shall leave you with the Book of God and teach you its contents.

End quote. End quote.

To the great disappointment of countless armchair generals all over the world, we don't really know a lot about the Muslim army's tactics or precise order of battle. We do know a few things. We know the Muslims were tactically audacious, inventive, and aggressive, whereas the Byzantines and Persians were much more conservative and risk-averse. We know that the Arabs were fast, they lived off the land, and were unburdened by slow baggage trains or long supply lines.

You can actually make more than a few casual comparisons between the Islamic armies of the 7th century and the Mongol armies of the 13th century. Both were poor tribal societies from a regional backwater bolstered by a fierce martial tradition that go on to conquer these old, complacent civilizations. Ironically, the sons of Genghis Khan would end up completely upending the civilization that Muhammad and subsequent caliphs established.

But whatever the Muslims did in those early days, it worked. These Persian and Byzantine armies, weakened and withered by fighting each other, just get annihilated by the Bedouin warriors who formed the backbone of the Arab armies. Again, we don't have a ton of detail about how these battles were fought, but one cool thing that does exist in the historical record is polytheism.

poems written by some of these Islamic warriors commemorating their victories and their accomplishments in battle. As previously mentioned, the early Muslims were not a highly literate society, but they were brilliant poets and orators.

For example, here's one of those poems composed by a Bedouin warrior or possibly just written contemporaneously from his perspective. Again, it's all a bit fuzzy when you go this far back. Quote, We came upon them at dawn with our tall steeds lean and sinewy.

End quote.

It's beautiful, evocative stuff. And you can imagine these Bedouin fighters sitting around a campfire, swapping poems and spitting rhymes about this or that victory they had achieved in the badlands of Syria or the lush river valleys of the Fertile Crescent.

Muawiyah might have been around a campfire like that, listening, absorbing, calculating. He was not a great warrior like Ali or these Bedouin killers that were piercing deep into the heart of Byzantium. But Muawiyah instantly realized that with men like these on his side, there was little he could not achieve. And the winding wheels of ambition started to spin in Muawiyah's big brain. He would never be fully accepted back in Medina. He knew that.

They would always distrust him for his family's role in the early wars against the Prophet. But maybe he could forge a new path for himself among the ashes of these crumbling empires. Even in those early days, Muawiyah might have imagined himself someday holding the title of Caliph. It would take a combination of intelligence, ruthlessness, and patience. And Muawiyah possessed all three.

Back in Medina, the oasis capital of the blossoming caliphate, other, more personal struggles were being waged. Many of you, I'm sure, have spouses or significant others, and many of you, I'm sure, have had occasional moments of anxiety about what life would be like without them. If by some accident, disease, or act of violence, they died.

It's a very human feeling, that fear of losing someone you've built your entire life around. And many of you, I'm sure, have lost people that you love. That grief is something you can never really understand unless you've felt it. And this is the headspace I always try and put myself in when thinking about Aisha during this time period.

In 634 AD, Aisha was in her early 20s. She couldn't have been more than 23 or 24 years old. And being a widow at that age must have been hard enough, but it was compounded by her new status as a, quote, mother of the faithful. If you'll recall from the end of last episode, this meant that she could never remarry after Muhammad died. She could never go on dates, have sex, or enjoy physical or emotional intimacy with any other man ever again.

It was a vow of celibacy, both physical and emotional, and in many ways, isolation. It was a choice that she'd been given by Muhammad, and one that she had willingly accepted. As empty as her life must have seemed in the weeks, months, and years after Muhammad's death, Aisha filled it with a newfound sense of purpose. She had spent the majority of her adolescent life in the constant companionship of her husband. But with Muhammad gone, she needed a new direction.

This is actually something you'll hear a lot from grief counselors, you know, you find a goal, a sense of meaning, something to dedicate your daily energies towards. Well, Aisha found meaning as a kind of historian and chronicler. She knew Muhammad better than anyone, better than any of his other wives, better than Ali, better than his own daughter Fatima. And so in the years after his death, she became a vital resource of stories and anecdotes about his life.

These stories formed a large portion of what is called the Hadith, or the accounts of Muhammad's life that form a bulk of the historical record about him.

As my favorite source on the subject, Leslie Hazelton writes, Aisha's hadith included, "...things large and small, from great matters of principle to the most minute details of when he washed and how even what kind of toothpick he used to clean his teeth." The Sunnis would eventually name themselves for these Sunnah. They would own it, as it were, despite the fact that the Shia honor it too.

End quote. As his favorite wife, Aisha saw the Prophet in ways that most people never did. Muhammad himself had acknowledged the level of emotional intimacy they shared, saying, quote, You understand immediately whether I am pleased or angry with you and I understand immediately whether you are pleased or angry with me. End quote. It always hurt Aisha that she had never been able to have children of her own with the Prophet, but she could at least see that he lived on in this other way.

Now, that said, Aisha was still very much her own person.

The title of "Mother of the Faithful" came with influence, clout, and power. She was consulted constantly for advice on matters of state and administrative questions. As a widow of the Prophet and daughter of Abu Bakr the Caliph, Aisha was probably the most powerful woman in Arabia at this time. But that didn't mean that she lived in a lap of luxury. In fact, quite the opposite. Aisha, by most accounts, was extremely frugal and lived in almost ascetic simplicity.

She was given lands and estates by her father, Abu Bakr, but she mostly lived an unpretentious, intensely religious life. During her marriage to Muhammad, she had lived in a tiny, cramped dwelling in Medina that was barely big enough to stand up in. In some of her hadith, she talks about how they had no oil to burn at night for a light source. They would just kind of fumble around in the dark for each other.

And despite her prominence in a post-Muhammad world, she clung to that bare-bones existence. She did her own housework, cooked her own food, and wore patchy clothing. She fasted constantly, saying, quote, I never ate enough to become full, even after the messenger of God. End quote. Always at the top of her mind was something that Muhammad had often advised his followers, quote,

Be in this world as if you were a stranger or a wayfarer." In other words, leave this world with what you came into it with, nothing. In time, a sense of calm and purpose came back into Aisha's life. But then, two years after the prophet's death, in 634 AD, she got more bad news. Her father, the caliph, was dying.

So she goes to see him, and in a likely apocryphal story, they have this conversation on his deathbed. It's very Shakespearean, it feels tailor-made for the stage. And she asks what he wants to wear when he's buried, thinking that he'd want some ornate robe or a special garment. Surprisingly, he insists on being interred with the simple, stained clothing he'd been wearing. Aisha objects, saying, quote, but that one is old.

End quote. He was, after all, the caliph, the first successor to Muhammad. Surely he should be buried in fresh clothes, at least, something befitting his position. But Abu Bakr, as the life leached out of him, insisted, quote, End quote.

Abu Bakr passed away shortly after, and in that moment, Aisha remembered her dream from when she was a teenager. The three moons hanging in the air and dropping into her lap like white apples, one by one. Muhammad had been the first moon to fall, and now the second moon had turned out to represent her dad. The only question left was, when would the third moon fall, and who would it be?

While Aisha embraced her new role as mother of the faithful and Muawiyah pushed deeper with the Muslim armies into Byzantium, Ali was living a much simpler and in some ways sadder existence.

The years had not been kind to the Lion of God or to his family, and the problems could all be traced back to the night that Abu Bakr first became Caliph, just 48 hours after the Prophet's death. We've already discussed how Ali grudgingly acknowledged Abu Bakr's claim to the Caliphate, but we haven't talked about the circumstances surrounding that critical decision and the consequences that it had for Ali's loved ones.

So, let's set the scene. Ali and his family were mourning the death of Muhammad in their house back in June of 632. He was there with his wife Fatima and their two sons, Hasan and Husayn, who were about eight and six years old at the time, respectively. Death can be a hard thing for kids that age to grapple with and Ali and Fatima likely struggled to explain to these little boys that their grandfather was gone.

Sometime in the night, Ali hears a knock at the door and a voice outside. On the other side of the paper-thin wooden door were dozens of Abu Bakr's supporters. Ali had not given his oath of allegiance to the new caliph yet, and they were there to make sure he did. Ali was the only other serious contender for the title, and if the Ummah was to remain intact, he needed to "bend the knee", as they say in Westeros.

When I first read about this incident, I instantly got the vibe of a spaghetti western. It's the tension, right? You've got this large posse of enforcers armed with torches surrounding an isolated farmhouse. And leading this posse was a man named Umar. Sometimes he's called Omar. We briefly mentioned him before he was instrumental in the succession of Abu Bakr. He was the guy who said, I pledge allegiance first. And then all the dominoes started toppling after that.

Well, Ali hears Umar's voice on the other side of the door. Now, we don't know exactly what was said, but the gist was this. Ali, you have two choices. Either come out right now and pledge allegiance to Abu Bakr, or we will burn your house to the ground with everyone inside.

Violence between Muslims was absolutely forbidden in the recitations of the Quran. The Prophet hadn't even been dead a week and already threats were being casually thrown around. It's hard to imagine how angry this must have made both Ali and Fatima. "How dare he?" they would have thought. They were Muhammad's family, his blood. And now these usurpers were threatening to burn them alive? Are you kidding me? Well, the two factions had a contentious history.

Ali saw Aisha's hand in everything, that manipulative honeypot who'd managed to wrap Muhammad around her little finger. Abu Bakr, her father, had stolen leadership of the Ummah from Ali, finally exacting their revenge for his role in the affair of the necklace all those years ago. And now, Umar, loyal attack dog that he was, was there to enforce the coup that had just been orchestrated before the Prophet's body was even cold.

At least that is the Shia view. The Sunnis maintain that Abu Bakr was simply "the best man for the job" and the group fairly, democratically selected him. After hearing Umar's threat, Ali shouts through the door that no, he would not come out. And this group surrounding the house, led by Umar, must have been a pretty sizable crowd because Ali said later in life that quote "If I had had only 40 men, I would have resisted with force."

End quote. So if 40 men were considered an underdog amount, Umar must have brought a lot of guys with him to ensure Ali took the oath. But nevertheless, Ali refused to budge. Umar's bluff had been called. The threat to burn down the house had not worked. He'd only intended to rattle Ali into compliance, but his intimidation tactic proved too extreme. No one would dream of actually hurting the Prophet's closest blood relatives. At least not at this point.

Well, as they say, to a hammer, every problem is a nail. And Umar was a hammer and nail kind of guy. So he does the one thing that makes sense. He kicks down the door and forces his way inside. 200 pounds of Umar burst through the flimsy wooden door right into 110 pounds of Fatima, Ali's wife.

Maybe she was walking in front of it at that exact moment. Maybe she was listening. It's hard to know for sure, but she gets knocked down to the ground hard and everyone freaks out because Fatima is pregnant, visibly extremely pregnant. Third trimester, pretty much about to pop.

Umar was a hard man, but he wasn't hard-hearted. All he could do was look at Fatima grimacing on the floor, Ali reaching for his sword, and their two small children cowering in the corner. Umar backs away and tells his men outside to retreat. They had never intended for things to go that far. Fatima was Muhammad's daughter. She was like a niece to Umar and he, presumably, instantly regretted his act of aggression.

But the damage had been done, and a few weeks later, Fatima gave birth to a stillborn child. It was impossible to prove that the miscarriage had been the result of Umar's violence, but in the Shia side of the story, it definitely was.

Abu Bakr and Umar knew that they had overplayed their hand. They couldn't compel Ali to pledge allegiance by brute force, but there were other ways of pressuring him to come around. Abu Bakr proceeds to use a loophole in Muhammad's own scripture to disinherit Ali and Fatima of their lands, money, orchards, and herds of animals. Muhammad had once said that, quote, "...we do not have heirs. Whatever we leave is alms."

End quote. Meaning, whatever we leave behind should go to charity. In other words, all of Muhammad's land and money did not go to his daughter, but to the Muslim community. Technically it was true, but it was also kind of a cynical act of textualism on Abu Bakr's part. Well, all of this stress, pain, and misfortune weighed heavily on Fatima. And just a month after Muhammad died, Fatima passed away from complications from her miscarriage.

According to the timeline, she was not a day over 27 years old.

In a handful of weeks, Ali had gone from the Lion of God to a cautionary tale. His father-in-law, the Prophet, was dead. His young wife was dead. His two young sons, after losing their mother at that age, must have been a mess. All Ali could do was give in and pledge allegiance to Abu Bakr, as much as it hurt him to do so. I mean, he must have hated these people, blamed them for everything. But if he did, he kept it bottled up tight inside.

Ali once said that the world was like a snake, quote, whose touch is smooth, whose venom is lethal, end quote. And as it turned out, life had bitten Ali in the cruelest way. While Abu Bakr's armies suppressed dissent in the Wars of Apostasy, Ali stayed home. He would recognize Abu Bakr as caliph, but he would never lift his sword arm for him. But then in 634 AD, Aisha's second moon fell to earth.

Abu Bakr was dead. For the smallest of seconds, Ali might have thought maybe Abu Bakr on his deathbed would understand the mistake that he had made. Maybe in the clarity of mortality he would make things right, heal the divisions between the Ummah, and appoint Ali as his successor. But he does not do that. Instead, he appoints none other than Umar as the next Caliph.

the same man who had threatened to burn Ali's house down and knocked his pregnant wife to the ground two years earlier. Of course that was the man, Ali thought, who Abu Bakr deemed worthy of carrying on the prophet's legacy.

As fate would have it, Umar would reign much longer than Abu Bakr, and this is when the timeline starts to dilate considerably. Weeks turn into months, turn into years. People get older, wiser, and in some cases, angrier. Under Umar, the second caliph, Islam became the expansionist force of nature that brought old empires to their knees. And no one had a better front row seat to that than our ambitious climber, Muawiyah.

The Byzantines had a fearful reputation. They were the heirs to the old Roman Empire, masters of the Mediterranean. But they fell like leaves to the armies of Islam. During Umar's reign, the Muslims inflicted horrific defeats on Byzantine armies, taking province after province and capturing city after city. For the soldiers of Islam, the conquest brought massive wealth and land and converts. They were spreading their religion and getting paid well to do it.

As historian Robert G. Hoyland writes, quote, Since God was sanctioning the fighting and the acquisition of booty, there is no need to debate whether Muhammad's West Arabian soldiers fought more for gain or for God. The two were inseparable. They were also mutually reinforcing. The gains won by fighting for God made his warriors more desirous to serve him in war and worship.

End quote. The Byzantines, naturally, were terrified of this onslaught. Religious propaganda and horror stories abound. For example, there's one hysterical warning from a specific church leader, quote, End quote.

But, at the end of the day, there was nothing the Byzantines could do. As far away as Gaul and Italy, people were hearing about the vicious rape of the Christian world by Bedouin beasts. But in reality, the armies of Islam were not any worse or better than any other army who'd marched across the Middle East. They wanted taxes, maybe some religious converts, but as long as you picked one of those two choices, you were mostly good.

And it's worth reiterating that there is not a religion on earth that hasn't been used to justify the acquisition of land, money, power, and slaves. Abu Bakr and Umar were just following a long historical tradition of might makes right. By 640 AD, Islam had a glittering new regional capital in the conquered city of Damascus, Syria.

In fact, some of that architecture still stands today, although I wouldn't recommend going there on vacation unless you have a bulletproof vest or maybe your own tank. Well, Umar decided he needed a governor for Damascus back in the day, a person to oversee the interests of the caliphate in that region. The man he chose, unfortunately, died of plague. So Umar went for the next guy in line, and that man just happened to be Muawiyah.

Muawiyah is often portrayed in Islamic history as a bit of an aberration, an outsider. He was fundamentally a political animal. He knew how to flatter and lie, cajole and manipulate, but he was also extremely rational. If he could, he would avoid solving problems with a sword when the pen would do. As he often said, quote, "...if there be but one hair binding someone to me, I do not let it break."

End quote.

Just ten years after he'd converted to Islam, a broken and shamed man in Mecca, Muawiyah was the governor of Syria, one of the most powerful people in the Middle East, beholden to no one but the Caliph Umar himself. This was the greatest game on earth, Muawiyah must have thought, more thrilling than any high-class Damascus whore or fighting Byzantines in the desert, to twist men into the shapes you wanted.

to pluck the invisible strings of the world around you like a well-tuned instrument, that was what Muawiyah loved most. He was disciplined, decadent, and dangerous.

Sunnis and Shia alike confer a type of supervillain status on Muawiyah, but there was always a current of respect running through the disdain. He was freakishly smart and completely unburdened by the piety that constrained Ali, Fatima, Aisha, even Abu Bakr and Umar. Remember, his conversion was one of convenience, supposedly, and being a Muslim had turned out to be very convenient.

convenient for Muawiyah, the new big boss of Damascus. He would run that town for the next 20 years from a green-tiled palace called Al-Qadra, or The Green One. And much to the chagrin of some of our other characters, his designs would extend far beyond the walls of that glittering city. There was no doubt Muawiyah's rise to power was a thing to be proud of, an accomplishment.

The second caliph, Umar, had a lot to be proud of as well when he sat down to pray at a mosque on October 31, 644 AD. In his ten-year reign, he had presided over an explosive expansion of the caliphate. The lands of Islam stretched from the pyramids of Egypt to the flood plains of Iraq and Iran. The Byzantines had been thrashed, Persia had been annihilated, even Jerusalem had been conquered. It was a true blue empire.

something his friend Muhammad could never have envisioned. He no doubt hoped that his old companion might be proud of him if he could see what Umar had achieved for the faith. But Umar had his regrets, too. The altercation at Ali's house the night after the prophet died was a sore spot, especially among the political supporters of Ali, who, even after all these years, insisted the Lion of God had been robbed and cheated. Many called Umar a humorless thug.

and an austere enforcer of Islam. But the truth was, Umar had always been that way, and he would not apologize for it, especially not now. In fact, one time, back when Muhammad was alive, someone had insulted the Prophet on the streets of Mecca. Umar reacted by calmly asking Muhammad for permission to cut off the man's head. But the Prophet calmed Umar down and reasoned with the offending man, who then converted to Islam, according to the story.

It is hard to know what Umar was praying for that day in 644. But whatever he was thinking about, it ended abruptly when someone stepped up beside him and stabbed him six times in the chest.

The assassin killed himself immediately after. He was a Persian slave and no one know for sure why he did it. Some said he was insane, others said it was revenge for the Islamic conquest of Persia. There may have even been evidence of a petty financial dispute but regardless of the motive,

the second caliph was dead a few days later. Now, Umar was a tank of a guy. He clung to life as long as he could, and he knew that dying without naming a successor would plunge the caliphate into civil war, so he designates a council of six men, all former companions of the prophet, to decide who would rule. You do have to wonder what kind of presence of mind a person can have with six stab wounds, but he managed to make his wishes known, apparently, and with that task complete, he died.

News traveled fast and within days Aisha heard of Umar's death. Almost instantly, she knew what it meant. Umar was the third moon, another radiant leader of Islam pulled down into the dirt. First it was her husband Muhammad, then her father Abu Bakr, and now the prolific conqueror Umar. But with no more moons in the sky, who would lead Islam?

The answer came swiftly, as the council of six men convened to appoint Umar's successor. Death, disease, and good old-fashioned time had thinned the ranks of the Prophet's original companions, so they had no choice but to invite Ali to be a part of this council of six men. Ali was now in his early forties, and once again he was a heartbeat away from becoming caliph. And once again, he was passed over, in favor of another. Passed over for the third time.

It was decided that the new caliph would be a man named Uthman. He was not nearly as magnetic a guy as Abu Bakr or Umar, but he was one of the prophet's companions, a respected guy with good connections and a solid resume. In some sources, he is known as He of the Two Lights because he had the unique honor of having two daughters who had been married to the prophet, two poor girls that Aisha probably ate for lunch back in her heyday.

Ali was obviously disappointed with his colleague's decision, but again he felt compelled to back down for the sake of unity. Sunnis and Shias alike mostly agree that Ali was a good man, and neither pride nor vanity would drive him to start a war over a bruised ego. But he wasn't a doormat. This was the Lion of God, after all. And he couldn't leave the meeting without issuing a warning. He gave a speech to the council before agreeing to their choice. Quote,

End quote.

In other words, look, you're screwing me over. I know it. You know it. But I'll take the L for the good of the community. But the second Uthman here starts deviating from the righteous path, I'm going to have something to say.

Ali could not deny that Abu Bakr and Umar had done right by their people. No matter how much he resented him for the pain they'd caused him personally, they had managed to spread the faith of the Prophet far beyond anything Muhammad had dreamed possible. But Uthman was a wild card, and it was only a matter of time before this winning streak of caliphs ran out.

In the year 655 AD, more than 20 years after the prophet had died, a huge crowd gathered at the mosque in the oasis city of Medina.

They were there for their morning prayers, but all of a sudden a lone figure stands up and starts making a speech. It was a woman, and her face was covered, but everyone immediately recognized the voice. It was none other than the mother of the faithful, Muhammad's formidable widow, Aisha. Aisha looked out over the crowd with growing anger and unease.

She rarely called attention to herself in public, always covering her face, traveling behind a curtain, or sticking to the outskirts of public gatherings. But today was a special occasion. She could not stay silent about what was happening in the caliphate any longer. It had been 11 years since Uthman had been declared caliph by the council of six. When Aisha heard who they had chosen, she was initially relieved.

Uthman was a doddering old man, an uncharismatic wallflower in the Prophet's former entourage but at least he wasn't her old enemy Ali. When Umar had been assassinated, Aisha knew that he symbolized the third and final moon from her dream, as she quickly realized that in the absence of a moon, the night is very dark indeed. Uthman starts doing stuff as Caliph that raises a lot of eyebrows.

He starts appointing family members to important positions even though they weren't qualified at all. He starts engaging in nepotism, favoritism, and outright corruption. He starts flaunting his wealth in ostentatious displays that ran counter to Islam's humble, generosity-focused ethos. Many thought that Uthman was spitting in the face of everything that the Prophet, Abu Bakr, and Umar had stood for. One critic said at the time, quote,

Uthman shrugs his shoulders arrogantly, and his brothers stand with him, eating up the property of God as the camels eat up the springtime grasses. End quote.

But that kind of critique could get you killed under Uthman's caliphate. Any dissent was crushed by draconian punishments up to and including the death penalty. Uthman had even started calling himself, quote, the deputy of God as a way of expressing his belief that he was literally doing God's will on earth and those who questioned it were flirting with heresy.

This enraged a lot of people, but it particularly enraged Aisha. Not only had Uthman been engaging in flagrant corruption, he was doing it openly, unapologetically.

He even had the nerve to reduce her annual pension, which was an open challenge to her position as mother of the faithful. By this time Aisha was in her early 40s, but she was still that brash, fiery teenager to the core. This was still the same woman who had tricked one of Muhammad's fiancés into annulling a marriage, the same woman who'd ran the Prophet's household with an iron fist, who'd screamed war chants from the rearguard of Islam's most desperate early battles,

How dare he? How dare he belittle her, the greatest of the Prophet's wives, the mother of all Muslims, him included?

So, Aisha stands up at the mosque and unleashes a blistering takedown of Uthman. She calls him corrupt, decadent, a "dotard", a deviant from the tenets of Islam. And to drive the point home, she even engages in a display of prop comedy. She holds up a sandal and she tells the crowd that it was a sandal worn by the Prophet himself when he was alive. She says, "See how this, the Prophet's own sandal, has not yet even fallen apart?

This is how quickly Uthman has forgotten the Sunnah, Muhammad's practice. End quote. And she was right. Muhammad hadn't been dead 20 years and already his successors were forgetting his message.

People unhappy with the caliphate start rallying around Aisha. She may have been a woman, but she was the foremost authority on the prophet, one of the closest tethers the community had to the founder of their religion. When Uthman heard of the frenzy that Aisha was whipping up, he replied dismissively, quote, Can the rebels and scoundrels find no other refuge than the home of Aisha? End quote.

He would never say it publicly, but wasn't this the same woman who had been haunted by scandal her entire life? Whose innocence and fidelity the prophet himself had doubted at one point before a conveniently timed revelation? Why should he, caliph of an empire that ran from Egypt to the Caucasus, bow to pressure from the woman whose supporters of Ali secretly called Aisha al-Fahisha, or Aisha the Whore?

Well, Uthman realized quickly how wrong he was to underestimate her. Before long, the Caliph had a full-on revolt on his hands. People are calling for his head day and night. The spark lit by Uthman's own bad management had been flamed into a raging fire by Aisha, and now the embattled Caliph turned to one man for help. The only person that everyone in the community had at least some respect for, Ali.

The Lion of God's claws had dulled in the 23 years since he'd been outmaneuvered by Abu Bakr and Umar and denied the position of Caliph. But in his early 50s, he was still considered an incredibly wise and pious person. After all, he was the very first male to convert to Islam.

Surely his word counted for something. So Ali speaks to Uthman and gives some very simple advice. He says, look man, you gotta tone down the nepotism and the corruption and all these other shenanigans. These people are gonna rip you to shreds. And my influence can only go so far. I'm not the caliph. You are. Only you have the power to lower the temperature of this situation. And things were getting progressively more dangerous.

Even Aisha was starting to worry about what she might have unleashed. As she left Medina to make a pilgrimage to Mecca, a critic accused her, quote, you're running away after setting the country ablaze, end quote. In classic Aisha style, she responded that she wished she could tie a stone around the heckler's feet and then throw him into the ocean.

Despite Ali's advice, Uthman continues provoking his critics, and on June 17th, 656 AD, his chickens came home to roost. Rebels stormed the Caliph's palace in Medina and broke into his private prayer room. Then, according to Hazleton, this happened. Quote,

As Uthman fell back, they piled on him, knives striking again and again. Blood splashed onto the walls, onto the carpet, even onto the open pages of the Quran. An indelible image of defilement that still haunts the Muslim faithful, both Sunni and Shia. Yet still, they attacked, even after there was no breath left in Uthman's body. Naila...

that's his wife, flung herself over her dead husband. She begged the assassins not to desecrate his corpse, only to have her blood mixed with his, as yet another knife slashed down and cut off part of her right hand. Her dreadful wail of pain and outrage bounced off the blood-spattered walls to pierce the consciences of the attackers, and only then did they stop." End quote.

Uthman was the second caliph in a row to be assassinated, but while Umar had been murdered by an insane slave, allegedly, Uthman had been a victim of a discontented faction within his own empire. Far away in Damascus, Muawiyah received news of the caliph's death.

By this point, Muawiyah had been the governor of Syria for about 15 years, and that decadent lifestyle had caught up with his health. Muawiyah suffered from gout, which if you don't know is an extremely painful form of arthritis that usually affects the feet or the hands. Henry VIII is like the most famous gout sufferer, so if you've ever heard of it, it's probably in the context of him.

It's a really sucky affliction to have in any place or era, but before modern medicine, it was excruciating. And during attacks of this disease, Muawiyah would have been up sleepless nights trying to ignore the incessant throbbing in his feet. But despite the frailty of his body, Muawiyah's mind was still sharper than ever, and he saw a political opportunity in the assassination of Uthman.

Somehow, someone had taken a memento from the murder site. They'd grabbed the caliph's bloody shirt and his wife's severed fingers and transported the mementos back to Syria. Well, somehow, Muawiyah got a hold of these trophies. He either paid handsomely for the real deal or just splashed a regular shirt with some blood and cut off a slave's fingers. But to the Muslim world, Muawiyah had the real thing. And he displayed these trophies in Damascus as a kind of

symbol of the rebel faction's barbarity and the need for revenge against them. Clearly, Muawiyah was positioning himself as Uthman's avenger and successor. But he had one little problem. 700 miles to the south in Medina, Ali found himself at the center of a raging political storm. The rebels wanted him to be caliph.

The very next day after Uthman had been murdered, thousands of people crowded into the mosque in Medina to pledge allegiance to Ali. After all this time and years and years, Muhammad's son-in-law finally accepted the position of rulership over the Islamic world. This had to be a bittersweet moment for Ali. I mean, this is something he had wanted for more than 20 years. He had been cheated, denied, and outwitted out of what he believed to be his inheritance for

for as long as he could remember. And now, all of a sudden, he had it. Unfortunately, it required the murder of Uthman to make it happen. And this is not how Ali wanted to become caliph. But things had taken their course and he had no choice but to accept the support.

After all, who else would it be? That gout-ridden puppet master Muawiyah in Damascus? Or one of the other endless parades of old men who could claim to have been in the same room as the Prophet at one point or another? No, Ali thought this was his time and his responsibility. He had to, somehow, stitch the caliphate back together. But there was one person who was not about to let Ali run the roost.

From her power base in Mecca, Aisha seethed at the ascension of a man she had hated since she was a teenage girl. Twenty years, three caliphs, and two assassinations later, the inevitable had finally come to fruition. Muhammad's favorite son-in-law was taking over the destiny of Islam. She should have known this would happen, and it really scared her.

Who knows what Ali would do now that he had power? His anger at her father Abu Bakr, her family, his resentment of the intransigent political forces that had kept him on the sidelines for years were sharp. In truth, Ali was not a vengeful man, but there was not a person on planet Earth who could convince Aisha otherwise. In her mind, Ali as Caliph was an existential threat to her personally, and at the very least a threat to her influence.

By now, Aisha was a middle-aged woman. If she had ever been able to have children of her own, they would have been grown up by now, with wives and husbands and children of their own. That type of motherhood was impossible for her. But she was mother of the faithful, and it came with its own set of responsibilities. No one could take that away from her. And as she saw it, a mother protects her children, especially from unworthy pretenders like Ali.

As of yet, Ali had not taken action against the murderers of his predecessor. Some even said he was protecting them. Well, this gave Aisha the rhetorical opening she needed.

In the fall of 656 AD, Aisha gave a speech in Mecca in front of the Kaaba, the sacred cube. "People of Mecca, the mob of men, the riffraff from the garrison cities together with boorish Bedouin and foreign slaves have conspired together. They have spilled forbidden blood and violated the sanctity of the sacred city of Medina. This is a heinous crime.

End quote.

And the crowd responded, quote, revenge for Uthman. The irony was apparently completely lost on everybody in the crowd that less than a year earlier, Aisha had been calling for Uthman's ouster. But for Aisha, the dead caliph was a useful political cudgel against her sworn enemy, Ali.

She whips people up in Mecca into a frenzy, and when the letter finally arrived from Ali demanding pledges of loyalty from everybody, one man grabbed it from the messenger and starts eating the paper. He chews it up and spits the soggy remnants on the ground. The crowd eats this up, literally. The sentiment in Mecca was clear as a bell. #NotMyKhalif Mecca becomes a rallying point for critics of Ali.

poets and dissidents start accusing him of having orchestrated the murder of Uthman in the first place. "If you, Ali, did not strike the murdered man openly, you surely struck him in secret." Which was obviously untrue, but once the fake news started spreading, it was really hard to pull people back to reality.

This was coming to a head. In the fall of that year, 656 AD, Ali received an urgent message at his home in Medina. An army was on the march from Mecca with the intent of forcing him to punish Uthman's killers or more likely forcing him to step down as caliph. And at the head of this army was none other than Aisha.

After all these years, the Prophet's favorite wife and the Prophet's son-in-law were heading for a bloody collision. Muhammad had forbidden Muslims to kill other Muslims. But that sacred taboo was about to be broken, thousands upon thousands of times over by the people who he had loved most in the world. The Islamic civil war had begun.

Well, I hate to leave you on a cliffhanger, but that is all we have time for in today's episode. Next time on the third and final chapter of Prophet's Dilemma, we will see what happens when these leaders and factions finally clash in open warfare.

Truth be told, I don't normally do three-parters. I like to keep these episodes as stand-alone experiences, ideally, so there's not anything you have to keep up with or remember month to month. But this story is just too big for a single episode. It needs room to breathe and naturally unspool across the decades.

So I really appreciate you sticking with me through all the twists and turns. And the next time we're going to bring it home in a satisfying conclusion. Look for that third episode to drop in the next few weeks or so. And once we wrap up the story of the Sunni-Shia split, I'll transition back to my normal standalone format, the typical one-and-done episode style.

Unless you guys really like this longer, multi-part series thing. Whether you love it or hate it, feel free to drop me a line on social media. I love hearing from you guys, so please don't hesitate to reach out and tell me how I'm doing. This has been Conflicted. Thanks for listening.

The Korean War has sadly been known as the Forgotten War, but half a century earlier, the United States was locked in a bloody conflict in Asia that's been all but erased from the history books. Hi, I'm Alex Hastie, the host of Ohio vs. the World, an American history podcast on the Evergreen Podcast Network. In our newest episode, we speak to experts about the Philippine-American War, America's first Asian counterinsurgency conflict, the heroes, the villains. We'll discuss President McKinley, Admiral Dewey, the vicious brutality of the fighting and the scandals and war crimes

that nearly sunk Theodore Roosevelt's presidency. Check out our show, Ohio vs. the World, on the Evergreen Podcast Network for our new episode about America's most forgotten war. Now back to the show.