62 • 5 THE EARLY ARAB CONQUESTS
murder. Soon afterward, some of Ali's men turned against him for agreeing
to the arbitration. Called Kharijites (seceders), these rebels harassed Ali for
the rest of his caliphate, even after he defeated them in battle in 659. Before
then, the appointed arbiters of Ali and Mu'awiya had met. Emboldened
perhaps by the Kharijite revolt against Ali, Mu'awiya's representative, Amr,
tricked Ali's arbiter into agreeing to his master's deposition from the
caliphate. Ali did not resign, but the arbitration undermined his authority.
His followers faded away. One province after another defected to Mu'awiya,
who had himself proclaimed caliph in Jerusalem in 660. Finally, in 661, Ali
was murdered by a Kharijite seeking revenge for his sect's defeat.
CHANGES IN THE GOVERNMENT OF ISLAM
Ali's death ended the period known to Muslims as the era of the Rashidun
(meaning "rightly guided") caliphs. All four were men related to Muham¬
mad by marriage and chosen by his companions. Later Muslims would
look back on this period as a golden age to which many longed to return.
They contrasted the simple governments in Medina and Kufa with the
swollen bureaucracies of Damascus and Baghdad, headed by kingly caliphs
who succeeded by heredity. Indeed, most of the Rashidun caliphs were ad¬
mirable and all four were interesting, but their era was marked by frequent
strife, many crises of adjustment to changing conditions, and much im¬
provisation. Even the caliphate itself had begun as a stopgap measure,
shaped by Umar into a lasting institution. It became the linchpin for a state
that was doubling and redoubling in area, population, and wealth. Now,
upon Ali's death, it seemed to be in peril.
Mu'awiya
The man who saved the umma and the caliphate from anarchy was the
Umayyad governor of Syria, Mu'awiya. He never faltered in his determina¬
tion to discredit Ali for the murder of Uthman, and his Syrian Arab troops
(many of them Christian) rewarded him with their unstinted backing. He
possessed a virtue prized among Arabs—the ability to refrain from using
force unless absolutely necessary. As Mu'awiya put it: "I never use my
sword when my whip will do, nor my whip when my tongue will do. Let a
single hair bind me to my people, and I will not let it snap; when they pull
I loosen, and if they loosen I pull." After Ali died, some of his die-hard
Kufan supporters pushed his son Hasan into contesting the caliphate.
Mu'awiya got him to withdraw his claim by sending what amounted to a
