38 DESTINY DISRUPTED
preparing Mohammed's body for burial, Mohammed's peer-group com-
panions had been picking a successor for Mohammed, not only passing
over Ali but failing even to consult him, failing even to inform him that
the meeting was taking place. Surely, Ali felt he deserved some greater con-
sideration than that!
On the other hand, every point in Ali's favor counted against him from
another perspective. Ali was close to the Prophet? Part of his family? Good
for him, but when did Allah ever say He was conferring special privileges
upon a particular family? Dynastic succession was the old way, the sort of
thing Islam proposed to overturn!
Besides, the Prophet had said there would be no more Messengers after
him. If this was true, Ali's charisma had no religious significance, in which
case, shouldn't Muslims separate the Prophet's bloodline from leadership
roles in the community to prevent undue concentrations of power from
distorting the egalitarian universalism of the Islamic message? Seen in that
light, in fact, wasn't Ali's charisma precisely the quality that made him
questionable? Might it not encourage his more fervid partisans to declare
him a new prophet?
No, said Abu Bakr's proponents, what the community needed at this
point was steady judgment, not youthful passion. Ali was just over thirty
years of age at this time; Abu Bakr was almost sixty. In the Arabia of that
time, choosing a thirty-year-old man as leader over a sixty-year-old proba-
bly struck most Arabs as unthinkable. Why, the word sheikh, the title for
tribal leader, literally meant "old man."
Some say it took Ali six hard months to concede the election, during
which some of Abu Bakr's more unruly followers threatened him and
roughed up his family. In one such shove and scuffle, they say, a door was
slammed against his wife Fatima's belly, who was pregnant at the time, and
this manhandling may have caused her to miscarry what would have been
Prophet Mohammed's third grandson.
Others claim that Ali swore allegiance to Abu Bakr just a few days after
the latter took office; they minimize the abuse that Fatima suffered and at-
tribute her miscarriage to an accident. A disagreement like this can never
now be resolved by an appeal to evidence. It can only reflect the position
one takes on the theological schism that developed out of the succession,
for the disagreement between proponents of Abu Bakr and Ali eventually