64 DESTINY DISRUPTED
with hand-to-hand combat. Ali, who was fifty-eight years old but still a
fearsome physical specimen, eagerly accepted the challenge. Mu'awiya,
who was about the same age as Ali, but dissipated and fat, said no.
Ali's troops renewed the attack, this time felling Mu' awiya's soldiers like
weeds, but Mu'awiya devised a stratagem to give them pause: he had his
soldiers attach pages of the Qur'an to their lance tips and march behind
recitation experts who chanted Qur'anic verses and exhorted Ali to nego-
tiate in the name of peace among Muslims. Ali's troops quailed at the
prospect of defiling the Qur'an and Ali agreed to negotiations.
He probably didn't think of himself as giving into anything, since he
had been calling for negotiation from the start; but no doubt he was think-
ing of talks that would end with Mu'awiya acknowledging his right to rule
in exchange for some concession such as a guarantee to let him stay on as
governor of Syria. Instead, when the representatives of the two leaders met,
they agreed that the two men were equals, and that each should remain in
charge of his own territories, Mu' awiya ruling Syria and Egypt, Ali ruling
everything else.
This wasn't what Ali had been looking for, and it certainly infuriated
his partisans, his shi'i, to use the Arabic word-a word that became the
name of the sect that grew out of this rift. But Ali could not now reject the
results without seeming to show bad faith. Mu'awiya had snookered him!
Besides, Ali was operating with a handicap. For twenty-six years Ali's
shi'i had been declaring that he possessed God-given powers of leadership,
powers that could save the Muslim community from its ills. Originally,
this claim referred to his blood relationship with the Prophet, but over the
decades, as the first three khalifas were shaping a new social order, Ali had
been delivering mystical sermons that held forth rapturously on the nature
of Allah's omnipotence, immensity, oneness, and beyondness. In short,
while the other khalifas had made themselves the guardians of Mo-
hammed's communitarian vision, Ali had established himself as the keeper
of the inner flame. So his partisans' proposition came to be that unlike all
other claimants to the khalifate, Ali had some mystical personal access to
Allah's guidance. His whole case rested on this image.
Now he was ... negotiating? With Mu'awiya, the utter embodiment of
anti-Muslim materialism? What kind of God-gifted avatar of Allah-guided
truth was he?