chapter 6

IF YOU WERE A BELIEVER IN FATE, YOU MIGHT THINK THAT ALI was destined

never to be Caliph, and that when he ɹnally did accept
the caliphate twenty-ɹve years after Muhammad’s
death, he was provoking fate and thus the tragedy that
would follow. He would be passed over not once or even
twice, but three times in those twenty-ɹve years, and all
that time, he said, he lived “with dust in my eyes and
thorns in my mouth.”

Dust and thorns are a vivid image of life in exile—not
physical but existential exile, from one’s sense of purpose
and self. But for Ali, the image was also cruelly ironic.
The Lion of God was only one of the many titles the
Prophet had bestowed on him; the one that would haunt
him now was Abu Turab, Father of Dust. A lowly title to
Western ears, but not to Arabian ones.

Some say that the name came from the dust thrown
up by the hooves of Ali’s horse as he charged into battle.
Others that it was from the time Muhammad found his
young cousin deep in meditative prayer despite a raging