sandstorm, his robe white with blown dust. Yet others
that it came from the early years in Medina, when Ali
had worked as a manual laborer, hauling stones and
water, an image that was to establish him as the
champion of working people, a bridge between the early
Arabian Muslims and the new Muslim masses to come.
All three are possible, and in all, the dust was a mark
of honor. It still is. The Shia faithful still gather dust
from the sandy soil of Najaf, the city surrounding Ali’s
gold-domed shrine a hundred miles south of Baghdad,
then press it into small clay tablets that they place in
front of them as they pray so that wherever in the world
a Shia prostrates himself in prayer, the soil his forehead
touches is sacred soil.
That same soil is where Shia from all over the Middle
East still ask to be sent for burial, as they have for
hundreds of years. The shrouded bodies once transported
like rolled-up carpets by mule and camel now arrive by
car and truck. They are carried in procession around the
shrine of Ali in Najaf or that of his son Hussein in
Karbala, then to one of the vast twin cemeteries known
as the Vales of Peace, there to rise together with Ali and
Hussein on the Day of Judgment, when their descendant
the Mahdi will return to lead a new era of truth and
justice.
But truth and justice must have seemed a long way oʃ
to Ali in those days after Muhammad’s death. “Woe to