the Helpers of the Prophet and to his kin,” wrote one of
his Medinan supporters. “The land has become narrow
for the Helpers and their faces have turned black as kohl.
We have given birth to the Prophet and among us is his
tomb. Would that on that day they covered him in his
grave and cast soil on him, God had left not a single one
of us, and neither man nor woman had survived him.
We have been humiliated.”
A Hashimi poet put it more succinctly: “We have been
cheated in the most monstrous way.”
They had been disinherited, deprived of what they saw
as their rightful place, the leadership of Islam. And this
sense of disinheritance would sear deep into Shia hearts
and minds, a wound that would fester through to the
twentieth century, there to feed oʃ opposition to
Western colonialism and erupt ɹrst in the Iranian
Revolution, then in civil war in Lebanon, and then, as
the twenty-ɹrst century began, in the war in Iraq.
Disinheritance was a rallying cry, which was why the
classic anticolonial text of the 1960s, Frantz Fanon’s The
Wretched of the Earth, became an Iranian best seller with
a pointed change in title, one speciɹcally designed to
speak to the Shia experience: The Disinherited of the
Earth. The time was coming, as it eventually would for
Ali himself, when the Shia would reclaim their
inheritance, in however embattled a form. But ɹrst, the
dust and thorns.