among their leaders was the son of the ɹrst Caliph—
Aisha’s own half brother Muhammad Abu Bakr. The boy
whose widowed mother had married Ali was now grown
to manhood, but with neither the judgment nor the
patience of his father or his stepfather. Under his orders,
the three armed columns did not disperse on arrival to
stay with family in Medina but demonstratively set up
camp in the dry riverbeds just outside the oasis, on full
military alert.
All of Medina waited tensely to see what would
happen. Was a coup d’état in the works? Would there be
an attack on the palace, even on the Caliph himself?
Surely that was unthinkable; Muslim did not kill
Muslim, after all. And indeed, despite their militant
posturing, the rebels—for that is what they surely were
—held back from immediate action. Instead, they
reached out to Ali, the one man who had proven his
commitment to unity above all else.
For two weeks, Ali acted as mediator. No matter that
one side was headed by his own stepson, whose demands
he fully endorsed; he was horriɹed by the younger man’s
rashness in resorting to armed threat. No matter either
that the other side was headed by a Caliph whose style of
leadership was the antithesis of everything Ali believed
in; he had sworn allegiance to Othman, and allegiance
he would give. His would be the role of the honest
broker, his ultimate loyalty to neither side, but to the
good of Islam, and he might well have succeeded were it