not that every step he took was undercut by Othman’s
cousin and chief of staff, Marwan.
Marwan was known as Ibn Tarid, the Son of the Exile,
at least when his back was turned. The exile in question
was his father, who had been a leading Umayyad
opponent of Muhammad’s. When Muhammad had
conquered Mecca, he had given all the Quraysh a last
chance to be accepted into the Islamic fold as full
members of the community. The sole exception he made
was Marwan’s father, whom he so distrusted despite his
last-minute avowal of faith that he ordered him
banished along with his family to the mountain city of
Taif. Both Abu Bakr and Omar had kept the order of
exile in place, but when Othman became Caliph, he had
revoked it and called his young cousin to Medina to
serve as his chief of staʃ. It was a position of enormous
power, and one that Marwan lost no time taking
advantage of.
There was the huge bite he took for himself out of the
war booty from the conquest of Egypt, for example, or
the matter of how he leveraged the market on animal
feed to his own advantage. A canny operator with an eye
always on the main chance, he would ɹnally claim the
caliphate for himself forty years later, but only for a
year. After he had married the widow of the man he had
deposed, she and her servants would trap him in his own