Basra. With Aisha in the lead, they could not fail. “You
will rouse the Basrans to action, just as you have the
Meccans,” they told her.
Aisha was not hard to persuade. She could expect
nothing—less than nothing—from Ali, but with either of
her brothers-in-law as Caliph, she would regain her
position at the center of power. Again, she strode to the
Kaaba and let loose with ɹery rhetoric. “March to your
brothers in Basra and denounce Ali,” she cried out. “To
Basra!”
And now, halfway there, she was beset by the howling
of the dogs, and she was the one who’d roused them. The
romance she’d found in the desert until the Aʃair of the
Necklace was a thing of the past. She’d been a teenager
then, along for the excitement; now she was in her
forties, at the head of an army of thousands, and for the
first time, she hesitated.
Was she really to lead these men into battle? Surely it
would not come to that. The plan was to take Basra
without violence, by force of numbers, then move up the
Euphrates together with the Basrans to Kufa. Once all of
Iraq was theirs, they would join forces with Muawiya,
the governor of Syria, whose army had been primed for
revenge by the sight of Othman’s shirt and Naila’s
ɹngers on the pulpit in Damascus. Against that strong a
coalition, Ali would have no option but to concede, as he
had three times in the past. That was the plan, but why