could he condemn it. “I cannot say if Othman was killed
justly or unjustly,” he said, “for he was himself unjust.”
Yet his statement implied approval. If Othman had been
unjust—if he had betrayed the sunna, as Ali maintained
he had, and contravened the law and the spirit of Islam
—then the assassins had acted in good faith. Though Ali
stopped short of calling Othman an apostate, his
reasoning was clear: as with the killing of an apostate,
no punishment was called for.
Instead of retribution, Ali called for reconciliation.
Revenge was not the way forward, he said. Islam needed
to look to the future instead of to the past. That was why
he had accepted Talha’s and Zubayr’s pledges of
allegiance, withered hands or no. It was why he still sent
letters to Mecca and Damascus instead of troops,
demanding allegiance rather than forcing it. Anyone
who misunderstood this as a desire to avoid conɻict at
all costs, as a position of weakness instead of strength,
would find himself gravely mistaken.
But if Ali hoped to avoid bloodshed, it was already too
late. When the news arrived of the Meccans marching on
Basra under the command of Aisha and her brothers-in-
law, he was left with no option but to set out from
Medina with his own army to stop them. Yet even as he
was en route to Basra, the violence had already begun.
Aisha and her brothers-in-law had miscalculated.
They had confronted the Basrans with a terrible