powerless. He was seized and whipped, his hair and
beard were torn out by the roots, and he was thrown in
jail. All Basra hunkered down, waiting to see what
would happen when Ali arrived.
Riders reached him quickly with the news: the town
taken, the governor humiliated, townspeople killed. Ali
was dismayed; if Talha and Zubayr did not fear God’s
loathing, he did. “God, undo what they have done and
show them their evil,” he cried out. “Spare me the killing
of Muslims as they have done, and deliver us from people
such as they.” But he was a realist as well as an idealist;
even as he prayed for peace, he prepared for war.
He sent his sons Hasan and Hussein north to Kufa,
there to raise an army of reinforcements. Within the
week they met him at Basra with a force several
thousand strong. There were now some ten thousand
troops on each side, and for the next three days the two
armies, the one headed by Ali, the other by Aisha and
her brothers-in-law, set up camp across from each other
on a wide, shallow plain just outside the town.
Would the show of force be enough in itself to deter
the Meccans? Ali evidently hoped so, yet as he addressed
his newly massed army, his words would prove horribly
prophetic. “To set things right is what I intend,” he told
them, “so that the community may return to being
brothers. If the Meccans give us allegiance, then we will
have peace. But if they insist on ɹghting, this will be a