Hussein’s half brother Abbas twenty-ɹve years later at
Karbala, when he became one of the great heroes of
Shiism. But nobody denies that such tales are a matter of
bravado, and everyone knows bravado for what it is: an
attempt to ward oʃ terror. That is why most of the
stories of the Battle of the Camel forgo heroics for a
palpable sense of folly, of the senselessness and tragedy
of it all. Each account, each teller, acted as another voice
in a vast Greek chorus of tragedy, testifying to the awful
bitterness and waste of civil war.
This was hand-to-hand ɹghting—eye-to-eye ɹghting,
that is, and the eyes they looked into were often those of
people they knew. The division between Ali’s forces and
Aisha’s cut deep into the social order. Tribes were
divided against themselves that day, and within the
tribes, clans and families were split between the two
sides, so that cousins, blood brothers, even fathers and
sons fought each other.
There was none of the cool distance of modern
warfare, where technology reigns and nobody sees the
eyes of the enemy or hears the screams. Hand-to-hand
combat was utterly and horribly visceral. When they
grappled too close to use swords or daggers, they used
whatever they could instead. Two ɹngers jabbed in the
eye here. A knee to the genitals there. A rock to the head.
An elbow in the kidneys. Warrior after warrior told of
the bite of steel into ɻesh, the acrid smell of blood
spouting from severed arteries, the terrifying, unholy,