play his hand. He made the cool calculation that if Ali
had displayed great nobility of purpose in dealing with
Aisha, that same nobility could also serve to hasten his
undoing.
The slinky sinuousness of the four drawn-out syllables
of the name—Mu-a-wi-ya—seems almost tailor-made for
the Shia curses that would be heaped on it in centuries
to come. Yet though he would become the Shia epitome
of evil, Muawiya may well have been the one man with
the political skill and power to keep Islam from falling
apart after Ali’s death. Certainly he was no one-
dimensional villain, though it is true he looked the part.
He had a protruding stomach, bulging eyes, and feet
swollen by gout, but as though in compensation for his
physical shortcomings, he was possessed of an
extraordinary subtlety of mind. If he lacked Ali’s virtues,
he had instead the inordinate advantage of strategic skill
and political adroitness.
He ran Syria smoothly—“there is nothing I like better
than a bubbling spring in an easy land,” he was fond of
saying—but it took a certain brilliance to make it look so
eʃortless. By his own account, Muawiya was “a man
blessed with patience and deliberateness”—an expert
dissimulator, that is, with a positively Byzantine sense of
politics that allowed him to turn things to his advantage
without seeming to do so.