behind, and this was entirely Muawiya’s doing. By
refusing to recognize Ali as Caliph, he had forced the
issue. It was his deɹance that had brought Ali to Kufa
and that would lead to Iraq’s becoming the cradle of Shia
Islam.
Yet it was perhaps inevitable that sooner or later the
center of Islamic power would move out of Arabia, and
nowhere more naturally than to Iraq. The fertile
lowlands between the Tigris and the Euphrates, together
with the rich grazing of the Jazeera steppes to the north,
had traditionally been the true heartland of the Middle
East. The great cities of ancient renown—the Sumerian
city of Ur, a hundred miles downriver from Kufa; the
Assyrian capital of Nineveh, near Mosul in the north;
Babylon, some forty miles north of Kufa; the Persian
jewel of Ctesiphon, close to modern Baghdad—all had
been in Iraq. Now this land was again the geographical
and agricultural center of a vast region, its control
pivotal, as both Ali and Muawiya were highly aware, to
control of the whole empire.
To the Umayyad aristocrats of Mecca, however, there
could be no worse fate. The power they had wielded
under Othman would be utterly lost, while these Iraqi
newcomers to Islam would be empowered. For the center
of Islam to move from where it belonged, in Arabia? It
was an insult, a clear reward to the “provincial riʃraʃ”
that so ardently supported Ali. Were Mecca and Medina
to be sidelined? To become mere places of pilgrimage,