hundreds of miles from the center of power? Were they
to be relegated to the status of onlookers in the faith to
which they had given birth?
The Meccans’ concerns were well founded. Their
descendants were to be the Islamic rulers of the future,
but they would never live in Arabia. As the centuries
passed, Muslim power would center in Iraq, in Syria, in
Persia, in Egypt, in India, in Spain, in Turkey, anywhere
but Arabia, which became increasingly cut oʃ, saved
from reverting back to its pre-Islamic isolation only by
the pull of the annual hajj pilgrimage. Arabia would not
exert political power again for more than a thousand
years, until the fundamentalist Wahhabi sect emerged
from the central highlands in the eighteenth century to
carry out violent raids against Shia shrines in Iraq and
even against the holy places of Mecca and Medina. In
alliance with the Saud family, the Wahhabi inɻuence
would spread worldwide in the twentieth century and
into the twenty-ɹrst. Financed by oil wealth, Arabia—
now Saudi Arabia—would regain the preeminence it
had once held in Islam, aided and abetted by the Western
thirst for oil even as it nurtured the Sunni extremists
who would turn so violently against the West.
Only one thing remained for Muawiya to put into
place, and that was a popular outcry for war against Ali.
His position would be far stronger if he could