allegiance or friendship throughout the Middle East of
the time—“God be the friend of he who is your friend,
the enemy of he who is your enemy”—the formula much
degraded in modern political parlance into the
misguidedly simplistic “The enemy of my enemy is my
friend.” But even in its original form, this did not
necessarily imply inheritance. As a declaration of trust
and conɹdence in Ali, it was accepted by all. But did that
mean it was a declaration of Ali as the Prophet’s
successor?
The more things seemed to be clear, the less clear they
had become.
What would Muhammad have written if the pen and
paper had arrived? That Ali would be his khalifa, his
successor, say the Shia. Who knows? say the Sunnis—a
matter of no importance, blown out of all proportion by
the overactive imaginations of the Shia faithful. After
all, if there are any number of ways to interpret a
written document, there are an inɹnite number of ways
to interpret one that was never written at all.
There can be no resolution to such an argument.
Everyone claimed to know the answer—everyone still
does—but the early biographies and histories report
what people did and what they said, not what they
thought or intended. And the crux of the argument
hinges not on what happened but on what it meant.