60 DESTINY DISRUPTED
when his successor would face an impossible challenge, now the Umma
was saying, "Take the reins, Ali."
THE FOURTH KHALIFA (36-40 AH, 656-661 CE)
Ali finally accepted the khalifate, but in his first oration to the people, he
told them he had accepted this office under duress. He lamented the un-
raveling of the Umma in the single generation since the Prophet's death. It
would take a stern hand to put things back in order, Ali said, and he gave
the Umma fair warning: from him, what they could expect was stern.
One key segment of the community didn't hear him. The members of the
Umayyad clan, Othman's close relatives, had fled to Damascus, where their
kinsman Mu'awiya had quietly been assembling his military force. Mu'awiya
began touring his province with a professional storyteller. At each stop, the
storyteller aroused the crowd with a dramatic account of the murder in Med-
ina. At the climactic moment, Mu' awiya himself would burst onstage, waving
a bloody shirt, the very shirt in which (he claimed) the khalifa had been mur-
dered. It was masterful political theater. Mu'awiya would then call upon the
new khalifa to arrest and punish Othman's murderers or step down.
But how could Ali arrest the assassins? No one knew exactly who in
that mob had dealt the actual blows. In any real sense, the whole mob was
"the assassin." To meet Mu'awiya's demands, Ali would have had to arrest
and punish the whole mob. This would never have been practical, but in
the circumstances, it was utterly impossible: the mob still ruled the streets
of Medina. Ali simply did not have the power to do as Mu'awiya de-
manded, and the governor knew it.
Besides, the rioters who murdered Othman had started out as victims
of injustice and oppression. They had come to Medina with legitimate
grievances, but in killing the khalifa, they had handed the higher moral
ground to their oppressors. Now, Ali was forced to choose between align-
ing himself with the oppressors or the murderers-a heartbreaking choice!
He decided he would start by attacking the corruption rotting the em-
pire. Win or lose, it was his only hope: by reversing Othman's policies and
restoring rectitude, he might still pull the community back onto the Path,
thereby acquiring the credibility and stature he needed to do all the other
things that needed doing.