chapter 11

A DISPIRITED IRAQI ARMY FOLLOWED ALI ON THE LONG JOURNEY back to Kufa.

Many of the men had begun to second-guess their
eagerness to accept arbitration at Siɽn. Perhaps they
realized that they had indeed been duped, and their faith
used against them, because none were more bitter than
those who had most stoutly insisted on laying down
their arms when they had seen the Quran on the lances
of Muawiya’s cavalry. And since Muawiya was by then
back in Damascus, they took out their bitterness on the
man who had led them to Siffin in the first place.

Blaming Ali for the very act they had forced him into,
they would form an entirely new kind of enemy, not
from Mecca or from Syria but from within his own
ranks—an enemy all the more dangerous since they
were fueled not by the desire for power but by the blind,
implacable logic of embittered righteousness.

Their leader was Abdullah ibn Wahb, a name that still
reverberates in the Islamic world since it calls to mind
Abd al-Wahhab, the founder of the fundamentalist