God’s cause” in Sura 9 of the Quran, which is aptly titled
“Repentance.” They had seen the light and repented, and
with the absolutism of the newly penitent, they devoted
themselves to the letter of the Quran and to the exclusion
of its spirit. We are holier than thou, they were saying,
purer than the pure. And as is the way with such
righteousness, they took their zeal for purity over the
brink into all-out fanaticism.
Anything that fell short of their standard of faith was
nothing less than apostasy and had to be ruthlessly
rooted out lest it contaminate the righteous. They began
to terrorize the countryside around Nahrawan,
submitting everyone they caught to a kind of mini
Inquisition. If the answers failed to satisfy their rigid
standards, the punishment was death.
Matters came to a head when they chose the farmer
son of an early companion of Muhammad’s as their
victim. A number of them had ridden into his village for
supplies and decided to make an example of him. Since
his father had been among those who had warned
against taking sides before the Battle of the Camel, they
posed a loaded question. “Did your father not tell you
that the Prophet told him: ‘There will be a fitna in which
the heart of a man will die as does his body, and if you
are alive then, be not the slayer, but the slain’? Did he
not say that?”
That was indeed what the Prophet had told his father,