become its governor in reward for his work. Ali would
have chosen his own chief of staʃ, the general who had
so vividly volunteered to take Muawiya to the desert
“and leave him staring at the backside of things whose
front side he has no idea of,” but his men insisted
instead on the aging Abu Musa. This was the man who
had argued so strongly that they should remove their
spearheads and unstring their bows before the Battle of
the Camel. “Fitna rips the community apart like an
ulcer,” he had said then, and now that the ulcer was
eating at them, they remembered his words. Never mind
that Ali’s chief aides called Abu Musa “blunt of blade and
shallow,” a man too easily manipulable by sharper
minds. The rank and ɹle countered that “he warned us
of what we have fallen into.” They would accept nobody
else.
The conclave lasted two weeks, and at the end, Abu
Musa and Amr stepped forward to make a joint
declaration. As Abu Musa understood it, they had agreed
to the perfect compromise: A shura would be held to
reaɽrm both Ali as Caliph and Muawiya as governor of
Syria. That is what he announced to the hundreds of
those gathered for the concluding ceremony. Then came
the double cross.
When Amr stepped up to the podium, his spin on Abu
Musa’s words was not at all what the old man had in
mind. He and his good friend Abu Musa had indeed
agreed to a shura, he said, but its purpose was to conɹrm