said at the graveside. “If the Prophet sent him on a raid,
the angel Gabriel rode at his right hand, and the angel
Michael at his left. By God, none who came before him
are ahead of him, and none who come after him will
overtake him.”
In time, a shrine would be built over Ali’s grave on
that sandy rise, and the city of Najaf would grow up
around it. Each time the shrine was rebuilt, it grew more
magniɹcent, until the gold-leafed dome and min a rets
soared above the city, shining out to pilgrims still twenty
miles away. By the late twentieth century, Najaf was so
large that nearby Kufa had become little more than a
suburb hard by the river. All the more canny, then, of
Muqtada al-Sadr, the leader of today’s Mahdi Army,
when he adopted not the Najaf shrine but the main
mosque of Kufa as his home pulpit. In doing so, he took
on the spirit not of Ali assassinated, but of the living
Imam. Preaching where Ali had preached, Muqtada
assumed the role of the new champion of the oppressed.
But Najaf was to be only the ɹrst of Iraq’s twin holy
cities. As the Caliph Muawiya assumed uncontested
power, the second city was still just a nameless stretch of
stony sand ɹfty miles to the north. It would be twenty
years yet until Ali’s son Hussein would meet his fate
here, and this stretch of desert be given the name
Karbala, “the place of trial and tribulation.”