The First Fitna: Ali ibn Abi Talib and the Fracture of the Early Muslim Community (656–661 CE)

Within twenty-five years of the Prophet Muhammad's death, the community he left behind was at war with itself. Between 656 and 661 CE, Muslims fought Muslims at Basra, on the Euphrates plain, and on the canals east of the Tigris. Two caliphs were killed by other Muslims. A movement emerged that declared most of the community outside the faith altogether. When the fighting stopped, political authority had passed from Medina to Damascus and would never return.

Arabic historiography calls this period al-fitna al-kubra, the great trial. The word carries both senses at once: a civil disturbance, and a test that exposes what people actually are.

Modern writing on the Fitna often treats it as a tragedy with no right side, a collision of equally sincere men. That framing is comfortable, but it does not survive contact with the sources. On the specific question of who held legitimate authority, the classical material is not evenly balanced. Ali ibn Abi Talib was acclaimed by the Muhajirun and Ansar in Medina and held the only valid oath of allegiance in the community. Every party that fought him fought a sitting caliph without one. That is not a Shi'a claim. It is the position of Sunni orthodoxy as well, which counts Ali the fourth of the Rightly Guided Caliphs and holds that those who opposed him were in the wrong, differing from the Shi'a only over whether that wrong was sinful or an error of judgement that God excuses.

This article sets out what the sources actually say.

The crisis before the war

The trouble began under the third caliph, Uthman ibn Affan, who ruled from 644. The conquests had slowed, and the enormous revenues of Iraq, Egypt, and Iran had to be distributed by someone. Uthman, an Umayyad, appointed kinsmen to key governorships, most consequentially his relative Mu'awiya ibn Abi Sufyan in Syria. To his supporters this was reasonable use of capable men. To his critics in the garrison cities of Kufa, Basra, and Fustat, it looked like one clan consolidating the spoils of a conquest that other men had fought for.

Grievances accumulated: the treatment of prominent companions who criticised him, the reallocation of conquered land in Iraq, and the standardisation of the Qur'anic text, which involved suppressing variant regional codices. Delegations of provincial soldiers came to Medina to press their complaints. In the summer of 656, one such group besieged Uthman's house and killed him (al-Tabari, Ta'rikh al-Rusul wa'l-Muluk, years 34–35 AH).

Ali's own position during the siege is well documented and is often misrepresented. He argued against the rebels, sent his sons al-Hasan and al-Husayn to help guard Uthman's door, and pressed for the caliph's demands to be met so the siege would lift. He neither instigated the killing nor benefited from planning it. This matters for everything that follows, because the demand later raised against him was precisely that he was complicit.

Ali's accession and the Battle of the Camel

Ali was acclaimed caliph in Medina in the immediate aftermath, by the surviving Muhajirun and Ansar in the Prophet's own mosque. This is the strongest form of legitimacy the early community recognised, and it was the same procedure that had produced his three predecessors.

He inherited an impossible position. The men who had killed Uthman were now dispersed among the Iraqi garrisons that formed his base. Moving against them immediately would have collapsed his support before he had a state to govern with; not moving made him vulnerable to the charge of complicity. Ali's stated position was that retribution required a functioning judicial authority first, and that authority did not yet exist.

Opposition formed quickly. Talha ibn Ubaydallah and al-Zubayr ibn al-Awwam, both senior companions with ambitions of their own, left for Basra together with Aisha, the Prophet's widow, demanding retribution for Uthman's blood. Both men had already given Ali their oath in Medina, a fact al-Tabari records and one that shaped how later Muslims judged the revolt: they were nakithun, oath-breakers.

It is at this point in the march that the tradition places the incident of the dogs of al-Haw'ab. The Prophet is reported to have said to his wives, "Which one of you will be the one at whom the dogs of al-Haw'ab bark?" On the road to Basra the party passed a watering place where dogs set upon them. Aisha asked the name of the place, was told it was al-Haw'ab, recalled the hadith, and said she should turn back. She was persuaded to continue when witnesses were produced to swear the place was not al-Haw'ab (Musnad Ahmad, in the musnad of Aisha; Ibn Hibban, Sahih; al-Hakim, al-Mustadrak; narrated by al-Tabari and Ibn Kathir).

On the grading: Ibn Hibban and al-Hakim classed the report as authentic, and al-Albani graded it sahih in Silsilat al-Ahadith al-Sahiha (no. 474). Some Sunni scholars, including Ibn al-Arabi and Ibn Taymiyya, contested it. Readers should know both facts. The report has strong support, and it is not uncontested.

The armies met outside Basra in December 656. The fighting concentrated around the camel Aisha rode, which gave the battle its name. Ali won. Talha and al-Zubayr were both killed. Aisha was escorted back to Medina under formal protection and with public respect, a detail al-Tabari preserves and which speaks to Ali's conduct as much as any of his statements. He forbade pursuit of the fleeing, the taking of captives, and the seizure of property, on the grounds that the defeated remained Muslims.

The victory secured Iraq. Ali moved his capital to Kufa, a decision that permanently shifted the centre of political gravity away from the Hijaz.

Siffin and the death of Ammar ibn Yasir

That left Syria. Mu'awiya, as Uthman's kinsman and governor, refused allegiance until Uthman's killers were surrendered. He had what no other opponent possessed: a disciplined provincial army, secure revenues, and twenty years of unbroken administrative control. He also had no oath of allegiance from anyone, and no claim to the caliphate that the Medinan process recognised.

The two forces met in the summer of 657 at Siffin, on the Euphrates near modern Raqqa. What followed was weeks of negotiation, skirmishing, and finally sustained fighting, culminating in a night of chaotic combat remembered as Laylat al-Harir.

Among Ali's dead was Ammar ibn Yasir, one of the earliest converts to Islam, a man tortured in Mecca for his faith, by then in his nineties. His death is the single most consequential fact of the battle, because of a hadith the entire community already knew.

During the building of the mosque at Medina, decades earlier, the Prophet had said of Ammar: "Alas for Ammar. The transgressing party will kill him. He calls them to Paradise and they call him to the Fire." The report appears in Sahih al-Bukhari (Book of Prayer, in the account of the building of the Prophet's mosque) and in Sahih Muslim (Book of Tribulations), and is also in Musnad Ahmad. Ibn Abd al-Barr regarded it as among the most firmly established hadiths in circulation, and many scholars have classed it as mutawatir, transmitted by too many independent chains to be doubted.

Ammar died fighting for Ali. The implication was immediate and public, and the sources record the disarray it caused in the Syrian camp. Mu'awiya's reported answer was that his side had not killed Ammar; rather, the man who brought him to the battlefield had killed him. Ali's reply, as the tradition preserves it, was that by that reasoning the Prophet killed Hamza at Uhud (Nasr ibn Muzahim, Waq'at Siffin; al-Tabari; Ibn Sa'd, al-Tabaqat al-Kubra).

This is the point on which the neutral reading of the Fitna is hardest to sustain. A hadith in both Sahihs identifies one party at Siffin as the fi'a baghiya, the transgressing party, and the events of 657 identify which party that was. Classical Sunni scholarship has never denied this. Al-Nawawi and Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani both accept the identification and argue that Mu'awiya's party were mujtahids who erred in interpretation and are therefore not culpable in the way deliberate rebels would be (Ibn Hajar, Fath al-Bari, commentary on the hadith of Ammar). That is an argument about culpability. It concedes the question of who was right.

With Ali's forces gaining ground, the Syrians raised leaves of the Qur'an on their lances and called for the dispute to be settled by the Book of God. The tradition attributes the manoeuvre to Amr ibn al-As. Enough of Ali's own army refused to keep fighting that he was compelled to accept arbitration against his own judgement, and he said so at the time. Abu Musa al-Ash'ari was appointed for Ali, Amr ibn al-As for Mu'awiya. The arbitration produced nothing favourable to Ali. Its real effect was to place a sitting caliph and a rebellious governor on the footing of equal disputants.

The Kharijites and Nahrawan

The arbitration also cost Ali a large part of his own coalition, and for the opposite reason. A faction of his army held that submitting the matter to human judges was itself sin, since God had already judged. Their slogan, la hukma illa lillah, gave the movement its name in reverse: they became the Khawarij, those who went out.

Their doctrine hardened into something new: that grave sin excluded a Muslim from the community, and that an unjust ruler could be removed by force. Ali defeated them at Nahrawan in 658. The victory did not end them, and Kharijite revolts troubled the Umayyad and early Abbasid states for another century and a half.

A widely circulated report has the Prophet telling Ali that he would fight the nakithin, the qasitin, and the mariqin — the oath-breakers, the deviators, and those who shoot out of the faith as an arrow shoots through a target. The three terms map onto the Camel, Siffin, and Nahrawan exactly. The report is found in al-Hakim's Mustadrak, in al-Tabarani, and in Ibn Abi Shayba's Musannaf, and al-Hakim graded it authentic; its chains have been contested by others. It is worth citing with that caveat attached rather than as settled.

The settlement of 661

Ali spent his final years unable to break the stalemate. In January 661, in the mosque at Kufa, he was struck down by the Kharijite Ibn Muljam and died of the wound.

His son al-Hasan was acclaimed in Kufa but faced an army he could not defeat and a base that would not hold. Within months he came to terms with Mu'awiya and withdrew. Mu'awiya entered Kufa as undisputed ruler, and the year was remembered as Am al-Jama'a, the Year of Unity — a name that says a great deal about how the preceding five years had been experienced.

The Umayyad caliphate that began there lasted until 750. But the settlement resolved the fighting without resolving the argument, and it established succession by dynasty in place of acclamation. Twenty years later, at Karbala, the same fault line opened again, and Ali's second son paid for it.

What the sources allow

A caution worth stating plainly. The narrative sources were compiled generations after the events. Al-Tabari's Ta'rikh, the fullest account, dates to the early tenth century; Ibn al-Athir's al-Kamil is later still. They preserve earlier material — Abu Mikhnaf on Iraqi affairs, Nasr ibn Muzahim on Siffin, al-Baladhuri's Ansab al-Ashraf — but that material was transmitted by partisans, and al-Tabari often reports incompatible versions side by side without adjudicating between them.

Some transmitters are actively contested. Sayf ibn Umar, a major source for the origins of the revolt against Uthman, was judged unreliable by many classical hadith critics, and modern historians treat his distinctive material, including the figure of Abdullah ibn Saba as instigator of the whole affair, with heavy scepticism.

The argument made in this article does not depend on the contested material. It rests on the bay'a of Medina, which no source disputes; on the prior oaths of Talha and al-Zubayr, which al-Tabari records; and on the hadith of Ammar, which sits in both Sahihs and which Sunni commentators accept and then interpret. Where a report is weaker, as with al-Haw'ab and the nakithin hadith, that has been said above rather than buried.

Sources and further reading

Classical

1. Al-Tabari, Ta'rikh al-Rusul wa'l-Muluk — available in the SUNY Press English translation, especially vols. XV–XVII.
2. Nasr ibn Muzahim al-Minqari, Waq'at Siffin — the earliest surviving monograph on the battle.
3. Al-Baladhuri, Ansab al-Ashraf, vol. II.
4. Ibn al-Athir, al-Kamil fi'l-Ta'rikh.
5. Ibn Sa'd, al-Tabaqat al-Kubra — for Ammar ibn Yasir.
6. Ibn Kathir, al-Bidaya wa'l-Nihaya.

Hadith

1. Sahih al-Bukhari, Book of Prayer — the hadith of Ammar.
2. Sahih Muslim, Book of Tribulations — the hadith of Ammar.
3. Musnad Ahmad; Ibn Hibban, Sahih; al-Hakim, al-Mustadrak — the hadith of al-Haw'ab.
4. Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani, Fath al-Bari — the classical Sunni commentary on the Ammar hadith.

Modern

1. Wilferd Madelung, The Succession to Muhammad: A Study of the Early Caliphate (Cambridge, 1997) — the most rigorous modern case for Ali's constitutional position.
2. Martin Hinds, Studies in Early Islamic History — on Kufan factional politics and the Siffin arbitration.
3. Hugh Kennedy, The Prophet and the Age of the Caliphates.
4. Julius Wellhausen, The Religio-Political Factions in Early Islam — dated, still influential on the Kharijites.