First Fitna and the rise of the Umayyads

Uthman’s reliance on his Umayyad kinsmen, whom he appointed to nearly all the major governorships, and his attempts to control the revenues of the provinces angered much of the early Muslim elite and the Arab settlers of Iraq and Egypt. In June 656 rebels from these provinces besieged the aged caliph in his house in Medina and killed him. Ali, Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law, was recognised as caliph, but Muhammad’s widow Aisha and the companions Talha and Zubayr demanded vengeance for Uthman and rose against him; they were defeated near Basra in December 656 in the Battle of the Camel, named after the camel carrying Aisha, around which the fighting raged. Ali made Kufa his capital.

Mu'awiya, Uthman’s kinsman and governor of Syria since Umar’s time, refused to recognise Ali and demanded the punishment of Uthman’s murderers. In July 657 the two armies met at Siffin on the Euphrates. When the battle turned against the Syrians, they raised copies of the Qur’an on their lances, calling for the Book of God to judge between the two sides, and Ali, pressed by his troops, accepted arbitration. The arbiters — Abu Musa al-Ash'ari for Ali and Amr ibn al-As for Mu'awiya — reached a verdict that strengthened Mu'awiya, whom the Syrians then acknowledged as caliph. Part of Ali’s army, rejecting any human arbitration, seceded; Ali crushed these Kharijites at Nahrawan, but in 658 Amr took Egypt for Mu'awiya.

In January 661 Ali was struck down in the mosque of Kufa by the Kharijite Ibn Muljam. His elder son Hasan was proclaimed caliph in Kufa, but his supporters melted away as Mu'awiya advanced, and he abdicated by a treaty that promised an amnesty and, according to the sources, the choice of the next caliph by a council. Mu'awiya ruled from Damascus as the first Umayyad caliph. The fitna (“trial”, “sedition”) left lasting divisions: from it grew the separation of Ali’s partisans, the future Shia, and of the Kharijites from the majority. Almost all the surviving accounts were written under the Abbasids, more than a century later.