'ALĪ, IBN ABĪ TĀLIB. - Cousin and son-in-law of Muhammad, and his fourth successor as head of the Muslim community; the last in the series of "orthodox" or "rightly guided" caliphs (Rāfidān). The son of a brother of Muhammad's father, he was considerably younger than the prophet. He was among the first to embrace Islam, and his ties of kinship with Muhammad were strengthened when he married his daughter Fāṭimah, by whom he had the two sons al-Ḥasan and al-Ḥusain, progenitors of all the subsequent descent, true or supposed, of the Prophet.
'A. faithfully assisted his cousin in the difficult early years of the Meccan preaching, followed him to Medina in the hijra, and distinguished himself for martial valor in the battles and military expeditions of the first decade. It does not appear, however, despite the assertions of the tendentious Shiite tradition, that he enjoyed any special ascendancy with the prophet, perhaps because of his scant political sense, and his temperament, courageous on the field but irresolute. Under the government of the third caliph 'Oṭmān, 'A. became the head of the opposition, composed of pietistic elements (the so-called Qurrā', "readers" or reciters of the Quran), of Medinese Muslims hostile to the family of the Umayyads, which had long remained pagan and to which 'Oṭmān precisely belonged, and of agitators and rebels. In the turmoil that culminated in 656 with the killing of 'Oṭmān, 'A. played an unclear part that compromised him morally before the hostile Umayyad party, since he found himself benefiting from the caliph's assassination by collecting its succession.
No sooner had he come to power than he clashed with the opposition of other former companions of the prophet, such as Ṭalḥa and az-Zubair, backed by Muhammad's widow, 'Ā'īšah. Victorious over these in the so-called battle of the camel (Nov. 656), 'A. had to face a far graver danger in the resurgence of the Umayyad party, led by the governor of Syria Mu'āwijah ibn Abi-Sufjān, and risen under the watchword "vengeance for 'Oṭmān". When attempts at settlement proved vain, 'A. also moved against Mu'āwijah, and clashed with his army at Ṣiffīn on the right bank of the middle Euphrates. But the battle, whose outcome was shaping favorably for 'A., was suspended by the skillful appeal of Mu'āwijah's partisans to arbitration "according to the Quran" (as they expressed themselves in an equivocal formula). His political career was hindered and finally cut short by the fanatical current of the Ḥāṅgīti, whom he defeated in the battle of Nāhrawān without, however, managing to extirpate the movement, which was to represent for about a century a source of bloody rebellions and tumults within the Islamic community.
'A., from whom his adversary Mu'āwijah had taken Syria and Egypt, fell victim in Jan. 661 to a ḥāṅgīta assassination attempt in the mosque of Kūfa, which he had made his capital from the very beginning of his rule. Mu'āwijah was recognized by all as caliph, and began the Umayyad dynasty, while to the descendants of 'A., and in the first place to his two sons, there remained only the choice between renouncing every political aspiration (which the elder, al-Ḥasan, did), or conspiracy and sterile insurrection, bloodily repressed, as was the fate, twenty years later, of the younger son al-Ḥusain.
Altogether disproportionate to the historical career of 'A., to his mediocre character and to the failure of his life, is the importance that his figure assumed in the later evolution of the Muslim religion. Considered by the Sunnis or orthodox as the wise and valiant right hand of the prophet, he was held by the Shiites to be the sole legitimate heir of the latter, in the direction of the Islamic community and in the very prerogatives of prophetic inspiration and infallibility. This conception then culminates, in the currents of extreme Shi'a, in a veritable divinization of 'A., placed before Muhammad himself, and held to be the supreme incarnation on earth of the divine logos. It may be said that apart from the Hāriqīti, long since almost entirely extinct, all heterodox Islam moves in the furrow of the veneration of 'A., and of the transformation of his historical figure. For the Christian West too, it was known at once alongside that of Muhammad; and Dante placed 'A. (the accentuation not corresponding to the Arabic form of the name is due to the influence of Turkish pronunciation) in the circle of the sowers of scandal and schism, with a dim awareness of the complications that within Islam itself lead back to this disconcerting and tragic figure.
Bibliography3 works
Francesco Gabrieli