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In the year 40 of the Hegira – the Emigration – an exceptional man was stabbed to death while at prayer in the great mosque at Kufa, Iraq. His name was Ali ibn Abi Talib. Prophet Muhammad’s cousin and son in law. The first male convert to Islam. Also the husband of Muhammad’s favourite daughter, Fatima, and the father of Hasan and Hussein, boys much loved by their grandfather. Most earnest in personal devotion to Muhammad, Ali showed lion-hearted courage during the wars against the enemies of Islam. In many fights he bore the green standard of the Prophet. At the battle of Badr he engaged in single combat and slew his foes. At Uhud he fought so fiercely that he received 16 wounds. He was the Prophet’s natural successor. Yet, after Muhammad died three times did other men pipped him at the post.

The caliphate fell eventually to him but his five-year rule opened the doors of fitna – strife or civil war amongst Muslims. Ali’s assassination by a fanatic was the sad denouement of a lion-like life. But Ali’s noble shade has not been consigned to oblivion. His fame endures. Ali the Lion inspires the actions of millions of Shia Muslims and other marginal Islamic sects. The Islamic Republic of Iran, the martial Shia of Lebanon, the Mahdi Army of Iraq – they are active political actors for whom Ali’s example is a living force. But why was such a big hero’s political career so ill-starred, against all expectations? Was it that Ali alas ‘lacked the qualities requisite for a ruler in tumultuous times’, as Canon Sell claimed in a forgotten pamphlet, The Cult of Ali? Or was it simply maktub, written or predestined? I fear the predestination move is both too easy and too fast. Reason must have its say, surely. Here are a few tentative, no doubt imperfect, thoughts:

• One reason why Ali was not appointed the Prophet’s immediate successor was that he was not at a crucial meeting at which Omar offered the caliphate to Abu Bakr. He was absent because he was occupied in a most pious and filial task – washing and preparing his father in law’s body for burial. So his piety perhaps counted against him, in this world at least. (Conversely, Trotzky missed out being at Lenin’s funeral, thereby favouring Stalin’s succession. Dubious analogy but...politics is politics.)
• Ali reached power immediately after the assassination of the third caliph, Uthman. Although the Lion had played no role in the murder – indeed Ali had initially had declined the post - the occasion was unfortunate. It generated much bitterness and hostility.
• Ali’s political base was in Medina. The desert oasis which many Muslims nostalgically consider the golden age of Islam. There politics, religion and virtue appeared perfectly conjoined under the Prophet’s guidance. But Islam’s later converts in Mecca, the powerful Quraysh, had no desire to submit to the lesser city and hence to Ali.
• Amongst Ali’s dangerous enemies was Aisha, one of Muhammad’s wives. She later fought against him at the battle of the Camel. Ali defeated her – here again his military ability comes to the fore – and treated her most honourably afterwards. An example of his wisdom and magnanimity but, as Professor Hugh Kennedy comments, the battle had opened a ‘Pandora’s box’. Muslims had killed other Muslims (for the first time?). A fateful development.
• Muawwiya, the governor of Syria and a relative of dead Uthman, demanded that Ali punish his murderers. But some of them had become Ali’s close supporters. That was a problem he never solved.
• Ali fought Muawwiya’s followers at the battle of Siffin. It seems he was about to win when his opponents affixed pages of the Qur’an to the tip of their spears. Either a pious or a Machiavellian ruse. Blasphemous to go on fighting? The righteous leader then submitted to arbitration. Unfortunately, Ali’s referee was neither his choice nor was he a particularly clever fellow. The whole thing unravelled, fatally weakening the Caliph’s cause.
• Worse, a part of Ali’s own followers accused of kufr, apostasy. By submitted to arbitration, a human thing, he had denied the role of the Qur’an, they contended. ‘Confess you have sinned!’ they demanded. Naturally, the Lion refused. His critics then seceded. They became the khawarij – those who went out. Radical religious extremists, addicted to terror and violence. (The fanatical Christian sectarians, the Donatists condemned by St Augustine might be a possible analogy of the Khawarij.) They are now technically extinct but, as my good Arabic teacher Ibrahim rightly suggests, ‘their spirit is still alive today’. Anyhow, it was a Khawarij who later assassinated Ali in Kufa. His rival, Muawwiya, was then elected Caliph, beginning the first historical Islamic dynasty based in Damascus, the Umayyads. Civil wars and internecine strife did not stop Muslims from winning a tremendous worldwide empire.

And so the Lion perished. His was a noble failure but a failure – in the political sense - nevertheless. His own party, the Shia, venerate him, stressing his high qualities, such as piety, sense of justice and military prowess. The Persian Sufi tradition, Professor Lewisohn writes, considers him the founding father of their spirituality, ‘an exemplar of all that is stalwart and steadfast in their mystical discipline’. Other, more outlandish and heterodox sects have scandalously raised him to semi-divine status. An extreme posthumous triumph. Intriguingly, Lewisohn relates some Sufi teachers call Ali Abu Turab, Father of Dust, ‘because of his unkempt and often soiled appearance’. Well, there have been plenty of ‘fathers of dust’ amongst Christian saints and hermits, sure.

I am left with a doubt. Was the Lion just unlucky? Given his many virtues, he should have succeeded politically also. Why not? Bad luck? Call it superstition, yet Napoleon always chose as his generals men with a reputation for fortune. Pope Benedict...somewhat unlucky, isn’t he? The Romans believed in signs, bad omens – Caesar learnt that at his cost, when he ignored the auguries and fell murdered on the Ides of March. Predestination, destiny, fate...no, the priest cannot venture into those fearful labyrinths now. He will cryptically conclude after the poet Virgil that perhaps ‘God understood Ali in another way’.

Revd Frank Julian Gelli