Documents of the Right Word

notables as Talha and Zubeyr, asked the (new) Khalîfa to arrest
the murderers and punish them as prescribed by Islam. Hadrat Alî
answered them that the situation was so chaotic that it would be
impossible to find the murderers, that another mutiny might occur
in case he tried to investigate, and that he could perform this
commandment of Islam after the re-establishment of public order.
They protested this answer, saying that a Khalîfa who would not
execute Islam’s commandment was not to be obeyed. Imâm-i-Alî’s
ijtihâd was correct. On the other hand, the opposing party had to
act upon their own ijtihâd. And the Khalîfa, in his turn, had to use
force to subjugate the people disobeying him. Eventually the
Camel event, i.e. the war called ‘Jemel’ took place, which cost a
great deal of Muslim bloodshed. In the meantime, hadrat
Mu’âwiya ‘radiy-Allâhu anhum’ was off in Damascus, where he
had been appointed as governor. He therefore did not join the
event of Jemel. Nor would he allow any Damascene blood to be
shed on account of this event. When hadrat Alî, the victor (of the
battle of Camel), asked the Damascene people also to obey him,
hadrat Mu’âwiya followed his own ijtihâd and asked him to arrest
and punish the murderers; and this in its turn led to another war,
i.e. the combat called Siffîn.
As is seen, none of the four Khalîfas, and in fact none of the Ashâb-i-kirâm
‘radiy-Allâhu anhum’ thought of worldly advantages
in the caliphate elections; they all endeavoured to execute the
commandment of Allâhu ta’âlâ. The four Khalîfas never thought
of their own comfort, struggling day and night for serving Islam
and Muslims and accepting the duty as a sine qua non which
someone would have to undertake for Allah’s sake.
Hurûfîs compare the caliphate institution to a kingdom, to
sovereignty. And because they think so, they say that hadrat Alî
was opposed to the caliphate of the other three Khalîfas and
therefore fought against them incessantly for twenty-five years.
They presume that he vied for presidency for years and nursed a
grudge and hostility against the As-hâb-i-kirâm because they were
against his caliphate. They allege that “therefore the three Khalîfas
and thousands of Sahâbîs who voted for them are to be cursed till
the end of the world.” In an effort to prove themselves to be right,
they fabricate preternatural stories which are neither Islamic, nor
logical, nor worthy of hadrat Alî’s honourable renown.
8- The jâriya is made to say, “When Abû Bekr Siddîq ‘radiy-
Allâhu anh’ became Khalîfa, he confiscated the date orchard
belonging to hadrat Fâtimat-uz-zehrâ by force, and therefore
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