Always the Bridesmaid | The Life & Times of Ali

I'm back! With a belated unrelated holiday special that will without a doubt catch me a bunch of flack. But hey, I'm just glad to have it behind me. This is the story of Ali ibn Abi Talib, passed over thrice for the caliphate, thrust into the First Fitna, really a guy who drew a very short straw in life.

Footnotes:

For anyone looking for more information on the subject, I would highly recommend a series of videos by the Caspian Report on the Rashidun Caliphate. As far as I can tell, they lean a little towards the Shia recounting of history, but generally don't point any fingers, except perhaps at the Egyptian delegation, making it out to be a great big conspiracy from the start when it doesn't entirely seem that way to me. Link here if you're interested:    • History of Islam, Part 1 of 5: Reign ...  

0:00 You're cringing, I'm cringing, we're all having a good time

1:33 Ummah referring to the general Muslim community

1:50 Ali wasn't exactly happy about being snubbed this way, from what I gather he was pretty upset about it and thought he'd be a much better leader, but decided not to make a fuss for the benefit of keeping the caliphate together.

1:56 For those of you not in the know (and I know I didn't really mention it) Ali not being the first to lead the Ummah/Caliphate is the main point of contention between Shia and Sunni Islam, which makes it especially ironic that Ali himself tried not to cause too much trouble over the issue.

3:03 This is wrong! I don't have a lot of information on how close Uthman was to Muhammad, but he was his son-in-law, just like Ali. Apologies!

3:50 This isn't 100% confirmed, but it's a plausible explanation. If you want a reason not to like Ali, you can suspect him, but it seems unlikely to me.

2:37 This is more theology, basically Umar used the theological concept of jihad to provide a motivation for taking over the Persian heartland as opposed to just unifying Arabia. The jist of it was that the non-Muslim world was against God and bringing God to them was justified, nothing too revolutionary among monotheistic religions, really. Caspian Report's video on Umar has more details.

2:44 So Umar came riding into Jerusalem and the people there assumed he was going to pray at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, but he respectfully declined so that future Muslims wouldn't try to turn the place into a Mosque just because he prayed there once.

4:25 This is where I'd like to deviate from the Caspian Report a little bit. It wasn't necessarily that the whole group that killed Uthman infiltrated both armies to stage a conspiracy and usher in chaos, it was more that some of the people responsible for Uthman's murder wanted to avoid being targetted by having other people fight each other instead of hunting them down, plus some members of the Khawarij (those soldiers who defect a little later) then known as the Qurra, though I couldn't find out what exactly they were doing in general before becoming the Khawarij.

5:25 They also targetted a third guy, Amr ibn Al-As, but I decided to leave him out of the video for the sake of simplicity.

5:58 On second thought maybe I shouldn't be encouraging people in already heated arguments to come over here...

Music (in order of appearance):

0:00 Alan Menken - Prince Ali (Instrumental)
0:09 Kevin Macleod - Hidden Past (Intro Music)
0:18 Brandon & Derek Fietcher - Desert Caravans (probably not authentic Arabian music, but then the music in my Pompey video probably wasn't very authentic either)
3:12 Kevin Macleod - Americana
5:40 Kevin Macleod - Deuces