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Why Were 3 of the First 4 Caliphs Assassinated?
Three of the first four Muslim leaders after the Prophet Muhammad (SAW) were killed. Only one died of illness. This is the plain story of what happened, and the simple reason behind it: a government built for one town ended up running an empire, with no rule for who takes over next.
Three Out of Four
The Prophet Muhammad (SAW) died in the year 632. Four men led the Muslim community after him, one after another.
Three of those four were murdered.
None of them died fighting a foreign army. Two of them were killed by other Muslims.
Only the first one, Abu Bakr (RA), died of illness in his bed.
Most people never hear this laid out in one place. You get it in pieces instead. Umar was stabbed. There was "trouble" later on. Ali was killed by a group called the Kharijites.
So let's ask it directly. Why did this keep happening? And why did it not happen to the first one?
The answer is not that the early Muslims were bad people, and it is not that Islam is violent. It is more ordinary than that. A government built to run one small town suddenly found itself running one of the largest empires on earth, and it never built the parts a big state needs. The most important missing part was a rule for who takes over next.
This article walks through the whole story, start to finish.
Two Short Phrases You Will See a Lot
You will see (SAW) after the Prophet Muhammad's name. It stands for sallallahu alayhi wa sallam, pronounced roughly "sal-lal-LAA-hu a-LAY-hi wa sal-LAM". It means "may Allah's peace and blessings be upon him."
Muslims do not only write it. They say it out loud, or quietly under their breath, every time they hear his name.
It is a small act of love that a Muslim repeats thousands of times in a lifetime. If you are not Muslim, you are warmly invited to read it aloud too. There is no obligation either way, and it is worth reading rather than passing over, because it carries real meaning.
You will also see (RA) after the names of the Prophet's companions. It stands for radiyallahu anhu, pronounced "ra-di-yal-LAA-hu AN-hu", and it means "may Allah be pleased with him." Muslims say this one out loud too, for the same reason.
Some of the men who get (RA) in this article ended up on opposite sides of a war from each other. That is on purpose, and it will make sense by the end.
How This Article Handles the Hard Parts
Three ground rules, so you know what you are reading.
Where the old sources disagree, this article says so. Early Islamic history is unusually well recorded for the 600s. Well recorded means many accounts, and some of them contradict each other.
Where a claim could not be checked, it was cut. Some famous and moving details about these events only appear in very late or very weak sources, so they are not here.
Complaints are reported, not agreed with. A lot of this story is about what people said was wrong with a particular leader. Writing down an accusation is not the same as saying it was true, and the ones here are the ones Muslim historians recorded themselves.
One word will come up constantly.
Caliph means the leader of the whole Muslim community. He is not a prophet, and he cannot invent new religious rules. His job is to run the state and command the army while applying rules that already exist.
Who the Four Were
Sunni Muslims call these four the Rashidun, which means "the Rightly Guided." Together they ruled for twenty-nine years, from 632 to 661 CE.
Abu Bakr (RA), 632 to 634. He was the Prophet's closest friend and the first adult man outside the family to become Muslim. He was also the one who hid with the Prophet in the cave during the migration to Madinah. He ruled about two years and three months and died of illness.
Umar ibn al-Khattab (RA), 634 to 644. Ten years. Under him the Muslim state grew from a regional power into an empire. He was stabbed at dawn prayer in 644.
Uthman ibn Affan (RA), 644 to 656. Twelve years, longer than any of the others. He is the reason there is one standard written text of the Quran. He was killed in his own house in 656.
Ali ibn Abi Talib (RA), 656 to 661. He was the Prophet's cousin, raised in his household, and married to his daughter Fatimah (RA). He ruled just under five years and spent nearly all of it at war with other Muslims. He was struck down in the mosque of Kufa in 661.
We have another article on the history of Shia Islam that covers some of the same events. That one follows the argument over who should have led. This one is about government, and why the state kept losing its leaders to murder. You do not need to read that one first.
Start With the One Who Died in Bed
Abu Bakr is the most useful person in this story, because he is the comparison point.
His two years were not easy ones. The Prophet (SAW) died in 632, and straight away large parts of Arabia stopped paying zakat or broke away from the state completely. Abu Bakr fought those wars, called the Ridda wars, and won them.
He had opponents too. He was chosen at a meeting at Saqifah on the day the Prophet died, and that choice was disputed at the time and has been argued about ever since. Some of the Prophet's own family did not pledge loyalty to him right away.
Even so, nobody tried to kill him.
Three things made his situation different from the three who came after. Each one comes back later in this article.
He only ruled for two years. That is not long enough for a complaint to grow into a movement.
There was hardly any money yet. The big conquests had barely started. There was no treasury worth fighting over, no payment list to feel cheated by, and no provincial income anyone could accuse him of taking.
He sorted out the succession himself, before he died. While he was dying he asked senior companions for advice, then dictated a written document naming Umar as the next caliph. The old accounts say not everyone was happy about it, and some thought Umar was too harsh. But it was decided, in writing, by the sitting caliph, in advance.
That is the only time in the whole twenty-nine years that a handover was planned ahead and went smoothly.
Remember that, because it is the heart of the whole article.
Then Twenty Years Happened
Now the part that changed everything.
Between roughly 634 and 651, the Muslim state stopped being an Arabian kingdom and became an empire. It took less than twenty years.
In 636 the Byzantine field army was defeated at Yarmuk. In the same year the Persian army was defeated at al-Qadisiyyah. Jerusalem surrendered in 638. Alexandria fell in 642.
Persia made its last stand at Nahavand that same year. By 651 the Sasanian dynasty was gone. It had been one of the two superpowers of the age and was over four hundred years old.
So by the mid-650s, the government in Madinah was responsible for land stretching from Libya to eastern Iran.
Now picture that government. It is a handful of men in an oasis town in western Arabia.
There is no civil service, because there has never been any need for one. There are no permanent courts out in the provinces. There is no official way to file a complaint about a governor.
The historian Hugh Kennedy studied how these early armies were actually recruited and paid in The Armies of the Caliphs (Routledge, 2001). His work shows how much of this was made up as they went. Almost every part of the new state was invented under pressure, by people who had never run anything bigger than a city.
Three of those improvised decisions caused most of what follows.
Improvisation One: Who Gets the Money
The conquests brought in more wealth than anyone in Arabia had ever handled. Land, tribute, treasure, and tax income from farming provinces that had been taxed efficiently for centuries.
Someone had to decide who got a share.
Umar's answer was a register called the diwan, set up around 641. Every Muslim entitled to a payment was written down. The size of your yearly payment depended on how early you became Muslim, how close you were to the Prophet (SAW), and whether you had fought at Badr.
The principle behind it is a fair one. People who became Muslim when it was dangerous and unpopular really had given up more, and rewarding that is not corruption.
But look at what the register also did. It locked the social order in place, permanently and in writing, based on things that happened before some people were even born.
A man who became Muslim in 645 and then fought in Iran could never move up that list, no matter what he did. And most of the people at the top of the list lived in Madinah, while more and more of the fighting was being done by people who did not.
There is a line in the Quran that sits over all of this. It is talking about wealth that comes to the community without a battle, and it explains why that wealth is shared out the way it is.
Quran“…so that it will not be a perpetual distribution among the rich from among you.”
Did the register live up to that, or quietly work against it? Within ten years that was a political fight, and there were armed men on both sides of it.
Improvisation Two: Where the Army Lives
The second big decision was about geography, and it may have mattered even more.
The Arab soldiers were not allowed to spread out into the conquered cities and blend into the local population. Instead the armies were settled in new garrison towns built for them, called the amsar. Kufa and Basra in Iraq, and Fustat in Egypt, on the spot that later became Cairo.
The military thinking is easy to follow. Your army stays together, stays disciplined, stays ready to move, and does not merge into the people it just conquered.
The political effect showed up about fifteen years later.
By then you had several cities, hundreds of miles from the capital, filled almost entirely with armed men. They were paid by the state and organised by tribe. They were no longer fighting anyone. And they increasingly believed that the wealth of the province they had conquered belonged to them, not to a town back in Arabia.
Kufa becomes the pressure point for the entire century. The angry delegations come from there. The new sects form there. Ali later moves his capital there, and he is killed there.
Umar seems to have seen the danger himself. In the last speech of his life, which we will come to, his advice about the garrison towns was that "nothing be taken from them except from their surplus, with their consent."
He knew which way the pressure was building.
Improvisation Three: Nobody Knows Who Rules Next
This is the one that gets people killed.
Islam did not arrive with a fixed procedure for choosing a head of state. The Quran praises shura, meaning consultation, as a quality of a believing community.
Quran“And those who have responded to their Lord and established prayer and whose affair is [determined by] consultation among themselves, and from what We have provided them, they spend.”
The Prophet (SAW) himself was told to do the same.
Quran“…and consult them in the matter. And when you have decided, then rely upon Allah.”
That gives you a principle to follow, but not a step-by-step method. It does not say who gets consulted, what counts as a final decision, or what to do when people disagree.
So look at how the first four actually came to power.
Abu Bakr was acclaimed at a meeting hurriedly called at Saqifah on the day the Prophet died. Not everyone who mattered was in the room.
Umar was appointed in writing by the caliph before him.
Uthman was chosen by a committee of six men that Umar made up on his deathbed while he was bleeding to death.
Ali was acclaimed in Madinah in the days after Uthman was murdered, in a city still full of the men who had done it.
Four caliphs, four completely different methods. Not one of them repeated the method used the time before.
When there is no agreed rule for who rules next, every handover becomes a fresh argument. And when the handover is an argument, the quickest way to start that argument is to kill the man currently in the job.
That is the main claim of this article. Everything that follows is the evidence for it.
Umar, 644: The Assassination We Can Almost Watch
Umar's murder is unusual, because a man standing in the prayer rows close enough to see it narrated the whole day. His account is recorded in Sahih al-Bukhari.
It is Sahih al-Bukhari 3700, narrated by Amr ibn Maymun, and it is one of the longest single reports in the collection. Almost everything below comes straight from it.
Four Days Earlier
The report does not start with the murder. It starts with Umar questioning two of his tax officials about Iraq.
He asks Hudhayfah ibn al-Yaman and Uthman ibn Hunayf whether they have put too much tax on the farmland of Iraq. They say no, the land can take it. He pushes them again, and they say no again.
Then he says: "If Allah keeps me alive, I will leave the widows of Iraq needing no man after me."
Four days later he was stabbed.
Notice where that conversation sits. The most detailed account we have of the second caliph's death opens with him worrying about whether the provinces are being taxed too hard. The problem that will eventually tear the state apart is right there in the first line.
Dawn
He was leading Fajr, the dawn prayer. The narrator was near the front, with only Ibn Abbas (RA) standing between him and the caliph.
Umar used to walk along the rows telling people to straighten their lines, and he would not begin until he saw no gaps. He liked to recite a long chapter in the first unit so that latecomers could catch up.
He said the opening takbir. Straight away, the man next to the narrator heard him say:
"The dog has killed me — or eaten me."
The attacker had a knife with two blades. He pushed through the congregation striking left and right and stabbed thirteen men, seven of whom died. When one of the worshippers threw a cloak over him and he realised he was trapped, he killed himself.
Umar was already fatally wounded. He reached out, took the hand of Abd al-Rahman ibn Awf, and pushed him forward to finish leading the prayer.
Then comes a detail that tells you how big that mosque was. The people at the edges had no idea anything had happened, because they could not see. All they knew was that Umar's voice had stopped, and they were saying "Subhan Allah, Subhan Allah", which means "glory be to Allah", into the confusion.
"Find Out Who Attacked Me"
They carried Umar out of the mosque, and his first question was who did it.
Ibn Abbas went to find out, came back, and said it was the slave of al-Mughira.
Umar asked: "The craftsman?"
Yes.
"May Allah curse him. I did not treat him unjustly."
That last sentence is answering something, and to see what, you need the other half of the story. It is not in Bukhari.
The Other Half
The assassin was a Persian usually called Abu Lu'lu'a, whose given name was probably Firuz.
The standard scholarly accounts are Ch. Pellat's entry in the Encyclopaedia Iranica and the article on Umar by Levi Della Vida and Bonner in the Encyclopaedia of Islam. Both have him captured during the Persian wars and held as a slave by al-Mughira ibn Shu'ba, the governor of Kufa.
He was a skilled craftsman, and al-Mughira charged him two dirhams a day out of his earnings. He asked the caliph in person to lower it.
Umar said no.
So when Umar says "I did not treat him unjustly", he is arguing about a tax decision he made, and insisting he got it right. That is the last argument of a dying man.
Wilferd Madelung, in The Succession to Muhammad (Cambridge University Press, 1997), argues that the tax was only the trigger. The wider issue, he says, was how non-Arabs were treated in the new order.
Both readings point in the same direction. This was not a religious killing. It was a man who could not get the state to listen to him.
Bukhari has the attacker killing himself when cornered. Some other historical reports have him captured and executed instead. The sources genuinely disagree, and the report inside Sahih al-Bukhari is the stronger of the two.
What Umar Refused To Do
There is a moment in the narration that is worth reading slowly.
Umar, dying, says something bitter to Ibn Abbas. He tells him that Ibn Abbas and his father had always wanted more non-Arabs living in Madinah.
Ibn Abbas replies: "If you wish, we will do it." The narration then explains what he meant. He meant that they would kill them.
So the caliph's own cousin has just offered to punish an entire ethnic group for what one man did.
Umar's answer:
"You are mistaken. After they have spoken your language, prayed toward your qiblah, and performed Hajj as you do?"
He is bleeding to death from a wound one of them gave him, and he refuses on the spot. They pray where you pray, he says. They are not guilty as a group.
There is another line just before that one which people often miss. Umar says: "All praise to Allah, who has not caused me to die at the hand of a man who claims to be a Muslim."
That is a strange thing to be thankful for. It makes sense once you know that the next two caliphs did not get the same mercy.
The Committee He Invented While Dying
Then came the practical question. Who rules next?
The people around him told him to appoint someone.
Umar did something nobody had done before. He named six men, Ali, Uthman, al-Zubayr, Talhah, Sa'd and Abd al-Rahman ibn Awf, and told them to pick one of themselves. He added his own son as a witness, on the clear condition that his son got no share in the rule at all.
He also gave them a list of instructions. Look after the early emigrants. Look after the Ansar of Madinah. Look after the people of the garrison towns, "for they are the protectors of Islam, and the source of wealth, and the fury of the enemy", and take nothing from them but their surplus, and only with their consent. Look after the bedouin. Keep the agreement with non-Muslim subjects, "and do not burden them beyond their capacity."
As a governing document that is very clear-headed. He knew exactly which groups could bring the state down.
After the burial the six met. Al-Zubayr stepped aside in favour of Ali. Talhah stepped aside in favour of Uthman. Sa'd stepped aside in favour of Abd al-Rahman.
Abd al-Rahman then made both remaining candidates promise that whichever one lost would obey the winner. Then he said:
"Raise your hand, Uthman."
Ali gave Uthman his pledge, and everyone else followed.
Now hold two facts together. That process was careful, consultative, and accepted by everyone at the time. It had also never been used before, was never used again, and only existed because a dying man invented it in a few hours.
Hadith“I do not find anyone more entitled to this matter than these few men, with whom the Messenger of Allah was pleased when he died.”
Uthman, 644 to 656: Twelve Years and a Revolt
Uthman's rule is the turning point of this whole story, and it is also the part most often squashed into a single sentence.
The first half went well by most measures. The conquests kept going and a navy was built.
He also made the decision with the longest life of anything in this article. He had the text of the Quran standardised into one authoritative copy and sent copies out to the provinces. That is why there is one Quran text today rather than regional versions.
He was personally one of the most generous men of his generation. That is not just a nice thing to say about him, and it comes back later as evidence in a very tense scene.
The second half of his rule went wrong, for reasons that come directly out of the three improvisations above.
What People Actually Accused Him Of
These are the recorded complaints. They come from Muslim sources, and they are what historians work from.
Appointments. He gave provincial governorships to relatives from his clan, the Umayyads. Julius Wellhausen says so bluntly in The Arab Kingdom and Its Fall (1927). Fred Donner, in Muhammad and the Believers (Harvard University Press, 2010), adds that some of those appointees were seen as too young for the jobs they were given.
The money and the land. This is the big one. Kennedy, in The Prophet and the Age of the Caliphates, describes Uthman treating former royal land in the conquered provinces as state property, and requiring provinces to send their surplus income to Madinah. The strongest opposition to this came from Iraq and Egypt.
Think about what that looked like on the ground. The men in Kufa and Fustat believed the wealth of the land they had conquered was theirs. The caliph in Madinah believed it belonged to the whole Muslim community and that his job was to manage it.
Both positions can be argued. Neither side had anywhere to argue them.
Treatment of senior companions. Madelung records that Uthman's handling of several of the earliest Muslims caused real anger. The names are Abu Dharr al-Ghifari, Abdullah ibn Mas'ud, and Ammar ibn Yasir (RA).
These were not minor figures. When men like that look like they are being pushed aside, every other complaint starts to sound believable.
Was each accusation fair? Muslims have argued about that for fourteen centuries and this article will not settle it.
What matters here is the structure. There were now tens of thousands of armed men with grievances and no process. No court could summon a governor. No assembly could approve a budget. There was no way to remove a caliph, because nobody had ever needed one.
If the only tool available is a mob, sooner or later the mob gets used.
The Delegations
By 655 and 656, delegations from the provinces were travelling to Madinah to confront the caliph face to face.
Kennedy notes that the Egyptian opposition gathered around Muhammad ibn Abi Hudhayfah and Muhammad ibn Abi Bakr, who was the son of the first caliph. They would not even pray behind their governor.
A deal was agreed with the Egyptian delegation, and they set off home.
The Letter
On the road, the Egyptians stopped a messenger carrying a letter to their governor. The letter told him to execute the delegation when they arrived.
They turned around.
Madelung's judgement, which is the mainstream scholarly view, is that the letter did not come from Uthman. It came from his secretary and relative Marwan ibn al-Hakam.
This is the moment where the situation became impossible to fix, and it is worth being exact about why.
The problem was not that the caliph betrayed them. The problem was that he could not prove he had not. He could not hand over whoever was responsible, could not show that he controlled his own household, and could not offer any process that would establish the truth, because no such process existed.
What kills him is the missing mechanism, not the letter.
The Siege
The rebels surrounded his house. The siege lasted around forty days.
We have eyewitness testimony from inside the house, and it is graded authentic. Two men who were with him, Abu Umamah ibn Sahl and Abdullah ibn Amir ibn Rabi'ah, narrated it. It is recorded in Sunan an-Nasa'i 4019 and graded sahih in the Darussalam edition.
Hadith“We were with Uthman when he was under siege, and we could hear what was being said outside. He came in one day, then came out and said: 'They are threatening to kill me.' We said: 'Allah will suffice you against them.' He said: 'Why would they kill me? I heard the Messenger of Allah say: it is not permissible to shed the blood of a Muslim except in one of three cases — a man who reverts to disbelief after Islam, or commits adultery after marriage, or kills a soul unlawfully. By Allah, I never committed adultery in the age of ignorance or in Islam, I never wished for any religion other than the one Allah guided me to, and I have never killed anyone. So why do they want to kill me?'”
That is an eighty-year-old man trapped in his own home, working through Islamic law out loud, trying to figure out what legal grounds anyone could have for doing this to him.
The rebels then cut off his water. Madelung records that this is what finally pushed Ali into stepping in on his behalf.
That detail also leads to the hardest scene in the whole story.
The Well
This is Jami' at-Tirmidhi 3703, narrated by Thumamah ibn Hazn al-Qushayri, who was present. Al-Tirmidhi graded it hasan, meaning sound.
Uthman appears above the crowd at his door. First he asks them to bring forward the two men who stirred them up against him. Then he starts asking the crowd questions and makes them answer him.
Hadith“I ask you by Allah and by Islam — do you know that when the Messenger of Allah came to Madinah there was no sweet water in it except the well of Rumah, and he said: 'Who will buy the well of Rumah and put his bucket alongside the buckets of the Muslims, in exchange for something better than it in Paradise?' And I bought it with the core of my wealth. And today you prevent me from drinking from it.”
They answer: "By Allah, yes."
He keeps going. Did I not buy the land to extend the Prophet's mosque with my own money, and today you stop me praying two units in it? By Allah, yes. Did I not equip the army of hardship out of my own wealth? By Allah, yes.
Then a fourth question. Do you not know that the Prophet (SAW) stood on Mount Thabir with Abu Bakr, Umar and me, and the mountain shook, and he struck it with his foot and said: "Be still, Thabir — upon you is only a Prophet, a truthful one, and two martyrs"?
By Allah, yes.
And Uthman said: "Allahu akbar. Bear witness, by the Lord of the Ka'bah, that I am a martyr." He said it three times.
The man who bought the town its drinking water is standing in front of a crowd that is refusing him water. He gets them to admit it out loud, one fact at a time.
They killed him anyway.
The Killing, and What Is Disputed
The final attack came on 18 Dhul-Hijjah 35 AH, which is 17 June 656 CE. He was around eighty years old.
Madelung reconstructs what set it off. A man named Niyar ibn Iyad al-Aslami called on Uthman to step down, and one of Marwan's servants threw a stone from the house and killed him. Whatever restraint was left ended there.
The men named in the reports as striking Uthman include Kinana ibn Bishr al-Tujibi and Amr ibn al-Hamiq. His wife Na'ila bint al-Furafisa was in the room and was wounded trying to shield him. Wellhausen notes that her severed fingers were later shown in Damascus as proof of the crime.
One point needs flagging rather than smoothing over, because it is a serious accusation about the son of the first caliph.
Some reports have Muhammad ibn Abi Bakr taking part in the killing. Others, including one that al-Tabari carries from al-Hasan al-Basri, have him grabbing Uthman's beard, being told "you are holding me in a way your father never would have," and then leaving the room without striking him.
The sources conflict. This article is not going to assert the worse version of a man's conduct when the tradition itself cannot agree on it.
The Warning
There is a report in Sahih al-Bukhari that reads very differently once you know how this ended.
Abu Musa al-Ash'ari (RA) was guarding the gate of a garden in Madinah while the Prophet (SAW) sat inside. Three men came, one after another, asking to come in.
For the first, Abu Bakr, the Prophet said to let him in and give him good news of Paradise. For the second, Umar, he said the same.
Then the third came, and the wording changed.
Hadith“Admit him, and give him the glad tidings of entering Paradise, with a calamity that will befall him.”
It was Uthman. He praised Allah and said: "Allah is the One whose help is sought."
What Changed Between Umar and Uthman
Twelve years separate the two murders, and something important changes in between.
Umar was killed by a foreign slave with a personal grievance. That is terrible, but it is easy to understand. It was a crime.
Uthman was killed by Muslims. They prayed, they had fought in the conquests, they believed they were fixing an injustice, they acted as a group, and afterwards they went home.
And here is the fact that really ends this period, more than the murder itself. Nobody was punished for it.
Ali became caliph in a Madinah where the killers were still there, still armed, and now part of the group that had put him in power.
He argued that he could not execute anyone without a proper legal process, and that no such process was available to him. There was no single identifiable killer, and the men involved were protected by their tribes.
Was that principle or weakness? Muslims have argued about it ever since.
The political result, though, is not arguable. If a caliph can be killed and nothing happens afterwards, then killing a caliph has become a working political option.
The Quran had already said how heavy that is.
Quran“But whoever kills a believer intentionally — his recompense is Hell, wherein he will abide eternally, and Allah has become angry with him and has cursed him and has prepared for him a great punishment.”
Ali, 656 to 661: An Impossible Position
Ali ibn Abi Talib is one of the most remarkable people in Islamic history. He was raised in the Prophet's own household, was among the first to accept Islam as a child, married the Prophet's daughter, and was known for both bravery and deep learning.
He inherited a situation with no good options in it.
He needed to punish Uthman's killers to look legitimate, and he could not, because they were inside his own support base.
He needed control of Madinah, but real power had already shifted to the garrison cities.
He needed the provinces to accept him, and the most powerful governor in the empire refused. That was Mu'awiya ibn Abi Sufyan, a relative of Uthman, who controlled Syria and its army. He would not pledge loyalty until the killers were handed over.
What follows happens almost automatically.
The Battle of the Camel, 656. Talhah and al-Zubayr (RA), two of the six men from Umar's committee, took Basra along with the Prophet's wife A'ishah (RA), demanding action against the killers. Ali defeated them, and both Talhah and al-Zubayr died. Muslims had now fought a full battle against Muslims, with companions of the Prophet leading both sides.
Siffin, 657. Ali against Mu'awiya, on the Euphrates, for months. It settled nothing, and it ended with both sides agreeing to hand the dispute to arbitration.
That agreement is what got Ali killed.
The Men Who Walked Out
Several thousand men in Ali's own army refused the arbitration on principle.
Their argument was religious, and it was short. Judgement belongs to Allah alone. La hukma illa lillah. You do not hand the truth of a matter to a committee of men.
They broke away and camped at Harura, which is why they are sometimes called the Haruriyya. History knows them as the Kharijites.
Their position hardened quickly, and it had no brakes on it. A Muslim who commits a major sin is no longer a Muslim. Ali accepted arbitration, so Ali was no longer a Muslim. Neither was Mu'awiya. Neither was anyone who disagreed with them. And killing a non-Muslim who is in rebellion is lawful.
They started killing people, including civilians. Ali marched against them at Nahrawan in 658 and crushed them in battle. That did not get rid of them. It gave them martyrs.
Sahih Muslim records what Ali said to his own army before that battle. He quoted the Prophet (SAW) directly.
Hadith“There will arise from my nation a people who recite the Quran — your recitation compared to theirs will seem like nothing, and your prayer compared to their prayer like nothing, and your fasting compared to their fasting like nothing. They recite the Quran thinking it is in their favour, when it is against them. Their prayer does not pass beyond their collarbones. They will pass out of Islam as an arrow passes clean through its prey.”
The same warning appears in Sahih al-Bukhari, narrated by Abu Sa'id al-Khudri (RA).
Hadith“There will appear among you a people whose prayer will make you think little of your own, and whose fasting will make you think little of your own — but they will recite the Quran and it will not go beyond their throats.”
Notice what this is describing. It is not talking about people who are lazy about their religion. It is talking about people whose worship looks more impressive than yours, and who are badly wrong anyway.
So how hard someone worships does not by itself prove they are right. That is an uncomfortable lesson, and it is meant to be.
In the same narration in Muslim, Ali tells his men something that turned out to be exactly right. You are about to march off against Mu'awiya and the people of Syria, he says, and leave these people behind you among your children and your property.
He was right about where the real danger was. He just did not know it would reach him personally.
661
According to the accounts, the plan was made by Kharijites who had survived Nahrawan. They would kill Ali, Mu'awiya and Amr ibn al-As, and end the conflict by removing everyone leading it. Poisoned blades, on the same night, in three cities.
Only one of the three attacks worked.
On 19 Ramadan 40 AH, in late January 661, Abd al-Rahman ibn Muljam struck Ali in the mosque of Kufa during the morning prayer. Ali died two days later, on 21 Ramadan.
He was around fifty-eight, and he had been caliph for four and a half years. He spent almost all of that time fighting other Muslims, and he was killed by a man who had once fought in his own army at Siffin.
His son Hasan (RA) had Ibn Muljam executed.
That is where the Rashidun period ends. Mu'awiya took power, the capital moved permanently to Damascus, and the caliphate became hereditary in practice. That is a long argument of its own, and a different article.
So Why Three and Not Four?
Here is the whole thing in one place.
Abu Bakr survived because his rule was too short and too poor to kill him over. Two years, no imperial income, no garrison cities, no payment register, no provinces with grievances. And the one thing that later went wrong every single time, the succession, he handled himself, in advance, in writing.
The other three ruled a state that had outgrown its own government. By 644 the caliph in Madinah was responsible for millions of people spread over thousands of miles, using systems designed for one city. Every important institution was less than ten years old and had been invented in an emergency.
There was no legal way to raise a complaint. This is the most important sentence in the article. Say you were an Arab soldier in Kufa in 655 and you thought your governor was corrupt and the caliph was taking your province's money. There was no court to go to, no assembly to petition, no election to wait for, and no lawful way to remove anyone. The only option was to travel to Madinah in a large armed group. That is not a moral failure by those men. It is a gap in the design of the state.
And there was no rule for who rules next. Four caliphs, four different methods, none of them repeated. When the succession is undefined, killing the man in office is not only a crime. It is also a move in the game.
Each killing made the next one easier to imagine. Umar was killed by an outsider. Uthman was killed by Muslims, and nobody was punished. Ali was killed by Muslims who had built a religious argument that made it a duty. That is an escalation, and each step was made possible by the one before it.
Three Deaths, Three Different Causes
One thing worth correcting. Saying "three of the four were murdered" can make these sound like the same event happening three times. They were not.
Umar was killed over a personal grievance. A man could not get a tax decision changed and took a knife to dawn prayer. There was no faction behind him, no religious argument, no movement. The state's failure here was narrow. It had no way to hear a complaint from someone with no status.
Uthman was killed by a political revolt. It was organised and collective, involving several provinces at once, over money, appointments and authority. The people involved did not see themselves as murderers. They thought they were correcting a government that could not be corrected any other way. The state's failure here was total. No oversight, no way to remove a ruler, no forum for any of it.
Ali was killed by a religious sect. They had built a doctrine in which killing him was an obligation. This one is different in kind, because no administrative reform would have stopped it. Once a group decides other Muslims have left Islam, the argument is not about government any more.
Three different causes, one shared condition. A young state with no institutions to absorb any of it.
What Muslims Actually Do With This
A beginner deserves an honest answer here, not just reassurance.
The honest answer starts like this. Yes, this really happened, and no, it does not get explained away.
Muslims regard these four as the best generation of Muslims. They also know that generation fought a civil war and that two of its caliphs were killed by Muslims. Both things are held together, and the tradition has been thinking about how for fourteen hundred years.
The Quran expected it. It does not describe a community that never breaks apart. It gives instructions for one that does.
Quran“And if two factions among the believers should fight, then make settlement between the two. But if one of them oppresses the other, then fight against the one that oppresses until it returns to the ordinance of Allah. And if it returns, then make settlement between them in justice and act justly. Indeed, Allah loves those who act justly.”
Notice that both sides are still called believers. The verse does not throw anyone out of the faith. It tells the rest of the community what to do.
The mainstream Sunni position is deliberate restraint. The creed of Imam al-Tahawi, who died in 933, is one of the most widely taught Sunni statements of belief, and it deals with exactly this. On the companions of the Prophet it says: love them without going overboard about any one of them, disown none of them, and speak of them only well.
That is not asking you to pretend nothing happened. It is a rule about how you carry yourself towards men who cannot answer back, whose motives you cannot see inside, and whose arguments you were not there for. Study the history. Do not appoint yourself judge of their hearts.
The killers were not the companions. This gets muddled a lot. Uthman was not killed by the senior Muslims of Madinah. He was killed by provincial soldiers, while the leading companions were either trying to protect him or arrived too late. Ali was killed by a sect that had already declared most Muslims to be outside Islam.
And there is a real lesson in it. The Kharijites are the earliest clear example of something that keeps coming back. Intense religious practice combined with total certainty that everyone else has left the faith.
The Prophet (SAW) described those people before they existed, and he described them by their worship. The impressive prayer, the impressive fasting, and the Quran that never gets past their throats.
That warning was not just about the past. It is still useful now.
What to Take Away
Three of the first four caliphs were assassinated, and the reason is not a mystery and not a scandal.
A community that had governed one city was handed an empire in twenty years. It built what it needed for war very well and very fast: armies, garrisons, a payroll.
It never built what it needed for peace. A way to complain. A way to judge. A way to remove a ruler. And above all, a way to decide who rules next.
Abu Bakr ruled before any of that mattered, and he settled the one thing that did.
The other three ruled after it started to matter, and all three were killed in the gap.
Almost everything that happens in Islamic political history for the next hundred years grows out of this. The Umayyads, the split that became Sunni and Shia Islam, the sects, the revolts. All of it is the community working through problems left unsolved between 632 and 661.
And it is worth ending on what the Quran keeps saying while all of this is happening. Consult each other. Judge fairly. Make peace between the two sides. Do not take a believing life.
The instructions were never the part that was missing.
Quran References
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