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Why Were 3 of the First 4 Caliphs Assassinated?
Three of the four Rightly Guided Caliphs were murdered, and only one died in his bed. That is not a coincidence and it is not a scandal — it is what happens when a town-sized government inherits an empire in twenty years, with no rule for who rules next. Here is the full history, and the honest analysis.
The Sentence Nobody Says Out Loud
The first four leaders of the Muslim community after the Prophet Muhammad (SAW) are remembered as the finest generation of Muslims who ever lived.
Three of them were murdered.
Not in battle. Not by a foreign army. Two of them were killed by Muslims, in a mosque or in a house, in the middle of prayer or in the middle of reading the Quran.
Only the first one, Abu Bakr (RA), died in his bed.
That is a strange fact to sit with, and most people never get told it plainly. It usually arrives in pieces — a mention of Umar being stabbed, a vague reference to "the troubles," a line about Ali and the Kharijites — and never as one connected question.
The question is worth asking directly. Why did this keep happening? And why did it stop happening to the first one?
The answer is not that the early Muslims were bad people. It is not that Islam is violent. It is something much more ordinary and much more interesting: a government the size of a small town suddenly found itself running one of the largest empires on earth, and it had no rulebook for the one thing that mattered most.
Let's do the whole story.
Two Words You Will See a Lot
Before anything else, two small things, because they are not decoration.
(SAW) appears 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" — and it means "may Allah's peace and blessings be upon him."
Muslims do not just write it. They say it, out loud or under their breath, every single time they hear his name. It is a small act of love, repeated thousands of times over a lifetime. If you are reading this and you are not Muslim, you are warmly invited to read it aloud too. There is no obligation either way, but please do not treat it as something to skim past — it is the opposite of filler.
(RA) appears after the names of the Prophet's companions. It stands for radiyallahu anhu — "ra-di-yal-LAA-hu AN-hu" — meaning "may Allah be pleased with him." Muslims say this one too, for the same reason.
You will see (RA) a lot in this article, including after the names of men who ended up on opposite sides of a war from each other. That is deliberate, and by the end it will make sense.
How This Article Handles the Hard Parts
Three ground rules, so you know what you are reading.
Where the sources disagree, this article says so rather than picking the tidiest version. Early Islamic history is unusually well documented for the seventh century, but "well documented" means many accounts, and some of them conflict. Pretending otherwise would be dishonest.
Where a claim could not be verified, it was cut rather than softened. Several famous, moving details about these events turn out to rest on very late or very thin sources. They are not in here.
Grievances are reported, not endorsed. A large part of this story is what people said was wrong with a particular caliph. Recording an accusation is not the same as agreeing with it, and the ones recorded here are the ones that classical Muslim sources record themselves.
Caliph is going to come up constantly, so: it means the leader of the whole Muslim community. Not a prophet, not a religious authority who can invent new rules — an administrator and a commander who is supposed to apply what already exists.
Who the Four Were
Sunni Muslims call these four the Rashidun, "the Rightly Guided." Their combined rule runs from 632 to 661 CE — twenty-nine years.
Abu Bakr (RA), 632–634. The Prophet's closest friend, the first adult man outside the family to accept Islam, and the one who was with him in the cave during the migration to Madinah. Ruled about two years and three months. Died of illness.
Umar ibn al-Khattab (RA), 634–644. Ten years. Under him the Muslim state went from a regional power to an empire. Stabbed at dawn prayer in 644.
Uthman ibn Affan (RA), 644–656. Twelve years, longer than anyone. He is the reason there is one standard text of the Quran. Killed in his own house in 656.
Ali ibn Abi Talib (RA), 656–661. The Prophet's cousin, raised in his household, married to his daughter Fatimah (RA). Ruled just under five years, almost all of it at war with other Muslims. Struck down in the mosque of Kufa in 661.
If you have read our history of Shia Islam, you have met some of these events from a different angle — that piece follows the succession dispute and where it led. This one is about governance: why the state kept killing its own leaders. Same events, entirely different lens. You do not need to have read it.
Start With the One Who Died in Bed
The most useful person in this story is Abu Bakr, because he is the control group.
He took power in a genuinely dangerous moment. The Prophet (SAW) died in 632 and large parts of Arabia immediately stopped paying zakat or broke away entirely. Abu Bakr fought those wars — the Ridda wars — and won them. Nobody could accuse him of an easy term.
He also had opponents. His selection at Saqifah, on the day the Prophet died, was contested at the time and has been argued about ever since. Some of the Prophet's family did not pledge allegiance immediately.
And nobody tried to kill him.
Three things separate him from the three who followed, and each one will come back.
He ruled for two years. Not enough time for a grievance to mature into a movement.
There was almost no money yet. The great conquests had barely started. There was no treasury worth fighting over, no stipend list to feel cheated by, no provincial revenue anyone could accuse him of stealing.
And he handled the succession himself, in advance. As he was dying, he consulted senior companions, then dictated a written appointment of Umar as his successor. The classical accounts record that not everyone liked it — some thought Umar too harsh — but it was decided, in writing, by the sitting caliph, before he died.
That is the only time in the whole Rashidun period that a transfer of power was planned in advance and went off without a crisis.
Hold onto that. It is going to matter enormously.
Then Twenty Years Happened
Now the part that changes everything.
Between roughly 634 and 651, the Muslim state stopped being an Arabian polity and became an empire. Not gradually. Not over a century. In under twenty years.
In 636 the Byzantine field army was broken at Yarmuk, and in the same year the Sasanian Persian army was broken at al-Qadisiyyah. Jerusalem surrendered in 638. Alexandria fell in 642. The Persian empire's last stand at Nahavand came the same year, and by 651 the Sasanian dynasty — one of the two superpowers of late antiquity, over four hundred years old — no longer existed.
By the time Uthman was killed in 656, the government in Madinah was responsible for territory running from Libya to eastern Iran.
Now picture the government doing the responsible-for-all-that part. It is a handful of men in a desert town in western Arabia. There is no bureaucracy, because there has never needed to be one. There is no professional civil service, no standing court system in the provinces, no established way to file a complaint against a governor.
The historian Hugh Kennedy's work on the early Islamic state — particularly The Armies of the Caliphs (Routledge, 2001), which reconstructs how these armies were actually recruited and paid — makes the scale of the improvisation clear. Almost every institution of the caliphate was invented on the move, under pressure, by people who had never run anything larger than a city.
Two of those improvisations are the direct cause of most of what follows.
Improvisation One: Who Gets the Money
The conquests produced an amount of wealth that had no precedent in Arabian life. Land, tribute, treasure, revenue from settled agricultural provinces that had been taxed efficiently for centuries.
Somebody had to decide who got it.
Umar's answer was a register — the diwan — set up around 641. Every Muslim entitled to a share was written down, and the size of your annual stipend depended on your precedence: how early you had accepted Islam, how close you were to the Prophet (SAW), whether you had fought at Badr.
Read that again and notice what it does.
It is a completely defensible principle. The people who accepted Islam when it was dangerous and unpopular had sacrificed more. Rewarding that is not corrupt.
But it also freezes the social order permanently, in writing, on the basis of things that happened before some of the recipients were born. A man who converts in 645 and fights in Iran can never rise on that list, no matter what he does. And crucially, the people at the top of the list were largely in Madinah, while the people doing the fighting were increasingly not.
The Quran has a line that hovers over all of this. Speaking about wealth that comes to the community without a battle, it says it is distributed the way it is —
Quran“…so that it will not be a perpetual distribution among the rich from among you.”
Whether the diwan honoured that principle or quietly undermined it was, within a decade, a live political argument with armed men on both sides of it.
Improvisation Two: Where the Army Lives
The second decision was about geography, and it may have been even more consequential.
Rather than let Arab soldiers scatter into the conquered cities and blend into the local population, the conquest armies were settled in purpose-built garrison towns — the amsar. Kufa and Basra in Iraq. Fustat in Egypt, on the site that would later become Cairo.
The military logic is obvious. You keep your army concentrated, disciplined, deployable, and not assimilating into the population it just conquered.
The political consequence took about fifteen years to arrive, and it was this: you have now created several cities, hundreds of miles from the capital, populated almost entirely by armed men who are paid by the state, organised by tribe, no longer fighting anyone, and increasingly convinced that the wealth of the province they conquered belongs to them rather than to a town in Arabia.
Kufa in particular becomes the pressure point of the entire century. It is where the delegations come from, where the sects form, where Ali eventually moves his capital, and where he is killed.
Umar himself seems to have understood the danger. In the very last speech of his life — we will come to how we know this — his advice to his successor about the garrison towns was that "nothing be taken from them except from their surplus, with their consent."
That is a man who knows exactly which way the pressure runs.
Improvisation Three: Nobody Knows Who Rules Next
Here is the one that actually kills people.
Islam does not arrive with a constitutional mechanism for choosing a head of state. The Quran commends shura — consultation — as a quality of the 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.”
And the Prophet (SAW) himself was told:
Quran“…and consult them in the matter. And when you have decided, then rely upon Allah.”
That is a principle. It is not a procedure. It does not say who is consulted, what counts as a decision, or what happens when people disagree.
So look at how the first four actually took power:
Abu Bakr — acclaimed at a hastily convened meeting at Saqifah on the day the Prophet died, by a group that did not include everyone who mattered.
Umar — appointed in writing by the previous caliph.
Uthman — chosen by a six-man committee that Umar invented on his deathbed while bleeding to death.
Ali — acclaimed in Madinah in the days after Uthman's murder, in a city still full of the men who had just committed it.
Four caliphs. Four completely different methods. Not one of them was the method used the time before.
When there is no agreed rule for who rules, every succession is a fresh argument. And when a succession is an argument, the fastest way to open the argument is to kill the man currently holding the office.
That is the structural claim of this article, and everything that follows is the evidence for it.
Umar, 644: The Assassination We Can Almost Watch
Something unusual happened with Umar's murder. An eyewitness who was standing in the prayer rows, close enough to see it, narrated the entire day — and that narration is 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 from it directly.
Four Days Earlier
The report does not begin with the murder. It begins with Umar interrogating two of his tax officials about Iraq.
He asks Hudhayfah ibn al-Yaman and Uthman ibn Hunayf whether they have overloaded the farmland of Iraq with tax. They say no, the land can bear it. He presses them again. 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.
Sit with the placement of that. The single most detailed account of the death of the second caliph opens with him worrying about whether the provinces are being taxed too hard. That is not a coincidence of narration. That is the shape of the problem announcing itself.
Dawn
He was leading Fajr, the dawn prayer. The narrator was standing near the front, with only Ibn Abbas (RA) between him and the caliph.
Umar used to walk the rows saying "straighten your lines," and only start once he saw no gap. He would recite a long chapter in the first unit so latecomers could catch up.
He said the opening takbir. And immediately the man beside the narrator heard him say:
"The dog has killed me — or eaten me."
The attacker had a double-bladed knife. He went through the congregation striking left and right, stabbing thirteen men. Seven of them died. When one of the worshippers threw a cloak over him and he realised he was caught, he killed himself.
Umar, already fatally wounded, reached out, took the hand of Abd al-Rahman ibn Awf, and pushed him forward to finish the prayer.
Then this detail, which tells you how large that mosque was: the people at the edges had no idea what had happened. They could not see. All they knew was that Umar's voice had stopped, and they were saying "Subhan Allah, Subhan Allah" — glory be to Allah — into the confusion.
"Find Out Who Attacked Me"
Carried out of the mosque, Umar's first question was who did it.
Ibn Abbas went, came back, and said: the slave of al-Mughira.
Umar said: "The craftsman?"
Yes.
"May Allah curse him. I did not treat him unjustly."
That sentence is doing something specific, and to see it you need the other half of the story, which is not in Bukhari.
The Other Half
The assassin was a Persian, generally called Abu Lu'lu'a, whose given name was probably Firuz. The standard scholarly reconstructions — Ch. Pellat's entry in the Encyclopaedia Iranica, and Levi Della Vida and Bonner's article on Umar in the Encyclopaedia of Islam — have him captured in the Persian wars and held as a slave by al-Mughira ibn Shu'ba, the governor of Kufa.
Al-Mughira levied two dirhams a day on his earnings as a skilled craftsman. He petitioned the caliph personally to have it reduced.
Umar declined.
That is what "I did not treat him unjustly" is answering. A dying man's last argument is with a tax ruling he made, and he is insisting he got it right.
Wilferd Madelung, in The Succession to Muhammad (Cambridge University Press, 1997), argues the tax was only the trigger, and that the broader climate — how non-Arabs were treated in the new order — is the fuller explanation. Both readings point the same way. This was not a religious assassination. It was a man who could not get the state to hear him.
Bukhari has him killing himself when cornered. Some historical reports instead have him captured and executed. The sources genuinely split here, 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 deserves to be read by everyone who thinks they know what the seventh century was like.
Umar, dying, says a bitter thing to Ibn Abbas — that Ibn Abbas and his father had always wanted more non-Arabs in Madinah.
Ibn Abbas answers: "If you wish, we will do it." The narration explains what he means. If you wish, we will kill them.
An offer of collective reprisal against a whole community, made to the head of state, by his own cousin, about the men who share the ethnicity of his assassin.
Umar's reply:
"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 shuts it down on the spot. They pray where you pray. They are not collectively guilty.
There is also a line just before it that people 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."
Which is a strange thing to be grateful for — until you notice that his two successors did not get that mercy.
The Committee He Invented While Dying
Then the practical problem. Who rules next?
The people around him say: appoint someone.
And Umar does something unprecedented. He names six men — Ali, Uthman, al-Zubayr, Talhah, Sa'd, and Abd al-Rahman ibn Awf — and tells them to choose from among themselves. His own son is added as a witness, with the explicit condition that he has no share in the rule at all.
He then delivers a policy testament: 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" — take nothing from them but their surplus and only with their consent, look after the bedouin, and honour the covenant with the non-Muslim subjects, "and do not burden them beyond their capacity."
Read as a governance document, that is remarkably clear-eyed. He knows exactly which groups can destabilise the state.
After the burial the six met. Al-Zubayr withdrew in favour of Ali. Talhah withdrew in favour of Uthman. Sa'd withdrew in favour of Abd al-Rahman. Abd al-Rahman then took a binding undertaking from both remaining candidates — that whichever of them was passed over would obey the other — and said:
"Raise your hand, Uthman."
Ali gave him the pledge. Everyone else followed.
Now hold two facts side by side. That process was careful, consultative, and universally accepted at the time. And it had never been used before, was never used again, and existed only because a dying man improvised 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, 644–656: Twelve Years and a Revolution
Uthman's caliphate is the hinge of this entire story, and it is also the part most often flattened into a sentence.
The first half of it was, by most measures, a success. The conquests continued. A navy was built. And in the single decision with the longest life of anything in this article, he had the text of the Quran standardised into one authoritative codex and copies sent to the provinces — the reason there is one Quran text today rather than regional variants.
He was also, personally, one of the most generous men of his generation. That is not a pious flourish; it comes up again in a moment as courtroom evidence.
The second half went wrong, and it went wrong for reasons that are directly downstream of everything in the improvisation sections above.
What People Actually Accused Him Of
These are the recorded grievances. They are in Muslim sources, and they are what the historians work from.
Appointments. He placed relatives from his clan, the Umayyads, in provincial governorships. Julius Wellhausen's The Arab Kingdom and Its Fall (1927) states it bluntly; Fred Donner's Muhammad and the Believers (Harvard University Press, 2010) adds the specific charge that some appointees were seen as too young for the posts they held.
The money and the land. This is the real one. Kennedy's The Prophet and the Age of the Caliphates describes Uthman treating former crown land in the conquered provinces as state property and requiring provincial surplus revenue to be forwarded to Madinah — with opposition strongest in Iraq and Egypt.
Look at what that means on the ground. The men in Kufa and Fustat believe the wealth of the land they conquered is theirs. The caliph in Madinah believes it belongs to the Muslim community as a whole, and that he administers it. Both positions are arguable. Neither side has any legal forum in which to argue it.
Treatment of senior companions. Madelung records that his handling of several of the earliest Muslims — Abu Dharr al-Ghifari, Abdullah ibn Mas'ud, and Ammar ibn Yasir (RA) — caused real outrage. These were not marginal figures. When men like that are seen to be pushed aside, it validates every other complaint.
Whether each accusation was fair is a question Muslims have argued about for fourteen centuries and this article is not going to settle it. What matters structurally is that there were now tens of thousands of armed men with grievances and no procedure. No court that could summon a governor. No assembly that could pass a budget. No mechanism for removing a caliph, because nobody had ever needed one.
If the only available instrument is a mob, then eventually the instrument gets used.
The Delegations
By 655–656 provincial delegations were travelling to Madinah to confront the caliph directly. Kennedy notes the Egyptian opposition coalescing around Muhammad ibn Abi Hudhayfah and Muhammad ibn Abi Bakr — the son of the first caliph — who refused even to pray behind the governor.
A negotiated settlement was reached with the Egyptian delegation. They started home.
The Letter
On the road, the Egyptians intercepted a messenger carrying a letter to their governor. The letter instructed him to execute the delegation on arrival.
They turned around.
Madelung's assessment, which is the mainstream scholarly position, is that the letter was not issued by Uthman but by his secretary and kinsman Marwan ibn al-Hakam.
This is the point where the whole thing becomes unrecoverable, and it is worth being precise about why. It is not that the caliph betrayed them. It is that the caliph could not prove he had not. He could not produce the person responsible, could not demonstrate control of his own household, and could not offer any process that would establish the truth — because no such process existed.
The absence of a mechanism kills him. Not the letter.
The Siege
The rebels surrounded his house. The siege ran roughly forty days.
We have eyewitness testimony from inside, and it is graded authentic. Two men who were with him — Abu Umamah ibn Sahl and Abdullah ibn Amir ibn Rabi'ah — narrated this, 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, besieged in his own home, reasoning through Islamic law out loud, trying to work out on what legal basis anyone could possibly do this to him.
The rebels cut off his water. Madelung records that this was what finally moved Ali to intervene on his behalf.
And that detail produces the single most devastating scene in the whole account.
The Well
This is Jami' at-Tirmidhi 3703, narrated by Thumamah ibn Hazn al-Qushayri, who was there. Al-Tirmidhi graded it hasan — 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.
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." Three times.
The man who bought the town its drinking water is standing in front of a crowd that is denying 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 assault came on 18 Dhul-Hijjah 35 AH — 17 June 656 CE. He was around eighty years old.
Madelung reconstructs the trigger: a man named Niyar ibn Iyad al-Aslami called on Uthman to abdicate, and one of Marwan's servants threw a stone from the house and killed him. That ended any remaining restraint.
Among the men named in the reports as striking him are 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 her severed fingers were later displayed in Damascus as evidence of the crime.
One point must be flagged rather than smoothed 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 itself. Others — including a report al-Tabari carries from al-Hasan al-Basri — have him seizing Uthman's beard, being told "you are holding me in a way your father never would have," and 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 detail 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 enter. For the first — Abu Bakr — the Prophet said to admit him and give him glad tidings of Paradise. For the second — Umar — 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."
The Thing That Broke
Between Umar's death and Uthman's, twelve years pass and something changes so completely that the rest of Islamic history runs through it.
Umar was killed by a foreign slave with a personal grievance. Terrible, but legible. A crime.
Uthman was killed by Muslims. Muslims who prayed, who had fought in the conquests, who believed they were correcting an injustice, who were acting collectively, and who went home afterwards.
And here is the fact that ends the Rashidun period, more than the murder itself: nobody was punished.
Ali became caliph in a Madinah where the killers were still present, still armed, and now part of the coalition that had raised him. He argued that he could not execute anyone without a proper legal process, and that no such process was available to him — the crime had no single identifiable perpetrator, and the men involved had the protection of their tribes.
Whether that was principle or weakness, Muslims have argued ever since.
But the political consequence was immediate and unarguable. If a caliph can be killed and nothing happens, then the killing of a caliph is now a functioning political option.
The Quran had already named the weight of it:
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, 656–661: Inheriting an Unsolvable Position
Ali ibn Abi Talib is, by any measure, one of the most extraordinary people in Islamic history. He was raised in the Prophet's own household, was among the very first to accept Islam as a child, married his daughter, and was famous for both courage and learning.
He inherited a situation with no good moves in it.
He needed to punish Uthman's killers to establish legitimacy, and he could not, because they were inside his own base. He needed to consolidate Madinah, and the real power had already moved to the garrison cities. He needed the provinces to submit, and the most powerful governor in the empire — Mu'awiya ibn Abi Sufyan, Uthman's kinsman, in control of Syria and its army — refused to give allegiance until the killers were handed over.
Everything after that follows almost mechanically.
The Battle of the Camel, 656. Talhah and al-Zubayr (RA), two of the six from Umar's committee, together with the Prophet's wife A'ishah (RA), took Basra demanding action against the killers. Ali defeated them. Talhah and al-Zubayr both died. Muslims had now fought a pitched battle against Muslims, on both sides led by companions of the Prophet.
Siffin, 657. Ali against Mu'awiya, on the Euphrates, for months. Inconclusive, and it ended with an agreement to submit the dispute to arbitration.
And that agreement is what killed him.
The Men Who Walked Out
A large body of Ali's own army — several thousand — refused the arbitration on principle. Their argument was theological, and it was short: judgement belongs to Allah alone. La hukma illa lillah. You do not submit the truth of a matter to a committee of men.
They seceded and camped at Harura, which is why they are sometimes called the Haruriyya. History knows them as the Kharijites.
Their position hardened fast into something with no brakes. A Muslim who commits a major sin is no longer a Muslim. Ali had accepted arbitration, so Ali was no longer a Muslim. Neither was Mu'awiya. Neither was anyone who disagreed. And the blood of a non-Muslim in rebellion is lawful.
They began killing people, including civilians. Ali marched on them at Nahrawan in 658 and crushed them militarily. It did not remove them; it gave them martyrs.
Sahih Muslim preserves what Ali said to his own army before that battle. He quotes 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 is in Sahih al-Bukhari, from 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.”
Note carefully what this is and is not saying. It is not describing people who are lax. It is describing people whose worship is more impressive than yours — and who are nonetheless catastrophically wrong. Intensity of practice is not, by itself, evidence of being right. That is an uncomfortable lesson and it is meant to be.
In the same narration in Muslim, Ali also tells his men something that turns out to be grimly exact. 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 the direction of the threat. He just did not know it would reach him personally.
661
The plan, according to the accounts, was formed by Kharijites who had survived Nahrawan: kill Ali, kill Mu'awiya, kill Amr ibn al-As, and end the whole conflict by removing everyone leading it. Poisoned blades, coordinated, in three cities.
Only one of the three succeeded.
On 19 Ramadan 40 AH — 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 fifty-eight or so, and he had been caliph for four and a half years. He had spent essentially all of it 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.
And with that the Rashidun period ends. Mu'awiya took power, the capital moved permanently to Damascus, and the caliphate became — in practice — hereditary. Which is its own long argument, and a different article.
So: Why Three and Not Four?
Now put the whole thing together.
Abu Bakr survived because his caliphate was too short and too poor to kill him over. Two years, no imperial revenue, no garrison cities, no stipend register, no provinces with grievances. And the one thing that later went wrong every time — the succession — he settled personally, 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 across thousands of miles, using institutions designed for a city. Every institution that mattered was less than a decade old and had been invented under emergency conditions.
There was no legal channel for a grievance. This is the single most important sentence in this article. If you were an Arab soldier in Kufa in 655 and you believed your governor was corrupt and the caliph was diverting your province's revenue, there was no court you could go to, no assembly you could petition, no election you could wait for, and no lawful procedure to remove anyone. There was only travelling to Madinah in a large armed group. That is not a moral failure of those men. It is a design gap in the state.
And there was no rule for who rules. Four caliphs, four different methods, none repeated. When the succession is undefined, killing the incumbent is not just a crime — it is a move in the game.
Each killing made the next one easier to imagine. Umar's death was an outrage from outside. Uthman's was done by Muslims, and went unpunished. Ali's was done by Muslims who had constructed a theology that made it a religious duty. That is an escalation, and each step was permitted by the one before.
Three Deaths, Three Different Causes
One correction worth making, because the "three of four were murdered" framing can flatten these into a single phenomenon. They are not the same event three times.
Umar was killed by a private grievance. A man could not get a tax decision overturned and took a knife to dawn prayer. There was no faction behind him, no theology, no movement. The state's failure here was narrow: it had no way to hear a complaint from a person with no standing.
Uthman was killed by a political revolt. Organised, collective, from multiple provinces at once, over money, appointments and authority. Its participants did not think of themselves as murderers; they thought they were correcting a government that had no other way of being corrected. The state's failure here was total: no oversight, no removal mechanism, no forum.
Ali was killed by a religious sect. A group that had built a doctrine in which killing him was obligatory. This one is different in kind, because no administrative reform would have prevented it. Once a group concludes that other Muslims have left Islam, the argument is no longer about governance at all.
Different causes, one common condition: a young state with no institutions to absorb any of it.
What Muslims Actually Do With This
This is the part that a beginner deserves an honest answer to, and it deserves more than reassurance.
The honest answer starts with: yes, this really happened, and no, it is not explained away.
Muslims regard these four as the best generation. They also know that generation fought a civil war and that two of its caliphs were killed by Muslims. Both things are held at once, and the tradition has thought about how for fourteen hundred years.
The Quran anticipated it. It does not describe a community that never fractures. It legislates 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 excommunicate anyone. It gives instructions.
The mainstream Sunni position is deliberate restraint. The creed of Imam al-Tahawi (d. 933), one of the most widely transmitted Sunni statements of belief, addresses exactly this. On the companions of the Prophet: love them without excess toward any individual, disown none of them, and speak of them only well.
That is not a request to pretend nothing happened. It is a rule about the posture you take toward men who cannot defend themselves, whose motives you cannot inspect, and whose disputes you were not present for. Study the history. Do not appoint yourself judge of their hearts.
The killers were not the companions. This matters and it is regularly muddled. Uthman was not killed by the senior Muslims of Madinah. He was killed by provincial soldiers, and the leading companions were either trying to protect him or arriving too late. Ali was killed by a sect that had already declared most Muslims to be outside Islam.
And there is a genuine lesson in it, not just a wound. The Kharijites are the clearest early example of something that recurs constantly: intense religiosity attached to a 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, the Quran that does not pass their throats.
That warning was not archaeological. It was practical, and it still is.
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 the institutions it needed for war — armies, garrisons, a payroll — brilliantly and fast. It never built the institutions 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 settled the one thing that did.
The others ruled after it started to matter, and every one of them was killed in the gap.
Almost everything that happened in Islamic political history for the next century — the Umayyads, the split that produced Sunni and Shia Islam, the sects, the revolts — is the tradition working through problems that were left unsolved between 632 and 661.
And it is worth ending on the thing the Quran keeps saying while all of this is going on. Consult. Judge justly. Reconcile the two sides. Do not take a believing life.
The instructions were never the missing part.
Quran References
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