8 Almoravid Empire Because of his familial relationship with Muhammad, many of Ali’s supporters thought he should be Muhammad’s successor Although the Prophet had not named a successor, some of Ali’s allies claimed that Muhammad had secretly chosen Ali to rule the Islamic community after his death However, after some debate the Muslim majority chose Abu Bakr to be the new leader, or caliph Many members of the powerful Umayyad clan opposed Ali, and he had also feuded with A’isha, the Prophet’s favorite wife Thus when the next two caliphs were chosen, Ali was again passed over as leader of the Islamic community In 656 mutinous soldiers loyal to Ali assassinated the third caliph, Uthman, a member of the Umayyad family, and declared Ali the fourth caliph But Muaw’iya, the powerful Umayyad governor of Syria, publicly criticized Ali for not pursuing Uthman’s assassins A’isha sided with the Umayyads and raised forces against Ali But she was defeated at the Battle of the Camel and forced to return home Feeling endangered in Mecca— an Umayyad stronghold—Ali and his allies moved to Kufa, in present day Iraq Ali’s followers were known as Shi’i, or the party of Ali This split was to become a major and lasting rift within the Muslim community Unlike the schism between Catholics and Protestants in Christianity, the division among Muslims was not over matters of theology but over who should rule the community The majority, orthodox Sunnis, believed that any devout and righteous Muslim could rule The Shi’i argued that the line of leadership should follow through Fatima and Ali and their progeny as the Prophet’s closest blood relatives The Syrians never accepted Ali’s leadership and the two sides clashed at the protracted Battle of Siffin, near the Euphrates River in 657 When neither side conclusively won, the famed Muslim military commander Amr ibn al-‘As negotiated a compromise that left Mu’awiya and Ali as rival claimants to the caliphate The Kharijites (a small group of radicals who rejected city life and who believed that God should select the most devout Muslim to be leader) were outraged at Amr’s diplomacy, Mu’awiya’s elitism and wealth, and Ali’s indecisiveness According to tradition, they devised a plot to kill all three during Friday prayers The attacks on Amr and Mu’awiya failed, but a Kharijite succeeded in stabbing Ali to death in the mosque at Kufa in 661 Ali’s tomb in Najaf, south of present-day Baghdad, remains a major site of Shi’i pilgrimage to the present day After Ali’s death, his eldest son, Hasan, agreed to forego his claim to the caliphate and retired peacefully to Medina, leaving Mu’awiya the acknowledged caliph Ali’s descendants as well as Muhammad’s other descendants are known as sayyids, lords, or sherifs, nobles, titles of respect used by both Sunni and Shi’i Muslims Within the various Shi’i sects Ali is venerated as the first imam and the first righteously guided caliph See also Muhammad, the prophet; A’isha; Shi’ism; Caliphs, first four; Umayyad dynasty Further reading: Kennedy, Hugh The Prophet and the Age of the Caliphates: The Islamic Near East From the Sixth to the Eleventh Century London: Longman, 1986; Madelung, Wilferd The Succession to Muhammad: A Study of the Early Caliphate New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997; Tabataba’i, ‘Allamah Sayyid Muhammad Husayn Shi’ite Islam Translated by Sayyid Hossein Nasr Albany: State University of New York Press, 1975; Vecchia, Vaglieri, L “Ali ibn Abi Talib,” Encyclopaedia of Islam New ed., Vol I, Leiden: Brill, 1960 Janice J Terry Almoravid Empire North Africa’s Berber tribes began converting to Islam with the commencement of the Arab conquests during the second half of the seventh century under the alRashidun and Umayyad Caliphates Although Berber Muslims were active participants in the expansion of the Islamic state north from Morocco into Iberia, they remained subservient to Arab commanders appointed by the reigning caliph in the Middle East Around 1050 from the Sahara in Mauritania, the first major political-military movement dominated by Berbers, the Almoravids, began to emerge This revolutionary movement was founded and led by Abdullah ibn Yasin al-Gazuli, a fundamentalist Sunni preacher of the Maliki legal school who had been trained at Dar al-Murabitun, a desert religious school in the Sahara Abdullah had begun his career as a preacher by teaching the Berber Lamatunah tribes in the Sahara, who had converted to Islam but remained ignorant of its intricacies, orthodox Sunni Islam The origins of the Almoravid movement lay in the foundation by Abdullah of a small, militant sect that abided by a strict interpretation of Maliki Islamic law To join Abdullah’s movement, new members were flogged for past sins, and infractions of Islamic law were severely punished The community was guided by the religious legal opinions of Abdullah and later by the legal rulings of Maliki jurists, who were paid for their services In 1056