The Rise and Decline of the Muslim Civilization 19
In spite of these statesmanlike foundations laid for the Empire by
' Umar, it was not destined to enjoy a long period of peaceful con-
solidation. After the murder of 'Umar by a discontented slave
after a reign often years, the caliphate passed by election among
the Muslims to the elderly and ineffectual 'Uthman, a member of
the aristocratic House of Umayya, a section of the Quraish tribe of
Mecca which had been one of the last to accept conversion to
Islam. Under 'Uthman his Umayyad kinsmen acquired most of
the leading positions in the Empire, and aroused the active jealousy
of the earlier converts, the Muhajirun and the Ansar. 'Uthman was
murdered in 655, and the caliphate passed by election to Ali, who
as cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet was his male next-of-kin,
but had been passed over in the previous three elections. Nor did
he now show that the doubts of the Muslims concerning his fitness
to govern had been misplaced. £ Ali had almost every virtue except
those of the ruler: energy, decision, and foresight. He was a gallant
warrior, a wise counsellor, a true friend, and a generous foe .. „ but
he had no talent for the stern realities of statecraft, and was out-
matched by unscrupulous rivals who knew that "war is a game of,
deceit" '.1 When his attempt to remove the Umayyad governors
appointed by 'Uthman was resisted by a show of force by Mu'-
awiya, the able Umayyad governor of Syria, Ali weakly agreed to
submit the matter to arbitration. This brought upon him in Iraq, a
strategic centre of the Empire to which he had removed his seat of
government from too-remote Madina, the revolt of a group of
Arab conservatives, who insisted that he had no right to submit the
caliphate to arbitration, as it had been conferred upon him by the
God-guided judgement of the whole body of the Faithful. One of
this group, the Khawarij or Seceders,2 murdered Ali in 661, after
the arbitrators had awarded the caliphate to Mu'awiya, no doubt
on the grounds of his greater fitness to govern.
Mu'awiya ruled for some twenty years, and for seventy years
more the caliphate remained hereditary in the House of Umayya,
thus bringing to an end the original elective caliphate and replacing
it by a hereditary monarchy of the traditional oriental kind. Syria,
Ptolemies the Greek civil law applied only to the Greek community and to
Hellenized Egyptians; the large Jewish community and the non-Hellenized
Egyptians remained subject to their traditional civil law administered by their
own priesthoods.
1 Nicholson, op, cit.,-191.
2 In the singular, Kharij. The movement survives to this day as the Ibadi
sect of Oman and Zanzibar, and some scattered communities in North Africa.