The Murder of the Caliph 'Uthmân

Abstract

The murder of ‘U th mân was an important turning-point in Islamic history, and the story of how opposition in the provinces, particularly Egypt, combined with opposition at Medina itself and brought about the Caliph's death has been repeated many times. Accounts in sources such as al-Tabarî's History and al-Balâ dh urîs Ansâb al-a sh râf bring together much transmitted detail concerning this dénouement . Caetani's monumental Annali dell'Islam serves as an extensive compilation of such detail, and Wellhausen, Levi Delia Vida, Gibb, Veccia Vaglieri and Petersen are only some of the other modern scholars who have commented on the event. Perhaps Professor Gibb best expresses the current view of the background to it in his thought-provoking article entitled ‘An interpretation of Islamic history’, where he sees in the caliphate of 'U th mân a conflict between two main parties, the Meccans and the ‘tribesmen’. He points out that the Meccan merchants had been swift to seize the opportunities of wealth which arose in the immediate post-conquest phase, and goes on to say that in the course of 'U th man's caliphate there arose at Medina ‘growing resentment at the rapid affirmation of Meccan political control… and the economic exploitation of the empire. Open discontent was first expressed by several religious personalities, whose conscience was shocked by the worldliness and grasping materialism displayed in the name of Islam. But these only provided a rallying-cry and a cloak for the material grievances of the tribesmen and Medinians, who swung into line behind them.’ Gibb therefore sees a total of four alignments, of which the Meccans and the tribesmen were the main parties, while the Medinans and the so-called religious party were secondary in importance.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 64 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.