The men who killed the third caliph, the leader of all Muslims, were soldiers from Egypt who believed he had governed the empire for his family’s benefit. Uthman ibn Affan had been caliph for twelve years, and the charge against him was concrete: the governorships of Kufa, Basra, Syria and Egypt had gone to members of his Umayyad clan. Egypt’s governor was his foster brother. Syria’s was Muawiya ibn Abi Sufyan, his cousin. Kufa’s governor was al-Walid ibn Uqba, his half-brother, until al-Walid was caught leading dawn prayer while drunk and had to be replaced - with another relative. The pattern was visible, and the soldiers who marched from Egypt to Medina in the summer of 656 knew exactly what they were objecting to.
Uthman was somewhere around 80 years old when they broke into his house and stabbed him while he was reading the Quran. His blood fell on the pages of the scripture. His supporters preserved that copy as a relic - a political object before the body was cold. The problem of who had done it, and who had or had not done enough to prevent it, would consume the next five years of Islamic history.
Within days of the murder, the community in Medina elected Ali ibn Abi Talib as the fourth caliph. The timing was the worst possible. The man was the best possible.
Ali’s claim to lead the Muslim community was less a political argument than a biographical fact. He was the Prophet’s cousin, his son-in-law, the husband of Fatima and father of Hasan and Husayn. He had converted to Islam as a child - the first male to do so, by most accounts - and had fought at Badr, Uhud, Khaybar, and every major early engagement. If there was a person whose personal connection to Muhammad surpassed everyone else’s, it was Ali.
The community chose Abu Bakr anyway. Abu Bakr was the Prophet’s father-in-law, elderly, trusted, and practically suited to the immediate crisis of holding the community together after the Prophet’s death. When Abu Bakr died two years later, he designated Umar ibn al-Khattab as his successor - the decisive administrator who oversaw the conquests of Persia, Egypt, and Syria. When Umar was stabbed in 644 by a Persian slave, a council of six senior companions deliberated over who came next. The council chair, Abd al-Rahman ibn Awf, reportedly asked both Ali and Uthman whether they would govern by the Quran, the Prophet’s practice, and the precedents of the first two caliphs. Ali said he would govern by his own judgement. Uthman accepted the full conditions. Uthman became caliph. Ali accepted it.
That pattern - Ali present, clearly qualified, passed over, accepting - repeated across twenty-four years. Whatever he felt about it, he did not translate the frustration into open opposition. He fought in the campaigns, gave religious and legal guidance, and waited. When the situation in Medina finally turned to him in June 656, he was in his mid-fifties and had spent most of his adult life being the obvious choice for something that went to someone else.
The election itself was irregular in ways his enemies would immediately exploit. No formal consultative council - shura - was convened. The soldiers who had just murdered Uthman were still in Medina, and their presence was not incidental to the proceedings. Some of them actively demanded Ali be declared caliph; the citizens of Medina followed. Ali was elected, essentially, in the political atmosphere created by a murder he had not committed and which he now had no viable path to prosecute. The killers were among his own forces. To try them was to destroy his army; to leave them unpunished was to validate every accusation of complicity his opponents would level against him for the rest of his life.
Muawiya ibn Abi Sufyan, Uthman’s cousin and governor of Syria for two decades, refused to swear allegiance until the killers were brought to justice. He displayed Uthman’s blood-stained Quran in the mosque in Damascus. The gesture was deliberate: the shirt and the book became permanent political instruments, a perpetual demand that Ali could not satisfy without dismantling his own coalition.
What followed across the next four years was the First Fitna - the first great civil war in the Islamic community. I covered what the conflict produced, and what Ali’s assassination in January 661 actually meant for the religion, in the piece about his death. The short version: he won the Battle of the Camel in November 656 against a coalition led by Aisha, the Prophet’s widow, and permanently damaged his standing by being the caliph who had shed Muslim blood in an open field battle. He fought Muawiya to an inconclusive standstill at Siffin in 657, agreed to arbitration under pressure from his own troops, and watched a faction of those troops - the Kharijites - walk off the battlefield because they judged human arbitration of God’s law to be apostasy itself. He spent his remaining years fighting enemies on multiple fronts simultaneously, all of them created by the circumstances under which he had taken power.
The question Ali’s caliphate posed to the Islamic community was not simply who should govern, but what governing authority meant in the first place. Was the caliph a community representative, chosen by consensus, removable by those who had chosen him? Was he the divinely guided heir of the Prophet, whose right came from God rather than from any council? Ali’s supporters and opponents answered differently in 656, and the answers have not converged in the fourteen centuries since. The Sunni tradition honours him as the fourth of the rightly guided caliphs, a man of exceptional piety who governed in impossible circumstances. The Shia tradition regards him as the first imam, the rightful leader from the very beginning - meaning the preceding three caliphs were usurpers, however pious, and the community had been going wrong for twenty-four years before it finally got it right.
He waited twenty-four years for the position. He held it for four years and eight months. The argument about whether he should have had it all along has been going for thirteen hundred and seventy.