Page:William Muir, Thomas Hunter Weir - The Caliphate; Its Rise, Decline, and Fall (1915).djvu/271

242 return then to your homes!" It is not improbable that with both of these, and their followers also, ambition was mistaken for desire of just revenge. In the whirl of passion, party-cry too often takes the place of reason; and we need not doubt that both leaders and followers had wrought themselves into the belief that punishment of the high treason enacted at Medīna was their real object.

Notwithstanding all this parade of justice, the conscience of ʿĀisha was ill at ease. As they journeyed through the desert, her camel-driver beguiled the tedium of the night by calling out the names of the hills and valleys through which they passed. Approaching a Bedawi settlement, the dogs began to howl;—The Valley of Al-Ḥauʾab! cried the guide, noting their progress. ʿĀisha started and screamed. Something dreadful which Moḥammad had spoken about the barking of the dogs of Al-Ḥauʾab, flashed across her memory. "Carry me back," she cried; and, making her camel kneel, she hastily alighted from her litter. "Alas and alas!" she continued, "for I heard the Prophet say, reproaching us, as he sat surrounded by his wives one day: O that I knew which amongst you it is at whom the dogs of Al-Ḥauʾab will bark! It is me! it is me! the wretched woman of Al-Ḥauʾab. I will not take another step on this ill-omened expedition." They sought to persuade her that the guide had mistaken the name; but she refused to stir, and the army halted for a whole day. In despair, they bethought them of a stratagem. The following night, they raised the cry that ʿAlī was upon them. The greater terror prevailing, ʿĀisha hastened to her camel and resumed the march.

The alarm, feigned for the purpose, was not altogether groundless, When rumours of the defection first reached Medīna, ʿAlī refused to move against the malcontents so long as no overt act of rebellion threatened the unity of Islm. But shortly after, news arrived of the design on Al-Baṣra. At the first, ʿAlī was disposed to congratulate himself that the conspirators had not made Al-Kūfa, with its greater Bedawi population, their object. Ibn al-ʿAbbās, however, pointed out that Al-Baṣra was really the more dangerous, because fewer of the leading chiefs were there, able to curb the people and repress rebellion, ʿAlī