Page:William Muir, Thomas Hunter Weir - The Caliphate; Its Rise, Decline, and Fall (1915).djvu/307

 278 They refused, but, masking their hostile designs, watched the issue of the struggle at Ṣiffīn. When on its conclusion Muʿāwiya was still left master of Syria, they gained heart and began to assume the offensive. Though repeatedly defeated, the slumbering elements of revolt were everywhere aroused, and Muʿāwiya, seeing his opportunity, commissioned ʿAmr to regain the province of which he had been first conqueror.

ʿAlī saw, now all too late, the mistake which he had made. He would have reappointed Ḳeis; but Ḳeis declined again to take the post. The only other fitted for the emergency was Al-Ashtar, the regicide, who was sent off in haste to Egypt. But on the way he met with an untimely death, having being poisoned (at the instigation, it is said, of Muʿāwiya) by a chief on the Egyptian border with whom he rested. There was joy at the death of the arch-regicide throughout Syria, where he was greatly feared. ʿAlī was equally cast down by the untoward event. His only resource was now to bid Moḥammad hold on and do what he could to retrieve his position. But the faction which favoured Muʿāwiya gained ground daily; and when ʿAmr, taking advantage of the defection of ʿAlī's troops, at the head of a few thousand men crossed the border, he was joined by an overwhelming body of insurgents. Moḥammad, after a vain attempt to fight, was slain, and his body ignominiously burned in an ass’s skin. Thus Egypt was lost to ʿAlī; and ʿAmr, as lieutenant of the rival Caliph, again became its governor.

The loss of Egypt was the harder for ʿAlī to bear, as immediately due to his own mistake in removing Ḳeis; and even now it might have been retrieved if the men of Al-Kūfa had not been heartless in his cause. Over and again he implored them to hasten to the defence of Moḥammad,