Avering the Shahadah: a Kaliphate AAR

As a child, Nadjaf is said to have acted as a mediator in a dispute between two sons who both claimed waqf over a small library. After attending the meeting, he took to both of their houses, deep in the old city, and told each in turn that they were the rightful awqaf of the building, but that neither of them must disclose their privileged status by decree of God. The waqf he was receiving monthly after the death of his father -- none of which he spent personally in the first place -- was redirected towards one of the sons.

Ayda ibn Ahmad al-Nadjaf (عائدة اين احمد النجف) was born in Mecca, although he spent only a few years in the city before his father, Ahmad, moved across the Levant and settled in Najaf, a town situated on the Euphrates in Iraq. Ahmad was a doctor who studied in Baghdad prior to a brief famine which placed his wife, 'A'isha, into a coma, and paralyzed his livelihood. As his melancholy became unbearable, he carried his sleeping wife to Mecca, in a bout of piety and desperateness he was previously alien to. His fortunes were mixed; servicing ill pilgrims, who were particularly wealthy, kept his pregnant wife and himself afloat, but as his attentions were directed towards praying for penance from God, he did not recognize how he was neglecting his life.

Having spent his tears completely at the holiest of holies, 'A'isha awoke only to give birth to a boy, Ayda, before dying of miscarriage. Ahmad carried the child, as he did his wife, back to Iraq, settling in Najaf, a town rich from Shi'a patrons.

His father placed Ayda into a strict Hanbali school at the age of three. Ayda's imam observed as the boy displayed an incredible intelligence; even more harrowing, however, was his sense of poetry and beauty. Ayda was humble and often occupied himself with flowering in the madrasah's garden when he wasn't studying or called upon for some purpose. By seven, he had memorized the Qur'an; by eleven, he had become the favored apprentice of the imam and to whom the latter only refrained from showering praise upon due to the discretion of Islamic nature. The Turkoman shaykh who ruled the city was aroused by a letter delivered from the imam concerning the boy's genius. Ahmad was called into the offices of the government and was advised to transfer Ayda into a medical school; Ahmad, mute and pious, refused.

At the age of fourteen, Ayda's father passed away of a cerebral hemorrhage and Ayda was taken by his imam to Baghdad, where he was placed under the tutelage of the most revered mullah east of the Sinai and west of Iran. Under the mullah, rumors of Ayda's unhindered genius spread through the city, and by seventeen, much of the inner city and friends scattered outside the government walls had gathered under the "banner" of Ayda, who they claimed to be the true caliph and the divine successor to Muhammad.

Ayda was modest and romantic; the most observant Muslim yet incapable of moralizing. Many of his motivations for arising to a growing leadership are assumed to have been derived from a human longing; his fateful return to Mecca was driven by an overwhelming need to pay respect to his deceased mother.

The time was precarious and destined to receive change as the wind receives and moves leaves. The Mamluks of Egypt ruled an empire stretching from Tunisia to north of Lebanon and they housed a decadent and unobserved "Abbasid caliphate" which served as more of a eunuch to the court than as any political authority. Arabia had fractured into merchant states and Iraq was ruled by a Turkoman force from the north, facing the looming power of Persians to the east.

As discontent and momentum grew exponentially under Ayda, he found himself in command of a country pleading to be restored to its former glory as the seat of the true caliphate. Ayda threw himself onto the wings of fate, kept aloft unknowingly by his own holy character. The local army and police force in Baghdad defected from the government and proclaimed Ayda, now known as Nadjaf, the caliph and the heir to Muhammad.


Nadjaf's forces gathered to the west of Iraq, trailed by militia and dislocated Arab officials and intellectuals who, in overthrowing foreign rule, had only the protection of Nadjaf to rely upon.


Nadjaf received a letter from his imam in his hometown, from which came his namesake, signaling the arrival of tens of thousands of troops, led by a cousin of the imam, al-Rashid, and his sons, Jem and Fayoum. Sure as the moon, in two weeks they had arrived, creating a throbbing center of gravity in the deserts of Iraq.

Nadjaf's forces split in two, Nadjaf leading a contingent with al-Rashid to the city of Amman while Jem and Fayoum lead another south to Tabuk.


As Jem and Fayoum, laying siege to Tabuk, slaughtered a surprised battalion arriving from Medina, al-Rashid reported the surrender of Amman's city governor to Nadjaf, who took south to join his companion's sons.


After Medina's perfunctory governmental apparatus was disposed of, Nadjaf appointed individuals from his enormous retinue to remain and rule over the city, carrying himself south still to his birthplace, Mecca.


After heavy siege and fighting lasting over a year, Mecca relented. While the troops and the vestigial company from Iraq poured into the Haram, Nadjaf left alone, speeding towards the well of Zamzam, to the west of which was buried his mother. In tears, Nadjaf issued a city-wide command of peace which was, almost without exception, held to the letter by "loyalist" forces and men under the guidance of the caliph.

As word of the arisen and holy caliph slipped across tongues from Mecca to Kirkuk, an Islamic consciousness of unity began to take form, differing in structure from the largely nomad Arab cohesion which succeeded the early years of Muhammad's rule. When the news reached local rulers in the west of Iran, pressure was incited on the largely Shi'a community of southern Iraq to revolt. The caliph rode back to Najaf, accompanied by only a small mounted guard. As he entered his hometown, the people stood agape at the child who had left them only years earlier; he was now an ascetic who could speak the most beautiful articulation of Islamic life heard since the golden days of Baghdad.


By 1431 A.D., the caliphate governed a nascent and energetic empire which joined the twin cities of Mecca and Medina to the Persian Gulf.