ʿAlĪ Ibn AbĪ ṬĀLib
ʿALĪ IBN ABĪ ṬĀLIB (c. 599–661 CE) was the cousin and son-in-law of the prophet Muḥammad through his marriage to Fāṭimah. As father of the prophet's two grandsons, al-Ḥasan and al-Ḥusayn, he was forefather of the descendants of the Prophet (known as the shurafāʾ, sing. sharīf; or sādāt, sing. sayyid); fourth of the four "rightly guided" caliphs; and first of the imāms for Shīʿī Muslims—the very term Shīʿa being originally shīʿat ʿAlī, the "partisans of ʿAlī."
ʿAlī is seen within the Islamic tradition as both a heroic warrior and an eloquent saint. Accorded deep veneration by Muslims generally, ʿAlī has also elicited sharply contrasting passions: on the one hand, cursed by official decree in Umayyad mosques for decades after his death; on the other hand, divinized by his extremist followers—the ghulāt—to the present day. The life of this seminal figure of nascent Islam was controversial, and his influence has been, and remains, pervasive.
Life
ʿAlī's life can be viewed in terms of three distinct phases: the first, from his birth (c. 599) to the death of the Prophet (632); the second, from the death of the Prophet to ʿAlī's assumption of the caliphate (656); the third consists of his own brief caliphate (656–661), a period characterized by the first civil wars of Islam.
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