[572] Aly had formerly taken the same route, via Medâin, when advancing upon Syria. Muâvia was no doubt marching now from Ricca or Tadmor, across the plain of Upper Mesopotamia, and the natural way of meeting him would, consequently, be up the Tigris from Medâin, and then striking off to the west.
[573] The received date of Hasan’s resignation, as in the text, would make his reign last five and a half months. Others place it in Rabî II., and some even in Jumâd I., which would make the reign one or two months longer.
His offer to resign on specified terms was crossed by a messenger from Muâvia, with a blank sheet signed by Muâvia, who thus declared his readiness to concede any terms to Hasan if he abdicated. Thereupon Hasan doubled his claim; but Muâvia refused, saying that he had already specified his terms, and that they had been accepted. Darâbgird was the district of which Hasan was to receive the revenues; but the people of Bussorah claimed it as their own conquest, and would not give it up.
There is an Abbasside tradition, that one abused Hasan as he left Kûfa, saying that he had ‘blackened the faces of the Moslems;’ to which Hasan replied by quoting a dream in which Mahomet saw the descendants of Omeyya one after another ascending the steps of his pulpit; whereupon the Prophet was comforted by the revelation of Suras 97 and 108, regarding the Fountain of Al Cawthar and the Night of Power, which he is told are ‘better than a thousand months,’ that is, than the thousand months during which the Beni Omeyya would rule!
According to another tradition, Amru persuaded Muâvia to allow Hasan, after his own inaugural speech, to address the people. Hasan then began to speak of the wheel of fortune, and of the necessity of stopping the effusion of blood, and was going on to quote Sura xxi. v. 111, about the world being a trial, and the Lord helping the Prophet against his adversaries, when Muâvia made him sit down. He also told Amru he had made a mistake in proposing that Hasan should be allowed to speak.
[574] Amru, they say, wished Muâvia to fight Cays, but he answered that it would be only useless bloodshed, and so sent to Cays a clean sheet signed at foot, as he had done to Hasan, agreeing to any terms he might propose. Cays, upon receiving this, bade his soldiers choose whether they ‘preferred to obey an illegitimate prince, or to go on fighting without any prince at all.’ They preferred to give in, and so retired from the field.
We hear little more of Cays, who died before Muâvia. His sympathies had been all on the side of Aly; and if the correspondence that passed between Muâvia and him, when in Egypt, be genuine, he had little reason to trust Muâvia.
[575] We are even told that the promise given by Muâvia to Hasan, namely that the sound of the curse should not fall upon his ears, was not kept.
It is said that Omar II. (A.H. 100) dropped the imprecation; but he was a poor pietist, whose religious scruples led him to make many weak concessions, and even to recognise the claims of the house of Aly. He is of course popular with the Abbassides, who magnify him as a saint of blessed memory, and have invented many wonderful stories to his credit. Weil thinks that this may be one of them; and, at any rate, if suspended during his reign, the curse was resumed immediately on his decease.
[576] The culprit was a noble Arab lady, the daughter of Asháth, Chief of the Beni Kinda. The tradition, that she was bribed by Muâvia, is altogether unlikely, and is no doubt a fiction of the prevailing character. Hasan was, politically, a harmless creature; and Muâvia had no motive whatever, after his abdication and retirement into private life (so far as our materials go), for the crime. The jealousies of Hasan’s ever-changing harem afford a far likelier reason.