Kufa

Kufa was laid out in 638 as a camp for the armies moving into Iraq and Iran, and within twenty years it was a capital. Ali ibn Abi Talib moved his government there during the first civil war, because the settlers of Kufa supported him against the Syrian army of Muawiya, and the city became the base of the party that would in time be called the Shia.

It also produced the first split within that party. When Ali agreed to arbitration after the battle of Siffin, a body of his own troops rejected the decision on the ground that judgement belongs to God alone, withdrew, and became the Kharijites. Ali defeated them at Nahrawan, and it was a man from that movement who struck him with a poisoned sword during the dawn prayer in the mosque of Kufa in the month of Ramadan in 661. He died of the wound days later and was buried secretly a short distance away, at the place that became Najaf.

The Great Mosque of Kufa is therefore one of the most heavily freighted buildings in Shia devotion. It holds the spot associated with the wounding, the shrines of Muslim ibn Aqil and Hani ibn Urwa who were killed in the city before Karbala, and stations linked in tradition to earlier prophets. Twelver practice assigns particular merit to prayer performed there. The nearby mosque of Sahla is associated with expectation of the hidden imam and draws worshippers who keep vigil in it.

When Muawiya died in 680, letters went from Kufa to Husayn in Mecca urging him to come and lead them. He sent his cousin Muslim ibn Aqil ahead to test the ground; the governor arrived, the promised support melted away, and Muslim was executed. Husayn set out anyway and was intercepted at Karbala, where he and his companions were killed. The failure of the Kufans to rise runs through Shia devotional literature as a standing reproach and a warning about the distance between what people say and what they do.

Four years later a movement calling itself the Penitents marched out of Kufa to die in battle in expiation for having failed him, and the revolt of al-Mukhtar in the city shortly afterwards made the avenging of Husayn its programme. Both belong to the origins of Shia political feeling.

Kufa's other legacy is legal and textual. Its scholars were known for reasoning from principle where no explicit text applied, in contrast to the Medinan preference for inherited practice, and out of that milieu came Abu Hanifa, whose students founded the school of law that bears his name and that is now followed by more Muslims than any other. Kufa also gave the Quran one of its canonical readings: the transmission of Asim through his student Hafs is the recitation printed in most editions worldwide, so an eighth century teaching circle in this city governs how the text is read aloud today.