But before Ali arrived in Iraq...

But before Ali arrived in Iraq, the “triumvirate” of Ayesha, Talha and Zubayr had already captured Basra. Uthman ibn Hunaif barely managed to escape from Basra with his life. Now the “choice” of Ali was narrowed down to one city – Kufa. Ali sent Imam Hasan and Ammar ibn Yasir to Kufa to bring reinforcements for him. Kufa sent 12,000 warriors to Basra, and it were these warriors who fought in the battle of the Camel, and defeated the “triumvirate” of Ayesha, Talha and Zubayr.

Makkah, Medina and Basra had left Ali in no illusions about what they would do in an emergency. But the citizens of Kufa had sent reinforcements to him at a most critical moment in his career. He could clearly see that if there was war with Muawiya, he had only the army of Kufa to depend upon. It was, therefore, the logic of events that influenced Ali's decision to make Kufa the capital of the empire.

The people of Medina, it appears, had only a tepid interest in the events taking place around them. When Ali declared that he would transfer the governmental headquarters to Kufa, no one among them protested against this decision. They did not react to such a momentous change as if they couldn't care less if their city was or was not the capital of Islam! (2). Medina was the cradle of Islamic culture and civilization. The truly Islamic mode of life could be seen at its best only in Medina.

The foreign wars and conquests had brought people of many different cultures in the dominion of Islam. If Medina were also to remain the political and administrative capital of the empire, as it was the spiritual capital, then the alien people, with their alien cultures and un-Islamic background, would have come to live in it. They would have brought their own mores, customs, manners, traditions and religious practices with them.

By doing so, they would have either dominated the pure Islamic culture or they would have diluted it. At any rate, pristine Islam would have been exposed at all times to alien influences. Joel Carmichael Islam collided with the immense intellectual entity of Christianity, heavy with the thought of Greece and Rome. Christian thinking included not merely the whole of Hellenistic thought, but also the ideas current in Persia and elsewhere throughout the ancient East.

Thus an immense variety of traditions and ideas, a central complex of ideas and institutions, all more or less predigested by Christianity, was transplanted en masse to the new universe of Islam.