The Child in the House
ʿAlī was the son of Abū Ṭālib, the Prophet's ﷺ uncle and protector. In a year of drought the Prophet ﷺ took the boy into his own household to ease his uncle's burden — a repayment of the shelter Abū Ṭālib had given him as an orphan — so that ʿAlī grew up in his house from early childhood.1
He was about ten when the revelation began, and he is generally counted the first child to accept Islam, as Khadījah was the first woman and Abū Bakr the first man. The sīrah records him finding the Prophet ﷺ and Khadījah praying, asking what they were doing, being told, and asking for a night to consider it before he came back and believed.1
When the Prophet ﷺ emigrated, it was ʿAlī he left behind: to sleep in his bed while the assassins watched the house, and to return the deposits the Makkans had entrusted to al-Amīn — a detail the sīrah pauses over, since the men whose valuables he was returning were the same men trying to kill their owner.2
Khaybar and Tabūk
He married Fāṭimah, the Prophet's ﷺ youngest daughter, in the second year after the Hijrah; their sons al-Ḥasan and al-Ḥusayn were the Prophet's ﷺ grandsons and, in a much-quoted ḥadīth, “the two masters of the youth of the people of Paradise.”3
At Khaybar, with the fortress holding out, the Prophet ﷺ said he would give the banner “tomorrow to a man who loves God and His Messenger, and whom God and His Messenger love.” The army spent the night wondering. In the morning he asked for ʿAlī, who was suffering from an eye complaint; he applied his saliva to his eyes, and ʿAlī took the banner.4
Left in charge of Madīnah when the army marched to Tabūk, ʿAlī was stung by talk that he had been left with the women and children. He followed and said so. The Prophet ﷺ answered with the comparison that has been discussed ever since: “Are you not content that you should be to me as Hārūn was to Mūsā, except that there is no prophet after me?”5
The name he liked best was one the Prophet ﷺ gave him after finding him asleep in the mosque with dust on his side: Abū Turāb, father of dust.6
The Caliphate
He became caliph in 656 after the killing of ʿUthmān, and inherited the crisis that had killed his predecessor. His five years were consumed by civil war: against the party of ʿĀʾishah, Ṭalḥah, and al-Zubayr at the Battle of the Camel, and then against Muʿāwiyah at Ṣiffīn, ending in an arbitration that split off the Khārijites, who turned on him for accepting it.7
He moved the capital to Kūfah and is remembered for a judicial and rhetorical legacy the later tradition prized highly; his sermons and letters were gathered in the fourth century of Islam as Nahj al-Balāghah, a collection whose attribution scholars have debated but whose influence on Arabic prose is undisputed.8
He was struck with a poisoned sword while going to the dawn prayer in Kūfah in 661, by a Khārijite avenging the arbitration, and died two days later. He was about sixty. The classical scholars record his instruction concerning his killer: that he be given food and drink, and that if he died of the wound the man should be executed for it and not mutilated — “for I heard the Messenger of God ﷺ forbid mutilation, even of a rabid dog.”9