fitnah, in Islamic usage, a heretical uprising—especially the first major internal struggle within the Muslim community, which resulted in both civil war (656–661 ce) and religious schism between the Sunnis and the Shiʿah.
The third caliph, ʿUthmān (reigned 644–656), a member of the Umayyad family of Mecca, incurred the opposition of Muhammad’s closest followers, the Muslims of Medina, by favouring his own Meccan family in his official appointments. ʿUthmān’s murder by Egyptian soldiers (June 17, 656) elicited Meccan demands for revenge, and, when Muhammad’s son-in-law, ʿAlī, whom the Medinese had proclaimed fourth caliph, failed to comply, opposition was directed against him. The Battle of the Camel (December 656), pitting the forces of ʿAlī against those of ʿĀʾishah, one of Muhammad’s widows, and Ṭalḥah and Zubayr, prominent Companions of the Prophet, temporarily secured ʿAlī’s position but inaugurated civil war. Muʿāwiyah, another Umayyad from Mecca and governor of Syria, took up the demands for vengeance on ʿUthmān’s death and questioned the validity of ʿAlī’s caliphate. Their confrontation in the Battle of Ṣiffīn (657), which the arbitration at Adhruḥ (659) attempted to resolve, was disastrous: it split ʿAlī’s forces, some of his followers (Khawārij) refusing to acknowledge the validity of human arbitration in a case which they felt could be rightly decided only by God. ʿAlī’s position was also undermined when the arbitrators would not declare him the rightful caliph; the result was an irrevocable split in Islam by the formation of the shīʿat ʿAlī (“party of ʿAlī”), political allies of ʿAlī who eventually translated their political demands into a religious conviction that ʿAlī and all his descendants were divinely appointed to succeed Muhammad as caliphs. Strengthened by this outcome, Muʿāwiyah seized Egypt and began raiding ʿAlī’s stronghold, Iraq. The open warfare finally ended in 661 when ʿAlī was assassinated and Muʿāwiyah began his reign as the first Umayyad caliph, but the religious split endured between the Sunnis and the Shiʿah.