‘Alī bn Abī Tālib

There are men whose lives are measured by the battles they fought, and there are men whose lives are measured by the quiet decisions they made when no one was watching. ʿAlī ibn Abī Ṭālib belongs to both categories, yet the subtler measure is the one most often overlooked.

He once said, as preserved in the transmissions of the early scholars:
«قِيمَةُ كُلِّ امْرِئٍ مَا يُحْسِنُهُ»
“The worth of every man is what he does well.”

The statement is brief, yet it contains an entire path of tarbiyah. He did not say “what he claims” or “what he inherits” or “what the people think of him.” He tied a man’s value to the excellence he actually produces—whether in knowledge, in courage, in judgement, or in the hidden worship that no eye sees. This was not the speech of a man who lived by slogans. It was the speech of one who had tested himself in the cave of the Messenger’s household, on the battlefield, in the court of justice, and in the loneliness of the night prayer.

ʿAlī ibn Abī Ṭālib
Abū al-Ḥasan ʿAlī ibn Abī Ṭālib ibn ʿAbd al-Muṭṭalib ibn Hāshim al-Qurashī al-Hāshimī. His mother was Fāṭimah bint Asad. He was born in Makkah twenty-three years before the Hijrah and was martyred in Kūfah on the seventeenth of Ramaḍān in the year 40 AH.

Most people know the public virtues: that he was among the first to accept Islām while still a youth, that he slept in the bed of the Messenger of Allāh ﷺ on the night of the Hijrah, that he married Fāṭimah, that he killed ʿAmr ibn ʿAbd Wudd at the Trench, that he carried the banner at Khaybar. These are true and firmly established in the books of Maghāzī and the Ṣaḥīḥayn. Yet the subtler qualities are what the Salaf lingered over.

Ibn Saʿd and adh-Dhahabī note his extreme caution when blood was involved. He would delay judgement rather than risk an error that could not be repaired. When a case was brought to him, he would ask, probe, and sometimes send the disputants away to reconcile before he would issue a ruling. His judicial decisions were marked by a precision that the later fuqahāʾ studied carefully. One of the well-known reports—transmitted with varying degrees of strength—is his judgement concerning a woman who gave birth after six months; he refused to apply the ḥadd of zinā, recognising the possibility of a shortened gestation, and the Qurʾān’s mention of the period of pregnancy and weaning supported his caution. Another is his careful distribution of inheritance when the shares seemed to conflict, preferring the method that preserved equity without violating the explicit texts.

His zuhd was not theatrical. During the years of his Khilāfah he continued to wear coarse garments and eat coarse food. When the public treasury was full he still patched his own clothes. The historians record that he would walk in the markets of Kūfah checking on the weak, and that he once saw a Christian woman begging and ordered that her needs be met from the bayt al-māl, saying that justice is not only for the Muslims. These are the details that do not fill the pages of popular storytelling, yet they reveal a heart that remained soft while the sword remained sharp.

His words of wisdom were many. He said:
«لَا تَكُنْ عَبْدَ غَيْرِكَ وَقَدْ جَعَلَكَ اللَّهُ حُرًّا»
“Do not be the slave of anyone else when Allāh has made you free.”

The commentary of the early scholars on this statement is that true freedom is freedom from the created, so that the heart is attached only to the Creator. He lived it: he refused to purchase loyalty with wealth or position, and he preferred reconciliation even when victory was within reach—most clearly at Ṣiffīn, where he accepted arbitration in the hope of preserving Muslim blood, knowing the cost to his own political standing.

When the people pressed the bayʿah upon him after the martyrdom of ʿUthmān, he accepted the Khilāfah with visible reluctance. The years that followed were years of fitnah. At the Camel and at Ṣiffīn and against the Khawārij at Nahrawān he fought only after every avenue of peace had been exhausted. He never cursed the Companions who opposed him; he prayed that Allāh would judge between them with justice. This restraint is one of the subtleties most often missed by those who read only the surface of the battles.

Imām ash-Shawkānī, in the course of his writings on the virtues of the Companions and in his transmission of the authentic reports, affirmed the high rank of ʿAlī among the greatest of the Ṣaḥābah. He transmitted the prophetic statements concerning him with acceptance of their established chains, and he upheld that loving ʿAlī is part of the Sunnah while excess concerning him is a path of misguidance. In Darr as-Saḥābah and related works he gathered the reports that the Messenger of Allāh ﷺ said of him, “Only a believer loves him and only a hypocrite hates him,” and that he was the gate of the city of knowledge—statements ash-Shawkānī treated as among the firmly established virtues that no fair-minded student of the Sunnah can deny.

Adh-Dhahabī closes his long entry by saying that ʿAlī was the fourth of the Rightly-Guided Khulafāʾ, the lion of Allāh, the one whose knowledge and courage and zuhd were joined in a single life. Ibn Kathīr and Ibn Ḥajar affirm the same consensus of Ahl as-Sunnah.

He was struck while entering the mosque for Fajr. He lingered long enough to give final instructions concerning the rights of the people and the treatment of his killer, then returned to Allāh.

This is the fourth mirror.
Look into it until you learn that true strength is joined to restraint, that knowledge is joined to caution in judgement, and that the highest rank is the one that remains humble when the world is placed in its hands.

May Allāh make their emulation easy for me and you, āmīn

Bārakallāhu Fīkum