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Explaining Imagination
Explaining Imagination

P E T E R LA N G LA N D - H ASSA N
 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the
University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing
worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in
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© Peter Langland-Hassan 2020
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
First Edition published in 2020
Impression: 1
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referenced in this work.
To Antoinette
 Contents

Acknowledgments
Preface

1. Explaining Imagination
2. Folk Psychology and Its Ontology
3. Imagistic Imagining Part I: Imagery, Attitude Imagining, and
Recreative Imagining
4. Imagistic Imagining Part II: Hybrid Structure, Multiple
Attitudes, and Daydreams
5. Conditional Reasoning Part I: Three Kinds of Conditionals and
the Psychology of the Material Conditional
6. Conditional Reasoning Part II: Indicatives, Subjunctives, and
the Ramsey Test
7. Pretense Part I: Metaphysics and Epistemology
8. Pretense Part II: Psychology
9. Consuming Fictions Part I: Recovering Fictional Truths
10. Consuming Fictions Part II: The Operator Claim
11. Consuming Fictions Part III: Immersion, Emotion, and the
Paradox of Fiction
12. Creativity

References
Index
 Acknowledgments

When you work on something for a decade or so, the debts start to
mount. Recognizing my own limitations in imagining the past, I’ll
confine these acknowledgments to the last five years, when the
book mainly took shape.
Jonathan Weinberg was kind enough to read early drafts of
several chapters, written in 2015 when I was a Taft Center Fellow.
His comments during a subsequent visit led to some important
reorganization of material—and to a recognition that I would need to
fully confront the issues surrounding fiction consumption. Around
that time, I met with Amy Kind and Shannon Spaulding at the
Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology to pitch my general
program; their reactions helped me to see where I would need to
focus energies. Among other helpful recommendations, they
suggested a certain egg-shaped diagram (see Figure 3.1, pg. 62) for
mapping the relationship of attitude imagining to imagistic
imagining. A plan was hatched.
I’m especially grateful to Amy Kind who, soon after—and with the
help of Eric Peterson—started the Junkyard of the Mind blog,
devoted to the scholarly study of imagination. In a series of posts, I
was able to audition a few arguments that are now more fully
developed in Chapters 9, 10, and 11. I’m indebted to the many who
commented on those posts and, in the process, helped me to clarify
and sharpen my arguments—including (but not limited to) Shannon
Spaulding, Neil Van Leeuwen, Shen-yi Liao, Alon Chasid, Luke
Roelofs, Gregory Currie, and Eric Peterson.
Christopher Gauker was an enormous help to me on several
fronts, helping to guide me through the literature on conditionals
and providing detailed comments on several chapters, including,
especially, those on mental imagery and conditionals. Neil Van
Leeuwen and Shen-yi Liao also each commented on at least half of
the manuscript and raised important challenges that helped me to
solidify and clarify the kind of explanatory paradigm I wanted to
pursue. Bence Nanay helped me to see some holes in my discussion
of mental imagery, and inspired me to reorganize that material in
important ways. Others who generously gave me written reactions
to (sometimes multiple) chapters include: Kathleen Stock, Margot
Strohminger, Tom Polger, Alon Chasid, Maxwell Gatyas, and my
entire graduate seminar class from Fall 2018, who read through an
early draft of the complete manuscript. I also had helpful
conversations about the book’s material with Heidi Maibom, Margot
Strohminger, Richard Samuels, Declan Smithies, Jenefer Robinson,
Dorit Bar-On, and Tony Chemero. Finally, I’m grateful to two
anonymous reviewers for Oxford University Press for their comments
and criticisms—especially to the aptly-named “Reader Y,” who
provided both penetrating and amusing blow-by-blow reactions to
the arguments across all twelve chapters.
I feel lucky to have Peter Momtchiloff as an editor at Oxford and
don’t wish to imagine an OUP without him. I also thank the
University of Cincinnati for awarding me a TOME grant that has
allowed for the open access publication of this book in digital format,
and the Taft Research Center at the University of Cincinnati, for
supporting the early development of the book during my tenure as a
Taft Center Fellow in 2014–2015. Philosophical Studies, Philosophy
and Phenomenological Research, and The Pacific Philosophical
Quarterly have my gratitude as well, for allowing me permission to
reprint here portions of articles previously published in those venues.
While none of the chapters in this book reproduce those previous
works wholesale, there are paragraphs here and there that appear
with only minor modifications.
Finally, and most importantly, I thank my wife, Antoinette, who
has supported me from dream to dream and year to year, keeping
me company in exotic, undreamt locales—including the Midwestern
United States—so that I could do work that I love. I thank also my
parents (all four of them) for affording me the priviledge of a life
examined, and reexamined. And, lastly, to my sons, Avery and Jude:
I couldn’t imagine you if I tried.

PLH

Cincinnati, OH
May 2020
 Preface

If you can’t make one, you don’t know how it works.

So said Fred Dretske in “A recipe for thought,” and so I’m inclined
to believe. He offered the slogan both as “something like an
engineer’s ideal, a designer’s vision, of what it takes to understand
how something works,” and as an axiom at the heart of philosophical
naturalism—one that applies as much to the mind as to anything
else (Dretske, 2002).
Knowing how to make something, in Dretske’s sense, entails
knowing how to write a recipe for it. Such a recipe can’t include, as
an ingredient, the very thing it is a recipe for. “One cannot have a
recipe for a cake that lists a cake, not even a small cake, as an
ingredient,” Dretske explains. “Recipes of this sort will not help one
understand what a cake is.” Likewise for intelligence: “if you want to
know what intelligence is, you need a recipe for creating it out of
parts you already understand” (Dretske, 2002).
The same points apply to imagination. We won’t understand what
imagination is—won’t be able to explain imagination—until we can
write a recipe for making it out of parts we already understand.
What you have in your hands (or, perhaps, hard drive) is a
compendium of such recipes.
What ingredients appear in the recipes? On my telling, they are
other familiar mental states like beliefs, desires, judgments,
decisions, and intentions. In different combinations and contexts,
they constitute cases of imagining.
Granted, it might seem that we don’t understand these
ingredients themselves all that well. It’s certainly true, in one sense,
that we don’t know how to write full recipes for any mental faculty,
state, or process. There are no artificial minds widely agreed to be
the equivalents of our own—no recipes for creating such. On the
other hand, we aren’t entirely clueless in that endeavor. There are
longstanding research programs in philosophy and cognitive science
for modeling human memory, perception, reasoning, and language
in artificial systems. In tasks of limited scope, many of these systems
have abilities far exceeding our own. We say that IBM’s Watson
knows the answers to Jeopardy questions, that Google Photos
recognizes faces, that DeepMind’s AlphaGo plans and executes
creative strategies for winning at Go and chess. The question of
whether we use the mental idiom literally in such cases grows more
delicate each year.
We can at least call the products of these research programs
proto-recipes for things like belief, memory, perception, inference,
and the like. Their development is made possible by the fact that we
know, at least roughly, what we need to make a system do so that it
might qualify as doing something like remembering, something like
perceiving, something like reasoning, or something like
understanding a question. Imagination presents a contrast. It’s far
less clear, at least on the face of it, what we need to make a system
do so that it might qualify as imagining. That’s why we can make
progress on explaining imagination by breaking it into parts like
beliefs, desires, judgments, and decisions, whose functions are
better understood, and for which we already have proto-recipes.
Contemporary philosophers have implicitly granted as much in
their theoretical accounts of imagination—accounts in which
imagination is alternately described as “belief-like” (Currie &
Ravenscroft, 2002; Nichols, 2004a; Weinberg & Meskin, 2006b) or
“perception-like” (Currie & Ravenscroft, 2002; Goldman, 2006a).
There’s no point in emphasizing the likenesses of one thing to
another, after all, if our understanding of each is equally opaque.
The problem is that imagination nevertheless remains an unreduced
phenomenon in each of these accounts—a mental state similar to,
yet entirely distinct from, states like belief, perception, desire, and so
on. The cake recipes still list cake as an ingredient.
 Some may worry that the reductive approach I will recommend is
dismissive, deflationary, or even eliminative of imagination proper.
But that is a misunderstanding. My aim is to explain imagination, not
to question its importance, or to make it disappear. Think how a
master baker—the author of award-winning cookbooks—would feel if
you told her she had written cakes out of existence! The real
message is this: there can be no understanding of the human mind
without an understanding of imagination. And, because we already
have the beginnings of an idea of how to make something with
beliefs, desires, perceptions, memories, and so on, then—if the
recipes offered herein succeed—we already have an inkling of how
to make something with an imagination as well. This seems like
good news to me.
I’ll conclude this preface with a brief user’s guide. Admittedly, this
isn’t a short book; but neither does it ask that each chapter be read
in sequence. All approved itineraries begin with Chapter 1, which
serves as a précis for the book as a whole. It sets out the terms of
the debate, responds to the most obvious objections, and provides
thumbnail examples of reductive explanations developed more fully
in subsequent chapters. Thereafter, chapters can be consumed à la
carte. This isn’t to say that they are unrelated; to the contrary, they
build on each other and pursue the same goal in much the same
way. The point is that you should feel free to dive in where you like
—to let your interests guide you—after having read Chapter 1.
Chapter 2 is a meditation on the nature of the ingredients used in
later chapters: just what are beliefs, desires, intentions, and other
folk psychological states? Are they mental representations?
Dispositions? Neurobiological states? I discuss the ambient options
and explain how the position one adopts influences the project of
explaining imagination. Chapters 3 and 4 turn to mental imagery,
investigating its nature and relationship to imagination generally. I
develop a framework in which mental-image-involving states can be
seen as beliefs, desires, judgments, decisions, and the like.
Thereafter, the book focuses on four key contexts where imagination
is commonly held to play an explanatory role: conditional reasoning
(Chapters 5 and 6), pretense (Chapters 7 and 8), fiction
consumption (Chapters 9, 10, and 11), and creativity (Chapter 12).
Reductive “recipes” are sought for the imaginings at work in each
context.
Like any philosopher, my deepest, most irrational desire is that
each claim in this book—no matter how heterodox—will be believed
by all. But I’ll be satisfied if the general strategy defended here gains
traction—the strategy of breaking imagination into smaller, more
recognizable parts. I dream of a world where the question is not
whether a reductive approach to imagination is possible, but which
reductive approach is best. In this fantasy, the kinds of non-
reductive theories criticized here still have a seat at the table. Sure, I
think they’re untenable in their current iterations. But they may have
a redemption story of their own.
It seems to me that the conversation is just beginning.
 1
Explaining Imagination

1.1 Introduction

Suppose you awoke one day having lost your imagination.

Some things would be easier. There would be no wavering on
what clothes to wear. You wouldn’t be able to imagine the different
possibilities. The creativity of your work might suffer, however. And
you would do well to avoid films and novels with absurd or
devastating plot lines. Unable to imagine the events described, you’d
have no choice but to corral them, somehow, into your view of the
real.
Games of pretense would come to an end, confounding your
partners in charades. How can you pretend that you’re a
bodybuilder, if you can’t imagine being one? Worse, your empathy
would diminish, as you could no longer imagine what it’s like to be
someone else—no longer stand in anyone’s shoes but your own.
Yet few could rival your honesty. When you can’t imagine things
being different than they are, you won’t conceive of a lie, much less
tell one. This would affect your personal relationships in interesting
ways. Even so, you’d have an enviable peace of mind. What’s there
to worry about, when you can’t imagine the future?
This is all to say that I don’t really imagine it would be you who
woke up, having lost your imagination. Imagination is too central to
who and what we are to remain ourselves without it. There are
animals—crickets, crocodiles, crayfish—that, arguably, cannot
imagine. But that’s not us. If we lost our imagination, we wouldn’t
be around to miss it.
The centrality of imagination to who and what we are hints at this
book’s main thesis: when we imagine, we don’t make use of a
distinct faculty of mind or collection of sui generis mental states,
quarantined from our actual beliefs, desires, and intentions. “The
imagination” is not something that, like sight, or knowledge of a
second language, could be carved off the mind while leaving our
self-defining commitments and inclinations intact. Instead, when we
imagine, we make use of our most basic psychological states in
complex bits of reasoning, planning, and contemplation. Indeed,
imagining is nothing over and above the use of such states—beliefs,
desires, and intentions central among them. To see how this can be
so is to arrive at an explanation of imagination in simpler, more
general terms.

1.2 What It Is to Imagine

Despite its importance to who and what we are, imagination remains

an elusive explanatory target—“one of the last uncharted terrains of
the mind” (Byrne, 2005, p. xi). Even in broad outlines, it just isn’t
clear what imagination is supposed to be. Describing our plight
without it, I relied on an intuitive notion of imagination as means for
thinking about the world being ways it is not—for considering
fictions, possibilities, and fantasies. And I relied on the fact that, for
each of the abilities I imagined us losing—be it for hypothetical
reasoning, pretense, empathy, or the enjoyment of fictions—there
are philosophers and psychologists who have held imagination to be
its cognitive engine.1
However, characterizing imagination by appeal to the diverse
capacities it enables invites the charge that we’ve lumped together a
heterogeneous collection of quite distinct mental states and
processes (Kind, 2013). Why think that what counts as imagining in
the context of enjoying a fiction, or considering someone else’s
perspective, is the same mental phenomenon as imagining during a
daydream, or during hypothetical reasoning? Indeed there are
longstanding concerns that imagination is an ill-defined notion
(Moran, 1994, p. 106; Strawson, 1970, p. 31). Stevenson (2003)
counts no fewer than twelve distinct conceptions of imagination at
work in philosophy. And P. F. Strawson finds the different uses of
“imagine” to compose a “diverse and scattered family,” where “even
this image of a family seems too definite” (1970, p. 31).
A natural reaction is to draw distinctions. The current landscape is
littered with them: propositional imagination is contrasted to sensory
imagination (Stock, 2017), recreative imagining is distinguished from
creative imagining (Currie & Ravenscroft, 2002), sympathetic
imagining from perceptual imagining (Nagel, 1974), enactive
imagining from suppositional imagining (Goldman, 2006a),
constructive imagining from both attitudinal and imagistic imagining
(Van Leeuwen, 2013), imagining “from the inside” from imagining
“from the outside” (Peacocke, 1985; Shoemaker, 1968), imagining
proper from supposing and conceiving (Balcerak Jackson, 2016;
Chalmers, 2002), and so on. Yet, somehow, the fog surrounding
imagination remains equally thick within each of its slices. As Amy
Kind and Peter Kung comment in their introduction to a recent
anthology:

The problem is not simply that philosophers give different theoretical

treatments of imagination but rather that there doesn’t even seem to be
consensus about what the phenomenon under discussion is. Among
contemporary philosophers in particular there is a surprising reluctance to
offer a substantive characterization of imagination; instead, it is understood
simply as a mental activity that is perception-like but not quite perception, or
belief-like but not quite belief.
(Kind & Kung, 2016, p. 3, emphasis in original)

I take Kind and Kung’s point to be that we are not in the usual
situation where there is a clear phenomenon to be explained—e.g.,
temperature fluctuation, or animal reproduction—and a set of
competing theories about its nature and causes. Rather, in the case
precise content p—constitute cases of imagining that p. Further,
whether they constitute cases of imagining that p will at times turn
on matters extrinsic to the states themselves, such as the reason for
which the judgments are made, or the social context in which they
occur. By loose analogy, J. L. Austin (1975), in How To Do Things
With Words, emphasized that some vocal utterances constitute acts
of naming, dedicating, taking a vow, and so on, depending on the
context of the utterance. Similarly, I’ll argue, some uses of beliefs
and desires, judgments, intentions, and decisions constitute
instances of imagining, and whether they do depends in part upon
the context in which they occur.10
To some, the kind of reductive explanation pursued here will
seem to involve an “elimination” of imagination—a kind of denial
that imagination really exists. But that misinterprets my view.
Showing that a phenomenon—water, say—can be explained in more
basic terms—molecular composition, say—doesn’t write the
phenomenon out of existence (not on my metaphysics, anyhow).
People really do imagine things, and that ability brings with it the
important capacities mentioned at this chapter’s opening. My project
is to explain what we do when we imagine, not to establish that
there is no imagining.
Why has no one else pursued this sort of view? Mustn’t it be
crazy, by dint of its novelty alone? While the view is indeed novel,
the approach is not as idiosyncratic as it might at first seem (and
perforce not as crazy). The most common explanatory strategy in
the philosophy of imagination over the last twenty years has been to
characterize imagination in terms of its similarities to other folk
psychological states—imagination being said to be belief-like
(Arcangeli, 2018; Currie & Ravenscroft, 2002; Nichols, 2006a; Van
Leeuwen, 2014), desire-like (Currie, 2010; Doggett & Egan, 2007),
or perception-like (Currie & Ravenscroft, 2002; Kind, 2001) in its
instances. Implicit in these proposals is the thought that we can gain
a better grasp on the nature of imagination by appreciating its
similarities to other, less mysterious folk psychological states—and,
indeed, that we have a good enough idea of what these other states
Another random document with
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 CHAPTER XLV.
ASSASSINATION OF ALY.

A.H. XL. A.D. 661.

The theocratic Separatists were sorely

troubled at the prospects of Islam. It was Three Khârejite fanatics
not that raids and robbery, dissension and conspire to assassinate Aly,
Muâvia, and Amru. a.h. XL.
strife, had been the order of the day. That a.d. 661.
they could bear, for bloodshed was more
tolerable than apostasy. To the Khârejite, the cessation of war
brought with it no peace of mind. A settled government was the ruin
of his hopes. Aly having come to terms with Muâvia, there was no
longer room to expect that the ungodly kingdoms of the earth would
be overthrown, and the reign of righteousness established in their
stead. Thus the theocratic party brooded over the blood that had
been shed in vain upon the plain of Nehrwân and other fields of
battle, and for the present abandoned themselves to despair. Many
took refuge from the godless tyranny (as they called it) prevailing all
around, in the sacred precincts of the Hejâz, where they might
lament freely with one another over the miserable fate of Islam. As
three of these thus mourned together, a gleam of hope suddenly
shot across their path. ‘Our blood need not have been thus shed in
vain; let each of us kill one of the three oppressors of the Faithful;
Islam may yet again be free, and the reign of the Lord appear.’ It was
one of the band of regicides that spoke; and so, as in the case of
Othmân, but under another guise and urged by bolder hopes, the
three again conspired against the State. The fatal resolve once
taken, details were speedily arranged. Aly and Muâvia both must fall;
and Amru also, not only as the godless Arbitrator, but also as the
likeliest successor to the throne left vacant by the other two. Each
was to dispose of his fellow, as he presided at the morning service,
on the same Friday when, in the month of Ramadhân, the cathedral
Mosques of Kûfa, Damascus, and Fostât would be thronged with
fasting worshippers. They dipped their swords in a powerful poison;
and separated from one another, swearing that they would either
fulfil the task or perish in the attempt. Amru
escaped. He was sick that day, and the Amru escapes.
captain of his guard, presiding in the
Mosque at prayers, fell a victim in his stead.[561] At Damascus,
Muâvia was not so fortunate.[562] The blow
fell upon him, and was near to being fatal. Muâvia
recovers.
wounded, but
His physician declared that his life could be
saved only by the cautery, or by a potent draught that would deprive
him of the hope of further progeny. He shrank from the cautery, and
chose the draught. The remedy was effectual, and he survived.
At Kûfa things turned out differently.
The conspirator Ibn Muljam, one of the Aly attacked by assassins in
the Mosque of Kûfa.
Egyptian regicides, was able there to gain
two desperate accomplices from the Beni Taym. The tribe, deeply
imbued with the fanaticism of the day, had suffered severely in the
massacre of Nehrwân, and ever since had nursed its resentment
against the Caliph. Ibn Muljam loved Catâm, a beautiful maid of the
same tribe, who having on that fatal day lost her father, her brother,
and other near relatives, was roused thereby to a savage ardour.
‘Bring me,’ said the maid to her lover, ‘the head of Aly as my dower;
if thou escapest alive, thou shalt enjoy me as thy guerdon here; if
thou perish, thou shalt enjoy better than me above,’ So she
introduced him to Werdân, a warrior burning with the same spirit of
revenge, and also to another accomplice, named Shuhîb, On the
appointed morning, the latter, with Ibn Muljam, lay in wait on either
side of the door leading into the crowded Mosque; if their blows
should fail, Werdân, stationed outside, was in the confusion to rush
upon Aly, and complete the work. At the time appointed, the Caliph
entered the Mosque calling aloud as usual, To prayers, ye people! To
prayers! Immediately he was set upon on either hand. Shuhîb’s
sword fell upon the lintel; but Ibn Muljam wounded the Caliph
severely on the head and side. He was seized. The other two fled;
one was cut to pieces, the other escaped in the tumult. Aly was
carried into the palace, but retained strength sufficient to question
the assassin, who was brought before him. Ibn Muljam declared
boldly, that the deed had been forty days in contemplation; and
during all that time he had prayed without ceasing to the Lord, ‘that
the Wickedest of mankind might meet his fate.’ ‘Then,’ replied Aly,
‘that must have been thyself.’ So saying, he turned to his son,
Hasan, and bade him keep the assassin in close custody: ‘If I die, his
life is forfeited to justice, and he shall be slain for the deed he hath
done; but see,’ said he, ‘that thou mutilate him not, for that was
forbidden by the Prophet.’ During the day Omm Kolthûm went into
the assassin’s cell and cursed him, adding, what no doubt she was
fain to believe, ‘My father shall yet live.’ ‘Then, Lady,’ replied the
fanatic, ‘whence these tears? Listen. That sword I bought for a
thousand pieces, and a thousand more it cost to poison it. None may
escape a wound from it.’
It soon became evident that the wound indeed was mortal. They
asked the Caliph whether if he died, it was his will that Hasan, his
eldest son, should succeed to the throne.
Still true to the elective principle, Aly Aly’s death. 17 Ramadhân,
answered: ‘I do not command this, neither a.h. XL. Jan. 25, a.d. 661.
do I forbid it. See ye to it.’ Then he called Hasan and Hosein to his
bedside, and counselled them to be steadfast in piety and
resignation to the will of God, and to be kind to their younger brother,
the son of his Hanifite wife. After that he wrote his testament, and
continuing to repeat the name of the Lord to the end, so breathed his
last. When they had performed the funeral obsequies, Hasan
arraigned the assassin before him. Nothing daunted, Ibn Muljam
said: ‘I made a covenant with the Lord before the holy House at
Mecca, that I would slay both Aly and Muâvia. Now, if thou wilt, I
shall go forth and kill the other, or perish in the attempt. If I succeed,
I will return and swear allegiance unto thee.’ ‘Nay,’ said Hasan, ‘not
before thou hast tasted of the fire.’ He was
put to death, and the body, tied up in a Ibn Muljam put to death.
sack, was committed to the flames.[563]
Tradition, strange to say, is silent, and
opinion uncertain, as to where the body of Aly’s burial-place unknown.
Aly lies. Some believe that he was buried
in the cathedral Mosque at Kûfa, others in the palace.[564] Certainly,
his tomb was never, in early times, the object of any care or
veneration. The same indifference attached to his memory
throughout the realm of Islam, as had attached to his person during
life, and it was not till that generation had passed away that the
sentiment of reverence and regard for the husband of the Prophet’s
daughter, and father of his only surviving progeny, began to show
itself.
Aly died about sixty years of age. His
troubled and contested reign had lasted His family.
but four years and nine months. For a time
(like Mahomet himself) he had been content with a single wife, the
Prophet’s daughter Fâtima, by whom he had three sons and two
daughters, the progenitors of the Synd race—the nobility of Islam.
[565] After she died, he took many women into his harem, both free
and servile; by whom he had, in all, eleven sons and fifteen
daughters. Aly was a tender-hearted father. In his old age, a little girl
was born to him, with whose prattle he would beguile his troubles; for
he had her always on his knee, and doted on her with a special love.
[566]

In the character of Aly there are many

things to commend. Mild and beneficent, Forbearance and
he treated the rebel city of Bussorah, when magnanimity of Aly.
prostrate at his feet (as Mahomet had done the ungrateful city of his
birth) with a generous forbearance. Towards the theocratic fanatics,
who wearied his patience by incessant intrigue and insensate
rebellion, he showed no vindictiveness. Excepting Muâvia (the man
of all others whom he ought not to have estranged) he carried his
policy of conciliation to a dangerous extreme. In compromise indeed,
and in procrastination, lay the failure of his
Caliphate. With greater vigour, spirit, and Procrastination and
compromise, his failings.
determination, he might have maintained
the integrity of the empire and averted the schism which for a time
threatened the existence of Islam, and is felt in its debilitating
influences to the present day.

Aly wise in counsel.

 Aly was wise in counsel, and many an
adage and sapient proverb has been attributed to him. But, like
Solomon, his wisdom was more for others than for himself. His
career cannot be characterised otherwise than as a failure. On the
election of Abu Bekr, influenced probably by Fâtima, who claimed
and was denied a share in her father’s property, Aly retired for a time
into private life. Thereafter we find him taking part in the counsels of
Abu Bekr and his successors, and even performing the functions of
chief judicial officer. But he never asserted the leading position,
which, as the cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet, might have been
expected of him; nor is there aught (excepting party-coloured and
distorted tradition) to show that this was due to any other cause than
his own easy and inactive temperament.
There is one indelible blot on the The blot upon his escutcheon.
escutcheon of Aly—the flagrant breach of
duty he was guilty of towards his sovereign ruler. He had sworn
allegiance to Othmân, and by him he was bound to have stood in his
last extremity. Instead, he held ignobly aloof, while the Caliph fell a
victim to red-handed treason. Nor can the plea avail that he was
himself in the hands of the insurgents. Had there been a loyal will to
help, there would have been a ready way. In point of fact, his attitude
gave colour to the charge even of collusion.[567] And herein Aly must
be held accountable not only for a grave dereliction of duty, but for a
fatal error, which shook the stability of the Caliphate itself, as he was
not long in finding to his cost.
There is no trace whatever, in the
history of those times, of the extravagant Divine Imâmate, a late
claims made in later days for Aly and his fiction.
family. Clearly none of these were regarded during their lifetime with
any respect or veneration beyond that which was due to their
relationship with the Prophet.[568] On the contrary, we find that even
in their own capital and provinces, there prevailed towards them an
utter want of enthusiasm and loyalty, amounting at times to positive
disaffection. The fiction of the Divine Imâmship was a reaction from
the tragedy at Kerbala (to be told below) and the cruel fate of the
Prophet’s descendants. And the superstition, fostered by Alyite and
Abbasside faction, soon formed a powerful lever which was skilfully
and unscrupulously used in the busy canvass to overthrow the
Omeyyad dynasty.
 CHAPTER XLVI.
HASAN SUCCEEDS ALY.—ABDICATES IN FAVOUR OF MUAVIA.

A.H. XL., XLI. A.D. 661.

When they had committed Aly, we know

not where, to his last home, the people, Hasan succeeds his father
following the example of Cays ibn Sád, Aly. Ramadhân, a.h. XL. Jan.
a.d. 661.
whose influence at the Court of Baghdad
continued undiminished, did homage, as it were by common
consent, to Hasan, the departed Caliph’s eldest son. But Hasan was
a poor-spirited creature, more intent on varying the charms of his
ever-changing harem than on the business of public life, and
altogether unworthy of his descent as the grandson of the Prophet.
[569]

It was, therefore, now Muâvia’s

opportunity for asserting his title to the But, attacked by Muâvia, and
whole Moslem empire. Already, in mobbed by his own troops,
accordance with Amru’s verdict at the Arbitration, he was recognised
as Caliph throughout Syria and Egypt.[570] Resenting the succession
of Hasan to his father’s power at Kûfa, Muâvia at once gathered a
powerful army and marched to invade Irâc. No sooner was this
intelligence received, than the men of Kûfa, impatient at the prospect
of falling under the rule of Syria, rallied beneath their new Caliph’s
standard, and an army forty thousand strong was ready to repel the
attack.[571] But Hasan had no stomach for the war. Sending forward
his vanguard of twelve thousand men under the brave and faithful
Cays, he followed himself irresolutely; and, with the bulk of his army,
rested at Medâin amidst the luxurious gardens of the old Persian
Court.[572] While thus ignobly holding back, the report gained
currency at Medâin that Cays had been defeated on the plains of
Mesopotamia, and slain. An émeute ensued. The troops rose
mutinously upon the Caliph. They rushed into his sumptuous
pavilion, and plundered the royal tents even to the carpets. A project
was set on foot to seize his person, and, by delivering him up to
Muâvia, thus make favourable terms. The faint-hearted Caliph,
alarmed at these demonstrations, took refuge in the Great White
Palace, a more congenial residence for him than the martial camp;
and, trusting no longer to his fickle and disloyal people, sent letters
to Muâvia offering to submit. Hasan agreed
to abdicate and retire to Medîna, on abdicates in favour of Muâvia
condition that he should retain the contents July, a.d. 661.
of the treasury, five million pieces; that he should receive for his
support the revenues of a Persian district; and further, that the
imprecation against his father should be dropped from the public
prayers. Muâvia granted the first two requests; and as for the third,
he consented that no prayer against Aly should be recited within
hearing of his son. The truce was ratified accordingly on the 24th day
of Rabî I.
After a brief and inglorious reign of only five or six months,
Hasan, with his household and belongings, retired to the Hejâz. The
people of Kûfa, we are told, wept at their departure. But Hasan left
them without regret. It was a race, he said, in whom no trust could be
reposed, and who had set purpose neither for good nor for evil.[573]
Cays, whose ability and prowess were
worthy of a better cause, remained for Cays submits to Muâvia.
some little while longer in the field. But at
length, having obtained terms for all his soldiers who had been
fighting on the side of Aly, and there being no longer any master left
to fight for, he laid down his arms and recognised Muâvia as
supreme.[574]
Thus, at last, Muâvia was able to make
a triumphal entry into Kûfa. Having Muâvia sole and undisputed
Caliph.
received the homage of that city and of the
Eastern provinces, he returned to Syria sole and undisputed Caliph
of Islam; and Damascus thenceforth became the capital of the
empire.
 The imprecations against the memory
of Aly, his house, and his adherents, still Continued imprecation
formed part of the public service at against the house of Aly.
Damascus. The curse, indeed, continued to be so used throughout
the whole period of Omeyyad ascendency.[575]
 CHAPTER XLVII.
SOME BIOGRAPHICAL NOTICES.

A.H. XL.-L.

Before passing on to the brief

remainder of this work, I purpose to notice Biographical notices.
shortly the sequel of one or two of the
leading men still left at Aly’s death upon the stage.
Hasan, the short-lived Caliph, retired to
Medîna, where, with ample means to Hasan, son of Aly, poisoned
gratify his ruling passion, he lived in ease by his wife.
and quietness, giving no further anxiety to Muâvia. He survived eight
years, and met his death by poison at the hand of one of his wives. It
was a not unnatural end for ‘Hasan the Divorcer;’ but Alyite tradition
would have us to believe that the lady was bribed by the Caliph to
commit the crime, and thus exalt the libertine to the dignity of a
martyr.[576] Of his brother Hosein, we shall hear more anon.
Amru remained in the government of
Egypt till his death, a.h. 43. He died Amru.
seventy-three years of age, and penitent,
we are told, for all his misdeeds. His life was one of the most
eventful in this history. No man influenced more than he the fortunes
of the Caliphate. Brave in the field, astute in counsel, coarse and
unscrupulous in word and action, it was mainly to Amru that Muâvia
owed his ascendency over Aly, and the eventual establishment of the
Omeyyad dynasty. He was four years Governor of Egypt under
Omar; he continued in the same post a like period under Othmân,
who by his recall in an evil hour made him his enemy; and, finally
reappointed by Muâvia on the defeat of Mohammed son of Abu Bekr,
he was still at his death the Governor of Egypt. One of his sons
succeeded him, but not for any lengthened period.[577]
 The vicissitudes in the career of
Moghîra were hardly less surprising than in Moghîra appointed Governor
that of Amru. Clever and designing, he of Kûfa.
survived the disgrace of his fall at Bussorah, and rose again to
influence at court. He was eventually placed by Muâvia in the most
difficult and coveted post of the empire, the government, namely, of
the no longer regal Kûfa, to which was added the northern district of
Persia. By his shrewd and firm administration, he held under strict
control that fickle and restless city, still betrayed ever and anon into
theocratic outbursts, or (the new trouble of the empire) into
treasonable demonstrations in favour of the race of Aly.
But, perhaps, the service of greatest
value which Moghîra rendered to his Ziâd, Governor of Southern
Persia, gives in his adhesion
sovereign, was that he induced Ziâd, now to Muâvia. a.h. XLII. a.d.
holding powerful command in the south of 662.
Persia, to tender his allegiance. The son of
a vagrant bond-woman, whom Abu Sofiân before his conversion
chanced to meet at Tâyif, Ziâd had overcome, by the faithful and
diligent application of his high abilities, the disadvantage of servile
birth. His merits as Chancellor of the Treasury at Bussorah had been
recognised by Omar, and he had risen both under Othmân and Aly
to the most important commands in Bussorah and Southern Persia.
Eloquent in address, and powerful in administration, he was by far
the ablest statesman of the day. Firmly attached to the cause of Aly,
he retained his animosity towards Muâvia, even after Hasan’s
abdication; and as Governor of Istakhr (Persepolis) was a thorn in
the side of the Caliphate. Moghîra, who had not forgotten that he
owed his escape from the capital charge of adultery to the partial
evidence of Ziâd,[578] maintained friendly relations with him, and in
the forty-second year of the Hegira was deputed by Muâvia to the
magnificent viceregal court of Istakhr, and there persuaded him to
tender his submission. Under a safe-conduct, he appeared before
the Caliph at Damascus, and presented, in token of his adhesion, a
purse of a thousand golden pieces. He was dismissed with every
token of honour, and confirmed in his Persian government.
 Not long afterwards a curious episode
in his history disturbed the equanimity of Muâvia declares Ziâd, as son
the Moslem public. Muâvia formally of Abu Sofiân, his brother.
a.h. XLV.
recognised Ziâd as the son of his own
father Abu Sofiân, and therefore as his brother. The open
acknowledgment of the relationship created a serious scandal
throughout Islam, because it was held to contravene the law of
legitimacy, and still more because it made Omm Habîba, one of the
‘Mothers of the Faithful,’ and daughter also of Abu Sofiân, to be the
sister of an adulterous issue. Even the Beni Omeyyad, Muâvia’s own
kinsfolk, were displeased at the affront put upon the purity of their
blood. But the feeling passed away when it was seen that a pillar of
iron strength had been gained to the Omeyyad side.[579] In the year
45 a.h., Ziâd was made Governor of
Bussorah, and of the whole of Southern Ziâd appointed Governor of
Persia, from the Straits of Omân to the Bussorah,
Kûfa.
and eventually of

river Indus. His strong hand fell heavily on

the restless population of Bussorah: the city was patrolled
incessantly by an armed police of a thousand men. None might
venture abroad at night on pain of death; and so ruthless was the
order, that an unlucky Arab, who had wandered unawares into the
precincts of the town, was tried and deliberately executed for the
involuntary offence. Both at the Mosque and the palace, and
whenever he went abroad, Ziâd was attended in Oriental guise by
silver-sticks and lictors, and a body-guard of five hundred soldiers
waited at his gate. The supremacy of law, or, as it might perhaps be
called, the reign of terror, was new at Bussorah, but it effectually
repressed rebellion; and the same may also be said of Kûfa, to
which, on Moghîra’s death, Ziâd was translated. This stern
administration was but a foretaste of the hard and cruel régime
which, later on, found its climax in the bloody rule of Hajjâj; the son
of Yusûf.
In the fiftieth year of the Hegira, we are
told that Muâvia entertained a project for Design of removing
Mahomet’s pulpit to
removing the pulpit and staff of the Prophet Damascus.
from Medîna, the rebellious scene of
Othmân’s murder, to Damascus, now the capital of Islam. But the
impious project was, by Divine interposition, checked. For, ‘on its
being touched, the pulpit trembled fearfully, and the sun was
darkened, so that the very stars shone forth, and men were terrified
at the prodigies.’ The tradition is significant of the superstitious
regard in which everything connected with the Prophet’s person was
held. It is not unlikely that Muâvia did entertain the sacrilegious
design; but, if so, he was dissuaded from it by Abu Horeira, who
urged that where the Prophet had placed his pulpit and his staff,
there they should remain. And so they were left as relics in the Great
Mosque hard by the dwelling-place of Mahomet.[580]
 CHAPTER XLVIII.
YEZID APPOINTED HEIR APPARENT.—HEREDITARY
NOMINATION BECOMES A PRECEDENT.

A.H. LVI. A.D. 676.

The election of a Caliph on each

recurring succession, excepting only that Precedents for nomination or
of Omar, had been followed by the risk of election to the Caliphate.
serious perils to the peace of Islam. The choice was supposed to be
a privilege vested in the inhabitants of Medîna—‘Citizens,’ as well as
‘Refugees;’ but the practice had been various, and the rule had been
oftener broken than observed. The Prophet himself nominated no
one. Abu Bekr may be said to have been chosen by acclamation.
[581] Abu Bekr, on his death-bed, named Omar his successor. And
Omar, establishing yet another precedent, placed the nomination in
the hands of Electors. It is true that on the two last-named
occasions, the choice was ratified by the homage of Medîna; but that
was little more than the formal recognition of an appointment already
made. At the fourth succession, the election of Aly, though carried
out under the compulsion of insurgent bands, resembled somewhat
the popular election of the first Caliph. Then followed the
unsuccessful rebellion of Talha and Zobeir, based on the allegation
that homage had been extorted from them under pressure. After that,
ensued the struggle between Muâvia, the de facto sovereign of
Syria, and Aly, which ended in the irregular recognition of Muâvia as
Caliph upon the so-called Arbitration of Dûma, and in the double
Caliphate. On the death of Aly, who (we are told) declined to
nominate a successor, his son Hasan was elected, not, as
heretofore, by the people of Medîna, but by the citizens of Kûfa. And,
finally, we have the first example of abdication, when Hasan
resigned his rights into the hands of Muâvia, and left him sole Caliph
of Islam.
 Whatever the rights of Medîna originally
may have been, circumstances had now The initiative in election no
materially altered the only practical means longer at Medîna.
of exercising them. Having been abandoned as the seat of
government, the privilege of choosing a Caliph, or of confirming his
nomination, however much it may have vested by prescription in the
citizens of Medîna, had become an anachronism now. The
succession, as in the case of Hasan, followed necessarily, and at
once, upon the death of the reigning Caliph, and Medîna could only
ratify what had taken place elsewhere. The functions of the citizens
of Medîna were thus, from the course of events, transferred to the
inhabitants of the seat of government, wheresoever it might be.
Again, that which had happened after
the election of Aly, might happen again at Danger surrounding each
succession.
any fresh accession to the throne. Zobeir
and Talha raised the standard of revolt on the plea that their oath
was taken under compulsion; while between Aly and Muâvia, there
followed a long and doubtful contest. The internecine struggle had
imperilled the existence of Islam. Not only had the ranks of the
Faithful been seriously thinned by the blood shed on either side; but,
from without, enemies might at any moment have taken advantage
of the strife. Muâvia, in point of fact, made a truce with the Byzantine
Court while the civil war impended. But if a similar opportunity again
offered, the foes of Islam might not be so forbearing, and a fatal
wound might be inflicted thus upon the empire torn by intestine
conflict.
Influenced by such considerations, as well, no doubt, as by the
desire of maintaining the Caliphate in his own line, Muâvia
entertained the project of declaring his son, Yezîd, to be the Heir
Apparent. By securing thus an oath of
fealty to his son throughout the Moslem Muâvia’s design to nominate
world, he would anticipate the event of his his son Heir Apparent.
own decease, and thus prevent the peril of a contested election
when it did occur. Ziâd, summoned to advise, was favourable to the
design, but enjoined deliberation, and a preliminary cautious
canvass throughout the provinces. He also counselled Yezîd, who
was devoted to the chase and careless of public affairs, to amend
his ways in preparation for the throne, and show before the people a
character more fitted for the high dignity in store for him. Moghîra
likewise was strongly in favour of the scheme.[582] But it was not till
both these counsellors had passed away, that Muâvia found himself
in a position to proceed with the design.
So soon as Muâvia felt secure of
adequate support, and especially that Yezîd declared Heir
Medîna would not resent the invasion of its Apparent. a.h. LVI. a.d. 676.
elective privilege,[583] provision was made that deputations from all
the provinces, and also from the chief cities, should present
themselves before the Caliph at Damascus. These, received in state,
affected to press the nomination; and accordingly, without further
ceremony, the oath of allegiance was taken by all present to Yezîd
as next successor to the Caliphate. Syria and Irâc, having without
demur tendered their homage to the same effect, Muâvia set out for
the Hejâz, followed by a retinue of a thousand horse, ostensibly to
perform the Lesser Pilgrimage, but in reality to obtain the assent of
the Holy Cities to what had been enacted at Damascus and
elsewhere. The leading dissentients at
Medîna were Hosein the second son of Mecca and Medîna forced to
Aly, the son of Zobeir, Abd al Rahmân son swear allegiance.
of Abu Bekr, and the son of Omar. Muâvia received them roughly as
they came out to meet him on his entry into the city; and so, to avoid
further mortification, they departed at once for Mecca. The remainder
of the citizens ratified the nomination of Yezîd, and took the oath
accordingly. Continuing his progress, and having arrived at Mecca,
Muâvia carried himself blandly towards the people of the Holy City
during the first few days of his visit, which were occupied with the
rites of pilgrimage. But as the time of departure drew nigh, he stood
up to address them on his errand; and although his speech was
gilded with many plausible assurances that the privileges of the
Sacred places would be religiously respected, there was at the first
no response. Then arose Abdallah son of Zobeir, and boldly said that
the oath of homage to an Heir Apparent would be opposed to all the
precedents of Islam. To such cavils, the Caliph, in answer, urged the