Hasan ibn Ali

Hasan ibn Ali, first son of Ali and Fatima and eldest grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, was born in Medina in 625 (3 AH). The hadith collections fix his grandfather's love in the community's memory: "O God, I love him, so love him and love those who love him," in Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim; the Prophet carrying him on his shoulder; the report in al-Tirmidhi naming Hasan and Husayn "the chiefs of the youth of paradise." One prophecy in al-Bukhari became his biography: "This son of mine is a sayyid, and perhaps God will make peace through him between two great parties of the Muslims."

He was seven at the Prophet's death, stood with his father through the caliphates that followed, was set with Husayn at Uthman's besieged door, and fought in his father's wars at the Camel and Siffin. On Ali's assassination in 661 the Iraqis pledged him caliph — by lineage and by his father's word, the fifth of the line Sunni tradition counts rightly-guided, and in Shia Islam the second Imam. Within months, facing Mu'awiya's army, a wavering Kufan coalition, and an attempt on his own life by a mutinous partisan, he negotiated the abdication the tradition calls the Year of Unity (am al-jama'a): sovereignty to Mu'awiya, on conditions the sources record variously — governance by the Book and the sunna, no persecution of Ali's partisans, and, in most transmissions, no appointment of a successor by Mu'awiya. He withdrew to Medina and lived quietly for nearly a decade, dying in 670 (49 AH by the common account, others differ), by poisoning in the near-unanimous transmission of the early sources — al-Tabari and the biographical literature record the reports naming his wife Ja'da bint al-Ash'ath, with instigation attributed in Shia and some Sunni accounts to Mu'awiya, an attribution other Sunni scholarship leaves unproven. He was buried in al-Baqi after armed objection prevented burial beside his grandfather.

Hasan's great struggle was the one his grandfather's prophecy assigned him: to end a civil war he judged unwinnable without destroying the community. The sources — al-Tabari, al-Baladhuri's Ansab al-Ashraf — record the pressures of 661: an army of divided loyalties, defections bought and threatened, the wound from the spear of a mutineer at Sabat, and his cold assessment, transmitted in his answers to protesting partisans, that the men demanding war would not stand in it. The abdication brought him the taunt "O humiliator of the believers" from his own side; his transmitted reply — that humiliation is not choosing life for the community over slaughter — became the Shia tradition's theology of the second Imam's hilm, forbearance, and the Sunni tradition's proof of the prophecy of peace.

His last struggle was domestic and fatal: the poisoning the sources transmit, and his recorded refusal — in the accounts of the biographers — to name his suspicion even to Husayn, "lest the innocent be taken with the guilty."

The tradition transmits Hasan as the family's face of generosity and forbearance: the biographical literature — Ibn Sa'd at length — records his dividing his wealth with the poor more than once and his repeated hajj on foot while mounts were led beside him. The anecdote most told of him: to a Syrian who cursed him, he answered with an offer of hospitality — "if you ask, we give; if you seek shelter, we shelter" — until the man left blessing him.

In Shia Islam he is the second Imam, ma'sum, his abdication read not as retreat but as the Imam's preservation of the believing remnant — the model, with his brother's Karbala, of the two faces of resistance: endurance and sacrifice. In Sunni Islam he is the fifth rightly-guided caliph by the reckoning many scholars adopt (counting his months in office), the sayyid of the Prophet's prophecy, and the peacemaker of the Year of Unity. Both traditions transmit his hadith from his grandfather — among them the widely-taught "Leave what makes you doubt for what does not make you doubt," in al-Tirmidhi.

Hasan's fields were his father's: the Camel, Siffin, the Kharijite aftermath. His own war, in 661, was the one he refused to fight to its end — the campaign against Mu'awiya that began with vanguards already skirmishing in Mesopotamia and ended at Maskin and Sabat with mutiny in his camp, the plunder of his own tent, and the wound that nearly killed him. The treaty that followed is the conflict history remembers him by: its terms, its differing transmissions, and its aftermath — Mu'awiya's declaration at Kufa, recorded by the historians, that the conditions were "under my feet," and, in 676, the appointment of Yazid as heir, against, by most transmissions, the treaty's own bar.

That breach is the hinge of what came after: Husayn's refusal in 680 stood on the ground his brother's treaty had marked out, and the traditions read the pair together — the peace that preserved the community and the stand that indicted its rulers.

Three disputes attach to Hasan in the sources. The abdication itself: Shia tradition defends it as the Imam's inspired preservation of the faithful under impossible conditions; some early partisans and later critics read it as capitulation; Sunni tradition reads it through the Prophet's prophecy as the community's healing — the positions are documented and remain distinct. The poisoning: the early biographical and historical sources transmit it all but unanimously, most naming Ja'da; the instigation of Mu'awiya is asserted in Shia sources and in some Sunni transmissions, doubted or left unproven in others — reported here as transmitted, unadjudicated. His marriages: a later literary tradition styled him "the divorcer" (al-mitlaq) with inflated counts of wives; modern and classical critics alike — including Shia scholarship defending the Imam — have traced the reports' weakness and their probable Abbasid-era polemical origin; the entry records both the trope's existence and its documented criticism.

His burial closed his life with a last documented conflict: the arrows that met the bier when burial near the Prophet was attempted, and Aisha's disputed role in the refusal, transmitted differently across the traditions — after which he was laid in al-Baqi, where his now-domeless grave stands.

Hasan's treaty gave the tradition its founding case of principled peace: cited by jurists on truce and public interest, by the prophecy of al-Bukhari as fulfilled prophethood, and by Shia theology as the Imamate's forbearing face. Through his line run the sharifs — the Hasanid nobility that furnished rulers from the Idrisids of Morocco to the sharifs of Mecca and the Hashemite kings of Jordan today; "sharif" itself, in its classical usage, means descent from Hasan as "sayyid" means descent from Husayn, though usage varies.

With Husayn he defines the paired options of the oppressed in Islamic memory — the peace that preserves and the stand that testifies — and the Muharram pulpit mourns him beside his brother, his poisoning commemorated in Shia devotion as the second Imam's martyrdom. The demolition of the Baqi domes in 1925, his among them, remains a live grievance in that devotion — his very grave still part of the traditions' unfinished conversation.