Epigraph

وَسَارِعُوا إِلَىٰ مَغْفِرَةٍ مِّن رَّبِّكُمْ وَجَنَّةٍ عَرْضُهَا السَّمَاوَاتُ وَالْأَرْضُ أُعِدَّتْ لِلْمُتَّقِينَ 

الَّذِينَ يُنفِقُونَ فِي السَّرَّاءِ وَالضَّرَّاءِ وَالْكَاظِمِينَ الْغَيْظَ وَالْعَافِينَ عَنِ النَّاسِ ۗ وَاللَّهُ يُحِبُّ الْمُحْسِنِينَ ‎

Hurry towards your Lord’s forgiveness and a Garden as wide as the heavens and earth prepared for the righteous, who give, both in prosperity and adversity, who restrain their anger and pardon people– God loves those who do good. (Al Quran 3:133-134)

Presented by Claude for Zia H Shah MD

Abstract

This essay examines one of the most beloved moral narratives in the Islamic tradition: the moment in which Ali ibn Abi Talib, cousin and son-in-law of the Prophet Muhammad, having overpowered a formidable adversary in single combat, was spat upon in the face — and, rather than deliver the killing blow, sheathed his sword and withdrew. Working principally from Jalaluddin Rumi’s rendering in the Mathnawi (Book I, verses 3721 onward), and reading it alongside the historical accounts of the Battle of the Trench (Khandaq, 627 CE), Quranic anchors, and the ethical vocabulary of the wider tradition, the essay argues that the incident’s enduring power lies not in its documentary status but in its illumination of ikhlas (sincerity of intention) and jihad al-nafs (the struggle against the ego). It treats the story in three movements — the encounter, Ali’s explanation, and the transformation of the foe — while honestly distinguishing the historical duel preserved in early sira literature from Rumi’s didactic retelling. The essay is offered in a non-sectarian, interfaith register, tracing resonances with other traditions of righteous restraint while framing them as harmonies rather than polemics. Its thesis is simple: the greatest victory is the one won over oneself, and sincerity purifies even the battlefield.

I. The Encounter and the Reaction

There are stories a civilization tells about itself so often that they cease to be mere anecdotes and become mirrors. Among the peoples touched by Islam — Arab and Persian, Turkish and South Asian, Sunni and Shia, and the many seekers beyond the faith who have found their way to Rumi — one such mirror is the tale of the Lion of God and the man who spat in his face.

The scene is a battlefield in the earliest years of the Muslim community, when a small and vulnerable band stood against forces determined to extinguish it. In the historical setting of the Battle of the Trench, the disparity was stark: the besieging confederate armies are estimated to have numbered around 10,000 men, including some six hundred horsemen, against roughly 3,000 defenders of Medina. Two champions meet in the ritual of single combat that framed the wars of that age. One of them is Ali ibn Abi Talib, whom tradition remembers as the bravest of warriors, so renowned that the Prophet is said to have entrusted him with his own sword. The other is a seasoned fighter, a mountain of a man — in the historical accounts of the Battle of the Trench, none other than Amr ibn Abd Wudd, a warrior so celebrated that, as the historians Shibli Nomani and Abbas Mahmud al-Aqqad record, the Arabs of the time reckoned him “more than a match for one thousand cavaliers,” honoring him with the title Faris Yalil, the Champion of Yalil.

The duel is fierce. Dust rises until the onlookers can no longer see the combatants; they can only hear the ring of blows. Then the dust settles, and the outcome is clear: Ali has thrown the giant to the ground and now kneels upon his chest, sword raised for the final stroke. The whole meaning of the battle seems compressed into that single suspended instant — the blade at its zenith, the defeated man beneath it, the watching armies holding their breath. The Muslim Vibe + 3

And then the defeated warrior, in his last extremity, does the only thing left to a man who has lost everything but his defiance: he gathers the spittle in his mouth and spits into Ali’s face.

Rumi lingers, almost in disbelief, on the sheer affront of it. He spat, the poet marvels, upon a face before which the very moon bows low in prostration — the face that is, in Rumi’s phrase, “the pride of every prophet and every saint.” Here is the insult at its most naked: not a blow, which belongs to the honest grammar of war, but contempt, humiliation, the deliberate defilement of the sacred. dar-al-masnavi

What happens next is the still center of the whole story. As Omid Safi renders the moment, “Ali calmly got up from the defeated warrior’s chest, put his sword back in his sheath, and walked away.” He does not strike. He rises. He returns his sword to its sheath. And he walks away from the man he had every right, in that moment, to kill.

The defeated warrior is astonished — and his astonishment is the reader’s. Rumi renders his bewilderment as a cascade of questions: You raised your sharp sword against me — why did you cast it aside and let me go? What did you see that was better than killing me? What did you see that made your lightning-flash of rage leap up and then jump back? The mercy is so far outside the logic of the battlefield that it reads, to the man who has just received it, as a kind of miracle demanding explanation. dar-al-masnavi

II. Hazrat Ali’s Explanation

Ali’s answer is the moral heart of the narrative, and Rumi gives it as one of the great speeches of Sufi literature. Its logic is deceptively simple and spiritually vertiginous.

Everything I did until this moment, Ali explains, I did for God. “I strike with the sword for the sake of God; I am the servant of God, not commanded by the body.” He was fighting not for himself — not for his name, his honor, his wounded pride — but as an instrument of a cause larger than himself, in defense of a community and a faith. In that condition his sword was not his own; it was, in the Quranic image Rumi invokes, like the hand at Badr of which God said, “You did not throw when you threw” (Q 8:17, wa-mā ramayta idh ramayta): the human agent moved by a will beyond the self. As Ali puts it in Rumi’s telling, “I am the Lion of God, not the lion of passion — my deeds bear witness to my religion.” dar-al-masnavidar-al-masnavi

But when the man spat, something changed. The insult was personal, and it stung. It kindled in Ali the ordinary human surge of anger, the assertion of the wounded ego — the nafs, in the tradition’s vocabulary, the lower self that clamors to be avenged. And Ali understood, in that lightning instant of self-knowledge, that if he now brought the sword down, the blow would no longer be purely for God. It would be, at least in part, for himself — the discharge of his own rage, the settling of a personal score. The spit had, as one retelling beautifully puts it, “raised an issue that did not directly involve God.” Maiale + 2

So he sheathed the sword. Better to spare an enemy than to let the blade of a holy struggle become the instrument of private vengeance. “Since a motive other than God entered my heart in the battle,” Ali says in Rumi’s lines, “I deemed it right to sheathe the sword.” His restraint was not weakness or squeamishness; it was the fiercest possible discipline. “The sword of my forbearance,” he declares, “has struck the neck of my anger.” He will not be a reed bent by every passing wind of rage and craving; he is a mountain, whose only motion is the remembrance of God. dar-al-masnavi + 3

This is the disposition the tradition names ikhlas — sincerity, purity of intention, the offering of an act to God alone with no admixture of self. Reynold Nicholson, the great English translator of the Mathnawi, noted in his commentary that the story “illustrates the meaning of ikhlás [= sincerity], i.e. pure disinterestedness and entire devotion to God.” It is the same disposition the Quran praises in those who feed the poor and say, in effect, that they seek no return: “We feed you only for the sake of God; we desire from you neither reward nor thanks” (Q 76:9, innamā nuṭʿimukum li-wajhi’Llāh lā nurīdu minkum jazāʾan wa-lā shukūrā). And it is the very definition of true religion in Surah al-Bayyinah: that human beings were commanded only “to worship God, sincere to Him in devotion” (Q 98:5, mukhliṣīna lahu al-dīn). Ali’s sheathed sword is that verse made flesh on a battlefield: an act so scrupulously purified that he would rather abandon it than let it be contaminated by the self.

Here the narrative touches what later Islamic spirituality calls the greater jihad. A famous tradition — which hadith masters such as Ibn Taymiyyah judged to be without sound chain of transmission — has the Prophet tell returning fighters, “We have come back from the lesser jihad to the greater jihad,” the striving against the self. Whatever the status of its transmission, the sentiment is firmly anchored in unimpeachable material: the Prophet taught, in a sound hadith recorded by al-Bukhari (no. 6114) and Muslim (no. 2609), that “the strong man is not the one who overcomes people by his strength, but the one who controls himself in a fit of rage” (laysa al-shadīdu bi’l-ṣurʿati, innamā al-shadīdu alladhī yamliku nafsahu ʿinda al-ghaḍab). Ali on the chest of his enemy, sword raised, is the living commentary on that hadith. He had already won the lesser jihad — the man was beneath him, beaten. The greater jihad was the one he fought in the half-second after the spit: the conquest not of the enemy but of his own inflamed heart. That is the victory the story asks us to admire. The Quran holds the same interior triumph before us when it praises “those who restrain their anger and pardon people” (Q 3:134, al-kāẓimīna al-ghayẓa wa’l-ʿāfīna ʿani’l-nās) — the root kaẓama evoking the sealing of a brimful waterskin so that nothing spills, a vivid image of rage contained rather than merely absent.

III. The Outcome

The tale does not end with the withdrawal. In Rumi’s telling, the defeated warrior is not merely spared; he is transformed. Confronted with a mercy so far beyond the calculus of victory and revenge, he is moved to the depths. The forbearance that stayed the sword accomplishes what the sword itself never could: it breaks open his heart.

Nicholson catches the paradox precisely in his commentary: it is God’s way, he writes, “to kill without sword” — to slay not the body but the unbelief within it, and to bestow spiritual life. “The forbearance and generosity of Ali,” he continues, “had killed the unbelief of his foe and opened his heart to knowledge and love of God.” The man who came to the field an enemy is disarmed not by force but by integrity, and in the versions treasured across the tradition he embraces the faith of the very man who declined to kill him. Ali’s own sword had made him living, not dead — exactly as Rumi has Ali say of himself: “I make men living, not killed.” dar-al-masnavi + 2

There is a further, tender turn in Rumi’s handling, drawn out by the contemporary scholar Omid Safi of Duke University: at the climax of their exchange Ali addresses his fallen foe as though speaking to himself — “I am you and you are I” — seeing his own humanity reflected in the man beneath him. The one who was enemy has become, in the space of a sheathed sword, a brother. Nothing could more perfectly enact the Quranic promise that lies quietly behind the whole story: “Repel evil with what is better, and behold, the one between whom and you there was enmity becomes as though he were a devoted friend” (Q 41:34, idfaʿ bi’llatī hiya aḥsan fa-idhā alladhī baynaka wa-baynahu ʿadāwatun ka-annahu waliyyun ḥamīm). The verse does not merely counsel patience; it describes an alchemy. Enmity, met with something better than itself, is transmuted into friendship. Ali’s mercy is that alchemy performed in the most unlikely laboratory imaginable — the dust of a duel, with the loser’s spittle still on the victor’s face.

IV. History and Meaning: A Note on Sources

Honesty requires that we distinguish what the tradition remembers as history from what it treasures as parable, for the two are not identical here, and the distinction enriches rather than diminishes the story.

The duel itself is firmly historical. The confrontation between Ali and Amr ibn Abd Wudd at the Battle of the Trench (al-Khandaq, also called al-Ahzab, “the Confederates”), fought in defense of Medina in Shawwal 5 AH / 627 CE — the siege beginning at the end of March that year, around a trench dug on the advice of the Persian companion Salman al-Farsi — is recorded in the earliest layers of Islamic historical writing: in the sira of Ibn Ishaq as transmitted by Ibn Hisham, and in the histories of al-Tabari and later chroniclers. In these accounts Amr, a celebrated champion, leaps the defensive trench, mocks the Muslims, and is answered by Ali, who slays him; his death breaks the spirit of the assault. So central was the moment that a tradition cherished in devotional literature — reported, for instance, by al-Majlisi in Hayat al-Qulub — has the Prophet declare that “each blow of Ali on the day of the Battle of Khandaq is better than all the worship of jinn and men until the Day of Judgment.” Al-Islam

The spitting-and-sparing episode, however, is a different matter. It does not appear in the earliest sira and maghazi accounts of the duel. Its earliest identifiable attestation seems to be the twelfth-century Manaqib Al Abi Talib of the Shia scholar Ibn Shahr Ashub (d. 588/1192), a work devoted to the virtues of the Prophet’s family — and even there, as later scholars note, some regarded the report skeptically. The eminent modern Rumi scholar Badiʿ al-Zaman Foruzanfar, who devoted a study to tracing the sources of the Mathnawi’s tales, concluded that this story as Rumi tells it could not be located in the earlier corpus. Where the incident is told in a more historicizing key, it takes a form different from Rumi’s: Ali pauses, walks away until his anger has subsided, and then returns to complete the fight and slay Amr — so that the act is done for God and not in wrath. In Rumi’s telling, by contrast, the warrior lives and is converted. The military historian Joel Hayward, citing exactly this Khandaq tradition in Warfare in the Qur’an (2012), notes the version in which Ali “immediately released him and walked away. He then rejoined battle and managed to slay his enemy,” and adds the candid scholarly caveat that “even if the verity of this story is impossible to demonstrate (it is first found in a thirteenth-century Persian Sufi poem), its survival and popularity attest to the perceived importance within Islam of acting justly at all times.” WikishiaWikipedia

That caveat is exactly the right posture. Rumi was not composing a chronicle; he was composing what Encyclopaedia Iranica calls his “didactic epic,” the Mathnawi, whose purpose is to take the raw materials of story and refine from them the gold of spiritual meaning. Whether the enemy died a moment later or lived to believe, the lesson Rumi draws is identical and is the one the whole tradition has kept: that Ali’s greatness lay in the perfect sincerity that would rather sheathe a righteous sword than let it serve the self. The story functions, in other words, the way parables function in every religious tradition — its truth is moral and spiritual, and it does not stand or fall on the forensic question of what a bystander’s camera would have recorded. To read it well is to receive it as the tradition offers it: as an icon of ikhlas. It is worth noting, too, that the tale is beloved right across the community’s internal boundaries — recounted by the Sufi Rumi, preserved in Shia manaqib literature, and retold from the pulpit in modern times, as in the 2020 Friday sermon of the Ahmadiyya Khalifa Mirza Masroor Ahmad — a story that belongs to no single faction but to the moral heritage of Islam as a whole, and beyond it.

V. Resonances Across the Traditions

Because the story speaks to something universal in the moral imagination, it naturally rhymes with the wisdom of other traditions, and it is worth hearing those harmonies — as harmonies, not as arguments.

Readers formed by the Gospels will think of the Sermon on the Mount, of the counsel to “turn the other cheek” and to love one’s enemies. There are real differences: Ali is a warrior in a just defense, not a pacifist, and the Islamic tradition characteristically balances mercy toward personal injury with the duty to resist injustice done to others. Yet the deep structure resonates: the refusal to let insult dictate one’s response, the preference for suffering a wrong over feeding the spiral of vengeance, the conviction that the truly strong person is the one who does not need to strike back. The virtue the Arabs called hilm — forbearance, composure, the mastery of one’s own temper, a quality prized even before Islam and then, as the tradition holds, re-founded by the Prophet upon devotion to God — names the same terrain that the Stoics mapped as self-command and that many contemplative traditions know as the sovereignty of the recollected soul over its own passions. As the scholar Reza Shah-Kazemi observes, hilm gathers into a single word “forbearance, wisdom, patience, composure, self-mastery… kindness, mildness and gentleness,” and it flows from one of God’s own names, al-Halim, the Forbearing.

What all these share, and what Ali’s sheathed sword dramatizes with unforgettable economy, is the intuition that the decisive battlefield is interior. The elephant is stronger than the man; brute power cannot be the measure of a human being. The measure is what a person does in the instant when power and provocation meet — whether the self is master of its anger or its slave. onbeing

Epilogue: The Victory Over the Self

Return, at the end, to that suspended instant: the blade at its height, the beaten man below, the spittle on the hero’s cheek, the armies watching. Every logic of the world says the sword should fall. And it does not. It is lifted, turned, and slid back into its sheath, and a man walks away from the killing he had earned — because to strike now would be to strike for himself, and he will strike only for God.

The tradition has held this image close for eight centuries not because it settles a historical question but because it answers a human one. It tells us that sincerity is so precious that a saint would forfeit a victory rather than adulterate it; that the ego’s rage, however righteous it feels, can counterfeit the voice of God and must be examined before it is obeyed; that the strongest thing a person can do is stop. And it tells us, in the converted enemy, that mercy has a power that force does not: it can reach into a heart the sword can only reach into a body, and there work a transformation that no conquest could compel.

The greatest jihad, the tradition teaches, is the one waged against the self — and its supreme trophy is not the defeated foe but the mastered heart. Ali’s sword, drawn for God, was sheathed for God, and in that sheathing conquered more completely than any blow. When we are wronged, insulted, and inflamed — and we all are — the question the story presses upon us is quiet and exact: for whose sake is the sword in our hand? To answer it honestly, and to sheathe the blade when the answer is “for myself,” is to win the only victory that finally matters. Sincerity, it turns out, purifies even the battlefield.

References

• Jalaluddin Rumi, Mathnawi, Book I: 3721–3809. Ibrahim Gamard translation with R. A. Nicholson’s commentary. Dar al-Masnavi (dar-al-masnavi.org/n-I-3721.html).
• R. A. Nicholson, trans. and comm., The Mathnawí of Jalálu’ddín Rúmí (1926), Book I.
• Omid Safi, “Sheath Your Sword: The Man Who Spat on Saint Ali,” On Being (March 26, 2015).
• Omid Safi, Radical Love: Teachings from the Islamic Mystical Tradition (Yale University Press, 2018).
• Azfar Rizvi, “Learning Jihad bin Nafs and Self Control from the Battle of the Trench,” The Muslim Vibe (October 12, 2020).
• “Spitting at Hazrat Ali — Daftar-e-Awwal,” Sufinama (Rumi Hikayaat 16).
• Hazrat Mirza Masroor Ahmad, “Men of Excellence: Hazrat Ali (ra),” Friday Sermon, December 11, 2020 (alislam.org).
• “Prophet Muhammad ﷺ as a Military General,” Makkah Masjid publication (makkahmosque.co.uk).
• Joel Hayward, “The Qur’an and War: Observations on Islamic Just War,” Air Power Review 13/3 (2010) / Warfare in the Qur’an (RISSC / MABDA English Monograph Series, no. 14, 2012).
• Ibn Shahr Ashub, Manaqib Al Abi Talib (12th c.); Badiʿ al-Zaman Foruzanfar, Maʾakhidh-e Qesas va Tamthilat-e Mathnawi.
• Ibn Hisham, Al-Sira al-Nabawiyya; al-Tabari, Tarikh al-Rusul wa’l-Muluk; al-Majlisi, Hayat al-Qulub, vol. 2 — accounts of the Battle of Khandaq.
• Reza Shah-Kazemi, The Spirit of Tolerance in Islam (on hilm).
• Encyclopaedia Iranica, “Rumi, Jalal-al-Din viii. Rumi’s Teachings.”
• Quran 3:134; 8:17; 41:34; 76:9; 98:5.
• Sahih al-Bukhari 6114; Sahih Muslim 2609 (hadith on self-control).