The Prophecy of Hasan and the Fifth Caliph

Shaykh Yasir Qadhi explains:

The Prophet's (ﷺ) affection for al-Ḥasan is recorded in multiple settings, famously interrupting a khuṭbah mid-sentence to rush down and pick him and his brother al-Ḥusayn up after they tripped over their long red garments and fell in the masjid, then carrying them both up to the minbar, citing Q 64:15 ("Innamā amwālukum wa awlādukum fitnah, your wealth and children are but a trial") as his justification for the interruption.

On a separate occasion, this time deliberate rather than spontaneous, the Prophet (ﷺ) held al-Ḥasan through an entire khuṭbah and declared, in a hadith recorded in Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī: "Inna ibnī hādhā sayyid, wa laʿalla Allāha an yuṣliḥa bihi bayna fiʾatayni ʿaẓīmatayni min al-muslimīn", this son of mine is a leader, and Allah may well use him to bring peace between two great factions of the Muslims. Dr. Qadhi notes the Prophet's (ﷺ) explicit use of the word "Muslim" for both sides of the future conflict, foundational to the Sunni position that both parties in the later civil war between ʿAlī and Muʿāwiyah were believers, one closer to the truth than the other (Sunni scholarship holds ʿAlī was closer to being correct), but neither side to be branded a disbeliever or open sinner for their position, a line the Muʿtazilah and other groups crossed by labeling one side fāsiq or worse.

The prophecy was fulfilled after ʿAlī's assassination by the Khawārij: the people of Madinah immediately gave al-Ḥasan the bayʿah as the fifth caliph, while Muʿāwiyah was separately given the bayʿah in Syria, the first instance of two rival caliphs in Islamic history. After roughly six months of tension and the threat of renewed war, Muʿāwiyah sent word proposing a peaceful settlement rather than further bloodshed among Muslims. Al-Ḥasan, in an emotional address to his own supporters in Madinah, gave them the choice between continued war or peace for the sake of the Ummah; his followers agreed to accept terms, and al-Ḥasan abdicated in Rabīʿ al-Awwal of 41 AH, leaving Muʿāwiyah undisputed caliph.

This settlement is widely understood to fulfill a hadith recorded in Musnad al-Imām Aḥmad: "Takūnu al-khilāfatu fīkum thalāthūna sanatan ʿalā minhāji al-nubuwwah", the caliphate will remain among you for thirty years upon the methodology of prophethood, after which will come a righteous kingship, then an unjust one, then eventually a return to a caliphate upon the methodology of prophethood. Calculated from the Prophet's (ﷺ) death, the thirty-year mark falls precisely at al-Ḥasan's abdication, down to the same month, Rabīʿ al-Awwal.

On this basis, the mainstream Sunni position, though not always widely known, holds that there were five, not four, Rightly-Guided Caliphs (al-Khulafāʾ al-Rāshidūn), with al-Ḥasan as the fifth despite his brief six-month tenure; his caliphate is regarded as rightly guided in a way the subsequent Umayyad dynasty, even at its best under Muʿāwiyah, is not considered to be. Al-Ḥasan and al-Ḥusayn are together described in a well-known hadith as "sayyidā shabābi ahl al-jannah wa abūhumā khayrun minhumā", the leaders of the youth of Jannah, though their father is better than them.