Ali Left in Charge of the Prophet's Household

Shaykh Yasir Qadhi explains:

❧Two responsibilities in Medina

The expedition would keep the army away more than a month, close to two, so the Prophet ﷺ divided the trust. Muḥammad ibn Maslamah was put in charge of the affairs of the city. ʿAlī ibn Abī Ṭālib was told to remain over the Prophet's ﷺ own household, the Mothers of the Believers, since as his son-in-law he was the one to attend to their needs while the army was away.

❧The taunt, and the pursuit

The hypocrites turned that trust into a weapon and began mocking ʿAlī: that he was a burden, unfit to fight, and that the Prophet ﷺ had merely invented an excuse to be rid of him. ʿAlī, young, and known for exactly the courage they denied him, was cut by it. He put on his armour, took his sword, and caught up with the army outside the city: "Yā RasūlAllāh, are you leaving me with the women and children, while the hypocrites say you left me only because I am not fit for the battlefield?"

The shaykh pauses on the inversion: the people of īmān are weeping to be allowed to go, and the men mocking them are the very ones staying behind on false excuses. That, he says, is the way of the hypocrites to this day, they accuse others of the crime they are themselves guilty of.

❧"Like Hārūn to Mūsā"

The Prophet ﷺ consoled him: "Are you not content that you are to me as Hārūn was to Mūsā, except that there is no prophet after me?" And: "They have lied; I have left you only to be over those I have left behind", that is, over his family.

❧How the shaykh reads it

This is among the main proofs the Shīʿah advance that ʿAlī was designated as khalīfah, and it is in our own authentic Sunnī collections. The shaykh answers that we affirm every virtue for ʿAlī, this one included, and that Sunnī and Shīʿah alike affirm he is of the Ahl al-Bayt, and who else would you leave over the Ahl al-Bayt, a stranger? But the setting itself tells against the reading: ʿAlī was not left in charge of the city at all; Muḥammad ibn Maslamah was. And the Prophet ﷺ states his own reason plainly, "to be over those I have left behind," his family. The likeness to Hārūn is a likeness of closeness, not of political authority: Mūsā and Hārūn were brothers, and the point is that we two are as close as they were. That is a great faḍīlah for ʿAlī, and it is not a designation of succession, and there are many evidences, to be taken in their place, of the Prophet ﷺ indicating Abū Bakr as the one to come after him.