ABSTRACT
This is the name of a pond or pool (ghadir) in a place called Khumm, between Mecca and Medina. The place acquired its fame from an incident associated with Muhammad’s last year, when he was returning from the Farewell Pilgrimage on 18 Dhu
) l-Hijja, 10/16
March, 632. Some sources mention that the Prophet stopped there in the company of
( Ali and other prominent Com-
panions and uttered the following: ‘Of whomever I am the mawla (patron/ friend),
( Ali is his mawla too.’ A variant
report uses the word wali instead of mawla. Shi
( i sources are practically
unanimous in understanding this hadith as confirming
( Ali’s status as Muham-
mad’s first successor as the leader of the polity, construing mawla as referring to ‘master’ or ‘patron’. Those Sunni sources that record this event point rather to the polysemy of the lexeme mawla (and, by extension, of wali as well), whose meanings range from ‘master’ to ‘friend’ to ‘client’, thereby casting doubt on the hadith’s value as unambiguous prooftext attesting to
( Ali’s designation as the
caliph. Significantly, some major Sunni authorities and chroniclers such as Ibn Hisham and Ibn Sa
( d do not refer to this
event; among the compilers of major Sunni hadith works, al-Tirmidhi and Ibn Hanbal record it, but al-Bukhari and Muslim do not. Some Sunni sources have also questioned the ‘occasion of occurrence’ (sabab al-wurud) of this hadith, saying that the Prophet made this statement on a different occasion to express his support for
( Ali in response
to a complaint against the latter by either the Companion Zayd b. al-Haritha or Burayda al-Aslami, rather than at the time of the Farewell Pilgrimage. In the Buwayhid period, the Shi
( i feast
( ( Id) of Ghadir Khumm was instituted
in Iraq by Mu ( izz al-Dawla Ahmad b.
