Note 573 — Chapter XLVI · HASAN SUCCEEDS ALY.—ABDICATES IN FAVOUR OF MUAVIA. A.H. XL., XLI. A.D. 661.
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The received date of Hasan’s resignation, as in the text, would make his reign last five and a half months. Others place it in Rabî II., and some even in Jumâd I., which would make the reign one or two months longer.
His offer to resign on specified terms was crossed by a messenger from Muâvia, with a blank sheet signed by Muâvia, who thus declared his readiness to concede any terms to Hasan if he abdicated. Thereupon Hasan doubled his claim; but Muâvia refused, saying that he had already specified his terms, and that they had been accepted. Darâbgird was the district of which Hasan was to receive the revenues; but the people of Bussorah claimed it as their own conquest, and would not give it up.
There is an Abbasside tradition, that one abused Hasan as he left Kûfa, saying that he had ‘blackened the faces of the Moslems;’ to which Hasan replied by quoting a dream in which Mahomet saw the descendants of Omeyya one after another ascending the steps of his pulpit; whereupon the Prophet was comforted by the revelation of Suras 97 and 108, regarding the Fountain of Al Cawthar and the Night of Power, which he is told are ‘better than a thousand months,’ that is, than the thousand months during which the Beni Omeyya would rule!
According to another tradition, Amru persuaded Muâvia to allow Hasan, after his own inaugural speech, to address the people. Hasan then began to speak of the wheel of fortune, and of the necessity of stopping the effusion of blood, and was going on to quote Sura xxi. v. 111, about the world being a trial, and the Lord helping the Prophet against his adversaries, when Muâvia made him sit down. He also told Amru he had made a mistake in proposing that Hasan should be allowed to speak.