Then Abū Bakr did not appoint his son Abd al-Rahmān, who was one of the Companions, as his successor. Nor did Umar appoint his son(1) to office during his lifetime or designate him as his successor after his death(2). He was among the most virtuous and finest of the Companions. Some people were willing to accept him as caliph(3), and he was qualified for it. Had Umar appointed him as his successor, no one would have opposed him, yet he did not(4) do so.

We find that when Alī assumed the caliphate, he appointed his relatives to office: Ibn Abbās(5) over Basra; Ubayd Allāh ibn Abbās over Yemen; Qutham and Ma'bad, the two sons of al-Abbās(6), over Mecca and Medina, respectively; Ja'da ibn Hubayra(7), the son of his sister Umm Hāni' bint Abī Tālib, over Khurāsān; and Muhammad ibn Abī Bakr, who was his stepson and his son’s brother, over Egypt.

He also approved the people’s pledge of allegiance to his son al-Hasan as caliph after him. We do not deny al-Hasan’s entitlement to the caliphate, nor Abd Allāh ibn Abbās’s entitlement to the caliphate—much less to the governorship of Basra. But we say: a man who declined to grant the caliphate to a son such as Abd Allāh ibn Umar or Abd al-Rahmān ibn Abī Bakr, even though the people were unanimously agreed(8) upon him, and who declined to appoint someone such as Talha ibn