Excerpts from Books and Wikipedia
"Cousin of Muhammad and husband of Fatimih, he is known by titles including the Commander of the Faithful, the Lion of God, and the Lord of Saintship. Saint and warrior, brilliant writer and administrator, he was killed at Kufa . . ." [Baha'I Glossary, p. 7] "Ali was its [chivalry's] beau-ideal--an impersonation of gallantry, of bravery, of generosity; pure, gentle, and learned, ''without fear and without reproach,' he set the world the noblest example of chivalrous grandeur of character." [Syed Ameer Ali: The Spirit of Islam, p. 254]." "The great tragedy of Islam is that three men, one after the other, took over the headship of the Faith for a period of twenty-four years, and that all this time the Imam 'Ali was forced to stand aside. He must have suffered untold agonies as He watched the irreparable damage being done, knowing all the time in His heart that He was the intended of God--the Imam, the one who stands before the people, the divinely ordained, divinely inspired." [Six Lessons on Islam, p. 29] "In that highly contested succession lie the origins of many of the major shapes and terms of Islam that are mostly unknown or puzzling to non-Muslims: Shiites and Sunnis, caliphs and emirs, Umayyads and Abbasids, all of these crucial internal divisions. . . . But Ali ruled a mere five years before his caliphate came to a bloody end with his assassination in 661." [Menocal: Ornament of the World, p. 18-9]