by Reza Aslan
As we shall see, the Ulama would eventually fashion a comprehensive code of conduct meant to regulate every aspect of the believer’s life. And while it would be a mistake to consider these religious clerics and scholastic theologians as constituting a single, monolithic tradition, the power of the Ulama and their influence in shaping the faith and practice of Islam cannot be overstated. Caliphs will come and go, and the Caliphate as a civil institution will rise and fall in strength, but the authority of the Ulama and the power of their religious institutions will only increase with time.
ABU BAKR WAS, in many ways, the perfect choice to succeed Muhammad. Nicknamed as-Siddiq, “the faithful one,” he was a deeply pious and respected man, one of the first converts to Islam and Muhammad’s dearest friend. The fact that he had taken over the Friday prayers during Muhammad’s lengthy illness was, in the minds of many, proof that the Prophet would have blessed his succession.
As Caliph, Abu Bakr united the community under a single banner and initiated a time of military triumph and social concord that would become known in the Muslim world as the Golden Era of Islam. It was Abu Bakr and his immediate successors—the first four Caliphs who are collectively referred to as the Rashidun, the “Rightly Guided Ones”—who tended the seed Muhammad had planted in the Hijaz until it sprouted into a dominant and far-reaching empire. While the Ummah expanded into North Africa, the Indian subcontinent, and large swaths of Europe, the Rightly Guided Ones strove to keep the community rooted in the principles of Muhammad—the struggle for justice, the equality of all believers, care for the poor and marginalized—yet civil strife and the incessant power struggles of the early Companions ultimately split the community into competing factions and turned the Caliphate into that form of government most reviled by the ancient Arabs: absolute monarchy.
As with most sacred histories, however, the truth about the era of the Rightly Guided Ones is far more complicated than the traditions suggest. Indeed, the so-called Golden Era of Islam was anything but a time of religious concord and political harmony. From the moment Muhammad died, there arose dozens of conflicting ideas about everything from how to interpret the Prophet’s words and deeds to who should do the interpreting, from whom to choose as leader of the community to how the community should be led. It was even unclear who could and could not be considered a member of the Ummah, or, for that matter, what one had to do to be saved.
Again, as is the case with all great religions, it was precisely the arguments, the discord, and the sometimes bloody conflicts that resulted from trying to discern God’s will in the absence of God’s prophet that gave birth to the varied and wonderfully diverse institutions of the Muslim faith. In fact, just as it may be more appropriate to refer to the movements that succeeded Jesus’ death—from Peter’s messianic Judaism to Paul’s Hellenic religion of salvation to the Gnosticism of the Egyptians and the more mystical movements of the East—as “Christianities,” so it may be more appropriate to refer to what followed Muhammad’s death as “Islams,” clumsy as that sounds. Of course, early Islam was not nearly as doctrinally divided as early Christianity. But it is nevertheless important to recognize both the political and (as will be discussed in the following chapter) the religious divisions within the early Muslim community that were so instrumental in defining and developing the faith.
To begin with, the selection of Abu Bakr as Caliph was by no means unanimous. By all accounts, only a handful of the most prominent Companions were present at the shura. The only other serious contender for the leadership of the Muslim community had not even been informed of the meeting until it was over. At the same time that Abu Bakr was accepting the oath of allegiance, or bay’ah, Ali was washing the Prophet’s body, preparing him for burial. Muhammad’s clan, the Banu Hashim, fumed, claiming that without Ali, the shura was not representative of the entire Ummah. Likewise, the Ansar from Medina, who considered both Ali and Muhammad to be as much Medinan as Meccan—in other words, “one of their own”—complained bitterly about Ali’s exclusion. Both groups publicly refused to swear allegiance to the new Caliph.
Many in the Muslim leadership—especially Abu Bakr and Umar—justified Ali’s exclusion on the grounds that he was too young to lead the Ummah, or that his succession would appear too much like hereditary kingship (mulk): arguments that Muslim scholars and historians are still repeating to this day. In the first volume of his Islamic History, M. A. Shaban claims that Ali was never really a serious candidate for the first Caliphate because of the reluctance of the Arabs to entrust “young and untried men with great responsibility.” Henri Lammens concurs, citing the Arabs’ abhorrence of hereditary leadership to suggest that Ali could not legitimately have succeeded Muhammad. As a result, most scholars agree with Montgomery Watt that Abu Bakr was “the obvious [and only] choice for successor.”
But these are unsatisfying arguments. First of all, Ali may have been young—he was thirty years old at Muhammad’s death—but he was by no means “untried.” As the first male convert and one of Islam’s greatest warriors, Ali was widely recognized for both his spiritual maturity and his military prowess. In Medina, Ali acted as Muhammad’s personal secretary and was his standard-bearer in a number of important battles. He was regularly placed in charge of the Ummah in Muhammad’s absence and, as Moojan Momen observes, was the only individual free to come and go as he pleased in the Prophet’s house. And no one in the community would have forgotten that only Ali was allowed to assist the Prophet in cleansing the Ka‘ba for God.
The proof of Ali’s qualifications, despite his age, rests in the fact that it was not only the Banu Hashim who pushed for his succession as Caliph. The Prophet’s cousin and son-in-law was supported by the majority of the Ansar from both the Aws and the Khazraj (one of the few things about which the two feuding tribes agreed); the Abd Shams and the Abd Manaf, two powerful and influential clans of Quraysh; and a significant number of prominent Companions.
Secondly, as Wilferd Madelung remarks in his indispensable book The Succession to Muhammad, hereditary succession may have been repugnant to the Bedouin Arabs, but it was hardly uncommon among the aristocratic Quraysh. In fact, the Quraysh regularly chose members of their own families to succeed them in positions of authority because, as mentioned, it was a common belief that noble qualities were passed through the blood from one generation to the next. The Quran itself repeatedly affirms the importance of blood relations (2:177, 215), and endows Muhammad’s family—the ahl al-bayt—with an eminent position in the Ummah, somewhat akin to that enjoyed by the families of the other prophets.
This is a vital point to bear in mind. Regardless of their opinions regarding Ali’s qualifications, no Muslim could argue with the fact that a great many of the prophets and patriarchs of the Bible were succeeded by their kin: Abraham to Isaac and Ismail; Isaac to Jacob; Moses to Aaron; David to Solomon; and so on. Faced with this fact, opponents of the Banu Hashim claimed that, as the Seal of the Prophets, Muhammad could have no heir. But considering that the Quran goes to such great lengths to emphasize the congruence between Muhammad and his prophetic predecessors, and recognizing the numerous traditions that parallel Ali’s relationship to Muhammad with Aaron’s relationship to Moses, one would be hard pressed to ignore Ali’s candidacy simply on the grounds that it violated the Arabs’ distaste for hereditary leadership.
The truth is that Ali’s deliberate exclusion from the shura that resulted in the selection of Abu Bakr was a result neither of his age nor of the Arab aversion for hereditary leadership. Ali was excluded because of a growing fear among the larger and wealthier clans of the Quraysh that allowing both prophethood and the Caliphate to rest in the hands of a single clan—especially the Banu Hashim—would too greatly alter the balance of power in the Ummah. Furthermore, there seemed to be some anxiety among certain members of the community, most notably Abu Bakr and Umar, that maintaining a prolonged hereditary leadership within Muhammad’s clan would blur the distinction between the religious authority of the Prop
het and the secular authority of the Caliph.
Whatever the justifications, Ali’s proponents would not be silenced; so it was left to Umar to silence them himself. Having literally beaten the leader of the Ansar, Sa‘d ibn Ubayda, into submission, Umar went to the house of Fatima, Ali’s wife and Muhammad’s daughter, and threatened to burn it down unless she and the rest of the Banu Hashim accepted the will of the shura. Fortunately, Abu Bakr restrained him at the last moment, but the message was clear: the Ummah was too unstable, and the political situation in Arabia too volatile, for this kind of open dissent to be tolerated. Ali agreed. For the sake of the community, he and his entire family surrendered their claim to leadership and solemnly swore allegiance to Abu Bakr, though it took another six months of cajoling for them to do so.
* * *
As turbulent as the succession to Muhammad may have been, there is one detail that should not be lost in the tumult and confusion that led to Abu Bakr’s Caliphate. Implicit in the conflict over who should lead the Ummah was the unanimous conviction among all Muslims that some kind of popular sanction was required to approve the candidate. Certainly this was not a democratic process; Abu Bakr was appointed through the consultation of a select group of elders, not elected by the Ummah. But the great effort that the Companions went through to achieve some semblance of unanimity is proof that Abu Bakr’s appointment would have been meaningless without the consensus of the entire community. Thus, upon becoming Caliph, Abu Bakr stood before the Ummah and humbly proclaimed, “Behold me, charged with the cares of the government. I am not the best among you. I need all your advice and help. If I do well, support me; if I make a mistake, counsel me.… As long as I obey God and the Prophet, obey me; if I neglect the laws of God and the Prophet, I have no right to your obedience.”
From our privileged position, the succession to Muhammad may seem a chaotic affair full of intimidation and disorder: a rigged process, to say the least. But it was a process, nonetheless; and from the Nile to the Oxus and beyond, nowhere else had such an experiment in popular sovereignty even been imagined, let alone attempted.
ABU BAKR’S WAS a short but highly successful reign—only two and a half years. His principal achievement as Caliph was his military campaigns against the “false prophets” and those tribes who had ceased paying the tithe tax because, in true tribal fashion, they considered their oath of allegiance to have been made to Muhammad, the “Shaykh” of the Ummah. Consequently, these tribes assumed that Muhammad’s death had annulled their pledge, meaning they no longer had to pay taxes to his “tribe.” Recognizing that the defection of these tribes would greatly weaken the political stability of the Ummah and economically devastate the small Muslim régime in Medina, Abu Bakr sent his armies to deal ruthlessly with the rebels. The Riddah Wars, as these campaigns came to be known, sent a powerful message to the Arab tribes that their pledge had been made not to any mortal Shaykh but to the immortal community of God, making its retraction both an act of treason against the Ummah and a sin against God.
The Riddah Wars represented Abu Bakr’s conscious effort to maintain the unity of the Arabs under the eternal banner of Islam and the centralized authority of Medina, and thus to prevent Muhammad’s community from dissolving back into the old tribal system. But these must not be mistaken for religious wars; the campaigns were intended to reinforce the purely political interests of Medina. Still, the Riddah Wars did have the regrettable consequence of permanently associating apostasy (denying one’s faith) with treason (denying the central authority of the Caliph).
Because religious affiliation and citizenship were nearly identical terms in seventh-century Arabia, so therefore were apostasy and treason considered one and the same. However, the relationship between the two has endured in Islam, so that even today there are some Muslims who continue to make the unsubstantiated and un-Quranic assertion that the two sins—apostasy and treason—deserve the same punishment: death. It is this belief that has given the Ulama in some Muslim countries the authority to impose capital punishment on apostates, by whom they mean anyone who disagrees with their particular interpretation of Islam. This despite the fact that nowhere in the whole of the Quran is any earthly punishment proscribed for apostasy (such punishment, the Quran repeatedly insists, is reserved for God alone in the afterlife: 3:86–87; 4:137; 5:54; 16:106; 47:25–28; 73:11).
Abu Bakr is remembered for one other decision that he made as Caliph. Claiming once to have heard Muhammad say “We [the Prophets] do not have heirs. Whatever we leave is alms,” the Caliph disinherited Ali and Fatima from Muhammad’s property. Henceforth, the family of the Prophet was to be fed and clothed only through alms provided by the community. Given that there were no other witnesses to Muhammad’s statement, this was a remarkable decision. But what makes the decision even more problematic is that Abu Bakr generously provided for Muhammad’s wives by giving them the Prophet’s house as a bequest. He even gave his own daughter, Aisha, some of Muhammad’s former property in Medina.
Abu Bakr’s actions are often interpreted as an attempt to enfeeble the Banu Hashim and strip the ahl al-bayt of their privileged status as Muhammad’s kin. But it also seems likely that in both providing for Muhammad’s wives and ensuring that their purity would remain inviolate, Abu Bakr was signaling to the community that it was Aisha and the rest of the “Mothers of the Faithful” who were truly the heirs of the Prophet.
Ali was stunned by Abu Bakr’s decision, but he accepted his fate without argument. Fatima, on the other hand, was inconsolable. In the span of a few months she had lost her father, her inheritance, and her livelihood. She never spoke to Abu Bakr again, and when she died a short time later, Ali quietly buried her at night without bothering to inform the Caliph.
Scholars have long argued that there must have been some other motivation behind Abu Bakr’s decision to disinherit Ali and strip Muhammad’s clan of power. Indeed, throughout his short Caliphate, Abu Bakr seemed to do everything in his power to prevent Ali from ever attaining a position of authority in the Ummah, mostly because of his conviction that prophethood and Caliphate—that is, religious and secular authority—should not rest in a single clan, lest the two become indistinguishable. But to say that there was no personal animosity between Abu Bakr and Ali would be a lie. Even while Muhammad was alive, there was a great deal of friction between the two men, as evidenced by the infamous “affair of the necklace.”
As the story goes, on the way home from a raid against the Banu al-Mustaliq, Aisha—who nearly always followed Muhammad regardless of whether he was going into battle or negotiating a treaty—was accidentally left behind at one of the campsites. She had slipped away to relieve herself, and in so doing she lost a necklace Muhammad had given her. While she searched for it, the caravan departed, assuming she was still in her litter; no one noticed her absence until the following morning. While the men scrambled about frantically, trying to figure out what to do about having lost Muhammad’s beloved wife, a camel suddenly entered the camp carrying Aisha and a handsome young Arab (and childhood friend of hers) named Safwan ibn al-Mu’attal.
Safwan had stumbled upon Aisha in the desert and, despite her veil (the verse of the hijab had recently been revealed), he recognized her at once. “What has caused you to stay behind?” he asked.
Aisha did not answer; she would not violate her hijab.
Safwan understood her predicament but was not about to leave Muhammad’s wife in the desert. He rode up to her and extended his hand. “Mount!” he said. “May God have mercy on you.” Aisha hesitated for a moment, then mounted the camel. The two raced to catch up with the caravan, but did not make it to the next campsite until morning.
The sight of Muhammad’s veiled wife clinging to Safwan atop the camel launched a wave of rumors throughout Medina. When the story first reached Muhammad, he reacted with uncertainty. He did not believe that anything had happened between Aisha and Safwan, but the scandal was starting to become disruptive. Already his enemies had produced some
deliciously lewd verses about the event. As the days passed, he grew cold and distant toward his wife. When he asked her to repent to God so that the matter could be settled and forgiven, Aisha flew into a rage. “By God,” she said, “I will never repent to God of that which you have spoken of.” Offended and unapologetic, she stormed out of Muhammad’s house and moved back in with her mother.
The absence of his beloved devastated Muhammad. One day he stood among the people and, clearly distraught, asked, “Why are some men hurting me regarding my family and saying falsehoods about them?”
Although most of his advisers were convinced of her guilt, they clambered over one another to praise Aisha’s chastity. “We know nothing but good about [your wives],” they declared. Only Ali remained adamant that regardless of Aisha’s guilt or innocence, the scandal was damaging enough to Muhammad’s reputation to merit divorce. As one can imagine, this advice infuriated Aisha’s father, Abu Bakr.
Eventually, Muhammad received a Revelation clearing Aisha of the adultery charges. Overjoyed, he rushed to his wife, crying, “Rejoice, Aisha! God has revealed your innocence.”