The Rightly Guided Caliphs: ‛Ali

The ascension of ‛Alī ibn abī Tālib to the caliphate in 656 had much to do with the political manuevering among the clans and families of Mecca and Medina. The core Muslim elite had been that of Medina. But the Meccan elite had gained much greater influence, particularly under ‛Uthmān. The Medinan elite backed ‛Alī for the caliphate, hoping to capture more influence and appointments.

But, as Hans Küng says in Der Islam (2004), ‛Alī's selection had a "deadly problem" from the start. "He had already discredited himself in the eyes of many because, instead of arresting ‛Uthmān's murderers and punishing them, he allowed himself to be elected caliph with their support." As we saw in discussing ‛Uthmān, his administration had particularly favored the Umayyad family of Mecca. Now, the Umayyad governor of Syria, Mu‛āwiya ibn abī Sufyān, became the leader of those seeking blood vengeance against ‛Uthmān's killers.

The first Muslim civil war

‛Alī's caliphate (656-661) is almost synonymous with what is known as "the first Muslim civil war." In 656, ‛Alī achieved an important victory at the Battle of the Camel at Basra, a city that has become somewhat more familiar to Americans the last couple of years. The Prophet's most influential widow, ‛Ā'iša, the daughter of the first caliph Abū Bakr, was a prominent and important opponent of ‛Alī, perhaps in part because ‛Alī had been reluctant to recognize her father as the legitimate caliph. Küng observes, "She would remain for a long time the last Muslim woman who would be able to exert that kind of influence on public affairs."

After a stalemate at the battle of Siffīn in 657, Mu‛āwiya persuaded ‛Alī to accept an arbitration to determine whether ‛Alī had been selected caliph through an appropriate process of consulation among the leaders of the ummah (Muslim community). In 659, the arbitrators decided that ‛Alī's selection as caliph in 656 had been improper and ordered a new selection. Although Mu‛āwiya formally became caliph in 660, his authority was not fully recognized until after ‛Alī's death.

‛Alī was assassinated in 661 by a Khāriğite, one of a group of embittered former supporter of ‛Alī. Beginning a century after his death, the city of al-Najaf, where ‛Alī's grand shrine is located, became an important spiritual center for "the partisans of ‛Alī," the Shia Muslims, and remains so today. Another city whose name has recetnly become more familiar to Americans.

The first Muslim civil war, of which the legitimacy of ‛Alī's caliphate was the central issue, gave rise to three major division within the ummah.

The Khāriğites were furious that ‛Alī had agreed to allow a council to decide on the legitimacy of his caliphate. In their view, ‛Alī had thereby made the things of God - the legitimate successor to the Prophet as leader, in this case - subject to human whim. The Khāriğites argued that the central criteria for selecting a caliph should not depend on dynastic relationships, but rather the best Muslim shold be selected for caliph, no matter who that might be.

Küng notes that the Khāriğite trend, having long since lost most of its militant edge, persists today among the Berbers of North Africa, in Zanzibar and most of all in Oman. Perhaps 500,000 Muslims in the world today would fall into this category.

It is sometimes said that contemporary jihadists like Osama bin Laden are Khāriğites. But that description seems as vague as to have little real meaning. It looks more like yet another bad historical analogy that manages to mystify more than clarify. Whatever ripples of historical influence may extend from 7th-century Khāriğites to 21st-century global jihadist groups is far overshadowed by more proximate influences. Prominent among them would be the 20th-century Islamist thinkers Pakistani Maulana Sayyid Abul Ala Maududi and the Egyptian Sayyid Kutb, the theory and practice of the Muslim Brotherhood (especially in Egypt) and above all the toxic brew of violence and religious fanaticism spawned by the guerrilla war against the Soviets in Afghanistan.

The Shi'a tendency among Muslims also emerged from the first Muslim civil war. This trend still persists today, with about 10% of the world's Muslims being Shia. The Shia were the "partisans of ‛Alī." They believe that ‛Alī was the legitimate successor to the Prophet, and that the caliphates of Abū Bakr, ‛Umar and ‛Uthmān were illegitimate. It's worth noting that for centuries to come, the Shia would be intermixed in the same communities as the majority Sunni. The present-day geogrpahical concentrations of Shia in Iran and certain areas of Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Lebanon was a later development.

The Khāriğites' rejection of both major sides in the civil war had a more clear theological basis than that of the Shia. The Khāriğites rejected the dynastic principle in favor a religious one. The Shia were the partisans of a dynasty based on ‛Alī's line. It would probably be misleading to say that the Shia/Sunni split was political rather than religious. The Shia did believe that ‛Alī carried a divine legitimacy that the first three caliphs did not. The issues were not theological as such at the beginning, though Shia theology would later develop in different directions than the Sunni.

The Sunni majority saw themselves as staying true to the Islamic "sunna," or tradition. They accepted all the first four caliphs, ‛Alī included, as legitimate and came to see them as the Rightly Guided Caliphs. (In other words, though the Shia were the "partisans of ‛Alī," the Sunni can't be seen as the "partisans of anti-‛Alī.) The conduct of the four Rightly Guided Caliphs, together with the Prophet's revelations and the traditions surrounding his life, are seen as akind of golden age of the religion. Just as religious Jews may look to the actions of Abraham or David for religious lessons, or Christians at Jesus or Paul, Sunni Muslims look to Muhammad and the Right Guided Caliphs as models.

So, even though the Shia are the "partisans of ‛Alī," it's not the case that the majority Sunni reject ‛Alī's legitimacy. It is rather that the Shia do not recognize the legitimacy of the caliphates of Abū Bakr, ‛Umar and ‛Uthmān.

The Shia and Husain

After Mu‛āwiya had established himself as caliph Mu‛āwiya I, founder of the Umayyad dynasty, conflict with the Shia continued. He persuaded ‛Alī's son al Hasan ibn ‛Alī to renounce any claim on the caliphate in exchange for a huge payoff, which allowed Hasan to lead a long life of luxurious decadence in Medina, where he had 60 wives and 300 concubines, according to the more conservative figures Küng gives. Both Mu‛āwiya and Hasan evidently regarded the result as a good bargain.

Shia tradition sees it differently. In their view, Hasan was forced to give up the caliphate due to multiple poisonings by Mu‛āwiya, and refused to fight to seize the caliphate militarily out of pious relectance to shed further Muslim blood. "In Shiite texts," writes Küng, "Hasan's story is consequently more and more embellished with miracles."

In 671, Shia opponents of Mu‛āwiya began courting another son of ‛Alī, Al-Husain ibn ‛Alī, to come from Mecca to Kufa to be proclaimed as caliph, which would mean overthrowing Mu‛āwiya. Eventually, Husain decided to make the fateful journey to Kufa.

Intercepted by the caliph's forces, Husain's party made a stand at Kerbala in 680, in which Husain met his death. Leaving aside the rather gruesome question of which parts of his body wound up in which city, Husain is also revered by Shia today, the city of al-Najaf being perhaps teh most important site for reverence of Husain's memory. The "profession of faithfulness to Husain becomes central for the 'party of ‛Alī [Shia]," says Küng.

Though the conflict ‛Alī's caliphate was the cause of the Shia split, the memory of Husain is also highly important for the Shia, being a direct continuation of that struggle. These events may seem for Christians or Jews as distant and vague as the passion of Christ or the Exodus from Egypt may seem for adherents of other faiths. But for many Shia Muslims, as Küng observes, the stories of ‛Alī, Hasan and Husain are "the past that is very much present" (allgegenwärtigen Vergangenheit).

Transition to a new religious paradigm

Küng sees two events associated with ‛Alī's caliphate (656-661) as being both symbolic and pratical signs of the end fo the "original Islamic community" paradigm. Those were ‛Alī's decision to move the residence of the caliphate from Medina to Kufa in Iraq, and the splits in the ummah resulting from the civil war. Küng writes of the period of ‛Alī's caliphate and the first Muslim civil war:

* Certainly, Mecca remains the religious center of Islam and the Ka‛ba its central shrine. But the political center, the government of the Islamic state
[caliphate] is located for the first time (and remains forever) outside Arabia,
which becomes the periphery.

* For the first time, Muslim armies confront each other as enemies (which in the time of the Prophet would have been unthinkable). A war among believers contradicts the Qur'ān.

Tags: ali, islam, hans küng's der islam, husain, rightly guided caliphs, shi'a, shiites

The Rightly Guided Caliphs: ‛Uthmān

‛Uthmān ibn Άffān served as caliph from 644 to 656. His primary historical significance is not in further conquests, though the Muslims did expand their control over the remains of the Sasanian (Persian) Empire during his caliphate. The Muslims also took Cypress from the Byzantine Empire and expanded their northern African territories west to Tripoli. In a real sense, it was ‛Uthmān who made possible the beginnings of Muslim theology, because it was at his direction that the Qur'ān was made into a standardized written work.

The written Qur'ān

Prior to that time, the revelations of the Prophet had been preserved in oral form. Today, we tend to think immediately of how accurately the original versions had been transmitted. And, of course, that was a consideration during ‛Uthmān's reign as well. But, unaccustomed as we are today to the oral tradition in such matters, it's easy to underestimate how well oral tradition can preserve such sayings. There were a whole group of Qur'ān reciters who preserved and carefully studied the sayings.

Hans Küng in Der Islam (2004) discusses the nature of the Qur'ān with reference to current methods of Biblical criticism and analysis. One difference is important to keep in mind in thinking of comparing the Qur'ān to the Christian Gospels and the transmitted sayings and stories about Jesus. Whatever the nature of their respective connections to the divine, Jesus in his human role was a carpenter and a charismatic preacher in a backwater province of the Roman Empire, while Muhammad was the leader of a major political movement. In purely secular historical terms, it's likely that the sayings of Muhammad were preserved in something closer to their original forms than those of Jesus, although Jesus' followers had a strong motivation to preserve his sayings, as well.

The codification of the Qur'ān into a standard form reduced the power of the group of "Qur'ān readers" who had grown up as an influential part of the religious community. As Karen Armstrong writes in Islam (2000):

The Quran-reciters, who knew the scripture by heart and had become the chief religious authorities, were also incensed when Uthman insisted that only one version of the sacred text be used in the garrison towns, and suppressed variants, which many of them preferred, but which differed in minor details.

‛Uthmān's governing strategy

‛Uthmān's politics involved centralizing the administration of the caliphate. And one of the major factors in the Muslim successes were the caliphs' willingness to adapt the useful administrative and governmental institutions of the conquered Byzantine and Sasanian (Persian) areas. But, as Küng points out, the centralized administration was also mixed with his strong suport of his own Umayyad family. The legitimacy issues of that time have not gone away, because within a few years they would porduce the Shi'a branch of Islam, the second largest branch of the faith today.
But although ‛Uthmān recognized the need for a more centralized administration for the large empire they were building, he himself was not a particulary efficient caliph. Or, as Küng puts it, he "did not represent the energetic leaderhip personality those times required."

‛Uthmān's policies of centralism and nepotism began to draw active and vocal opposition among Muslims who thought adherence to the faith should carry greater weight than traditional familial ties. In 656, a group of dissidents from various parts of the caliphate gathered in Mecca to protest outside the caliph's residence. A group of Egyptian dissidents broke into the house and killed ‛Uthmān.

The religious development of Islam

The theological emphasis in the Qur'ān is on God and the responsibility of human beings. The question of how to understand the ultimate power of God in relationship to the responsibility of humanity to act rightly and our power to choose has always been the "core problem" of Muslimm theology, says Küng.

The Islamic religioius traditions, or "sunna," were initially very localized, often merging Islamic ideas with local practices and viewpoints. And at this time there was no unified Muslim legal tradition.

The Qur'ān itself is not a legal manual. Islamic law at this time was primarily directed at administering the conquered territories. In this, the Muslims largely adapted the legal practices of the conquered territories. Küng notes grimly that during this period one of the legal practices adopted was stoning as a punishment for adultery, an "innovation with fatal aftereffects into our own time."

Küng summarizes the legal admixture developed in this time as follows: "So then Roman-Byzantine as well as Talmudic-rabbinical and finally also Sasanian-Persian concepts became part of the developing Islamic law." In Küng's six-paradigm model of the development of Islam, the period of the Rightly Guided Caliphs is part of the first paradigm, the "original Islamic community" paradigm. In this paradigm, one cannot speak of "a specific Islamic law in the narrow sense of the concept." The following period, that of the Umayyad dynasty, would see major developments in Islamic law.

Tags: islam, hans küng's der islam, karen armstrong, quran, rightly guided caliphs, uthman

The Rightly Guided Caliphs: ‛Umar

After Abū Bakr's death in 634, his formally designated successor ‛Umar ibn al-Khaţţāb became caliph. On the formal succession planning, Hans Küng in Der Islam (2004) writes, "One had learned something from the crisis after the death of the Prophet."

‛Umar (also called ‛Umar I)set out to give greater emphasis to the Islamic nature of the caliphate. He did this be selecting close associates of Muhammad for high governmental positions. He also declared himself to be not only the Deputy of the Prophet but the Commander of the Faithful. This combination bound him "as caliph with the traditional authority of the elected tribal leader and the new authority as the top official of the Muslim community." (Küng) The elites of Mecca and Medina were still the dominant leadership group in the caliphate, and Medina was still the seat of the caliphate.

‛Umar built Abū Bakr's on the victory over Byzantium at Ağnādain in 634 by pressing the Muslim conquests further. He seized the Syrian capital of Damascus in 635. He took Jerusalem in 638; Byzantium would later recapture it, but could only hold it for a few years. In 641, Muslim forces seized Egypt from the Byzantian Empire. Byzantium continued as a power in Europe, but its eastern territories were now largely reduced to Anatolia (present-day Turkey).

In combat with the Sasanian (Persian) empire, ‛Umar seized their capital, Ctesiphon and other Persian cities including Isfahan. His conquests extended as far as Aserbadjan. Although the caliphate fought over various principalities for decades still, the great Sasanian Empire was destroyed by ‛Umar's forces.

How could the Muslims do it?

Küng stresses how remarkable it was that by the the time ‛Umar's death in 644, the two great empires of the area, Byzantium and the Sasanian Empire, were defeated and lost such large amounts of territory to the Muslim movement, whose existence dates from Muhammad's first revelations in 610. Up until Muhammad, the Arab tribes were were a weak collection of tribes squeezed between the two great empires next to them.

Relying in particular on Fred McGraw Donner's 1981 Early Islamic Conquests, Küng thinks that the traditional Muslim historiography is basically right when they give credit to Islam as a motivating and unifying force which made possible this historically rapid and far-reaching shift in regional power relations. The Islamic provided a common ideology and inspiration, and the political structures and leadership of Muhammad and the first two caliphs created a practical governmental form that made such conquests achievable by the heretofore scattered Arab tribes.

It's worth noting that Küng's reading of the role of the Islamic religion contrasts with that expressed by Karen Armstrong in her Islam (2000):

It is important, however, to be clear that when the Arabs burst out of Arabia they were not impelled by the ferocious power of "Islam." Western people often assume that Islam is a violent, militaristic faith which imposed itself on its subject peoples at sword-point This is an inaccurate interpretation of the Muslim wars of expansion. There was nothing religious about these campaigns, and Umar did not believe that he had a divine mandate to conquer the world. The objective of Umar and his warriors was entirely pragmatic: they wanted plunder and a common activity that would preserve the unity of the ummah. For centuries the Arabs had tried to raid the richer settled lands beyond the peninsula; the difference was that this time they had encountered a power vacuum. Persia and Byzantium had both been engaged for decades in a long and debilitating series of wars with one another. Both were exhausted. In Persia, there was factional strife, and flooding had destroyed the country's agriculture. Most of the Sassanian troops were of Arab origin and went over to the invaders during the campaign. In the Syrian and North African provinces of Byzantium, the local population had been alienated by the religious intolerance of the Greek Orthodox establishment, and were not disposed to come to their aid when the Arabs attacked, though Muslims could make no headway in the Byzantine heartlands ofAnatolia.

Küng's book also deals with the weakness of the two large empires against which the Muslim armies were fighting. But he gives a stronger weight to the contribution of Islam as such to making those conquests happen. And I'm inclined to agree with him, at this stage of my own knowledge about that period. And I'll even go out on a limb and speculate a bit about why Küng's reading differs from Armstrong's.

The main reason is probably that Armstrong is relying more on the Western liberal tradition of historiography. To digress a bit, historians in the nineteenth century started giving much more weight than their predecessors to economic and social considerations in looking at the causes of wars. And in the European context, the efforts to establish democratic institutions had to contend with the power of the institutionalized state Christian churches, both Catholic and Protestant. Part of the result was that religious explanations for events, including the traumatic and extremely destructive Thirty Years' War (1618-1648), were given much more intensive scrutiny.

This tradition has carried over into present-day historiography, which tends to de-emphasize religious motivations in political conflicts and to view such expressed motivations as superficial justifications for deeper-lying causes. And such caution in giving credence to official explanations for wars is certainly in order. Americans in 2005 shouldn't really need any reminders about that, given what we know know about the nonexistent "weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq.

But religious belief is also an historical fact. And today's accounts of the Thirty Years War are more willing to look at the religious conflicts that were involved. In fact, the century following the Protestant Reformation saw the set of conflicts in Europe now known as the Wars of Religion and then the Thirty Years War, which began with the revolt of Bohemian Protestants (Bohemia is part of today's Czech Republic) in defense of their right to practice Protestantism. It's also clear that other key events of the early modern period in Europe - the witch hunts, the settlement of the Americas, the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492 (yes, the same year that "Columbus sailed the ocean blue" financed the the Spanish "Catholic Monarchs" Ferdinand and Isabella), the Spanish Inquisition - clearly involved religious motivations, whatever other forces may also have been at work. All of North America was first explored by Jesuit missionaries, the shock-troops of the Pope in the Counter-Reformation, because they were willing to go to the most God-forsaken corners of theNorth American wilderness to win the souls of the heathen savages for Jesus and the Catholic Church.

And a big part of Küng's approach is to try to take an honest and realistic look at the role religion plays in historical events.

I suspect another factor is that Karen Armstrong is trying hard to present the most benign face of Islam to her readers, especially in Islam, which is part of the Modern Library Chronicles series, which tries to provide readers with a brief and "popular" but substantial overview of the current state of scholarship in the various topics covered. Don't get me wrong. Armstrong is a serious and respected religious scholar, and I would highly recommend her books to anyone interested in Islam or the other subjects she covers. And her ecumenical outlook certainly compatable with Hans Küng's. In the passage I quoted, for instance, she's at pains not to give ammunition to those who try to paint Islam as a "violent religion."

But I do think on this particular question, Küng's view which gives much greater weight to the religious factor is the more realistic one.

But Küng also makes clear, as Armstrong does, that the Muslim expansion in this period was not a matter of, in her words criticizing such a view, "a violent, militaristic faith" imposing "itself on its subject peoples at sword-point " In fact, Küng also gives credit to the Muslims' relatively accomodating attitude toward the conquered populations as an important factor in the successful expansion. There was no question that the Muslim Arabs ruled in those situations, and the people of the conquered territories had to recognized their authority and provide tax revenue for them. But they also did not force conversions among the conquered populations. In fact, at this stage, conversions to Islam were not particularly welcomed, in part because non-Muslims had to pay taxes from which Muslims were exempt. As he puts it:

Islam was understood at this time primarily as an Arab religion, a religion for Arabs. And it was thought that it should remain so. ...

And the missionary-religious zeal to convert others? The Arabs hardly developed any such thing. There are nowhere reports [from either Muslim historians or Western ones] of the conversion of wholecities, villages or regions, and certainly none of forced conversions.

Given Küng's ecumenical outlook, it's not surprising that he takes particular note of the fact that the new Muslim rulers were more tolerant of Jewish and dissident Christian communities and their religious observances than the previous Byzantine Christian empire had been. He writes that Jews in Palestine as well as the Coptic Christians in Egypt and Nestorian Christians in Iraq experienced the new Muslim rule as a genuine improvement from the previous restrictions placed on them. Muslims also allowed Jews to live in Jerusalem, which Byzantium had not. The Muslims regarded adherents of other monotheistic religions - Jews, Christians and Zoroastrians - as "people of the book" who would be protected as long as they recognized Muslim political supremacy in the conquered lands.

The past isn't even past (as Faulkner once wrote)

The following is an interesting example of how the actions of the Rightly Guided Caliphs are used by contemporary Muslims to reflect on the Islamic approach to issues. The The Taliban, the Buddhas, and Islamic Teaching by Azizah al-Hibri, Beliefnet.com (which has an annoying habit of not providing the dates for articles; this one is apparently from the first half of 2001). She refers here to ‛Umar as the third caliph, apparently counting Muhammad as the first, though normally Muhammad is not counted as a caliph.

For centuries, Islam has preserved and even maintained all prior cultural expressions, including the Egyptian Sphinx, the Persian Persepolis, ancient houses of worship belonging to other religions, and the pictures, images, artifacts and possessions housed in those sanctuaries. In fact, had it not been for Islamic protection, these structures and artifacts may not have survived. Khalifah 'Umar, a companion of the Prophet and the third Muslim Caliph, provides an excellent example. Upon entering Jerusalem in the seventh century, he prohibited the destruction of any Christian images or places of worship.

The point of reference was the plan of Aghanistan's former rulers, the Taliban, to demolish two historic giant statues of Buddha,a plan which they carried out.

‛Umar was killed in 644, as Küng puts it, "murdered by a, so it is said, discontented slave. The "Successor to the Messenger of God"and the "Commander of the Faithful," violently killed by a slave! That is for Muslims a shocking experience. It would not remain the only political murder of a caliph ..." (The ellipse is Küng's.)

The traditional reading of ‛Umar's death, which the Persian slave carried out in the mosque of Medina, was that it resulted from a personal grudge. Küng clearly doesn't buy it. He refers to explicitly as a "political murder." Maybe that was an early version of what today we might call a "lone gunman" theory. (Although I do believe that Oswald was acting alone, but that's a whole other discussion.)

There would be no question about the political nature of the ultimate fates of the final two Rightly Guided Caliphs. And both the political and religious implications of them still reverberate in the world today.

Tags: abu bakr, a'isa, islam, hans küng's der islam, karen armstrong, rightly guided caliphs, umar

The Rightly Guided Caliphs: Abū Bakr

The first of the "rightly guided caliphs" was Abū Bakr, who had been one of Muhammad's earliest followers. Like his three successors in the caliphate, he was considered one of the "Companions of the Prophet." His rule lasted only two years (632-634). But his two years were very important in establishing the instituiton of the caliphate and in holding the Arab tribes together while expanding the power of the Muslims with new conquests.

Abū Bakr's daughter ‛Ā'iša was one of Muhammad's wives, making Abū Bakr the Prophet's father-in-law. Though the partisans of Άli, the fourth caliph, would later claim that Muhammad had designated Άli as his successor, there was no clear process or public declaration of a mode of succession. Muhammad had selected Abū Bakr to be in charge of his final pilgrimage to Mecca and had designated him an "imām," or leader of prayer, shortly before he died. He was also from the Quyrash tribe and was one of the "emigrants" who had followed Muhammad to Mecca in the hiğra.

Whatever Muhammad's intention, Abū Bakr took on the leadership role, which he evidently assumed peacefully with no major opposition.

Hans Küng in Der Islam (2004) calls atention to a couple of distinctive aspects of the caliphate at this stage:

(1) The caliph was seen as the deputy of the Prophet, not as a leader by virtue of any direct divine revelation. "There was no longer any self-renewing legitimation by new divine revelations."

(2) The establishment of the caliphate represented the substitution of a leadership office for the charismatic leadership the Prophet had exercised.

The caliph became the political leader, but the Prophet himself was still seen as the religious leader. Abū Bakr declared that he sought to emulate the "sunna," the exemplary standard set by Muhammad. The "sunna" also referred to the Prophet's relatives, who initially carried on an important religious function in the community. As Küng says, the Qur'ān, the collection of Muhammad's divine revelations, became "in the long run the ultimate religious (but indirectly also the political) authority."

Hans Küng takes the conventional Sunni viewof the meaning of the caliphal title. But Patricia Crone in God's Caliph (1986) argues that the title used by the rightly guided caliphs and the Umayyads was khalifāt Allāh, or deputy of God. She says that during the Άbbasid caliphate, the title khalifāt rasūl Allāh, or successor of the messenger of God, also came to be used. In traditional Sunni historiography, the rightly guided caliphs were said to have used khalifāt rasūl Allāh, and that it was the first Umayyad caliph Mu'āwiya I who first adopted khalifāt Allāh. But she discounts this, arguing that the evidence indicates that the rightly guided caliphs used it, as well. This title would imply a greater authority to speak on religious matters than the khalifāt rasūl Allāh title.

Abū Bakr continued to unite the Arab tribes, including Beduins who began to fall away from the Muslim umma (community) after the Prophet's death. And he led them in successful military drives against neighboring tribes. Most of Arabia was thus brought into the Islamic camp. And Abū Bakr led the first Muslim war against the Byzantine Empire, which ended in Muslim victory at the battle of Ağnādain in 634.

Tags: abu bakr, a'isa, islam, hans küng's der islam, rightly guided caliphs, patricia crone