Pictured: Naqsh-e Jahan Square, the Qeysarie Gate • Isfahan, built 1598–1629
Photo Credit: Amir Pashaei via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0 (cropped)

Overview

Before we cover any Islamic content, we will separate the nonsectarian point of view from the sectarian — scholarship from theology — and knowledge from belief. We meet the three tests a claim must pass before it counts as scholarly knowledge: the insider/outsider problem that has occupied scholars of religion for a century, and the distinction between describing what a tradition is and prescribing what it ought to be — the distinction every later section depends on.

Assigned Reading
None for this Section.

Key Terms for this Section
Nonsectarian · Sectarian · Descriptive claim · Normative claim · Theology
Islam · Mosque (Masjid) · Madrassa

1.1 | Welcome to the Scholarly Study of Islam

An Introduction to this Series

This is a survey of Islam: its history, its literature, its thought, and the civilizations it has built. No foreknowledge of Islam or Arabic is required. Key Arabic terms are introduced and taught as we go, and by the end you’ll carry a working vocabulary of several dozen of them.

Here’s the map.

Module 1 | The Rise of Islam. We begin with method (this section), then move to the socio-political world into which Muhammad ﷺ was born, the Ka’ba, the tribal order of pre-Islamic Arabia, the monotheisms already circulating through the peninsula.* We follow Muhammad’s life, his revelation, his flight to Medina, his war with Mecca, and then the succession crisis that fractured the community within thirty years of the Prophet’s death.

Module 2 | The Qur’an. A close reading. How an oral recitation became a written codex, what the text says about war and tolerance, about evil and mercy, about paradise and judgment, and how Muslims have argued for fourteen centuries over how to read the foundational text of 2 billion adherents.

Module 3 | The Golden Age. Baghdad. Philosophy, medicine, mathematics, mysticism. The centuries when the Islamicate world was the intellectual center of gravity for half the planet, and the invasions (Turkish, Crusader, Mongol) ended them.

Module 4 | Islam & Modernity. Empire, colonialism, secularism, nationalism, oil. How the Islamic world met the modern West, and the range of responses it produced.

Three principal writers guide us. The first is Reza Aslan (Iran), whose No god but God carries the narrative spine of the early centuries. The second is Tamim Ansary (Afghanistan), whose Destiny Disrupted tells world history from the inside of the Islamic world looking out — a genuinely disorienting experience if you learned history the other way around. The third is the University of London’s M.A.S. Abdel Haleem (Egypt), whose scholarly descriptions and translation of the Qur’an are unparalleled.

Note: ﷺ (“peace be upon him”) is a traditional honorific for Muhammad in religious circles. It’s used sparingly in this course to illustrate its usage in the printed and digital world. But as this is a scholarly endeavor and not a religious one, it will not be used throughout.

About Me

Today, I serve as an adjunct professor of religion at the University of Texas at Tyler, where I’ve taught World Religions, Intro to Islam, and Islamic Philosophy since 2019. I’m also the Department Chair of Philosophy, Humanities, and Foreign Languages at Tyler Junior College, where I’ve been a full-time professor since 2012. This series is the culmination of that teaching. (Link to CV)

Before that, I held a teaching fellowship with the Religion Department at Florida State University (2009–2011). At Florida State, I studied Islam at the graduate level under Dr. Adam Gaiser, himself an alum of the University of Virginia’s prestigious Religion program. His mentor was Dr. Abdulaziz Sachedina, a renowned scholar who advised the writing of the 2005 Constitution of Iraq. My research with Dr. Gaiser prepared me to publish a 2012 article, “Islam in the Early Modern Protestant Imagination (1528–1588),” in the ERAS journal of Monash University, one of Australia’s “Group of Eight” top-tier universities. It’s available online, and it has been cited internationally.

I also had the opportunity at Florida State to assist in a course called “Introduction to Islamic Culture,” and that experience had a lasting effect on my ability to teach this material to an undergraduate audience. On the strength of it, I taught my own sections of World Religions for Florida State’s Religion department through 2010 and 2011. In 2019 I published “Forgiveness in Judaism” in The Philosophy of Forgiveness (Vernon Press), and in 2020 I received the Thomas H. Shelby Jr. Endowed Chair for Teaching Excellence at Tyler Junior College. I’m happy to note that students have consistently lauded my treatment of Islam in this course.

Defining this Project

Islam is the name of the religious tradition that emerges in 7th-century Arabia through the teachings of Muhammad.

It is not a single institution, not a denomination, and not a set of practices frozen in time. From the very beginning, Muslims have disagreed with each other: about politics, theology, law, interpretation, and authority. Those disagreements are not an inconvenience we need to smooth over. They are the history of Islam, and several of the most consequential ones will occupy us for entire sections.

That means we’ll be careful with the phrases like “Islam says” or “Islam believes.”

Sometimes it’s perfectly appropriate. But often what we really mean is that the Qur’an says something, or a particular scholar says something, or that Sunni Muslims in one century said something that Shia Muslims in another rejected. Learning to pull those apart is not a prerequisite to learning the subject. It is the subject.

Along the way you’ll encounter Muslims praying in a mosque (masjid), studying in a madrassa (Islamic religious school), reading the Qur’an, practicing Sufism, interpreting Islamic law, and disagreeing vigorously with one another about what Islam requires. Our job is never to decide which of them is the “real” Muslim. Our job is to understand what people believe in a specific time and place, why they believe it, how those beliefs developed, and what those beliefs have meant in practice.

Which brings us to the one rule this whole series runs on:

We are here to study Islam, not to practice or prosecute Islam.

All are welcome to study in my courses. But I do not allow proselytization — for or against a religion — in my public courses. This rule isn't there to protect Islam from scrutiny, and it isn't there to protect anyone's faith from history. It's there so that every reader — Muslim, Christian, atheist, or none of the above — can look directly at the same fourteen centuries of evidence without wondering whose side the author is on. The material is far more interesting than any verdict I could render on it.

So the first question we ask is not “Is Islam true?”
That question belongs to someone else, and we’ll meet him shortly.

Our question is: “What can we know about Islam?”

That is the question the scholar brings into the room.
The rest of this section builds the toolkit for answering it.

1.2 | The Scholar’s Toolkit

Sectarian vs. Nonsectarian

The first and most fundamental piece of our method is a word you must know to make any sense of the academic study of religion: nonsectarian.

Nonsectarianism is the attitude that secular institutions of higher learning take toward the study of religion. What it means is that we do not take sides in religious debates. We don’t rank one religion above another. We’re not in the business of proving or disproving any tradition’s tenets. We don’t privilege Sunni over Shia, traditionalist over reformer, mystic over legalist. This series is not “pro-Islam” or “anti-Islam,” any more than it is pro-Christian or antisemitic. This series, proudly, is a nonsectarian study of Islam fit for all readers.

So what does that look like in practice?

Take History, a subject we’ve all sat through. A good history teacher can give you a detailed account of American politics without making one party the good guys and the other the bad guys. That doesn’t mean the teacher has no political opinions. It just means the classroom isn’t being used to advance them. The opinions are not the method.

This stands in stark contrast to a sectarian center of learning, like a religious private school, a Sunday school, a madrassa, or a seminary. What’s the difference?

It’s simple.
A sectarian program of study picks sides. A nonsectarian course like ours does not.

And notice that “sectarian” is not an insult here. A seminary that refused to say what Christians ought to believe would be failing at its job! A madrassa that refused to promote Islamic theology and law would be failing at its job too. These are institutions with a theological purpose, and their purpose is a legitimate one: adherent formation within a religious tradition. I have friends and family who’ve paid good money to attend such institutions, and would be upset if it didn’t take a theological side.

However, ours is a different purpose. And with Islam, the nonsectarian method earns its keep quickly. The tradition contains enormous internal diversity, which means a scholar is constantly standing between Muslim communities that disagree about what Islam requires of Muslims. A theologian may resolve that disagreement. A scholar studies it. For us, the disagreement is not an obstacle to the subject; it is the subject.

What a Theologian Does

That brings us to Theology: the discipline of belief.
Literally from the Greek for the study (logos) of God (Theos).

In a sectarian setting, a theologian — an imam, a pastor, a rabbi — will generally tell you that their view of religion is correct and try to persuade you of it. (There are notable exceptions.) It’s the job of theologians to make religious truth-claims (eg. there is only one God), and part of the job is defending those claims and contesting the rival claims of others. Whether God exists, what God is like, which reading of scripture is correct, what the faithful ought to believe and do: this is theology’s home turf, and Islam’s theological tradition is long, internally contentious, and extraordinarily sophisticated. We will study those arguments with real admiration.

Theology also has an institutional home. Walk into a mosque, and you will find the theologian’s whole world in one room. Prayer. Counsel in a crisis. Instruction. Community. The Friday sermon, delivered from a raised platform, where someone stands up and tells the assembled what God requires of them this week. A church and a synagogue are doing the same work in a different setting. And notice what the person on that platform is doing: not reporting that a community believes something, but telling the community what it ought to believe. That’s the job of a theologian.

This series will describe everything that happens in that room.
It will never perform any of it.

One more thing, because people sometimes assume that “academic” means “skeptical,” or that “nonsectarian” means “anti-religious.” Neither is true. The scholar doesn’t have to reject a religious claim to study it; she simply can’t treat her own acceptance or rejection of the claim as evidence about it. The line between scholarship and theology runs between jobs — not people. A Muslim can be a first-rate scholar of Islam. So can a Christian, and so can an atheist. A theologian can also be an excellent historian (some of them are better historians than the “historians”). The question is never what the author believes when she goes home. The question is which chair she’s sitting in when she writes.

Why They Don’t Compete

At first glance, it might look like theologians and secular scholars are rivals.
Two parties fighting over the same territory.

They’re not, and the reason is simple: they have different goals.

The theologian’s work is directed toward a religious community: preserving a tradition, defending its beliefs, reforming its practices, separating orthodoxy from error. A nonsectarian scholar does something else entirely. I share peer-reviewed scholarship while making no claim whatsoever about metaphysical or absolute truth. The foundation of a nonsectarian claim is empirical evidence and the evolving consensus of scholars worldwide — which is exactly why researchers of every nationality and religious affiliation can sit at the same table and study Islam together. They aren’t trying to prove or disprove Islam’s truth-claims. They’re fascinated by the subject and want to add to what we know about it.

Consider prayer, since we’ll spend some of Section 5 on it.

A theologian teaches a Muslim how to perform the daily prayers correctly — according to his school, and not the school down the road. A scholar asks how daily prayer developed historically, why the schools disagree about its performance, and why the practice looks different in Indonesia, Nigeria, Turkey, Iran, and Texas. Both are looking at the same prayer. But they are asking different questions of it.

The theological question is: What should we believe?

The scholarly question is: What can we know about what people believe?

Neither question cancels the other. Keeping them separate helps make both useful.

Now here’s the part readers sometimes find strange. Like most people, your humble professor has deeply held religious beliefs. But you will not find them in this series. I don’t intend to convince you of my religious beliefs or dissuade you from yours. Your beliefs are likewise not the subject. For some, that restraint is a challenge. For many, it’s a breath of fresh air — a chance to learn about Islam with no one trying to convince you into or out of a religion while informing you.

1.3 | Knowledge & Belief

The Three Tests

To get at the real differences between the theologian and the scholar, we have to get at the epistemic difference between belief and knowledge. And the difference between those two is not a difference in subject matter. It’s a difference in justification.

All of us carry beliefs: about God, politics, beauty, family, and the world. Some are deeply considered, some inherited, some born of experience, and many are held with enormous confidence. None of that, by itself, makes any of them knowledge.

The knowledge of a scholar must be logical, falsifiable, and precise. Beliefs don’t have to be any of the three. Let’s take them one at a time.

Knowledge is logical when it’s limited to rigorous, valid, evidence-based reasoning.
“I know force equals mass times acceleration” clears the bar.

• The conclusion follows from the premises (valid)

• There’s no counter-evidence against it (undisproven)

• It’s been tested by an enormous variety of experts (scholarly consensus)

Compare the above scientific claim to this: “I believe the president must be a great banjo player, because great musicians make great leaders.” Not tested. It’s invalid, as the conclusion doesn’t follow. And there’s abundant evidence against it (ie. there are successful former presidents who cannot play the banjo). A person may believe this sincerely. But it does not count as knowledge.

Knowledge is falsifiable when there is some conceivable way to show it’s wrong — the criterion the philosopher Karl Popper put at the center of scientific reasoning, and it does just as much work in history. “Ottawa is the capital of Canada” can be checked. “The Mona Lisa is the most beautiful painting in the world” cannot be checked against anything, because there is no empirical test for the prize most beautiful. That may be a meaningful personal judgment. Which makes it a belief, not knowledge.

Knowledge is precise when it isn’t assembled out of arbitrary parts. “A calorie is the energy needed to raise 1 gram of water by 1 degree Celsius” — precise. Now consider a spiritualist’s claim that “a person’s well-being depends on their overall sense of unity and balance.” What is specifically meant by well-being? Balance of what measurable thing? What evidence would even bear on it? The sentence sounds impressive right up until you ask it to mean something.

Watch how the three tests behave the moment religion enters.

“I believe God exists” is a belief, and a common one. “Muslims have believed in one God since the emergence of Islam in 7th-century Arabia” is an historical claim about a belief, checkable against texts, evidence, and fourteen centuries of scholarship. While the subject is religious in both cases, the kind of claim is entirely different. The theologian deals in the first kind; the scholar deals only in the second.

Now, before you walk away thinking we’re looking down on beliefs… Beliefs are a great deal of what makes a life meaningful, and none of us would be who we are without them. Your humble professor has beliefs about God, about his country, about his community, and about family and friends.

But they’re my beliefs. As smart as I am, my beliefs do not count as knowledge.

The Insider/Outsider Problem

Here’s a question that has occupied scholars of religion for a century:
Do you have to be a member of a religion to study it?

In our case: do you have to be Muslim to study Islam?

Let’s grant the insider his due first. An insider brings something to the table no training can supply: lived experience. A Muslim scholar may understand from the inside why a particular prayer matters, what Ramadan feels like in a practicing household, why a theological distinction that looks like hair-splitting on paper carries real spiritual weight. And the outsider has plenty of ways she can fail if not careful: she can mistake unfamiliarity for irrationality, or confidently assign a ritual a meaning its practitioners would laugh at.

So the naive answer — only Muslims should discuss Islam — at least starts from something true. But follow the next three steps, and it collapses.

First: who counts? To privilege insider voices, someone has to decide who the insiders are. Imagine a professor saying: “We’ll cite Omar, because he’s a real Muslim — but not Yusuf, because although he calls himself Muslim and attends the mosque, he doesn’t act like a Muslim.” That judgment belongs to a theologian. The scholar has no instrument for measuring the sincerity of anyone’s faith, and no business building one.

Second: who gets the last word? If the subjects of a study can simply object to its findings and have them revised to their liking, it is hardly a study at all. Letting the people under examination dictate what may be written about them isn’t scholarship. It’s public relations. And an eager, advocating outsider falls into the same pit from the other side: reproducing the image of a community most desired by those in charge of it. What he produces may be perfectly respectable. It just isn’t research.

Third (and this is the sharpest point), as the University of Chicago’s Bruce Lincoln argues, information from inside a community is complicated by the fact that one’s consciousness is itself a product of that system. Or, as the old line has it: whoever coined the concept of water probably wasn’t a fish. A fish doesn’t notice water. The deeper inside a community you stand, the harder it is to see its shape.

This is one of the real strengths of nonsectarian scholarship — not an apology for it.

So the solution is not to crown the insider, and not to crown the outsider. The solution is scholarship — the method that makes every claim, from either side of the line, answer to evidence and survive criticism.

Let’s run the whole argument back through History, where the stakes feel lower, and the logic is identical. Say I want to know President George Washington…

I’ll read books by Americans and non-Americans alike, and I’ll dismiss anyone who claims a non-American can’t write about Washington. I’ll set aside books that advocate too warmly for him, because I want to see the whole man — his strengths and his faults. I won’t rely on books by politicians, who’ll primarily use Washington to prop up their own positions. And I’ll be wary of texts about Washington produced where the press isn’t free, and peer review isn’t real, because I want my Washington vetted by Washington scholars across the globe.

Now go back through that paragraph and substitute Muhammad for Washington, Muslim for American, and theologian for politician.

That’s what we’re doing here.

The Aslan Interview

Among nonsectarian scholars, there is no assumption that an expert on a religion is a member of that religion. It is, at best, a non-issue.

A famous cable-news interview (I won’t link it here) illustrates the point well. Dr. Reza Aslan — the scholar of religion who wrote the first book on our reading list — had published a scholarly study of Jesus of Nazareth. The interviewer opened by asking why he, a Muslim, would write a book about a Christian topic.

Aslan’s visible bewilderment is what made the exchange famous.

The question didn’t compute for Aslan. He’s a scholar of religions. He holds advanced degrees in the subject and has studied Christianity’s history for decades. That he happens also to be a Muslim is, to every other scholar in the field, completely beside the point — the way it would be beside the point to ask a non-Roman why she studies Ancient Rome.

For scholars, the question is never who are you?

The question is what do you know? For any scholar of any subject, the primary question is: What do you add to the sum of what we understand about this subject?

And notice that this cuts both ways. The insider/outsider problem is not an argument that outsiders make better scholars. It’s an argument that the question is simply the wrong question. Aslan is a Muslim who writes about Christianity — and a Muslim who writes about Islam, and neither fact qualifies or disqualifies him. Some of the finest scholarship on Islam has been produced by Muslims, and some of it by people who’ve never set foot in a mosque except to take notes. The tradition doesn’t belong to its critics, and it doesn’t belong exclusively to its adherents. It belongs to whoever does the work.

What the scholar owes, in either case, is the same: evidence, argument, and a willingness to be corrected.

Which is why I can write this series, and why you can read it.

1.4 | Normative & Descriptive Claims

Two Kinds of [Dental] Claims

So how does a scholar talk about religion without turning into a theologian?
Here’s the machinery.

A Descriptive claim describes what something is.
A Normative claim tells you what something ought to be.

A dentist might tell you, descriptively, that the average adult has 32 teeth. That same dentist might tell you, normatively, that people with good teeth floss daily — if you want good teeth, you ought to floss. One statement reports. The other prescribes.

The distinction is quite old. The philosopher David Hume (d. 1776) warned against sliding from is to ought, and philosophers still call it the is–ought problem — and it is absolutely essential to everything that follows in this series. Get careless with it and you’ll find yourself making strong normative claims about Islam, at which point you’ve stopped doing scholarship and started doing theology.

Now consider these:

A Christian must not serve in the military.
A Jew must have a Jewish mother.
A Muslim woman must cover her face in public.
A Hindu shouldn’t eat beef.
A Buddhist should meditate every day.

Every one of them is normative, because every one draws a line in the sand: on this side is our religion, and on that side is not. They are theological statements, and notice that whether any of them is true isn’t the issue. The issue is what kind of work the sentence is doing.

Here’s where it gets genuinely difficult. Normative claims are very good at dressing up as descriptive ones.

“That group isn’t practicing real Islam” — it looks like a report. It has the grammar of a report. But there’s no fact in the world it corresponds to; it’s a judgment about who belongs, wearing a scholar’s tweed jacket. Watch for the tell: real, true, authentic, proper, genuine. When one of those words shows up in front of the name of a religion, a normative claim is almost always hiding behind it. Real Christianity. True Judaism. Authentic Islam. Somebody is drawing a boundary and hoping you won’t notice their pencil.

One more pair, stripped of religion entirely:

Johnny is a good person.
Bob claims Johnny is a good person.

The first is normative — because it presumes the speaker knows what makes a person good. The second is descriptive, because it simply reports a fact about something Bob said. The scholar’s sentence is almost always the second kind. Not “that isn’t real Islam,” but “this community regards that practice as illegitimate, and here is the argument they make.” Same information about the dispute. None of the refereeing.

The Ahmads & Haddads

Let’s put it to work on a live dispute.

Imagine two Muslim families: the Ahmads and the Haddads. Both identify as Muslim. But the Ahmad family believes Muslims should oppose a particular war, while the Haddads support it.

A Muslim theologian compares good Islam with bad Islam — that’s his job, and he does it in the open. He might say: “The Ahmad family are good Muslims because they are pacifists, but the Haddad family are bad Muslims because they support the war.”

That is a normative, theological claim.
It sorts. It ranks. It tells the reader which family to admire.

But a descriptive, historically defensible claim is the kind nonsectarian scholars are focused on. A scholar of religion makes no claim about who is a “true” Muslim, a good Jew, or a bad Christian. Instead, she pays attention to the people making such claims and reports them as historical and cultural facts. So the scholar may write:

“While both the Ahmads and the Haddads identify as Muslim,
the Haddads support the war, while the Ahmads do not.”

Read those two versions again, back to back. The second one tells you more. It preserves the disagreement instead of resolving it. It treats both families as Muslims because both families say they are. And it leaves the theological question exactly where it found it: with the theologians, who have the standing to argue it out.

This is the tool we will reach for at every moment of live sectarian tension in the weeks ahead. When Sunni and Shia accounts of the same afternoon diverge, when a practice one community treasures is called an innovation by another, when a reformer says a tradition must change and a traditionalist says it cannot: as nonsectarian scholars, our work is to describe both sides as accurately as possible. You’ll see that sentence again.

Not a verdict.
A description accurate enough that both parties would recognize themselves in it.

Which is harder than it sounds, but scholars think it's worth the trouble.

Long Live Theology!

Let me be unmistakably clear about something. None of the above is a criticism of theology. In fact, it’s a defense of it!

Theological training belongs in a religious institution — a private school, a madrassa, a seminary. That’s what those institutions offer and what their tuition buys. A public college has a different purpose: it proudly serves people of many beliefs and none, all of whom have decided together that greater knowledge of religion serves everyone’s interest. So my task is a survey of Islam from a nonsectarian standpoint. I never presume to tell my readers what is and isn’t proper Islam. I leave that work to my friends on the minbar (the pulpit) at the head of the mosque.

The scholarly approach may feel irreverent — especially when scholars discuss a tradition you’re personally invested in. If that happens, remember our objectives. This is an academic study of religion — not a religious course. And no scholar of religion is trying to replace anyone’s theologian.

Consider the limits of my office.

A nonsectarian scholar can’t lead a prayer in a mosque.
A nonsectarian scholar can’t marry a couple.
A nonsectarian scholar doesn’t counsel the grieving in the middle of the night.
A nonsectarian scholar doesn’t exhort you to repent.
A nonsectarian scholar can’t tell you the secrets of the universe, and wouldn’t dare try.
A nonsectarian scholar works neither to bring someone to Islam nor out of it.
A nonsectarian scholar doesn’t take sides on the divisive questions within Islam.
A nonsectarian scholar doesn’t work to shape Islamic doctrine.

Theologians are not only permitted but expected to do all of these things and more!

So we both have jobs. Both of us are looking at religion, though our methods and our goals are entirely different. Some people have use for one. Some for the other. Some for neither. And some of us, myself included, find real value in both — reading scholars and theologians alike while never confusing the two.

That’s the toolkit.
Nonsectarian, not theological. Knowledge, not belief. Description, not prescription.

Now, with that toolset in front of you, we go back 1,400 years to a dusty settlement in the Arabian desert built around a single cube of stone, to the age the tradition itself remembers as the Jahiliyyah, and to an orphan born there who will change the world.

Salaam.

This Section: Normativity & Religion
Next Section: Pre-Islamic Arabia & Muhammad

Pictured: Shia Muharram mourning gathering in Iran • Nov 2014
Photo Credit: Payam Moein via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0 (cropped)

Overview

In this section, we pick up where Section 4 left us: on a plain in Iraq in 680, standing next to the Prophet's grandson, Husayn. We trace how that afternoon turned a political faction into a religious tradition — through the Penitents, the mourning of Ashura, and the doctrine of the Imams — and follow that tradition forward to the Mahdi, to Safavid Iran, and to the Islamic Republic. We then turn from what divides the Ummah to what unites almost all of it: Islam as an orthopraxic tradition, in which Islamic theology (kalam) is inseparable from Islamic law (fiqh), and the Five Pillars by which a Muslim builds a life. The section closes with Salat, the communal prayer that encompasses the other four pillars.

Assigned Reading
Reza Aslan, No god but God, chapters 6- 7

Key Terms for this Section
Kalam · Tawhid · Shirk · Zakat · Sawm · Hajj · Salat · Sunni
Imamah · Twelver · Khomeinism · Mahdi · Husayn

5.1 | Karbala

Iraq • 680 🇮🇶

It is the Christian year 680 CE.
The Muslim year 61 AH. 61 years since the Hijra to Yathrib (Medina).

Muhammad’s dream of a free, peaceable, egalitarian community of believers has become so much dust in the desert, and in its place sits a new Islamic empire ruled from Damascus by the sons of the men who once hunted the Prophet.

Here, on a dry plain in Iraq called Karbala, the Prophet’s grandson is about to die.

Husayn (Hossein) is the son of Ali and Fatima (Fatemeh), leader of the Hashemite clan, and, to a great many Muslims, the rightful heir to the Caliphate. Against him rides Yazid, the 33-year-old son of Mu’awiya (Mo'aviyeh), the second Umayyad caliph. Here in Iraq, the sons are fighting their fathers’ war. Ali and Mu’awiya had settled nothing at Siffin (cf. Sec. 4.3); they had only partitioned the disagreement and postponed the war.

The two forces are nowhere near evenly matched, and everyone knows it. Husayn bravely rides out with fewer than a hundred followers, his own family of women and children near him — back at the camp. Yazid meets Husayn with a large, well-paid, mounted Syrian army. What follows is not a battle. Over three days, without water or food, it is the slaughter of a family in the open Iraqi desert.

Husayn’s 18-year-old son, Ali Akbar, dies armed on the field. So does his brother’s 14-year-old son, Qasim (Ghasem). Even Husayn’s infant son is killed, shot in the neck by a soldier’s arrow as Husayn carries the child toward the Syrian lines to beg for water.

Bloodied, and with few left to hear it, Husayn calls out to the riders closing on him:

These are the last words of Husayn, son of Ali, Grandson of the Prophet, Master of Martyrs. Moments later, Yazid’s general decapitates Muhammad’s grandson and carries his head away as a prized trophy. The new Umayyad Caliphate in Damascus celebrated this as the beginning of the first Islamic empire. And it was. But it also gave rise to a rival tradition that fervently mourns the Battle of Karbala to this day.

The Penitents

Husayn had ridden out to Karbala from Kufa, in Iraq: a city of freed slaves and Persian converts, where his father Ali had governed as the fourth Rashidun caliph.

Kufa was the heart of the Party of Ali (Shi’atu Ali, cf. Sec. 4.3). Its people had written to Husayn, promising him an army. But when Husayn came, almost none of them went with him to Karbala.

Four years later, a small group of Kufans gathers at the site of the massacre. They are remembered as the tawwabun, the Penitents. They blacken their faces. They tear their clothes. They weep openly, in public, for a man they had failed. They name their own failure as the reason he died.

This is the moment the Party of Ali stops being a political faction and becomes the religious tradition of Shi’ism. Not at Siffin, where the argument was about who should govern. Shia Islam is born where the argument became about what we owe the one who suffered for us, and what it means that we did not go.

At the heart of Shia Islam is a 1,400-year-old grief. Reza Aslan puts the theology plainly: Shi’ism rests on the conviction that the righteous believer sacrifices himself in the struggle for justice, as Husayn did in the face of his oppressors. He went to Karbala knowing — that’s the whole point. He was not ambushed. He was not outmaneuvered. Husayn chose certain death rather than swear fealty to the Umayyads.

And the Shia reading places that choice in a very long line

The sacrifice-theology of Shia Islam begins in Genesis with Abraham (Ibrahim) raising the knife over his son and ends with Husayn’s brave and willing sacrifice at Karbala. Between those historical bookmarks were the Lawgivers: Moses (Torah/al-Tawrat), Jesus (the Gospel/al-Injil), and Muhammad (al-Qur’an). For the Shia, what starts and completes this circuit is the sacrifice: opened by Abraham and closed by Husayn.

Ashura: Honoring Martyrdom

Every year, on the 10th of Muharram, the largest act of communal devotion in Shia Islam takes place.

Ashura is the anniversary of Husayn’s death. It is less a commemoration and more of a public atonement. The tears that should have been shed at Karbala, by the people of Kufa who stayed home, are shed now, to redeem the tragedy. Hence the Shia saying: a tear shed for Husayn washes away a hundred sins.

The observance takes many forms. Congregations gather for majlis, lamentation assemblies where the story is recited and the room weeps together. In Iran and South Asia, communities stage ta’ziya, passion plays that put Karbala on a stage — one of the very few dramatic traditions in the Islamic world. Processions carry black banners through the streets. Mourners beat their chests in rhythm (latm). And in some communities, a minority practice of ritual bloodletting with blades or chains (tatbir) has drawn cameras (out of all proportion to how common it is), and has been discouraged or forbidden by major Shia authorities, including Ayatollah Khamenei in Iran and Grand Ayatollah al-Sistani in Iraq, who direct the faithful toward blood donation instead.

Many Sunni Muslims regard the mourning rites as bid’ah, an innovation with no warrant in the Prophet’s practice. That objection is old, sincere, and widely held among the Sunni. At the same time, Sunnis keep the 10th of Muharram too, as a fast, for completely different reasons. Tradition states that Muhammad, arriving in Medina, found the Jews of the city fasting and fasted with them (cf. Sec. 3.4).

So the same date is, in one tradition, a fast for a people delivered, and in the other, a public mourning for a family who were not. As non-sectarian scholars, our work is to describe both as accurately as possible.

For the Shia, one does not understand Islam without Karbala.

5.2 | The Imams

Imamah

For the Sunni, nothing stands between the Believer and the Message. But for the Shia, there is a critical link: salvation comes through Muhammad, through his son-in-law Ali, through his grandsons Hasan and Husayn, and through the line of successors the Shia hold to be legitimate. That line is the Imams, and Ali is the first.

There are two basic uses of the word imam.

The word imam (إمام) comes from a Semitic root meaning to go before. The first use of imam is as a title for the Muslim who stands before the congregants at the Friday prayers (analogous to a pastor or rabbi). But there’s nuance in this first form that informs the second. The Qur’an also uses this title for Abraham, an “imam for humankind” (2:124). In honor of this Quranic precedent, the Sunni world honors its four great jurists with the title Imam (Imam Abu Hanifa, Imam Malik, Imam al-Shafi’i, and Imam Ahmad). For those great men, English translators use a capital “I” for Imam.

Following this, the Shia world uses the vaunted Imam for the twelve figures after Muhammad who define their tradition. So, if you visit a Sunni mosque for Jummah on a Friday afternoon, you can meet the imam. For them, imam is a job. Every major American city has imams. But an Imam (capital I) in Shia Islam is a wholly other thing.

For the Shia, the Imams are specific members of Muhammad’s family who are ismah — morally protected from error (like God’s prophets and angels). This doctrine is called Imamah, and it is the theological engine of the entire tradition.

In Shia tradition, a Prophet (eg. Moses, Jesus, Muhammad) transmits the message, while an Imam (eg. Ali, Hasan, Husayn) translates the message.

Abraham transmitted monotheism. His sons carried it.
Moses transmitted the Torah. His brother Aaron established it.
Jesus transmitted the Gospel. Peter built the Church around it.

For the Shia, Muhammad transmitted the Qur’an. The Imams translated it.

Which is why the Imams are said to possess what no one else does. They carry the living spirit of the Prophet. They know the secret name of God. And where the rest of the Ummah reads the Qur'an through tafsir (standard meaning), the Imams alone can perform ta'wil (fathom the esoteric meaning), tracing a verse back to the hidden meaning beneath its surface. Humanity is made from the dust of the earth; the Imams, tradition holds, were made from light.

The Twelfth Imam

The line of Imams begins with Ali (1), then to his sons Hasan (2) and Husayn (3), then Husayn’s son Ali (4), then his son Muhammad (5), and his son Jafar (6).

Jafar as-Sadiq (Sadegh, d. 765) is the most consequential figure in this list after Ali himself. He formalized the rites of Karbala. He founded the school of law the Shia still follow — Jafari fiqh — which recognizes the teachings of the Imams alongside the Sunnah of the Prophet. And, critically, his school built reasoned interpretation into the machinery of Shia law. As the Shia legal scholar Hossein Modarressi renders the principle: whatever is ordered by reason is also ordered by religion.

That principle has a name — ijtihad, independent legal reasoning — and it produced a powerful Islamic institution. Those qualified to practice it are mujtahids. The highest rank of mujtahid is an ayatollah, a title meaning the sign of God. The title takes decades to earn, and few ever reach it. Those who do gather followers are bound by their rulings (a strong contrast to the Sunni, who have no such practice).

The line continues, and then it splits. Jafar’s eldest son Ismail (Esmail, 7) was to succeed him but died first — or did he?? A small sect of Ismaili Shia, the Seveners, hold that Ismail did not die but entered concealment, and will return at the end of time.

However, for the vast majority of Shia, Jafar’s son Musa (7) succeeded him, followed by Rida (Reza, 8), Jawad (Javad, 9), and then Hadi (10) and Askari (11) — two Imams the later Abbasid caliphs (cf. Sec. 9) feared so thoroughly that they spent most of their lives under guard. Which is why the twelfth, Muhammad al-Mahdi, was hidden from public view almost from birth.

The Twelver Shia — the overwhelming majority of Shia Muslims today — hold that the Twelfth Imam did not die but entered occultation: hidden, living, ever-present in the world. He is the Mahdi, the one who guides divinely, and he will reveal himself at the end of days to restore justice to the world.

For the Shia, Muhammad* al-Mahdi, the twelfth Imam (*not to be confused with the Prophet Muhammad), is the summation of history, morality, and Islamic theology. At the end of time, he returns to fill the earth with justice as Jesus the Messiah (Isa al-Masih) descends to pray behind him before hunting down and killing the antichrist (Dajjal). For Sunnis, almost none of this is settled. The Mahdi may be (a) identified with Jesus outright, (b) folded into prophecies of black banners out of Khorasan, or (c) set aside entirely.

As the Mahdi appears nowhere in the Qur’an, if you ask ten Sunni theologians about the Mahdi, you may get ten different answers. Ask a Twelver, and you will get one.

Quietism vs Khomenei 🇮🇷

According to Shia tradition, the Imam is alive today, divinely appointed, and thoroughly unavailable to the Islamic world. He is God’s answer to every hard question, but no one can reach him to ask him.

Every argument about religious authority in Shia Islam for the last 1,100 years descends from this problem.

During the Lesser Occultation (ca. 874-941), the Hidden Imam is held to have communicated through 4 successive named deputies, one after the other. Questions went in; rulings came out. Then the fourth deputy died, naming no successor, and the Greater Occultation began. From that point on, there is no one with a direct line.

What develops instead is the doctrine of niyaba — deputyship. If the Imam appoints no individual, then the qualified jurists together stand as his general deputies, and this is precisely why an ayatollah’s rulings bind his followers in a way no Sunni scholar’s do. He is not merely learned. He is standing in for someone.

But standing in for him for how long and how far? That question has never been settled among the Shia, and the tradition’s two answers are genuinely far apart.

The quietist reading is the older and, for most of Shia history, the majority one: the jurist’s deputyship covers law, worship, and the care of the community — and stops there. Politics is not the Imam’s portfolio to lend out. The world will be set right when he returns and not before, so no government, however pious, may claim his authority. On this reading, a cleric who takes power has misunderstood his own office.

The activist reading pushes the argument the other way. If the jurist truly deputizes for the Imam, then he inherits what the Imam held — including the right to govern. This is referred to as the guardianship of the jurist, and it is the contemporary doctrinal core of what 20th-century scholars called Khomeinism.

Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (d. 1989) worked his namesake doctrine out while living in exile in Najaf: the quietist capital (6 miles from Kufa) where Ali lies buried. Ironically, the most consequential argument for clerical rule in modern Islam was written in the city most opposed to it.

By 1979, in Qom, Iran, Khomeini’s activist reading was penned into a modern Constitution, fusing three things that had never sat together: Twelver theology, a modern state, and an ayatollah as its Supreme Leader. Meanwhile, also from Najaf, Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani continues the quietist reading of Shia governance and has trained generations to carry it forward — a Shia scholarship entirely free of Khomeini’s politics.

Two cities, Najaf and Qom, led by two ayatollahs, utterly opposed in their view of what the hidden, Twelfth Imam requires of the awaiting Shia Muslim population.

5.3 | Orthopraxy & the Five Pillars

Right Belief, Right Practice

Every religious tradition is held together by two poles: orthodoxy (Gr. ortho “right” and doxa “belief”) and orthopraxy (Gr. ortho “right” and praxis “practice”). Every tradition has both. No tradition weights them equally.

Focused on belief, Christianity is an exemplar of orthodox religion.

Christian practice varies greatly across the world. A Pentecostal service in South Texas and a Russian Orthodox liturgy share almost no choreography; what makes someone a Christian is what they believe about Jesus. Creedal claims have been the primary Christian instrument. The Council of Nicaea was a fight about belief (cf. Sec. 2.2).

Judaism sits at the opposite pole.

Jewish identity is bound far more tightly to what one does: an observant Jew walks Halacha (the Path), a body of practice covering food, time, labor, and speech. Theology, in Judaism, has never been the membership test.

Broadly writ, Islam belongs closer to the Jewish side of this distinction. While belief matters enormously to Muslims, correct practice has generally been the greater concern of Muslim communities. So much so that the Ulama (Learned Ones) took to calling Islamic theology kalam, from an Arabic word meaning talking — and ahl al-kalam, “the People of Talking,” is what critics called the speculative theologians. The label stuck, which tells you how the argument went.

With this attitude in mind, it comes as no surprise that questions of kalam (theology) are always bound to fiqh, Islamic jurisprudence. In other words, the great theological questions of Islam are always aimed at a practice question: how should a Muslim live?

The Sunni, over 90% of Muslims today, frame their responses along a moral architecture they refer to as the Five Pillars* — Shahadah, Zakat, Sawm, Hajj, and Salat.

With these five building blocks, a person builds a penitent Muslim life.

*The Shia add to these Five Pillars with five beliefs (all but one shared by the Sunni) and six more obligations (two not shared by the Sunni). The Shia belief in Imamah (explained above) and special Shia obligations to Muhammad’s family (loyalty to him and his descendant Imams and disavowal of their enemies) are not shared by the Sunni.

The Shahadah

The first pillar is a sentence. The creed of the Islamic tradition.

The Shahadah is where Islamic belief and Islamic practice meet, because saying it is the doing of it. One performs this belief out loud.

Its first clause is the whole of Islamic theology compressed. In the Qur’an’s language, the Oneness of God is tawhid — literally, to make one. Tawhid is not a claim Islam introduced; it is central to the 5,000 year-old claim of the Jewish Shema in Deut 6:4.

For Muslim and Jew alike, God is indivisible and without equal.

God has no parts, personhood, or children. There is no essence of God that a human sentence can hold. Whatever one can image God to be, the Islamic response is always, Allahu Akbar, God is Greater. Not great. Greater. Greater than the thought you just had.

The 10th-century al-Tahawi put it in five words: imagination does not reach Him.

So the tradition reaches for metaphor and knows it is doing so. The Qur’an calls God Compassionate and Merciful in nearly every surah, and among the ninety-nine names are the Sacred (62:1), the Peace and the Omnipotent (59:23), the Creator (6:102), the Eternal (59:24), the Forgiving (20:82), the Provider (51:58), the Omniscient (2:158), and the Gentle (22:63). Ninety-nine names, and the tradition’s own position is that all ninety-nine fall short.

The opposite of tawhid is shirk: worship directed anywhere but to God. On its face, that means idolatry, and in Islamic theology it includes the Christian Trinity. The claim that Jesus is God, or part of God, is shirk by definition.

But the concept stretches, and the stretch is where it gets interesting. Shirk comes to name anything a person puts between themselves and God. Greed is shirk when the alms go unpaid. Pride is shirk when the ego takes the first seat. Even piety is shirk when it is performed for an audience. One can commit shirk in a mosque!

Which reframes the sentence entirely. To say There is only One God is not to pass a theology quiz. It is to concede sovereignty over every part of one’s own life — and to keep conceding it as a practice of daily living.

The second clause does different work. Muhammad is Rasul Allah, the Messenger of God. The Qur’an he recited is the final revelation — his example is the path — and there is no prophet coming after him. Note what the sentence does not say. Not Muhammad and others. Not Muhammad was. Muhammad is the Messenger — present tense, permanently.

And this sentence is the door. Say it sincerely, before witnesses, and you are a Muslim — no clergy, no committee, no ceremony. It is your choice; it cannot be made for you, and it cannot be taken from you.

Zakat, Sawm, & Hajj: The Great Levelers

The next three pillars all have the same job, but from different angles.
They level the world in the spirit of Muhammad’s teachings.

Zakat is obligatory almsgiving for the poor. The great economic leveler.

For each Muslim, 2.5% of their excess wealth is paid to those in need. This does not include income or homeownership. If you owe more in credit card debt than you have in the bank, you pay nothing. Muhammad built the Ummah as a community that carried its burdens collectively. Simply put, zakat is the debt society owes one another. If a prosperous Muslim lets their neighbor go hungry, it is a sin. How? That Muslim has put their wealth in front of God. Can a Muslim be wealthy? Many are, and zakat is in place to purify their wealth. In fact, the word zakat literally means to purify.

Sawm is an obligatory annual fast. The great hunger leveler.

During the holy month of Ramadan (the first month of the first revelation), from dawn to sunset, physically capable Muslims abstain from food, drink, smoking, and physical pleasure. Children, the sick, the elderly, travelers, and pregnant/nursing mothers are exempt. Islam’s fast has Jewish roots: in the earliest Medina years, Muhammad had the Ummah fast on Yom Kippur (cf. Sec. 3.4), and the Qur’an is explicit that the practice is inherited — fasting is prescribed for you, just as it was prescribed for those before you (2:183). How does it level society? It guarantees that every observant Muslim on earth, prince and poor alike, knows exactly what it feels like to want food and not have it.

Hajj is an obligatory pilgrimage to Mecca. The great class leveler.

Once in a lifetime, every able Muslim is to travel to Mecca and to enter the Grand Mosque. Once there, every pilgrim, of every nation and class and station, must put on the same plain white cloth. There are no social classes on Hajj. This was Muhammad’s dream, made visible for one week of the year.

At the center stands the Ka’ba, the same sacred cube, now emptied of its 360 idols, draped in black (cf. Sec. 3.4). Pilgrims circle it seven times, retracing the circuits Muhammad walked 1,400 years ago. They run between two hills (cf. Hagar), stand at Mount Arafat (cf. Adam and Eve), and throw stones at three pillars representing the Devil. It ends with an animal sacrifice — the meat given to the Meccan poor.

For a quarter of humanity, the Ka’ba is the axis mundi — the center point every Muslim on earth faces to orient themselves to each other and God. So a pilgrim standing at the shrine (whether they be Sunni or Shia) is faced from every direction at once: from the west, Muslims in the Americas; from the south, African Muslims; from the east, Iran, Pakistan, and Indonesia; from the north, Europe, Russia, and the Levant.

Afterward, the pilgrim puts his ordinary clothes back on and returns to the world a Hajji. But he keeps the white cloth. He will wear it once more as his burial shroud.

5.4 | Salat: the Tent Pole of Islam

Du’a & Salat (Namaz)

This leaves the fifth pillar: prayer (salat).

Islam distinguishes two kinds of prayer. Du’a is the informal prayer of an individual. Any words, any time, at any place where the believer speaks to God directly. Salat is something else: formal, communal, choreographed prayer, performed five times daily: at dawn, midday, afternoon, sunset, and night.

Here’s a link to those times in major US cities.

The name tells you what it is. Salat comes from a root meaning to bow, bend, or stretch. It is named for what the body does. Not for what the mind intends, not for what the heart feels, but for the social posture.

The Friday midday prayer, Jummah, is the congregational gathering of the week: the structural counterpart to the Jewish Shabbat service on Friday evening and the Christian service on Sunday morning. Three siblings, three days, one weekend.

Wudu (Vozu) & Prostrations

Like the other four pillars, Salat has sacred conditions.

The worshipper must be modestly dressed, physically clean, and in a clean space. Then comes wudu, ritual ablution: washing the hands, mouth, nose, face, arms, hairline and neck, ears, and feet, in order.

Outside, the muezzin turns toward Mecca and calls the adhan (azan) — the Call to Prayer — traditionally from a tower so the whole city hears it. It is easily the most recognizable sound in the Islamic world, and it has marked the hours in Damascus and Cairo and Istanbul for well over a thousand years. Translated, it says:

What follows is a far more physical practice than what most Christians or Jews do in worship. Hands rise and fall together. The congregation goes to hands, then knees, then forehead to the floor — and rises again shoulder to shoulder, in ranks, in time. Qur’anic verses are recited throughout, and God is Greater punctuates the movements.

Allahu Akbar.

Consider what that costs a person. Five times a day, you stop what you are doing, wash, and put your face on the ground in a room full of people doing the same thing at the same moment. There is nothing private about it and nothing convenient about it. Salat is a physical decentering of the self — a body trained, several times daily, to be one rank among many rather than the center of anything.

There are few sacred rituals today more thoroughly opposed to the casual, entertainment-centered instincts of the modern world.

The Tent Pole

So why is salat the greatest of the pillars?
Because salat contains all five pillars at once.

In prayer, the Shahadah is recited. The first pillar, nine times a day over five prayers. The five prayers take roughly half an hour out of 24 hours, which is about 2.5% of the day: the Zakat proportion — in time instead of money. Throughout, the worshipper abstains from food, drink, and physical pleasure — a Sawm in miniature. And every prayer is performed facing Mecca, in rank with other believers — a brief Hajj, made from anywhere a Muslim may find herself.

One pillar, a tent pole, holding the other four inside it.

We opened this section on a plain in Iraq, with a family dying from a question over who should lead. A question that has not been settled in 1,400 years and will not be settled here. Nevertheless, at dawn tomorrow, roughly two billion people will wash their hands and faces, turn toward the same draped cube in the same desert valley, and put their foreheads on the ground in submission to God. Sunni and Shia. Najaf and Medina. The same words, under the same sun, in the same direction.

The Ummah may never agree on who leads.
It has never once disagreed about which way to face.

And the words recited in every one of those prayers — the same verses, in the same 7th-century Arabic, from Jakarta to Dallas — are the subject we take up next.

Last Section: After Muhammad
This Section: Kalam & Shia Islam
Next Section: Philosophy & the Qur’an

Pictured: Folio from the Birmingham Qur’an, 20th Surah • 7th c.

Overview

In this section, we describe the crisis that followed Muhammad's death in 632: the invention of the Caliphate, the office built to answer a question the Ummah had never had to ask. We trace the reigns of the first four caliphs — the Rashidun — from Abu Bakr and the Riddah Wars, through Omar’s conquest decade, to Uthman's canonization of the Qur'an and the contested rule of Ali. We then situate the factions whose quarrel over succession broke into open civil war (fitnah) at the Battle of the Camel and at Siffin. The section closes with the Umayyad turn of 661 and the origins of the divide between Sunni and Shia Islam.

Assigned Reading
Reza Aslan, No god but God, chapter 5
Tamim Ansary, Destiny Disrupted, chapter 4

Key Terms for this Section
Caliph · Rashidun · Ulama · Fitnah · Kafir · Shia (Shi'atu Ali) · Kharijite · Umayyad Abu Bakr · Umar (Omar) · Uthman (Osman) · Ali · Fatima (Fatemeh) · Aisha · Mu'awiya

4.1 | The Succession Crisis

The Prophet is Dead • 570-632

Mecca is safeguarded, the idols are broken, but Muhammad does not stay long.

Many in Arabia assumed he meant to make himself King of Mecca. But he had no such political ambition. He wanted change, not power. And once change came to the Arab world, he wanted to go home, to his true home, in Medina. It’s there, two and a half years after the emptying of the Ka’ba, that Muhammad rests his head against his wife Aisha’s (Ayesheh) lap and dies quietly in his home — finally at peace, in Islam’s first mosque.

It is the Jewish year 4392, the Christian year 632, and the Muslim year 11.

After the Prophet’s untimely death, the Ummah comes apart at the seams. His old friend Umar (Omar), a large, hot-tempered man who had spent a decade defending the Prophet with his fists, simply refuses to accept his death. He stands in the mosque loudly insisting Muhammad is not really dead and threatening anyone who says otherwise. It falls to Abu Bakr, who had been leading prayers during the Prophet’s illness, to calm and put the death into perspective for a grieving congregation:

“If anyone worships Muhammad, Muhammad is dead. If anyone worships God, God is alive, immortal.” Abu Bakr

It is, in a sentence, the whole problem of the next thirty years. The message survives its Messenger. But who leads, and by what right?

The Prophet Muhammad had named no successor, and (this is the part that matters) he left no procedure for choosing one either. He had collapsed every office of Arab authority into himself — Elder, Judge, Warlord, Mystic — and above them all, Lawgiver and Messenger of God (cf. Sec. 3.2). Now all of those seats were suddenly vacant. The position of Messenger — of Rasul Allah — was sealed forever.

For context, consider the Biblical alternatives known to Muhammad. In the Torah, Moses lays his hands on Joshua before the whole assembly and transfers his authority in public (Num. 27:18-23). In the early Church, when the Apostles replace Judas, the community assembles and casts lots (Acts 1:15-26). But, for reasons lost to the sands of time, Muhammad left the Ummah without a prescribed method of succession. Instead, a grieving Ummah had to find a method on the spot.

The pressure to choose Muhammad’s successor was felt both inside Medina’s mosque and in tribal meetings far away. Client tribes concluded their agreements had been with Muhammad personally, not God, and ended their zakat payments. Additionally, copycat prophets began to spring up in Yemen and eastern Arabia who tried to imitate Muhammad and reproduce his social programs. Some drew real followings.

But perhaps the worst problem the Ummah now faced was the ephemeral nature of Muhammad’s teachings. At the time of his death, there was no Qur’an. Instead, the teachings of the Prophet survived in the memories of his Companions and on the occasional scrap of parchment. The Ummah had no legal code, no settled theology, and no institutional religion. And now, there was no longer anyone to ask.

Successor to the Messenger of God

The argument begins immediately, and it begins over geography.

Should the new leader of Islam come from Medina, the Prophet’s City that had sheltered the movement? Or from Mecca, home of the Ka’ba and of the newly converted Quraysh? Maybe one of each, sharing power?

The debate eventually settles on continuity: the succeeding man should be one of the Companions who had made the original Hijra ten years earlier, and a Meccan of the Quraysh. After hours of heated argument at the shura (the ancient Arab tribal council), the assembly lands on the calming voice that had taken over when Muhammad fell ill and had steadied the community at the funeral. The majority choose Abu Bakr.

But what to call Abu Bakr? This was a political, theological, and philosophical problem that required nuance. He could not be called “prophet,” as the holy revelation had ended with Muhammad (he was very clear on that point). The community decided on the rather modest title of Khalifat Rasul Allah — the ‘Successor’ to the Messenger of God. Caliph for short.

The word is worth pausing on, because it defines an office that governs the rest of this course. A caliph is a successor, a deputy. He’s never a prophet, and never a source of revelation. Abu Bakr inherits Muhammad’s political authority: Shaykh, Hakam, Qa’id. He inherits none of his religious authority. That falls instead to the Ulama — the Learned Ones — (alim in the singular), the scholars who would carry the religious direction of the Ummah forward.

This split — caliph as political successor and alim as theological successor — is the single most consequential piece of institutional design in early Islam. Nearly every fight throughout Section 4 will be about the line between these two forces.

As Caliph, Abu Bakr tells the assembled Muslims in his inaugural address:

“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.” Abu Bakr

Think about that for a moment. The caliph’s legitimacy comes from the consent of the governed — and it can be withdrawn! Not from bloodline, not from conquest, not from divine appointment. Aslan points out that nowhere else in the 7th-century world had such an experiment in popular sovereignty even been imagined. And the practice the shura embodies is not an Arab political habit the Ummah merely carried forward. The Qur’an lists it among the marks of the faithful, set directly alongside prayer itself:

“…respond to their Lord; keep up the prayer; conduct their affairs by mutual consultation…” QUR’AN 42:38

But consent has a shadow side: somebody has to be left out of the room.

The most obvious alternative to Abu Bakr was Ali — Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law, raised in his home, the first child to accept his message, and the one who had stood beside him at the Ka’ba. Ali was also a Hashemite, of Muhammad’s own clan. And, interestingly, the Hashemites were not present at the shura when Abu Bakr was chosen by the majority.

The Qurayshi answer was blunt and, on its own terms, principled: no one wanted the whole authority of the Ummah consolidated into one small family. If this community was going to be a new kind of tribe — one anybody could join — it could not become the private property of the Prophet’s relatives. Prophethood and the Caliphate, Abu Bakr and Umar both insisted, cannot live in the same clan.

But the Hashemites, with plenty to lose, simply did not accept this. Neither did the Ansar of Medina, who resented watching a Meccan take the office in their own city. Umar eventually went to the house of Ali and Fatima (Fatemeh) — Muhammad’s own daughter — and threatened to burn it down unless they submitted to the new authority. But Abu Bakr restrained him at the last moment. This was the level of tension around the choice of caliph. Umar’s threat was withdrawn, but the message was still received. In the end, Ali would swear his allegiance to the new caliph.

The Ummah had its caliph. It also had its first faction.

The Riddah Wars

Abu Bakr was the first of the Rashidun — the Rightly Guided Ones, the four caliphs who ruled from Muhammad’s death to 661.*

Abu Bakr’s reign barely lasted two and a half years, and he spent nearly all of it at war.

The campaign is remembered as the Riddah Wars — the Wars of Apostasy — and it was aimed at both problems at once: the copycat, rival prophets and the tribes who had stopped paying zakat. The fighting was led by the formidable general Khalid ibn al-Walid, whom our second author, Tamim Ansary, calls the “hero of the Apostate Wars.”

Abu Bakr’s reasoning is the hinge of the whole episode. The deadbeat tribes, he argued, had not made their agreements with the Shaykh of Medina; they had made their agreements with God Almighty. Refusing zakat was therefore not a broken contract or a tax dispute. It was treason against the Ummah and a sin against God — and the penalty for treason was death.

Abu Bakr won his wars against the apostates. Arabia held. But Aslan notes the long shadow the victory cast: by treating the refusal of zakat as apostasy, and apostasy as treason, the Riddah Wars welded the two together in Islamic thought for centuries to come — pay zakat or die by the sword. The Qur’an, by the way, never taught this.

For Abu Bakr’s administration, there was one more piece of critical domestic business. He wanted to check Hashemite influence for good. So Abu Bakr announces an official ruling on inheritance: ‘the Prophet Muhammad left no heirs.’ The widows of Muhammad — the “Mothers of the Faithful,” including Abu Bakr’s own daughter Aisha — would be provided for directly by the Ummah instead. And, as a father and caliph, he kept that promise scrupulously.

Muhammad’s daughter was heartbroken. Fatima (Fatemeh) had lost her father’s estate by decree, and she never spoke to Abu Bakr again. When she died a short time later, Ali washed and buried his wife himself, the daughter of the Prophet, quietly, at night, without informing the caliph. One can imagine his sadness and anger.

It is a small, personal act of protest. 1,400 years later, it is still remembered by those with allegiance to Ali.

*A word of caution on the term. “Rashidun” is not a neutral historical label; it is the Sunni tradition’s own retrospective judgment that these four reigns, and only these four, were rightly guided. Shia Muslims do not read the period this way at all. We use the term because the sources do, not out of deference to either side.

4.2 | Omar’s Conquests & Uthman’s Codex

Commander of the Faithful

When Abu Bakr died in 634 (13 AH), he did something the shura had not authorized: he named his own successor. Ali’s popularity had grown considerably in the two years since the Prophet’s death, and Abu Bakr and Umar remained convinced that the Hashemites must not inherit the office.

So Abu Bakr named his protégé, Umar, as second Caliph of the Ummah.

It has to be said, though, that naming him settled nothing by itself. Umar could not rule without the consensus of the Ummah — the same requirement Abu Bakr had faced. And, like Abu Bakr, he was granted it.

The loud and powerful Umar styles himself Amir al-Mu’manin — Commander of the Faithful. He was an enormous, bald, physically intimidating man, and under his command the Ummah expands at a rate almost impossible to wrap your head around. He personally meets both superpowers of the period in the field of battle and beats them decisively. Damascus, Jerusalem, Egypt, Libya — they fall like dominoes.

In 636, at Yarmuk, the Muslim armies destroy the main Christian Byzantine field army in Syria. Against the Sassanid Persians near Qadisiya, there is a famous parley in which the Persian commander dismisses the Arabs as poor and starving, comparing them to a mouse that gorges itself until it is too fat to escape its own hole — trapped by its own greed. The Arabs were unimpressed. Within a few years, the Persian capital of Ctesiphon falls. Under Umar, the Ummah destroys the Sassanid (Persian) Empire.

Jerusalem surrendered too. The story goes that the caliph traveled to accept the surrender of the holy city with a single servant and a single donkey, the two men taking turns riding and walking, so that when they finally arrived the waiting Christians mistook the servant for the caliph. “No pomp,” Tamim Ansary writes. “That was Omar’s style, according to legend.”

These were Christian cities, and not incidentally so. Damascus was a Byzantine provincial capital built around the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist; Muslims and Christians would share that site for two generations before it became an Umayyad Mosque. The Jerusalem once burned by the Romans had been rebuilt as a Christian pilgrimage city over centuries of imperial patronage. Egypt was Christian, too.

And Caliph Umar took each of these wealthy Christian provinces as his own. So why didn’t the Eastern (Byzantine) Christians fight harder for them?

Recall the theological fractures we traced back in Sec. 2.2. Most of these Christians were the wrong kind of Christian by Byzantine standards. Syria leaned Miaphysite. Egypt was overwhelmingly Coptic Miaphysite. These were precisely the communities the imperial church in Constantinople had spent centuries pressuring to conform — the losing side of Nicaea’s long aftermath, taxed and legislated and occasionally persecuted by their own emperor for believing the wrong things about Christ.

So consider the arithmetic from a Miaphysite doorway in Damascus, or a Coptic one in Alexandria. Trading a Byzantine emperor for a Muslim caliph was not an obvious downgrade — and, in tax terms, it was frequently a huge win (ie. the jizyah discussed in Sec. 3.4 was often more favorable than eastern imperial Christian tax requirements). Historians still argue over how much this actually accelerated the early Islamic conquests, and we won’t settle it here. But either way, an army at the gate isn’t always a loss for those inside.

To problematize the image of the ‘conquering Islamic horde’ further, consider how Umar garrisons his men. The caliph would deliberately set his standing army apart from conquered populations, rather than letting soldiers settle among them. His standing orders to new regional governors emphasized slow change. And, interestingly, he worked to treat non-Arab Muslims as the equal of Arabs — just as the former began to outnumber the latter.

Back home, in an attempt to make amends with Ali’s clan, he offered to give the Hashemites full control of Muhammad’s Medina estates. He also married Ali’s own daughter, and consulted Ali, now his father-in-law, on matters of state. But the one political reality on which Umar would never move was his and the late Abu Bakr’s position: that the Prophethood and the Caliphate cannot reside in the same clan.

The Deathbed Shura

In 644 (23 AH), Umar is stabbed in the mosque at Medina while leading prayers.

The once hot-headed man who had refused to believe the Prophet was dead had evolved into a shrewd, if not disciplined, ruler. In his final act as caliph, Umar refuses to name a successor — so that the Hashemites, his wife’s clan, cannot be slighted a second time. Instead, he summons the six leading candidates to his deathbed and instructs them to settle it among themselves in the ancient form of the shura, with the Companion Abd al-Rahman ibn Awf serving as Hakam — their neutral arbitrator.

They narrow it down to two: the Hashemite Ali, and the Umayyad Uthman (Osman).*

Uthman was an early convert who had known Muhammad personally. He was wealthy, well-connected, and mild-mannered to the point of utter dullness. In fact, his dullness was his chief qualification. He was the exact opposite of the passionate, brilliant, uncompromising (and, thus, deeply polarizing) Hashemite, Ali.

The Hakam put two questions to each man. The second was whether, as caliph, he would follow the precedents set by the first two caliphs. Uthman said yes. Ali, insulted, said no.

Uthman was then endorsed by the Ummah as the third caliph.

Predictably, the Hashemites went into a rage — not because Uthman was dull, but because he was an Umayyad. The Umayyad clan was among the most powerful of the Qurayshi tribe. In life, they were among Muhammad’s most bitter enemies. Their clan’s part in the Meccan war was devastating — Uthman’s uncle had led the Qurayshi armies against the Prophet and the Ummah! Now, the clan of Muhammad (Ali and the Hashemites) was being asked to bend the knee to the clan of Muhammad’s enemies (the Umayyads), all in the name of Islam.

Then Uthman made it worse. Much worse…

After taking office, he replaced most of the regional governors with members of his immediate family and began handing his relatives enormous sums from the public treasury. And he adopted a bizarre new title: Khalifat Allah, the Successor to God.

Abu Bakr had been Successor to the Messenger of God, and had pointedly refused anything grander. Uthman now presented himself as successor to God Almighty.

The Uthman Codex

All of this has to be set against the other side of Uthman, who was genuinely and strenuously pious. When his wives refused to accept Islam, he divorced them and married two of Muhammad’s daughters. When a group of persecuted Muslims fled to Abyssinia, he went along as their financial backer. In Medina, he expanded the Prophet’s Mosque and bought the community a strategic well out of his own pocket.

But all of this is a small footnote to what he did next.

Uthman set the Ulama, the Learned Ones, to the holiest and most critical task left after the Prophet’s death: to produce one authoritative written edition of the Qur’an.

Until then, the revelation had been preserved chiefly by the Qurra, the Prophet’s authorized reciters, and committed to writing only piecemeal: verses scratched onto pieces of bone, scraps of leather, and the flat ribs of palm leaves. Written verses were collected from across the Islamicate world. Surviving Companions were interviewed. Discrepancies among early local Islamic traditions were resolved.

Around 650 CE, a single binding text was authorized — and the variant collections, tradition states, were rounded up and burned.

Objections came at once, from Iraq, Syria, and Egypt. But note what the objectors were not saying. Their specific complaint, Aslan carefully observes, was never that the local Qur’ans were better or more accurate. It was that Caliph Uthman had overstepped the bounds of his secular authority in dictating the sacred text. Which is to say: the fight over the codex was another fight about that line between political power and religious authority — the line Abu Bakr had drawn on his first day in office, and that Uthman had now stepped across in the most conspicuous way imaginable.

Uthman’s authorized edition arranged its surahs roughly by length, which is how they stand today. And the result is extraordinary. The Qur’an that Uthman held in his hands, in the original Meccan Arabic, is the same recited by nearly two billion Muslims this morning.

4.3 | The First Fitnah

The Murder of Uthman, Successor to God

Uthman made enemies at a rate that would have alarmed a less confident man: not just the old enemies of the Umayyad clan, but senior Companions, and eventually even the Hakam who had handed him the office in the first place.

By 655 (34 AH), eleven years in, revolts are breaking out across the Islamicate world — and the grievance is nearly always the same: the corruption and incompetence of the caliph’s relatives in the provinces. The anger reaches into the Medina mosque itself, where the elderly caliph is pelted with stones during Friday Jummah prayers and knocked clean off the minbar (pulpit) onto the floor.

Several Companions urge him to repent publicly of his nepotism and make amends. But his kinsman and adviser Marwan talks him out of it. Uthman holds his course.

Two of his kinsmen governed the richest provinces in the empire, and both were notorious. From Damascus, Uthman’s cousin Mu’awiya (Mo'aviyeh) was enriching himself at great expense to his subjects. And in Egypt, Uthman’s foster brother Abdullah ibn Sa’d was squeezing his once Coptic Christian province dry.

Prominent Egyptians write to the caliph and get no reply. So they send a delegation to Medina in person, and are joined en route by delegates from Basra, Kufa, and elsewhere. Uthman hears them out and agrees to replace the Governor of Egypt. The delegation starts for home satisfied.

And then, on the road, they intercept a letter. It is carried by one of Uthman’s own slaves. In the letter, Uthman instructs the Governor of Egypt to arrest and execute the delegates the moment they arrive.

Some historians claim the letter is a forgery. Uthman swore he never wrote it, and both of our scholars, Aslan and Ansary, record the judgment of later historians that its likely author was, in fact, Marwan. Honestly, though, it made no difference. The petitioners march back to Medina and arrive as an angry mob. They demand the caliph abdicate his throne. He refuses and goes back to reading his Qur’an.

Touchingly, among Uthman’s defenders were Ali’s sons. Hasan helps to hold the door, as Husayn (Hossein) carries water through the siege. Uthman himself forbids his supporters from shedding blood on his behalf.

Nevertheless, the mob breaks into the house, smashes Uthman’s belongings, and then beats the old leader to death. The tradition remembers his blood soaking into the pages of the open Qur’an he had been reading.

The Party of Ali

Ali was at prayer when word reached him.
His first thought was for Hasan, who had tried to shield the caliph from the mob.

The day after the murder, a congregation gathers at the mosque and begs Ali to take the Caliphate. After twenty-five years of watching other men hold the office, he still says no. The assassination was appalling; the mob still controlled Medina, and to accept the office from them was to accept rule from a mob.

But the support for Ali kept building: the Hashemites, the Ansar of Medina, several prominent Companions, a few Qurayshi clans, and many of the non-Arab Muslim communities. Collectively, these supporters became known as the Shi’atu Ali, the Party of Ali. More commonly known today as the Shia.

Ali finally accepts and takes his oath in the mosque before all of Medina. Believing that Uthman’s bizarre antics had tainted the word itself, he refuses to be called “Caliph,” taking Umar’s old charge instead: Commander of the Faithful. Ali then declares a general amnesty for the mob, and he removes the problematic Umayyad governors, replacing them with qualified local men.

Both decisions were defensible. Both were catastrophic.

By this point the Ummah has sorted itself into four distinct positions on what the Caliphate even is — and it is worth discussing them, because the next thirty years are, by and large, these four arguments conducted with weapons.

The Party of Uthman, led now by Aisha and carrying the convictions of her late father Abu Bakr and his protégé Umar: the caliph’s power should be confined to political matters, with religious questions left to the Ulama.

The Party of Ali, the Shia: Ali and the Hashemites, as the family of the Prophet, should govern both the political and the religious destiny of the Ummah.

The Kharijites, a smaller faction within Ali’s own camp: the most pious living Muslim should lead the divinely ordained Ummah, irrespective of tribe, lineage, or ancestry. At the moment, that man was Ali. But it need not stay Ali. This group also grew obsessed with labeling those who disagreed with them kafir: unbeliever.

The Party of Mu’awiya: the Umayyad clan, who had run Arabia’s economy from Mecca for generations and now held a claim to the office through the murdered Uthman, should rule the expanding empire. To that end, the Umayyad Governor of Damascus was already raising an army on Egyptian taxes.

By Ali’s time as leader of the Caliphate, the neo-tribal dream of Muhammad is all but gone. Larger financial and imperial ambitions have flooded into his Ummah. And the future of Islam is about to be decided on a battlefield.

The Camel & Siffin

Aisha, Muhammad’s youngest widow and Abu Bakr’s daughter, goes to Mecca to raise an army against Ali (her own stepson-in-law, if you’re counting).

Aisha’s position was that of her father’s, held consistently for 24 years: the clan of Muhammad cannot hold both religious and political authority over the Ummah. It is too much power for one family. She rallies the Meccan elite, and with a group of Meccan warriors she rides out to meet Ali in the field, leading the cavalry herself from the back of a camel.

It is remembered as the Battle of the Camel (36 AH), and it is the Ummah’s first taste of fitnah — their first civil war. Muslims are now killing Muslims over the question of who should be their leader.

Talha and Zubayr, two of Ali’s most prominent opponents, both Companions of the Prophet, are killed. Aisha herself is wounded by an arrow. Ansary reckons the field left some 10,000 Muslim dead.

When it’s over, Ali pardons Aisha (his stepmother-in-law and late wife's stepmother, if you’re counting). She lives out her days as a revered teacher and transmitter of the tradition, and her authority in the Hadith remains considerable to this day.

Ali then moves his seat of government to Kufa, in Iraq, to reward the city’s loyalty. He will never return to Medina. Instead, Ali turns west, toward his enemy Mu’awiya — who had by then been parading the alleged bloody shirt of Uthman from town to town, asking local leaders to join him in a coup against Ali.

The two armies met at the Battle of Siffin.

The battle opens with Mu’awiya’s forces trying to block Ali’s army from reaching the river, and then settles into months of stalemate before the real fighting begins. When it comes, the slaughter is staggering: some sources, Ansary hedges, put the toll as high as 65,000 Muslims dead over four blood-soaked days.

Ali tries repeatedly to stop it. He asks Mu’awiya to negotiate, again and again. There was even an offer to settle the Caliphate by single combat — both in their mid-50s — a slender, battle-ready Ali agreed, while a rich and portly Mu’awiya declined.

Then, with the battle apparently turning in Ali’s favor, Mu’awiya orders his soldiers to fix pages of the Qur’an to the points of their lances.

It was a cynical maneuver, and everyone knew it. The Kharijite faction pushes Ali to ignore the stratagem — to cut down the rebels, the kafirs, for their insubordination. He does not. Facing the Qur’an on the field, Ali grounded his refusal in the Qur’an’s own rule of restraint:

“if [the enemy] desists, then you must also cease hostilities.” QUR’AN 2:193

So Ali calls for a parley. A Hakam led lengthy negotiations, and with tens of thousands already dead, the best that could be agreed was a partition: Mu’awiya and the Umayyads would hold Egypt and Syria. Ali would keep everything east.

Ali had obeyed his scripture. It cost him everything.

4.4 | The Umayyad Turn

No Judgment but God Alone

The Kharijites regard Ali’s agreement to arbitration as a grave sin.

Their thinking was, if the Caliphate is a divinely ordained office, then submitting its disposition to a panel of human negotiators is a categorical error. God’s judgment is not the sort of thing men arbitrate.

Crying “No judgment but God alone!” the Kharijites abandon Ali on the blood-soaked field. To their view, Ali forfeited his office the moment he agreed to discuss it.

Three years later, in the mosque at Kufa, Ali is at prayer when a Kharijite named Ibn Muljam pushes through the crowd. “Judgment belongs to God, Ali, not to you!” he shouts, and kills the fourth and final Rashidun caliph with a poisoned sword.

The Kharijite movement itself eventually dwindled into an historical footnote. But what remains of them was their penchant for declaring another Muslim an unbeliever, and treating that declaration as a license for violence. This Kharijite view has resurfaced in every century since, and Muslim critics of modern extremist groups routinely reach for exactly this comparison, naming ISIS in particular as the Kharijites coming round again.

Hasan Steps Aside

Ali’s supporters then turn to his eldest son, Hasan, to take up the Hashemite claim.

He declines.

And Hasan’s reasoning is the epitaph for the whole era. Like it or not, the Caliphate was now a global empire, stretching from the Zagros Mountains of Persia to the desert sands of Libya. It was no longer the holy egalitarian community it had once been dreamed to be. To claim the office at this point, Hasan judged, would be little more than a power grab — one more round of court intrigue ending in the deaths of tens of thousands of Muslims.

So he steps aside. And with that, the first era of Islamic history was over.

In Ali’s place, Mu’awiya — Uthman’s cousin, the Governor of Damascus — moves the seat of power from Kufa in Iraq to Damascus in Syria, and, in 661, inaugurates the Umayyad Caliphate — just 40 years after the Hijra.

The first Islamic empire. Not a shura. Not a community of consent. A dynasty, seated in a Roman provincial capital, that would pass from father to son.

Sunni & Shia

The question that opened this section — who leads the Ummah, and by what right? — was never actually settled. Not at the Camel, not at Siffin, not at Damascus.

In a real sense, it is still an open question,
as the two great Islamic traditions grew out of it.

Sunni Muslims (the Majority) hold that the community was right to choose its leaders by consensus, beginning with Abu Bakr, and that the Rashidun era is the model of legitimate succession. Shia Muslims (the Party of Ali) trace their name to the Shi’atu Ali and hold that leadership belonged by right to Ali and to the family of the Prophet, and that the community, however sincerely, chose wrong in a courtyard in Medina in 632. As non-sectarian scholars, our work is to describe both readings accurately and to leave the adjudicating to those who hold to them.

What is striking is how much the two share. Ali is revered across both branches. For Sunnis, he is the fourth of the Rightly Guided Caliphs. For Shia Muslims, he is something considerably more — the first Imam.

Today, roughly two billion people are Muslims. About 90% are Sunni. Nearly all the rest are Shia, concentrated in Iran, Iraq, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, and Lebanon. Think about that — a quarrel among a few thousand people over who should lead a desert oasis community now defines the religious lives of a quarter of our planet.

And it only gets worse from here. Because what makes the Shia claim really burn, what turns a political grievance into a theology of martyrdom and suffering, has not happened yet in our telling. It will take place 20 years later…

In a dusty plain in Iraq called Karbala.

Last Section: Jihad & the Holy City of Medina
This Section: After Muhammad
Next Section: Kalam & Shia Islam

Pictured: Al-Masjid an-Nabawi | The Prophet’s Mosque, Medina, Saudi Arabia
est. 622 CE, expanded many times, last major expansion 1994 CE

Overview

In this section, we trace the Hijra: the emigration that marks Year 1 of the Islamic calendar (AH), and describe the founding of the Ummah at Medina. We situate Muhammad's social reforms within 7th-century Arabian society: the Constitution of Medina, the reform of the ancient Law of Retribution, zakat, and the changing status of women. We then describe the war with Mecca (at Badr, Uhud, and the Trench) and trace the two doctrines of jihad that emerge from this period. The section closes with Islam's early relationship to the Jews and Christians of Arabia: the dhimmi, the jizyah, and the Qibla (direction of prayer).

Assigned Reading
Reza Aslan, No god but God, chapters 3–4

Key Terms for this Section
Hijra · Ummah · Zakat · Hijab · Hadith · Jihad · Dhimmi · Jizyah

3.1 | The Hijra & the Constitution of Medina

The Secret

In 622, the weeklong exodus of Muhammad's Sahabah (Companions) to the distant city of Yathrib was a well-guarded secret in Mecca.

Known as the Hijra, the flight of the Sahabah was as dangerous as it was alienating. In all, about 70 Meccans left the comforts of home and family for the promise of Muhammad's profound message. These 70 Companions are known as the Muhajirun — those who have made the flight. And those who received them in Yathrib and assisted them became known as the Ansar — the Helpers. Together, Muhammad establishes the first masjid (Arabic word for mosque), which is also his home, in Yathrib. Eventually, the loose collection of villages of Yathrib will become known as Medina, literally the City (Madinat an-Nabi, the City of the Prophet), and will become the capital city of the initial Muslim community. This period is so central to the story of Islam that it marks Year 1 of the Islamic Calendar (“After the Hijra,” A.H. 1).

Muhammad, Settler of Disputes

When Muhammad arrives in Yathrib, he is effectively the Shaykh of the Muhajirun — the political clan leader of the new Meccan émigrés. As such, he is one of several Shaykhs in Yathrib. He also makes a name for himself as a Hakam — a settler of disputes between the clans.

Of course, to his 70 or so followers, Muhammad is much more than a mere Shaykh or Hakam. For them, Muhammad is Rasul Allah — the final Messenger of God.

The prevailing political and economic authority of Yathrib was a loose confederation of about 20 Jewish-Arab clans. The Jews of Yathrib, who numbered in the thousands, were craftsmen, weaponsmiths, and cultivators of dates and wine, while the nearby pagan Bedouins herded sheep and camels. These two strata — the settled Jewish Arabs and the nomadic Bedouins — benefited each other in Yathrib’s oasis. Five of these clans held an especially large share of that wealth, including the Banu Qaynuqa, who also controlled the oasis’s only marketplace, along with the Banu Nadir and the Banu Qurayza. But (Aslan is careful to note this), for the most part, the Jews and Arabs of Yathrib lived in relative peace, bound together by strategic alliance and economic interdependence. The real fault line ran between the Arabs themselves: the rival confederations of the Aws and the Khazraj, locked in a feud whose origins had been long lost to memory by Muhammad’s time, and which even the ancient Law of Retribution had failed to settle. By the time Muhammad arrived in Yathrib, the eternal quarrel had spread among the Jewish clans as well. The Jewish Nadir and Qurayza clans sided with the Bedouin Aws, while the Jewish Qaynuqa sided with the Bedouin Khazraj. This split the oasis in two. What Yathrib needed was an outsider — a Hakam and Shaykh — with no kin and no old grievance in Yathrib to answer for.

Muhammad was the right man at the right time, now in the right place to help bring an ancient blood feud to an end.

The Birth of the Ummah

In Yathrib, Bedouin Aws and Khazraj tribes see Muhammad as a wise Hakam — an outsider brought in to end their feud. To the wider oasis, he is one Shaykh among many, and leader of a small clan of outsiders. But to the Muhajirun (those who left Mecca) and the Ansar (the Helpers), he remains Rasul Allah, the Messenger of God.

This is where the Ummah begins.
Not yet an Islamic nation.
Not yet a regional power the Quraysh in Mecca need fear,
but a community of common belief.

Today, the Ummah specifically refers to the international Muslim community. But it’s important to note, as the scholar Frederick Denny shows, that this term has evolved from its Medinan beginnings. The Arabic word ummah (أُمَّة) can be traced at least as far back as Genesis (25:16), where it’s used in Ancient Hebrew to mean tribe. In Muhammad’s 7th-century Arabic use, the ummah came to mean those who agreed to the Prophet’s message. Moreover, Denny ties the ummah to political and theological decisions Muhammad makes as his standing in Medina firms up — decisions this section will follow, including the day he turns the direction of prayer away from Jerusalem and toward the Ka’ba in Mecca.

3.2 | The Medina Reforms: Women & Hadith

The Lawgiver

Over the last 1400 years, the Ummah of Medina has remained the classical standard for Islamic society. Why? Because it was there that Muhammad was finally able to enact the radical social reforms he had once dreamed of pursuing in his native Mecca.

First, he collapses the ancient Arab tribal offices — Elder (Shaykh), Judge (Hakam), Warlord (Qa’id), and Mystic (Kahin) — into one: Lawgiver. And Muhammad, like Moses before him, takes on the mantle of Lawgiver of his people.

No pre-Islamic Arab ever held all four at once; the Arabs were too wary of concentrated power to allow it. The Elder carried the least formal authority but the most moral weight: elected as first among equals, his sole job was to guarantee the protection of every member of the tribe, especially those who could least protect themselves, and his standing rested on a personal oath of loyalty (bay’ah) that could be withdrawn the moment he failed. The Judge was the neutral party brought in to arbitrate disputes the tribe’s Law of Retribution left unclear — his rulings, accumulated over years, hardened into a tribe’s Sunna, its body of unwritten legal precedent. The Warlord led the tribe in battle. And the Mystic held the Kahin‘s office, the tribe’s one sanctioned channel to the divine.

Muhammad now held all four titles in a single person, the Lawgiver.

As Lawgiver to the Ummah, Muhammad opens the tribe to new members. Under the old system, you were born into a clan. Now anyone may join the Ummah by swearing an oath of allegiance, the Creed (called the Shahadah in Arabic): “There is only One God, and Muhammad is His Messenger.”

This makes the Ummah a new kind of tribe — one that can accept anyone and expand forever.

Within the Ummah, the Law of Retribution (ie. an eye for an eye) is reformed. Muhammad implores his followers to grant forgiveness instead — a Jewish and Christian custom — which, he maintains, God will reward (Qur’an 42:40). And where the Law of Retribution is followed, everyone in the Ummah is now treated equally. A Shaykh’s eye is now worth the same as a destitute orphan’s.

The Women of the Ummah

As Lawgiver, Muhammad also makes reforms for women without precedent in Arabia.

After a decisive battle in 625 (cf. Sec. 3.3), the widower Muhammad ensured that the widowed women of the Ummah had the right to inherit their husbands’ property and to keep their wedding dowries as their own. He also limits the number of wives a man may marry, and he grants women permission to divorce their husbands (and keep the dowry!). No doubt this deference to women owes much to the abiding love Muhammad carried for his late wife of 25 years, Khadija.

And what about the men who came to the Prophet complaining about a woman’s traditional place? Muhammad’s answer is simple: those who do not honor these reforms will burn in Hell forever (Qur’an 4:14). End of discussion.

Over his 10 years in Medina, the widower Muhammad will marry nine different women. Generally, these are unions with a political framing — paralleling European aristocratic practices well into the 20th century. In short, marriage was a political act for most of history. It certainly was among the élite of 7th-century Arabia. His betrothal to Aisha (Ayesheh) links him politically to Abu Bakr, while his marriage to Hafsah links him to Umar (Omar) — both central figures of the early Ummah. He joins a powerful Meccan clan by marrying Umm Salamah. He also marries both a Jew and a Christian, Rayhana and Mariyah. He even marries an elderly widow, Sawdah, as an example to other men to marry those in need.

As wives of the Prophet, living in a house that also served as a mosque to countless guests, these women covered themselves with a veil (ie. hijab) to preserve their modesty among visitors in a holy place. In this way, taking the veil — darabat al-hijab — became a way of saying, “married to Muhammad.” She has ‘taken the veil.’ Conversely, in the Qur’an, the term hijab is only ever applied to the Prophet’s wives and to no other woman in the Ummah. (Compare this to the Christian teaching in
I Corinthians 11:5-6, which instructs all Christian women to cover their heads.)

Traditionalist Islamicists read the Qur’an’s modesty verses (24:31; 33:59) as extending the practice of hijab to all Muslim women — and their reading remains authoritative across much of the Islamicate world today. As non-sectarian scholars, we can describe both readings without adjudicating between them.

Almsgiving & Hadith

Muhammad also outlaws interest loans (ie. usury) — the practice the Quraysh had used to keep the poor of Mecca poor. In the Prophet’s City, the market is tax-free, and loans carry no interest. In their place, Muhammad redistributes wealth through zakat: 2.5% of a person’s accumulated wealth, given to the poor.

And make no mistake: zakat is not charity. Islamic almsgiving is a holy obligation, second only to prayer. Every capable member of the Ummah must do this to be a Muslim.

After Muhammad’s eventual death (cf. Sec. 4), a great variety of religious questions (like the hijab) continued to need answers. The Ummah will look first to the early Companions (Sahabah), and their stories will become the beginnings of the Hadith: the oral accounts of the life, deeds, and words of Muhammad not found in the Qur’an.

The practice of looking back on the accounts of eyewitnesses* to Muhammad becomes a research skill in and of itself. Sussing out the authenticity of a teaching’s chain of transmission — its isnad — will become a subject of great study and debate in Islamic theology. Entire schools of thought will swing on the hinge of an Islamic teaching’s credibility via its isnad.

*Especially important to scholars of Hadith is how a teaching was transmitted: sami'tu (direct, as in, “I heard [him say]”), or 'an (the more ambiguous, “on the authority of”). An 'an-report from a trustworthy narrator is generally accepted, but from a narrator with a record of concealing his sources, the vague form can be grounds for theological rejection. The Hadith collectors even disagreed on how much proof of contact between narrators an 'an required.

3.3 | Jihad & the War with Mecca

Jihad: History & Caricature

For years, there has been an unfortunate stereotype of Islam: a horde of savage warriors with scimitars raised, charging on camelback, hellbent on world domination.

Reza Aslan traces this caricature of the “warrior religion” to the Middle Ages, when the leaders of Christendom sought to take the Holy Land (and the lucrative trade roads to China) from the Islamicate world. Whether it’s King Richard fighting Saladin for Jerusalem, the Holy Roman Empire against the Turks, or the Allies seizing oil fields in the modern Middle East, Aslan argues there has always been an economic incentive in the West to draw the Islamic world as a caricature of evil barbarity.

As scholars, our interest is in looking past the headlines, the speeches, and the propaganda to ask how this image actually developed.

7th-century Islam came about in an era of great socio-religious empires. To the north lay the Christian Byzantine Empire — inheritors of the Roman world, from Constantinople to Jerusalem. To the east lay the ancient Zoroastrian Sassanian Empire — descendants of the mighty Persians of Biblical and historical legend. All else was little more than desert and ocean.

The early Islamic attitude toward religion ran parallel to that of their Byzantine and Sassanian neighbors:

“Your religion was your ethnicity, your culture, and your social identity; it defined your politics, your economics, and your ethics. More than anything else, your religion was your citizenship.” Reza Aslan, No god but God

As such, the early Ummah was not out to force converts (despite how it is often otherwise portrayed). Conversion for non-Arabs was, in fact, a complicated matter. It’s more accurate to say the Arab Muslims formed a kind of aristocratic clique in the lands they conquered, slow to accept outsiders.

So, was Islam a “religion of the sword” as is often claimed?
Actually, this is the wrong question — or, at least, a question posed in bad faith. Why?

Because the early Ummah had swords just like the Christian Byzantines, the Zoroastrian Persians, the kingdoms of India, the Daoists of China, the Vikings, the Saxons, the Welsh, the Mayans, the Pueblo, and every other culture living in the 7th century. Calling early Islam a “religion of the sword” pretends it is different than their 7th-century Christian, Zoroastrian, and pagan neighbors who also carried swords. Calling it another religion of the 7th century, that also had swords like everyone else, is certainly more fitting.

The fact is, Islam would not have survived the Meccan Quraysh — much less the Byzantines or the Sassanids — without the sword.

Now, what the question of Islam being a “religion of the sword” is often really asking is what role jihad (جِهَاد) has in Islam. Jihad (meaning “to struggle”) may be the most misunderstood concept in all of Islam and is worthy of our attention here, before we start counting off battles in which the Prophet Muhammad engaged.

There are two forms of jihad (struggle) in the Qur’an.

The Greater Jihad is the internal struggle to overcome sin and the obstacles standing between oneself and God — analogous to the “narrow way” Jesus describes in his Sermon on the Mount (Matt 7:14). The Lesser Jihad is the outer struggle to secure the peace and welfare of one’s community. When the community comes under attack, the lesser jihad takes the form of defensive war.

The theological logic here is simple. If the battle is defensive, it is just. If the battle is offensive, it is unjust (Qur’an 2:190). This is why Aslan argues that there is no concept of “holy war” in Islam — only the struggle for peace for one’s community (ie. the lesser jihad) and peace for one’s own soul (ie. the greater jihad).

Such is his normative, modern Islamicist view. But the concept has been put to other uses by other Islamicists. Since the Medieval era of the Crusades, a stream of thought has developed that Aslan calls the “Classical Doctrine of Jihad.” In this way of thinking, the world splits in two — the Islamic world (dar al-Islam) who fights the World at War (dar al-Harb). Here, the former must fight the latter until it yields to Islam. This is the view of breakaway, Islamist groups like ISIS and Al-Qaeda.

However, the backlash among Muslims to the so-called Classical Doctrine cannot be overstated. The medieval theologian and jurist Ibn Taymiyya undermines the Classical Doctrine with the Qur’an itself:

“There is no compulsion in religion.” QUR’AN 2:256

Nevertheless, leaders like the Ayatollah Khomeini, Abdullah Yusuf Azzam, and Osama bin Laden have used the classical doctrine of jihad to justify modern campaigns of violence and terror in the name of Islam. While the vast majority of their victims have been other Muslims.

Two Fronts, One Victory

In 7th-century Medina, Muhammad comes to understand two things about his prophetic work.

First, the success of the Ummah has shown him that the larger world could benefit from his message (Qur’an 12:104). His vision of a radically egalitarian society could reach millions.

Secondly, it immediately follows from the first point that there will be no expansion of the Ummah so long as the powerful Qurayshi elite control Arabia’s dominant religious and economic center, the Ka’ba in Mecca.

This is why Muhammad comes to confront Qurayshi power on two fronts.

First, Muhammad declares the city of Medina itself a ḥaram — a holy sanctuary — placing it in direct competition with Mecca. Merchant caravans now have a choice: trade in Mecca, or trade in Medina, 300 miles to the north. (This declaration will later be written into the Constitution of Medina, once Muhammad has the standing to make it official.)

Secondly, Muhammad sends members of the Ummah on caravan raids. In 7th-century Arabia, this was a legitimate and traditional way for small clans to take a share of the riches of the super-wealthy. It rarely ended in bloodshed; merchants counted such petty thievery as a normal cost of doing business on the frontier. But Muhammad isn’t aiming to be a nuisance; he does this to disrupt Meccan power.

And it works!
Caravans begin skipping Mecca for Medina, and the Quraysh take decisive notice.

The first flashpoint comes at the Battle of Badr in 624 (AH 2). Nearly 1,000 Qurayshi warriors surprise 300 of Muhammad’s men along a caravan road. After days of eyeing each other across the valley, Muhammad will not allow his men to fight until they are attacked (cf. jihad). In fact, he continues his prayers even after the fighting starts — until Abu Bakr insists he rise and join the fight. Muhammad then leads his men to a 3-to-1 stunning victory! The Quraysh lose about 70 men, among them several key leaders. Muhammad loses 14.

For the Believers, Muhammad’s triumph shows that God has clearly blessed His Messenger. His 3-to-1 victory at Badr signals that the new Ummah has a real chance at eventual victory over the mighty Quraysh — and beyond them, perhaps the entire Arabian Peninsula! From that day until now, the Islamic Ummah controls the desert region of the Hijaz. And Yathrib becomes known as Medina. The City [of the Prophet].

From Badr also come the first principles of Islamic Just War. Unlike the pre-Islamic Quraysh, Muhammad acknowledges moral differences between combatants and non-combatants, and between offensive and defensive war. Later Islamic teaching will expand on these themes — prohibiting the torture of prisoners, the mutilation of the dead, sexual violence, the destruction of property, and protecting religious sites.

The Constitution of Medina

Victory changes everything, including what Muhammad can claim at home.

Islamic tradition places the Constitution of Medina at the very start of his time in Yathrib, drafted almost as soon as he arrived. But scholars like Reza Aslan and Michael Lecker date the document after the victory at Badr. The powers therein make little sense coming from a recently arrived Shaykh, while they fit well with a Lawgiver returning home with a defensive victory enjoyed by all.

It is often held up as history’s first written constitution. The Constitution of Medina binds the Companion émigrés, the Helpers (Ansar), and the rest of Medina’s clans — Jewish, Christian, and pagan alike — into a single pact of mutual defense. Each community keeps its own faith tradition outright: “to the Jews their religion and to the Muslims their religion.” But every signatory, Jewish clans included, now owes the others loyalty against outside attack. And the document grants Muhammad authority no mere Hakam had ever held: sole arbiter of every dispute in Medina, its recognized war leader (Qa’id), and — the Constitution states plainly — the Messenger of God.

The historian Moshe Gil reads it more bluntly still: less a ‘peace treaty’ than an early exercise in ‘sorting friend from foe’ before the war everyone sees coming. And the Constitution comes to immediate relevance: when Muhammad comes to suspect the Banu Qaynuqa (one of Medina’s most powerful Jewish clans) of breaking their sworn protection, the Constitution is what gives him the grounds to act. What that action looks like, and what it costs, picks up on the other side of Mecca.

3.4 | Jews, Christians, & the Return

The People of the Book

Antisemitism, by and large, has been far more a feature of Christendom than of the Islamicate world.

As the Muslim world expanded after Muhammad into Christian (northwest) and Zoroastrian (northeast) lands, the Jews the Ummah encountered generally received better rights and treatment than they had under their previous rulers. Put plainly: for Jews in the Middle Ages, trading a Christian ruler for an Islamic ruler was historically a net positive — both in terms of safety and prosperity.

Medieval Christians persecuted Jews for their beliefs, forced conversions on them, or killed them outright. The Muslims generally did not. Under Islamic law, Jews and Christians alike were known as dhimmi — protected peoples — because they were also the People of the Book (ahl al-Kitab): the ones who brought the Bible and the knowledge of the prophets to Arabia and the wider world. The tradition recounts Muhammad’s warning: He who wrongs a Jew or a Christian will have me as his accuser on the Day of Judgment.

Because they were not Muslims, the dhimmi did not pay zakat. Instead, they paid a (now controversial) protection tax: the jizyah. In exchange, Jews and Christians received religious autonomy and an elevated social status in the Islamic world. Facing the Christian antisemitism to the north, Medieval Jews came to call the Islamicate world “an act of God’s mercy.”

All of this arises from a central tenet of Islam: Muhammad’s message is indistinguishable from the message of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, the People of Israel, Moses, and Jesus (Qur’an 3:84). As Moses brought the Torah (al-Tawrat), David the Psalms (Al-Zabur), and Jesus the Gospel (Al-Injil), so Muhammad — the Seal of the Prophets — brings the Qur’an. When Jews speak of the Jewish prophets, and when Christians speak of Jesus, Muslims happily honor these forebears of their own religion of Islam.

Muhammad takes special care to align the Ummah with the Jewish people. He first sets the Qibla (the Islamic direction of prayer) toward the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, the same direction as Jewish prayer, then and now. He mandates an Islamic fast to coincide with Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement. He sets the hour of Muslim congregation called “Jummah” at midday Friday — early enough not to interfere with the Jewish Sabbath at sundown. He adopts many of the Jewish dietary and purity laws. And he encourages his followers to marry Jews, as he has done.

However, as Islam develops its own features and traditions, the Qibla is eventually turned to face the Ka’ba in Mecca (as it is now), and the annual fast is moved to Ramadan (Ramazan) — the month in which the Qur’an was first revealed. But the esteem Muhammad placed on the Jewish people never wavers. To this day, after Mecca and Medina, Jerusalem remains the third holiest city of the Islamic world.

As for the Christians: Muhammad holds Jesus in great esteem. The Qur’an confirms that Jesus was born of a virgin (3:47), performed miracles (3:49), was the promised Messiah (3:45), and will judge humanity at the end of time (4:159).

The principal Islamic theological disagreement is specific to the Christian doctrine of Trinitarianism. As we covered in Sec 2.2, there were centuries-old communities of Christians, in Arabia and elsewhere, who honored Jesus as a holy prophet but not as God. Trinitarianism, by contrast, is the belief that God the Father, Jesus the Son, and the Holy Spirit are all God. And this belief in particular — that a flesh-and-blood man could also be God — was anathema to Jews and Muslims alike. The Qur’an’s 112th surah answers it directly:

“Say, ‘He is God the One, God the eternal. He begot no one nor was He begotten. No one is comparable to Him.’” QUR’AN 112:1–4

And yet the Qur’an does not encourage bickering among the three sibling religions:

“People of the Book, let us arrive at a statement that is common to us all: we worship God alone, we ascribe no partner to Him, and none of us takes others beside God as lords.” QUR’AN 3:64

Allegiances & War

After Badr, the Jews, Christians, Hanifs, and growing Muslim population take sides.

Many flee Mecca and the surrounding region for Medina and join the Ummah. Others, particularly the Hanifs who disagree with the new prophet, head south to the Ka’ba and the Quraysh — seeking the way things used to be.

Amid the great exchange of allegiances, Muhammad comes to suspect that the Jewish Qaynuqa in Medina are in secret contact with the Quraysh in Mecca. Following a two-week siege, Muhammad exiles the Jewish Qaynuqa from Medina (Arab custom demanded their deaths, but Muhammad chose a lighter sentence). Their view was simple: the Quraysh were their primary financial partners, and they did not expect an upstart like Muhammad to win.

History proves them momentarily right. The next fight, the Battle of Uhud, proves an unmitigated disaster. Mid-battle, Muhammad’s undisciplined archers break ranks to take spoils from the field. The break opens his forces to be flanked by the Qurayshi army, and Muhammad barely escapes with his life.

This is all the proof the Jewish-Arab élites of Medina need to prove that Muhammad is unfit to lead. A second Jewish clan attempts to assassinate him. The plot is discovered, and Muhammad once again exiles the conspirators. Many veterans of Uhud are enraged at the mercy of this decision. They want blood — as custom demands.

Two more years of skirmishes follow, and neither side gains ground. So the Quraysh send a 10,000-strong Bedouin army to lay siege to Medina, and Muhammad answers with engineering: he orders a trench to be dug around the city.

The trench protecting Medina holds.
After a month, the besiegers run out of supplies and abandon the fight.

Then comes the darkest episode of the Medina years. It turns out that during the siege, a third Jewish-Arab clan — the Banu Qurayza — had been supplying the Bedouin army. For the Ummah, this is the last straw. They again plead with Muhammad to have the conspirators killed. Muhammad recuses himself, asking another Hakam to render the final judgment. The decision sides with ancient Arab custom: the men are killed, the women and children are enslaved, and their property is divided.

Aslan figures this involves about 1% of Medina’s Jewish population, alongside hundreds of fellow Arabs; after which, thousands of Jews continued to live peacefully with Muhammad in Medina throughout his life. To be clear, the Banu Qurayza were killed for their wartime alliance with a besieging army — not because they were Jews. It is later, under the caliph Umar (after Muhammad’s death), that the Jews of Medina are collectively exiled* from the Hijaz.

*It should be noted here that from the time of Umar until the 20th century, hundreds of thousands of Jews continued to thrive in Yemen, Iraq, Iran, and other Muslim regions.

Return to Mecca

Which brings us, at last, back to Mecca.

In the midst of a protracted war with the Quraysh, Muhammad makes a surprising announcement: he and 1,000 followers plan to go on a pilgrimage to Mecca. He will enter the holy city unarmed. And he will circumambulate the Ka’ba.

This decision confounds everyone. Just before his arrival, the Quraysh sign the Treaty of Hudaybiyyah with Muhammad, offering him and the Ummah an empty sanctuary the following season. He agrees. And when the Ummah return the next year as peaceful pilgrims, the people of Mecca see their character with their own eyes.

The treaty also lets other tribes across Arabia ally with either side without joining the war themselves — and it's this clause that ends up breaking the peace. Some ally with Muhammad while others choose the Quraysh. Two years later, a rival tribe attacks one of Muhammad's allies — with Qurayshi backing, chasing survivors into Mecca's own sacred sanctuary, where violence is supposed to be forbidden. It's a direct violation of the treaty: an attack on Muhammad's ally is an attack on Muhammad. The attacked tribe sends word to Medina pleading for help. The Quraysh, realizing what they've done, send their chief, Abu Sufyan, to Medina to try to salvage the peace, but Muhammad refuses to see him. Instead, the Ummah marches on Mecca with 10,000 warriors. Moreover, the people of Mecca have seen the quality of Muhammad's character first-hand. They know the truth about him, his message, and his community. And the people of Mecca accept Muhammad with open arms.

There are no forced conversions.
In total, only 10 Meccans are put to death.
Contrary to Arab custom, a general amnesty is declared for the whole city.
Even the slaves are freed.

At the city center, Muhammad and his son-in-law Ali approach the Ka’ba. One by one, Muhammad removes the pagan idols, raising them over his head, and smashes them to shards before a cheering crowd. The tradition recounts that the only image he spares is a Christian icon of Jesus and Mother Mary.

The last idol to go is the great Syrian god Hubal — in whose name so many of Muhammad’s enemies had hunted the Ummah. For Hubal, Muhammad draws his sword and hacks the idol to pieces. The shards are then refashioned as a doorstep to the Ka’ba. One now steps on Hubal to pray to Allah.

On the day Muhammad emptied the Ka’ba of Mecca, a new universal faith was declared, Islam. Today, two billion Muslims — roughly a quarter of our species — now celebrate the Ka’ba as the holy House of God.

North of Mecca, in the city of Medina, the small mosque that was once Muhammad’s home has grown over the centuries into the mighty al-Masjid an-Nabawi — the Prophet’s Mosque — raised over the site of that first structure and Muhammad’s tomb. It is the second holiest site in the Islamic world, after the Great Mosque of Mecca, and it draws millions of visitors each year.

And, to think, all of this started with a prophet on the run and a few dozen followers.

Last Section: Pre-Islamic Arabia & the Prophet
This Section: Jihad & the Holy City of Medina
Next Section: After Muhammad

Pictured: Allat, Pre-Islamic Goddess of Arabia (2nd century)

Overview

This section introduces the world into which Muhammad ﷺ was born and the first thirteen years of his prophetic career. We situate the Ka'ba and the town of Mecca within the religious landscape of pre-Islamic Arabia (the Jahiliyyah) and trace the monotheistic currents already moving through the peninsula: Jews, Christians, Zoroastrians, and the Arab seekers called hanifs. We then trace Muhammad's early life, his wife Khadija, the revelation of 610 CE, the earliest Qur'anic verses, and the conflict with the Quraysh elite that ends with the Companions’ flight from Mecca.

Assigned Reading
Reza Aslan, No god but God, chapters 1–2

Key Terms for this Section
Ka'ba · Jahiliyyah · Allah · Jinn · Quraysh · Adam · Abraham (Ibrahim) · Jesus (Isa)
Zayd ibn Amr · Muhammad · Abu Talib · Khadija · Waraqa · Ali · Abu Bakr
The Shahadah · The Companions (Sahabah) · Mecca

2.1 | The Ka’ba & the Age of Jahiliyyah

The Sanctuary City

1400 years ago, the Arabian town of Mecca was an ancient, dusty settlement in the desert interior — its value marked less by what it produced than by what it protected. At its center stood a single cube of stone, the Ka’ba, the only masonry structure in a town of mud and straw. The shrine housed a copy of every idol worshipped across Arabia — some 360 of them, a god for every tribe that came to trade. Among the images, Aslan notes, were figures of Jesus and his mother Mary, standing next to the gods of the Arabian desert.

Pilgrims came from across the peninsula to walk the tawaf — the sevenfold circling of the shrine, a rite whose rhythm some scholars connect to the wheeling of the stars overhead. The Meccan leadership could boast that each visitor to their town could find, somewhere in that crowd of idols, the god of his own tribe, and so each had reason to come and safely trade. Beside the Ka'ba lay the well of Zamzam, whose waters Islamic tradition binds to the Jewish story of Hagar and her son Ismail (the Ishmael of Genesis), who were cast into the wilderness, the boy near death from thirst, until, as Genesis tells it, God opened Hagar's eyes to a well of water that saved them both (Gen. 21:19). The well made Mecca livable. Its shrine made it sacred. Together, these two pillars provided the inner circle of Mecca with tremendous wealth. Tradition held that the Ka’ba’s foundations reached back to the very beginning of the Genesis narrative. In Islamic tradition, Adam raised the Ka’ba first, Noah knew of it, and Abraham rebuilt it with Ishmael at his side. Now, a word of scholarly caution: these are stories meant to convey what the Ka’ba means, not a historical record of where it came from — the sacred biography of a place is not its archaeology. As scholars, we can describe what the tradition holds without passing judgment on whether it happened.

What is certain, however, is that custody of 7th-century Mecca was the most valuable office in all of Arabia.

Tradition credits a figure named Qusayy with gathering the scattered clans of the region, seizing the guardianship of the shrine, and settling his people around it, becoming the “Keeper of the Keys” — the one who held the right to open the Ka’ba, water the pilgrims, and take a share of the trade that flowed through the sacred precinct. His descendants would inherit that right, and one branch of that group would become the Quraysh. The whole arrangement rested on a fragile and ingenious custom: the sacred months. For part of each year, raiding and blood feud were suspended by common agreement, so that caravans could move in safety and old enemies could meet at the pilgrimage fairs without violence. In a land governed by feuds, those months of truce were the closest thing to desert law. They allowed a great market to gather in the shadow of the shrine — and whoever controlled the shrine controlled the market. That is how a well and a stone cube in a barren valley became a town worth protecting and fighting for.

The Jahiliyyah

The word Jahiliyyah is usually translated as the “Age of Ignorance” in Arab and Islamicate history. It is not a neutral historical label but the tradition's own retrospective theological name for the pre-Muhammadan era. It does not mean the pre-Islamic Arabs were uncultured or stupid — they had poetry, genealogy, law, and a rich spiritual imagination. In the Islamic reading, what their forebears lacked was divine guidance: they were living in the time before Muhammad’s message came.

Religious life in the Jahiliyyah was split along the same line that divided Arabian society itself: on one side was a barren desert, on the other side were the scattered Arabian towns. For the nomadic Bedouin, religion traveled light. What mattered was the tribe, its ancestors, and the code that kept both alive; the gods were local, portable, and consulted as needed. The settled tribes of the towns and oases lived differently — anchored to shrines, sacred stones, and fixed holy places, with cults that could accumulate wealth, custodians, and prestige. Mecca, built around the most successful shrine of them all, was the settled pattern at its logical zenith.

Running through both worlds of desert and civilization were the Jinn — unseen spirits woven through the landscape, inhabiting the sandy wastes, the ruins, and whirlwinds. Aslan compares the Jinn to the nymphs and fairies of Greek and British lore, and the comparison is useful: like those figures, the Jinn occupied the space between gods and demons — powers to be respected, occasionally bargained with, and blamed when things went wrong. Poets were said to draw their verses from them; madness was attributed to their touch. They made the Arabian landscape a crowded spiritual place long before any theology organized it.

The whole pre-Muhammadan situation followed what the 19th-century scholar Max Müller coined henotheism: where one highest god presides over a pantheon of lesser gods beneath him. Note: this is not monotheism, which denies that other gods exist. Instead, early Arabia had a hierarchy with one figure unmistakably at the summit. This was the religious architecture of the Jahiliyyah. Allah sat at the top, remote and rarely addressed directly, while the tribal gods and the “daughters of Allah” handled the daily traffic of petition and offering. When Muhammad (Persian: Mohammed) begins to preach, the high god is already installed. His work will be clearing out everything beneath him.

1400 years ago, there was no single “Arab religion” in any organized sense — no scripture, no priesthood, no creed binding the tribes together, and no institution to enforce belief. Instead, we find a kind of pluralist ‘pagan’ society: a scattering of local cults, each tribe with its own idols, its own sacred stones and trees and springs, and its own bargains struck with unseen powers. In the Jahiliyyah, piety was largely transactional. One made an offering and expected a return; one honored the gods of the shrine one happened to be visiting, and thought little about the gods of anyone else. This is part of why the Ka’ba could hold hundreds of idols without contradiction.

In a world with many gods, one more shrine simply meant more gods to bargain with.

What held a person’s life together, then, was not doctrine but a code — muruwah, the ideal of manliness and tribal virtue. Aslan lists the demands of Arab muruwah:

• bravery in battle
• loyalty and honor
• hospitality to the stranger
• the justice owed to one’s own kin

In the ancient, harsh world of the open desert, muruwah did real work. It bound the tribe together against a merciless environment and obliged the strong to protect the weak within it, because the survival of each depended on the survival of all. But the ancient muruwah code assumed a world of scarcity and shared fate — and an ever-growing Mecca was no longer part of that world. As caravan wealth pooled in a handful of powerful clans, the old obligations began to fray. Honor thinned into the privileges of the rich; hospitality became display; and the protection once owed to every member of the tribe narrowed quietly to those who could pay for it. The widow, the orphan, and the debtor fell through the gaps. It is precisely this erosion — a proud code hollowed out by cynical greed — that Muhammad’s earliest preaching will name and condemn.

2.2 | Monotheism in Seventh-Century Arabia

God & His Daughters

Today, the holy Arabic name Allah (used by Muslims as well as millions of Arabic-speaking Christians and Jews) is a contraction of al-ilah, and it means, simply, “the God.” Where gods like Zeus and Marduk use personal names, Allah is a title — the definite article (al/the) fused to the common Arabic noun for deity. Interestingly, the name Allah did not arrive with Muhammad. It was already in the air of pre-Islamic Arabia. Rather, Allah had been the title of the remote high god of the Arabian pantheon who, in the Jahiliyyah, held court over the lesser Arabian gods who scurried about the daily business of local Arab shrines.

But a god at the summit is still a god far away.

The high god of the Jahiliyyah was understood to be too exalted and distant to be approached directly by ordinary worshippers — a creator acknowledged in principle but bypassed in practice. When an Arab needed rain, a safe journey, or a son, he did not petition Allah, the god at the summit. Instead, he went through channels. And the most important of those channels were three goddesses remembered as the banat Allah — the “daughters of Allah.”

Now, when these goddesses are called Allah’s “daughters,” it was primarily to rank them as derived from the high god, beneath the high god, and belonging to the high god. The powers of the Arabian goddess-daughters flowed downward from the top as they stood below. Each had her own cult, her own sanctuary, and her own tribal following. There was Allat, whose name is the feminine of the divine title itself — al-ilat, “the Goddess” to her father’s “the God” — venerated especially southeast of Mecca. There was al-Uzza, “the Mighty,” who commanded particular devotion from the Qurayshi tribe. And there was Manat, the goddess of fate and eldest of the sister-goddesses by most accounts, whose sanctuary lay north of Mecca. For centuries, their images were among the most honored in the peninsula, and their names appear in the Qur’an itself, which asks the Meccans directly, “Have you considered Allat, al-Uzza, and Manat, the third, the other?” (Qur’an 53:19–20). For 7th-century Meccans, this was a rhetorical question posed precisely because everyone listening knew exactly who these three Arabian goddesses were.

So let’s try to unpack what’s going on here. One did not choose the daughters over Allah. Rather, one prayed to them as divine intermediaries, sending a message up the chain toward a god presumed too high to be reached on one’s own, the way a petitioner approaches a king through the members of his court. When Muhammad’s message eventually declares that God needs no intermediaries and has no daughters (Qur’an 53:21–23 presses this point immediately after naming them), it severs the channel through which most of Arabia did its praying — and with it the intercessory system on which shrines like the Ka'ba, and the fortunes built on them, depended.

Jews & Christians in Arabia

But let's not imagine ancient Arabia (ie. the Jahiliyyah) as a world sealed off from the rest of what the Afghan-American writer Tamim Ansary calls the “Middle World” (ie. the lands between the Mediterranean and India, knit together by overland trade). Competing religious identities surrounded 7th-century Arabia and the Middle World. The most ancient of these communities had long been the Jews. Jewish life in the Arabian Peninsula reached back at least to the Babylonian Exile of 587 BCE — more than a thousand years before Muhammad. By the time of the Jahiliyyah, the biblical patriarchs had deep roots in Arabian imagination; Aslan writes:

“Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, and Aaron were all in one way or another associated with the Ka’ba long before the rise of Islam.”
Reza Aslan, No god but God

Jewish presence in the Arabian Peninsula only deepened after the Roman destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE, as new waves of settlement pushed south. Jewish tribes put down roots at oasis towns like Yathrib (see Sec. 3) and at Khaybar, where they farmed the date palms, worked as smiths and jewelers, and took a share of the caravan trade. Over many generations, their Judean Aramaic shifted into Arabic as Jews assimilated to the customs of their Arab neighbors. These ancient Arabized Jews organized into tribes, made alliances, and took part in blood feuds just like all the Arab tribes around them. But the social pillar that remained untouched was Biblical monotheism — it was definitive, old, and long settled for Jews. Jewish monotheism stood firmly apart from Arab henotheism. This will matter greatly in the next section (Sec. 3.1), when Muhammad arrives in a Yathrib whose population includes several powerful Jewish clans.

Christianity was also present in pre-Islamic Arabia,
though within that umbrella term were a variety of rival theological positions.

South of Mecca, the city of Najran and parts of Yemen held long-established ancient Christian communities with their own churches and bishops. To the north, the Ghassanid Arabs served as a client kingdom of the Byzantine Empire: Arabic-speaking Christians allied to Constantinople (the capital of Eastern Christendom), along the desert frontier. But the Christianity the Arabs encountered was not a single, unified Church. Across the desert lay a variety of rival theological camps.

Those rivalries deserve a moment, because they represent what an Arab trader would have identified as ‘Christian.’ Christian orthodoxy — from the Greek ortho (right) and doxa (belief) — was a relatively recent construction. For Christianity’s first three centuries there was no single scriptural canon and no institution strong enough to enforce one; each region curated its own scriptures and its own account of who Jesus was and what Jesus taught. The imperial Roman Church settled the question of orthodoxy at Nicaea in 325: Jesus as fully human and fully divine. But many 4th-century Christians did not accept Rome’s Nicene Creed. Arian Christians (followers of Arius; no relation to “Aryans”) held that the Son was a created being, subordinate to the Father. Miaphysite Christians taught that Christ’s divine and human natures were united as one (their opponents called them “Monophysites,” a label their heirs in the Coptic, Syriac, and Armenian churches reject today). Nestorian Christians kept the two natures of Christ so distinct that critics accused them of preaching two persons. And these disputes mapped onto the politics of the age. The Ghassanids, Constantinople’s own Arab allies, leaned Miaphysite against the imperial creed. They compare well to the Lakhmid Arabs of al-Hira: eastern clients of the Persian shahs, whose capital grew into a major center of the Church of the East, the tradition outsiders called “Nestorian,” and whose last king converted to it.

An Arab caravan could pass through three rival Christianities in a single season’s trade. And make no mistake: each of these rival positions thought itself the true heir of Christ’s teachings.

However, while European Christianity (eg. Rome and Constantinople) was heir to the teachings of St. Paul (ie. the Pauline epistles of the New Testament), the oldest Christian tradition in the Arab world came from the remnants of the original Jewish-Christian movement once led by St. James, the brother of Jesus. From St. James’ Jerusalem church came a Christian group historians call the Ebionites (from Heb. evyonim, “the Poor Ones”), who were scattered across the Near East. Ebionite Christianity remained closer to Judaism and was strictly monotheistic. They kept the Sabbath, circumcised their sons, and, while they honored Jesus as Christians, they denied that Jesus was God. Some earlier scholars, struck by how closely this resembles the Qur’an’s own portrait of Jesus, argued that such communities reached Arabia and prepared its hearing. More recent scholarship is skeptical — there is (as yet) no firm evidence of Ebionites in the peninsula, and the Qur’an’s account of Jesus is now widely read as engaging with European Nicene Christianity. For our purposes, the dispute matters less than the solid fact beneath it. In the Middle World, there was a long-standing monotheistic reverence for Jesus (as prophet rather than God), and Arabia’s traders and herdsmen would have been familiar with this position centuries before the Qur’an.

Other Monotheists: Zoroastrians & Hanifs

From Persia came the Zoroastrians, and with them a set of concepts and ideas that would echo through the Middle World: a heaven and a hell awaiting the soul, a universal savior yet to come, and history bending toward a final cosmic battle between the forces of good and evil. If we place these neighboring traditions side-by-side, a clear picture emerges: centuries before Islam, the Arabian peninsula was already thick with discussion of one God, of moral judgment, and of a life beyond this one. The materials of monotheism were everywhere in Muhammad’s Arabia. What was missing was an Arab prophet to gather them together.

Lastly, against this background of Persian Zoroastrians, Arabized Jews, and competing Christian sects stood a much smaller group called the hanifs — Arab seekers who had turned away from their traditional idols while not attaching themselves to any established religion as they reached toward a single God on their own. They were not Jews or Christians, but they had absorbed much of these worldviews, and from the memory of Abraham that all Christians and Jews shared. The figure to remember here is Zayd ibn Amr, whom the Islamic tradition recalls as a kind of forerunner to Muhammad. Zayd renounced the worship of the goddesses outright, declaring that he would serve neither Allat nor al-Uzza but only the one God (Allah), and he took to leaning against the wall of the Ka’ba and calling openly on the God of Abraham — a public rebuke to the idols all around him. There were other hanifs, too, like the poet Umayya ibn Abi as-Salt who longed for a “religion of Abraham,” and Waraqa, a cousin of the woman Muhammad would marry, who had studied Christian scripture, who moved in these same circles of seekers.

All of this to say: when Muhammad began preaching about one God, called Allah, he was not introducing a wholly foreign idea into a peninsula that had never heard it. He was stepping into a centuries-old conversation Arabia had been having, restlessly and inconclusively, for a very long time.

2.3 | 610 CE: Muhammad, Khadija, & the Call

The Stratified City

Picking back up from Lesson 2.1, 7th-century Mecca was a thriving center of trade, built of concentric circles of mud and straw dwellings. The closer one’s home was to the center of the city — to the Ka’ba, the only structure made of stone — the more social power and prestige one had. The most powerful tribe in Muhammad’s youth was the Quraysh, known as the “Tribe of God.” They controlled the Ka’ba, and therefore trade in the city of Mecca.

The Quraysh were the ‘Keepers of the Keys.’

Merchants running the caravan route between Yemen and Syria often went out of their way to visit Mecca. (Earlier scholarship assumed they came because Mecca sat at a crossroads of international trade; the historian Patricia Crone dismantled that assumption in the 1980s, and we follow her lead on this.) The merchants came for the shrine. The Ka’ba was a uniquely universal sanctuary in ancient Arabia as it housed a copy of every Arab idol — all 360 of them — giving Mecca a universally recognized religious prestige, which led to an economic supremacy that rivaled anyone else on the peninsula.

The #2 religious spot in the Middle World was a great cathedral, al-Qalis, commissioned by the Christian ruler, Abraha. It sat south of Mecca in Sana’a (Yemen), and it was built in the hopes of drawing the pilgrim economy south. The economic rivalry between Christian Sana’a and pagan Mecca came to a head in the Year of the Elephant, when Abraha marched on Mecca in a failed attempt to destroy the Ka’ba. That year was 570 CE. Islamic tradition holds this as the year of Muhammad’s birth.

The Mecca that Muhammad grows up in is an intensely stratified city.

Over the generations, the powerful Quraysh took every economic advantage they could and made themselves excessively wealthy. In traditional Arab culture, the Shaykh, the elder of one’s clan, maintained order by ensuring each member of the tribe was protected. His most useful tool was the ancient Law of Retribution: an eye for an eye. If a man’s goat was stolen, he was owed another goat. A slain pregnant camel was worth two camels. And a man’s life was worth roughly a hundred camels. This was frontier justice, without a fixed law code, and it carried two immediate problems. First, there was no such thing as a crime outside one’s tribe. Killing or stealing from someone beyond the tribe did not concern the Shaykh, so long as it did not affect the tribe. Second, there is no real justice left when wealthy tribesmen can simply pay their way out of their crimes. The result was that the Quraysh grew so rich as to be untouchable by anyone else in Mecca. They did what they wanted. They taxed the Ka’ba’s pilgrims while the city’s Shaykhs prospered and stopped caring about the poor, the widow, and the orphan.

An Orphan in Mecca

This is Muhammad’s reality, and he enters it already at its margins.

Muhammad’s father died before he was born. His mother died when he was 6. His grandfather, who took him in, died soon after. He was raised, finally, by his uncle Abu Talib, the Shaykh of his clan, the Hashemites (Banu Hashim). It was an upbringing on the edge of a wealthy world, close enough to see its comforts and dependent for protection on the goodwill of family and friends.

When he was old enough, Muhammad eventually found work in the caravan trade. In his early adult years, he set his sights on a woman he hoped to marry, but she declined. Muhammad persevered, and his reputation as an honest and reliable caravaneer grew. He earned the nickname al-Amin in Mecca, “the Trusted One.” Over time, he moved from the back of the caravan to the front, operating as a Caravan Master for the Meccan wealthy. One such patroness — an older, self-made woman named Khadija — proposed marriage to him.

Their marriage would last about 25 years, until her death in 619.

Marriage to Khadija brought Muhammad into the highest levels of Meccan society. But creature comforts could not settle him. Muhammad spent the next fifteen years struggling with his own complicity in an economic system that enriched the powerful on the backs of the poor. He took to leaving the city for the desert hills and kept to a practice of solitary retreat the sources call tahannuth: nights of vigil and reflection in a cave on Mount Hira, above Mecca. He did not like the Qurayshi system. As Aslan reads him, social injustice clearly weighed heavily on his mind.

God Calls Muhammad

Islamic sources recount that in 610 CE, on one of those nights at Hira, something overwhelming comes upon him. A presence presses against a 40-year-old Muhammad in the dark (this was later understood to be the angel Gabriel), and a Voice commands him to “Recite!” (Iqra’ [اقْرَأْ] – this can be rendered “recite” or “read aloud” in English). Muhammad — terrified — asks what he should recite. The Voice comes again, and again, the pressure tightening until he thought he could bear no more. And then, the Islamic sources say, the words were pressed upon his heart.

Recite! In the name of your Lord who created:
Created humanity from a clot of blood.
Recite, for your Lord is the Most Generous One
Who has taught by the pen;
Taught humanity that which it did not know. QUR’AN 96:1–5

Muhammad flees the cave, shaking. The tradition recounts that he feared he had gone mad or been seized by an evil spirit, and that in his terror he came close to ending his own life on the mountain before the vision returned to steady him. He comes down to Khadija trembling and asks her to cover him with a cloak. It is Khadija who calms him, and Khadija who first believes him. To settle her husband’s doubts, she brings him to her cousin Waraqa (the Christian seeker we met earlier, among the hanifs) who listens and confirms that Muhammad had indeed received a true revelation, calling him “a prophet of this people.” And so it was that in 610 CE, Muhammad understood himself to be called as a nabi (prophet) and as Rasul Allah: the Messenger of God.

A long silence followed the first revelation. Islamic sources call it the fatra, the pause, and it fed Muhammad’s self-doubt and the doubts of those around him. Finally, at his lowest, he was called again to be the Messenger of God.

You are not, by God’s grace, a madman: you will have a never-ending reward — truly you have a strong character — and soon you will see, as will they, which of you is afflicted with madness. QUR’AN 68:2–6

Muhammad then began to recite the Qur’anic verses to his closest friends.

The Early Verses

The verses of this earliest period fall into one of two themes: religious verses and social verses. The earliest religious verses speak of the power and glory of God, but they do not yet press an authoritative case for monotheism against the reigning polytheism and henotheism of the day — that confrontation comes later. And monotheism, in any case, is hardly news to the Meccans. The Jews, Christians, and hanifs have spoken of one God among them for generations, and a caravan city hears every creed that passes through it. So Muhammad's earliest focus lies elsewhere, on ground where the Quraysh are genuinely vulnerable: the mistreatment of the weaker and forgotten members of Meccan society.

So do not be harsh with the orphan and do not chide the one who asks for help.
QUR’AN 93:9–10

And he warns the powerful about their greed.

Woe to every fault-finding backbiter who amasses riches, counting them over, thinking they will make them live forever. QUR’AN 104:1–2

Such teachings were a direct threat against the Meccan elite. Live with compassion, free those you have enslaved with debts, and feed those who cannot feed themselves, or you will burn in the holy fire. (Paraphrase of Qur’an 90:13–20).

2.4 | The First Muslims & the Eve of the Hijra

The First Muslims

Khadija, Muhammad’s wife and most loyal companion, is the first person to accept his message. The first child to accept it is Ali (the son of Muhammad’s uncle Abu Talib, who grew up in the same house with Muhammad). Ali will one day marry Muhammad’s daughter and, in time, inspire a new branch of Islam: Shia Islam. Muhammad’s slave, Zayd, soon accepts Muhammad’s message and is freed. Abu Bakr, a powerful Qurayshi merchant, follows, and his story is a striking one — after his conversion, he makes himself poor by spending his fortune to buy the freedom of enslaved believers. Muhammad continues to draw followers from the wealthy elite and, surprisingly for the time, from among women as well. Altogether, the early Companions (Sahabah) of Muhammad number about 30-40.

Those without the shield of a powerful clan pay the highest price for their conversion. In the tribal order, a person’s safety rests on the certainty that harming them will bring retribution from their kin. But converts from the lower ranks of Meccan society — the enslaved, the poor, the clanless — have no Shaykh to avenge them, and as the movement grows and the Quraysh grow angrier, that makes them easy targets. The elite cannot touch Muhammad himself so long as Abu Talib (his Shaykh) lives and the Hashemites stand behind him; so the pressure falls instead on the followers who have no such protection: in beatings, in economic ruin, and worse.

The persecution grows heavy enough that, by 615 CE, Muhammad sends a group of his most vulnerable followers out of the city altogether: across the Red Sea to the Christian kingdom of Abyssinia (today: Ethiopia). There, the Christian king grants Muhammad’s followers refuge and, tradition recounts, refuses Qurayshi demands to hand them back. The scene is worth pausing on: Muhammad’s early followers found shelter under a Christian king, in the very years the two faiths are first taking each other’s measure. This crossing is remembered as the first hijra, the first flight of the believers from persecution, and it foreshadows the far greater flight that will one day reshape the whole movement.

The Break with the Mighty Quraysh

Three years into Muhammad’s ministry, in 613 CE, his message becomes more religiously focused. We find that focus in the Shahadah, the Islamic profession of faith.

Strict monotheism is now fundamental to the movement, and it’s spreading across Mecca and beyond. What enrages the powerful Quraysh is not the claim that there is only one God — they do enough business every day with Jews, Christians, and hanifs to have heard that claim many times before. What the Quraysh cannot abide is that Muhammad claims to be God’s Messenger. While the other monotheists preach about Abraham (a man most Meccans honor), Muhammad claims to be a prophet equal to Abraham! He is the new Abraham! Muhammad is not asking the Quraysh for their blessing or their permission. He claims to be without equal, answerable only to God! This goes against all ancient and (seemingly) eternal Arab tradition, and it is a direct challenge to the power of the Qurayshi elite.

Muhammad’s first target is the very source of Qurayshi economic power: the Ka’ba.

The story goes like this. Merchants go out of their way to visit the Ka’ba in Mecca because it houses every Arab idol, which makes it safe and sacred ground for all Arabs, which in turn makes Mecca the most lucrative center for peaceful trade in the region. Forget your long-standing blood feuds — come to Mecca and trade with enemies and friends alike! All one has to do is pay a tax to the powerful Quraysh, who run the city at the expense of the Meccan poor. So how does Muhammad turn this upside down? Well, if there is only one God, and Muhammad is His Messenger, then all the idols are worthless, which makes the Qurayshi-run Ka’ba worthless, which strips every bit of power, money, and influence from the abusive Qurayshi elite!

But wait, were the Quraysh actually pagan believers? Tellingly, the Qur’an never quotes the Quraysh as professing belief in their expensive idols. It seems, rather cynically, that idol worship was simply good for business.

Muhammad upends Mecca’s status quo by preaching his message directly before the Ka’ba at the next pilgrimage fair, and from there it spreads throughout Arabia. Unable to silence him while his clan protects him, the Quraysh answer with a decisive boycott of Muhammad’s entire clan (the Hashemites), most of whom make their living by trade. No Meccan is to buy from them, sell to them, or intermarry with them. For roughly three years the ban grinds on, and it devastates the clan. Families go hungry, businesses collapse, and the innocent are punished alongside the believers. Yet the boycott fails: the sheer cruelty of it turns popular sympathy toward the struggling Companions rather than against them, and in time it is shamed into collapse and lifted.

Then comes the hardest year.

Just as the boycott ends, in 619 CE, Muhammad loses the two people who anchor his life. He loses his wife Khadija, his first believer, the one who covered him with a cloak and steadied him after the first night at Hira, his partner and his refuge for a quarter century. He also loses his uncle Abu Talib, who, as Shaykh of the Hashemites, has shielded Muhammad from the worst the Quraysh can do. Islamic tradition remembers this as the Year of Sorrow. The losses are deeply personal for Muhammad. Central to our study, they are also strategic: the new Hashemite Shaykh despises Muhammad for the boycott his preaching provoked, and he withdraws all clan protection from him. Devastated and legally unprotected, Muhammad is now a man anyone can attack without fear of retribution. His position in Mecca has become impossible. And so, at last, he and about 70 of his growing number of ‘Companions’ withdraw from the city under cover of night and set out for Yathrib (today: Medina), a remote cluster of villages hundreds of dangerous miles to the north. Muhammad is now a wanted man, hunted by the rich and powerful who fear his message.

Little do they realize that he will one day return to Mecca
with an army of 10,000 followers.

Last Section: A Primer of Method
This Section: Pre-Islamic Arabia & the Prophet
Next Section: Jihad & the Holy City of Medina

MODULE I – The Rise of Islam

Sec 1 • Normativity & Religion: A Primer on Method

1.1 Islam in a Public College
1.2 The Scholar’s Toolkit: the Nonsectarian Method
1.3 Knowledge, Belief, & the Insider/Outsider Problem
1.4 Descriptive vs. Normative Claims

Sec 2 • Pre-Islamic Arabia & Muhammad ﷺ

2.1 The Ka’ba & the Age of Jahiliyyah
2.2 Monotheism in 7th-century Arabia
2.3 610 CE: Muhammad ﷺ, Khadija, & the Call
2.4 The First Muslims & the Eve of the Hijra

Sec 3 • Jihad & the Holy City of Medina

3.1 The Hijra & the Constitution of Medina
3.2 The Medina Reforms: Women & Hadith
3.3 Jihad & the War with Mecca
3.4 Jews, Christians, & the Return

Sec 4 • After Muhammad ﷺ

4.1 The Succession Crisis
4.2 Omar’s Conquests & Uthman’s Codex
4.3 The First Fitnah
4.4 The Umayyad Turn

Sec 5 • Kalam & Shia Islam

5.1 Karbala
5.2 The Imams
5.3 Orthopraxy & the Five Pillars
5.4 Salat: the Tent Pole of Islam

MODULE II – The Noble Qur’an

Sec 6 • Philosophy & the Qur’an

6.1 The Qur’an as Text: From Recitation to Codex
6.2 Al-Fatiha & the Divine Face
6.3 Rationalists & Traditionalists: Reading the Qur’an
6.4 Sharia & Fiqh: The Law & Its Making

Sec 7 • Qur’anic Ethics: War & Tolerance

7.1 The S-L-M Root & the Norm of Peace
7.2 Just War & the Sword Verse in Context
7.3 Tasamuh vs. Tolerance
7.4 People of the Book & the Five Injunctions

Sec 8 • Qur’anic Ontology: Evil & the Afterlife

8.1 Evil, Shaytan, & Divine Mercy
8.2 Al-Dunya & al-Akhirah: Resurrection & Judgment
8.3 Al-Jannah: The Hidden Garden
8.4 Jahannam, Gehinnom, & the Limits of Language

MODULE III – The Golden Age

Sec 9 • Umayyads & Abbasids

9.1 From Ummah to Empire: The Umayyads
9.2 The Conquest Map: Jerusalem to Tours
9.3 The Abbasid Revolution
9.4 Baghdad: The Crown Jewel of the Age

Sec 10 • Islamic Intellectualism & Mysticism

10.1 Falsafa: Reason Meets Revelation
10.2 Baghdad’s Loanwords: from Algebra to Coffee
10.3 The Sufi Way: Rabia of Basra
10.4 The Conference of the Birds: Fana & Rumi

Sec 11 • Invasions East & West

11.1 The Coming of the Turks
11.2 1099: The Crusades
11.3 Saladin & Richard
11.4 1258: The Mongol Storm & Baghdad

MODULE IV – Islam & Modernity

Sec 12 • Europe & the Three Empires (1300–1850)

12.1 Europe Reborn: Banks, Ships, & the Age of Discovery
12.2 The Ottomans: The Sick Man of Europe
12.3 Safavid Iran & Mughal India
12.4 The East India Company & the Great Game

Sec 13 • Philosophical Responses to Modernity

13.1 All Figured Out: Islam Meets Modernity
13.2 3 Responses: Salafism, Secularism, & Islamic Modernism
13.3 Constitutionalism & the Majlis
13.4 Nationalism, the Great War, & Sykes-Picot

Sec 14 • The Islamic World Today

14.1 New Nations: Atatürk, Pan-Arabism, & Oil
14.2 Israel & Palestine: A Tale of Two Peoples
14.3 Nasser, Qutb, & the Six-Day War
14.4 On Histories Talking Past Each Other