Abu Bakr soon confronted two new threats: the secession of man of the tribes that had joined the
ummah after 630 and
the appearance among them of other prophet figures who claimed continuing guidance from God. In withdrawing, the tribes appear to have been able to
distinguish loyalty to Muhammad from full acceptance
of the uniqueness and permanence of his message. The
appearance of other prophets illustrates a general
phenomenon in the history of religion: the volatility of
revelation as a source of authority. When successfully claimed,
it has almost no competitor; once opened, it is difficult
to close; and, if it cannot be contained and focused at the
appropriate moment, its power disperses. Jews and
Christians had responded to
this dilemma in their own ways; now it was the turn of the
Muslims, whose future was dramatically affected by Abu Bakr’s response. He
put an end to revelation with a combination of military force
and coherent rhetoric. He
defined withdrawal from Muhammad’s coalition as ingratitude
to or denial of God (the concept of kufr. Thus he gave secession (riddah) cosmic
significance as an act of apostasy punishable, according to God’s
revealed messages to
Muhammad, by death. He declared that the secessionists had become Muslims, and
thus servants of God, by joining
Muhammad. They were not free not to be Muslims, nor could they be Muslims,
and thus loyal to God, under any
leader whose legitimacy did not derive from Muhammad. Finally, he declared
Muhammad to be the last prophet
God would send, relying on a reference to Muhammad in one of the revealed
messages as khatm alanbiya’ (“seal of the
prophets”). In his ability to interpret the events of his reign from the
perspective of Islam, Abu Bakr demonstrated the power of the
new conceptual vocabulary
Muhammad had introduced.
Had Abu Bakr not asserted the
independence and uniqueness of
Islam, the movement he had inherited could have been
splintered or absorbed by other monotheistic communities or
by new Islam-like movements led by other tribal figures. Moreover, had he not
quickly made the ban on secession and intergroup conflict yield material
success, his chances for
survival would have been very slim, because Arabia’s
resources could not support his state. To provide an adequate
fiscal base, Abu Bakr enlarged impulses present in pre-Islamic
Mecca and in the ummah. At his death he was beginning
to turn his followers to raiding non- Muslims in the only direction where
that was possible, the north. Migration into Syria and Iraq already had a
long history; Arabs,
both migratory and settled, were already present there. Indeed, some of them were already launching raids
when ‘Umar I, Abu Bakr’s acknowledged successor, assumed the caliphate in
634. The ability of the Medinan state to absorb random action into a
relatively centralized
movement of expansion testifies to the strength of the new
ideological and administrative patterns inherent in the concept
of ummah.
The fusion of two once separable
phenomena, membership in Muhammad’s community and faith in Islam—the mundane and the
spiritual—would become one of Islam’s most distinctive features. Becoming
and being Muslim always involved
doing more than it involved believing. On balance, Muslims have always
favoured orthopraxy (correctness of practice) over orthodoxy (correctness
of doctrine). Being
Muslim has always meant making a commitment to a set of
behavioral patterns because they reflect the right orientation to God.
Where choices were later posed, they were posed not in terms of religion
and politics, or
church and state, but between living in the world the right
way or the wrong way. Just as classical Islamicate languages developed no
equivalents for the words religion and politics, modern European languages have developed
no adequate terms to capture the choices as Muslims have posed them.
Riddah
The riddah wars, or wars of apostasy, were a
series of politicoreligious uprisings in various parts of Arabia
in about 632 CE during the
caliphate of Abu Bakr. In spite of the traditional resistance of the Bedouins
to any restraining
central authority, by 631 Muhammad was able to exact from
the majority of their tribes at least nominal adherence to
Islam, payment of the zakat, a tax levied on Muslims to
support the poor, and acceptance of Medinan envoys. In March
632, in what Muslim historians later called the first
apostasy, or riddah, a Yemeni tribe
expelled two of Muhammad’s
agents and secured control of Yemen. Muhammad died three months later, and
dissident tribes, eager to
reassert their independence and stop payment of the zakat, rose in
revolt. They refused to recognize the authority of Abu Bakr,
interpreting Muhammad’s death as a termination of their
contract, and rallied instead around at least four rival prophets.
Most of Abu Bakr’s reign was consequently occupied with riddah wars, which
under the generalship of Khalid ibn al- Walid not only brought the
secessionists back to Islam but also won over many who had not yet
been converted. The major campaign was directed against Abu Bakr’s
strongest opponent, the
prophet Musaylimah and his followers in Al-Yamamah. It culminated in a
notoriously bloody battle at ‘Aqraba’ in eastern Najd (May 633),
afterward known as the Garden of Death. The encounter cost the Muslims the
lives of many ansar (“helpers”;
Medinan Companions of the Prophet) who were invaluable for their
knowledge of the Qur’an, which had been revealed to the Prophet,
recited to his disciples, and memorized by them but not yet written
down. Musaylimah was killed, the
heart of the riddah opposition was
destroyed, and the strength
of the Medinan government was established. Sometime between
633 and 634 Arabia was finally reunited under the caliph, and
the energy of its tribes was diverted to the conquest of Iraq, Syria,
and Egypt.
Islamic history / edited by Laura S.
Etheredge. Britannica Educational Publishing
(a
trademark of Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.): New York.
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