Episode 120: The Rashidun Caliphate

Episode 120: The Rashidun Caliphate

Hello, and welcome to Literature and History. Episode 120: The Rashidun Caliphate. In this program, we will explore the main events of early Islamic history from 632-661, and the careers of the first four caliphs, Abu Bakr, Umar, Uthman, and Ali. This 29-year period completely changed the history of the world. Over the course of four short, tumultuous caliphal reigns, Islamic leadership consolidated control over the Arabian Peninsula, and then conquered what is today Iraq, Jordan, Israel, Palestine, Syria, Armenia, Azerbaijan, almost all of Iran, and parts of Afghanistan, Turkey, Egypt, and Libya. The scope of Islam’s expansion after the Prophet Muhammad’s death in 632 has always been astounding. But the tumultuous internal history of the caliphate during these same decades is equally astounding. From end to end, the Rashidun Caliphate rumbled with internal conflicts – three of the first four caliphs assassinated, old Arabian tribal schisms fissuring the new Islamic umma, or citizenry, dissension within conquered territories, and most consequentially, the Sunni-Shia split, along whose lines Islam is still divided today. The Rashidun Caliphate, like so many other subjects in early Islamic history, is also historiographically complex, its events not systematically chronicled until a century after it ended.¹ As complex as the saga of the Rashidun era is, however, the entire epoch can perhaps be summed up with a short explanation of what Rashidun Caliphate (al-Khilafah ar-Rashidah) means. The word khalifah means “successor” – initially, of course it meant successor to the Prophet Muhammad. The word ar-Rashidah gets translated as “rightly guided.” And the central issue of Islamic history after Muhammad’s death was who his successor ought to be, and which of the successors who followed him were actually rightly guided.

We have met the first four caliphs in previous episodes – again Abu Bakr, Umar, Uthman, and Ali, a quartet who emerge from the pages of early Islamic historians as titans; men who knew, worked with, were family with, and loved Muhammad. And I want to begin today’s program with a story which will help get us back to the time in which they lived, and the beginning of the Rashidun Caliphate. This is a controversial story, and not one told in the major Islamic biographies of Muhammad, including Ibn Hisham, ibn Sa‘d or al-Tabari.² Here’s the story. [music]

In the early spring of 632 CE, just a few months before Muhammad’s death, the prophet had finished undertaking what is often called the Farewell Pilgrimage in Dhu al-Hijjah, the month of the Hajj. Muhammad had given a final sermon atop Mount Arafat in Mecca, filled with resonant Qur’anic truisms, and an assurance that, in the words of the historian al-Waqidi, “every Muslim is the brother of a Muslim. All Muslims are brethren.”³ Some time later, as the pilgrims made their way back to Medina, Muhammad and all of those traveling with him halted. They stopped at a seasonal pond called Ghadir al-Khumm, where a few shade trees allowed the travelers to rest. There, Muhammad took the opportunity to speak, and among the things he said was,

I am a human being. . .I, in response to Allah’s call, (would bid good-bye to you), but I am leaving among you two weighty things: the one being the Book of Allah in which there is right guidance and light. . .The second are the members of my household. . .I remind you (of your duties) to the members of my family.⁴

The original Arabic is important here. The “weighty things,” or thaqalayn, is sometimes translated as “treasures,” or “weighty treasures.” And the phrase “members of my household,” or Ahl al-Bayt, has become “People of the house,” in later Islamic usage, meaning the genetic descendants of the Prophet Muhammad. The Hadith of the Thaqalayn, as this narrative is called, though set down in writing long after Muhammad passed away, has been massively circulated and analyzed in its different versions. Here is why.

A moment later, according to this same narrative, Muhammad took his cousin, son-in-law, and the father of his grandchildren by the hand. This was Ali ibn Abi Talib, or more commonly, just Ali. Holding Ali by the hand, at this fateful moment just a few months before the Prophet’s death, Muhammad asked his listeners if he, meaning Muhammad, were their leader and friend. The assembly concurred – of course he was their leader and friend. Then Muhammad said, and I’m going to leave one word untranslated for now, “He of whom I am the [mawla], of him Ali is also the [mawla]. . .O God, be the friend of him who is his friend, and be the enemy of him who is his enemy.”⁵ The word mawla, there, is translated variously as “patron,” “master,” “leader,” and “friend.” Later in Islamic history, the word mawla came to describe non-Arab converts who allied themselves to a specific tribe, or the sons of Arab fathers and non-Arab mothers, so it’s quite a complex word. But to stick with the critical Ghadir Khumm narrative, this narrative, which has Muhammad saying that his descendants are a bequest on posterity just like the Qur’an, and urging his listeners to accept Ali as a leader or friend just as they accept him as their leader or friend, has been circulated for over a thousand years in both Sunni and Shia literature.⁶ Its phraseology is well known, especially the word mawla, again “patron,” “master,” “leader,” or “friend.” The declarations that we just heard from Muhammad are often called the Ghadir Khumm speech, named after the modest watering hole where it occurred, as everyone made their way home from that year’s pilgrimage.

Ghadir Khumm and the Hadith of the Thaqalayn

So why is the Ghadir Khumm speech so important? Wouldn’t any Prophet, toward the end of his career, tell his followers to respect his sacred teachings and his descendants? Muhammad obviously loved his son-in-law, who had been with him through war and peace, and thick and thin, for the 22 years of the Prophet’s ministry, being Islam’s first ever male convert, if we exclude the Prophet himself. So wouldn’t any aging Prophet ask posterity to respect his children and their spouses? The answer to these questions lies both in the precise language of the tradition, as well as in later history.

Muhammad says man kuntu mawlahu fa ‘Ali un mawlahu, again, “He of whom I am the mawla, of him ‘Ali is also the mawla.” In other words, those who follow me, follow ‘Ali. From a Prophet at that moment keenly aware of his own mortality, the announcement can be, and has by many, been interpreted as an announcement of succession, naming ‘Ali as the new successor, or khalifah, to all Muslims, following a directive to revere Ahl al-Bayt, or lineage of the Prophet. So, if you are new to the history of Islam, let me succinctly explain this importance of the Ghadir Khumm speech.

The major doctrinal divide between Sunnis and Shias centers on Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law Ali. To Sunnis, the Rashidun caliphate (and remember that ar-Rasidah gets translated as “rightly guided”) is aptly-named. For Sunnis, a succession of caliphs followed Muhammad, rightly guided by their direct familiarity with the Prophet’s teachings. To Sunnis, in the directive, “He of whom I am the mawla, of him Ali is also the mawla,” Muhammad simply means that he wants all listeners to revere Ali as a friend. Shias, however, have a different take on all of this. To Shias, the Rashidun caliphate was not rightly guided. To Shias, at the roadside oasis of Ghadir Khumm, Muhammad made it clear that he wanted Ali to be his successor. Shias read the quote “He of whom I am the mawla, of him ‘Ali is also the mawla,” and translate the word mawla as “leader” or “master.” To Shias, then, the caliphal careers of Abu Bakr, and then Umar, and then Uthman should not have happened. To Shias, Muhammad’s descendants, most of all ‘Ali and his sons, were the blessed heirs of prophets that stretched all the way back to the Biblical Adam, and no one else should have ever called themselves a caliph.

The split between Sunnism and Shiism today is a complex one. It widened over a long period for geographical and cultural reasons, as well as theological ones. But its roots lie with Ali, and the three decades of the Rashidun Caliphate. Between 632, when young Ali did not take the caliphal throne, and 656, when Ali finally did, factions had hardened in the burgeoning Islamic world, with many alleging that Ali should rule, and that Ali should have ruled all along. Upon the end of the First Fitna, or Islamic civil war, Ali was assassinated, a devastating heartbreak for his supporters, and neither of Ali’s sons, the grandsons of the Prophet Muhammad, ended their careers as caliphs. The Sunni and Shia divide, then, has its roots in the Rashidun, or not-so-Rashidun Caliphate, depending on whom you ask. The 29 years of Islam’s first caliphate produced not only the most explosive world empire since that of Alexander a thousand years before. They also produced the most consequential succession dispute in all of human history.

The Rashidun Caliphate, in the words of the Afghan-born historian Tamim Ansary, survives in

stories [that] chronicle a tumultuous human drama that unfolded in the first twenty-nine years after the Prophet’s death, a story of larger-than-life characters wrestling with epic issues, a story filled with episodes that evoke wonder and heartbreak. It’s quite possible to take sides in retelling these stories, for there are sides to take. . .Over the centuries writers have compiled their own versions of the most compelling anecdotes, some of which [have made] their way into popular and oral accounts and eventually [turned] into the Islamic version of “Bible stories,” told to kids like me at home by our elders and in grammar school by our religion teachers.⁷

The saga of the four caliphs Abu Bakr, and after him Umar, and then Uthman, and the much-beloved ‘Ali, these are stories on whose outcomes hinged the fate of a lot of the world, and even if we don’t grow up hearing them, like Tamim Ansary did, they’re still important stories to know. By the end of this show, I hope to have given you a clear idea of the careers of each of the first four caliphs, the ultimate import of the Rashidun caliphate as a whole, and the origins of the Sunni-Shia split in the generation after, and indeed in the weeks after Muhammad’s death. We will begin our story with the immediate aftermath of the Prophet’s passing in the city of Medina in the summer of 632, and the several days of activity that decided who would be Islam’s first caliph. [music]

Abu Bakr’s Ascension to Caliph

When you read any biography of Muhammad, medieval Islamic or modern academic, there is a disproportionate emphasis on the last ten years of the Prophet’s life. 622 CE marks the hijra, or the emigration of Muhammad’s followers from Mecca to Medina. Between 622 and 632, based in the city of Medina, Muhammad and his followers were able to assume control over much western Arabia, and when Muhammad died, Medina had pledges of tribal loyalty not only from the immediate Hijaz, but also from faraway Yemen and the upland Najd district in central Arabia. But beneath the spreading influence of Islam, and beneath the dynamism of the new Islamic polity, there were deep social divisions. For one, Arabia had been a tribal civilization since time immemorial, and though the influence of Late Antique empires and the amalgamating force of commerce had begun to change the peninsula, much of it was still organized along ancient lines of clan and kin. And of more immediate importance to Muhammad’s succession, in Medina in the year 632, Muslims remained grouped into two populations. The muhajirun were those who had originally immigrated to Medina with Muhammad ten years before. The ansar, or “helpers,” were Medinan converts who had lived alongside them. Although both groups were equally Muslim believers, a preponderance of Muhammad’s closest companions were people whom he had known in Mecca, and thus, upon the Prophet’s death, some of the ansar – the Medinan converts – felt that they would need to look out for themselves. The ansar, when Muhammad died in 632, thus appointed a leader named Sa’d ibn Ubadah, already a chief of one of Medina’s clans, to guide the Medinan Muslims.

This appointment was unacceptable to the muhajirun of Medina, those Muslims who had initially immigrated with Muhammad back in 622. And the appointment of a Medinan chief to the position of luminary of Islam was also unacceptable to the Meccans who had recently converted. The Meccan Quraysh tribe, that wealthy population in charge of the Kaaba and the city’s pilgrimage economy, had long looked down on Medina, formerly Yathrib, as an agricultural town that lacked Mecca’s glitz and notoriety, and thus Meccans saw a Medinan clan chief – a northern bumpkin, effectively – taking over as Muhammad’s successor to be a non-starter. The Quraysh, who had fought Muhammad for so long, and eventually been won over by him, were still a power bloc to be reckoned with in the Hijaz.

The powerful Quraysh tribe of Mecca had two candidates. Muhammad’s best friend Abu Bakr, and Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law Ali both had excellent qualifications. We heard about the Ghadir Khumm speech above, which happened some months before Muhammad’s death, and seemed, to some, to announce Ali as the Prophet’s successor. But months after Ghadir Khumm, and just days before Muhammad died, he did something which, to others, seemed to announce Abu Bakr as his successor. Muhammad, ailing and no longer able to preach, had asked his best friend Abu Bakr to lead the congregation in Medina. Abu Bakr assumed the lectern at the Prophet’s Mosque. And with Muhammad gone, and with the Medinan clan chief Sa’d ibn Ubadah angling to take over, Abu Bakr took action. Abu Bakr went, uninvited, to a tribal council, or shura, in Medina. Tens of thousands of pages of history and debate fueled by sectarian polemics have been written about this meeting, and this crucial first succession, but the ultimate outcome was that Abu Bakr, along with the future Caliph Umar, met with Sa’d ibn Ubadah of the Medinans, and it was decided that Abu Bakr, who had known Muhammad much longer than the Medinans, would take up Muhammad’s position as leader. Young Ali, in spite of whatever had been discussed at Ghadir Khumm, was sidelined.

The promotion of Abu Bakr over Ali, to many, seemed quite sensible. Abu Bakr was a distinguished Qurayshi man of middle age, and a preponderance of Meccan power players thus would have seen him as far preferable to a Medinan clan chief from a different tribe. Abu Bakr was as devout a Muslim as any. He had been one of the first converts. He had hid in a cave with Muhammad while a Meccan posse tried to hunt them down. Further, there was a prejudice in Arabian tribal societies against hereditary monarchies, and Islam and the Qur’an generally seemed to emphasize that one person was as good as the next. Ali was a generation younger than Abu Bakr, and the Arabic word sheikh means “elder,” so Abu Bakr, being middle aged and not a close blood relation, may have appeared a safer and more esteemed choice. For all these reasons, Abu Bakr’s ascension ultimately resulted in a stable first succession.

But beyond the great Sunni and Shia schism that would later unfold, there were also two immediate problems with Abu Bakr becoming caliph, rather than ‘Ali. Remember that in Late Antique Arabia there were tribes, and within those tribes, there were clans. Both Abu Bakr and Ali were of the Quraysh tribe. But while Ali was of the Prophet Muhammad’s Banu Hashim, or Hashemite Clan, Abu Bakr was of the Banu Taym, or the Taym clan. Abu Bakr was thus Quraysh, but for some Quraysh tribesmen, he was not the correct kind of Quraysh. Additionally, not everyone in the Hijaz was opposed to power transfers based on heredity. A pervasive distaste for hereditary monarchy characterized Arabian Bedouin society, itself anchored on personal distinction through acts of martial valor, personal industriousness, eloquence, and uprightness of character. But within the Quraysh aristocracy, based as it was on commerce and business, families became powerful precisely through the dynastic transference of wealth, and so to some Quraysh, passing up the chance to hand Muhammad’s power to his son-in-law Ali, and Muhammad’s grandsons Hasan and Husayn, was a great mistake.

The Ramifications of Abu Bakr’s Ascension to Caliph

As time passed over the decades of the Rashidun Caliphate, and over the course of the story you will hear today, the supporters of Ali hardened around him as a faction. Ali’s first proponents followed him for various reasons – because he was from the Hashemite clan, because he was competent, capable, and a renowned warrior, because he was the father of Muhammad’s grandchildren, and because they thought that Muhammad’s descendants shared the Prophet’s status as intermediary to the divine. Ali’s proponents were the shiʿat ʿAli, or “followers of Ali,” which is where the word “Shia” comes from, and over time, the belief that Ali and his sons were the true imams of all Islam would become the signature tenet of Shiism.

While the promotion of Abu Bakr ultimately led to the Sunni-Shia split, then, it had another important theological consequence. As historian Reza Aslan writes, “As far as Abu Bakr was concerned, the Caliphate was a secular position that closely resembled that of the tribal Skaykh.”⁸ Abu Bakr, in other words, understood that in becoming caliph he would inherit some of his best friend’s responsibilities – sheikhs were expected to direct their tribe’s military activities, and adjudicate divisive matters of law. Abu Bakr, however, did not expect to inherit Muhammad’s status as prophet and luminary. The ascension of a man who was effectively a tribal leader, more focused on military and legal logistics than spiritual ministry, set the stage for Islam’s organization as a religion, forever after.

Islam has never had a Pope. Likewise, it does not have a hierarchized clerical class that, like Catholic clergymen do, mediate between the divine and the laity. Islam’s clergy has, generally speaking, always been closer to the Jewish rabbinate in its architecture – educated community leaders, married and with families and often with secondary vocations, serve as imams. There are national positions today, like the Grand Imam in Egypt and the Ayatollahs and Grand Ayatollahs of Shiism. But most often, over the past thirteen centuries, Islamic leadership has been organic, community based, and in the case of Mujtahids and Muftis drafting Islamic laws, intellectually meritocratic. Madrasas, or Islamic religious schools, though they all share core tenets and have the equivalents of professorships, have differed substantially in their teachings from era to era and region to region. Although some later caliphates and Islamic rulers were more theocratic than others, Islam has never had a Vatican, and amazingly, the general absence of a transnational ecclesiastical hierarchy to this day has roots in the week or two after Muhammad’s death in the summer of 632.

So at the risk of being patronizing, let me repeat, one final time, the significance of Abu Bakr, rather than Ali becoming Muhammad’s successor. To Sunnis today, Abu Bakr is considered to have been the ideal man for the job. Abu Bakr did not pretend to have Muhammad’s capacity for divine revelation. Abu Bakr worked hard tending to the affairs of state, and even milked his neighbor’s cow from time to time because the position of caliph didn’t come with an official paycheck.⁹ To Sunnis, Abu Bakr is al-Siddiq, “the veracious,” a steady, farsighted person who stopped a Medinan caliphate in its tracks, and kept Islamic leadership where it ought to have been – among those who knew and loved Muhammad best. To Shias, however, Abu Bakr usurped the rights of the Ahl al-Bayt, or “people of the house,” meaning the line of Muhammad, who had bequeathed his leadership to Ali at Ghadir Khumm just a couple of months before the Prophet died. To Shias, had Ali become the first caliph, Islam would have continued to have full-blooded prophets on the throne, capable of divine revelation, rather than mere men. [music]

Abu Bakr’s Negotiations with Ali

So, we’ve learned that Abu Bakr became the first Caliph upon the death of Muhammad in the summer of 632. And we have explored how this succession lies at the root of the Sunni-Shia split. Let’s move forward a little more quickly through history, now, and learn about what Abu Bakr did in his position of caliph, or khalifa, which again means “successor.” One of the first things Abu Bakr had to deal with was precisely what we’ve just been discussing. Abu Bakr may have become a caliph with overall assent. But everything about the first caliphate following Muhammad was an evolving experiment, and one of the first things Abu Bakr had to do was to deal with ‘Ali, and those who would have preferred Ali as a successor to Muhammad.

There are many stories about how Abu Bakr and Ali reached a settlement, stories which reflect Sunni and Shia partisanship. Some stories indicate that young Ali, after only a few days, had a heart to heart with Abu Bakr in the Prophet’s Mosque, and that Ali, after admitting that Abu Bakr had blindsided him by assuming the title of Caliph, shook hands with the older man and then pledged loyalty to him. Other stories hold that tensions hung between the two men for six months, and that powermongering Abu Bakr, fretting that Ali’s theological legitimacy was a threat to his reign, dispatched followers, including the future caliph Umar, to the home of Ali and Ali’s wife, Muhammad’s daughter Fatima, who was injured and miscarried when these followers barged in so as to compel Ali to concede to Abu Bakr’s leadership. As with many moments in early Islamic history, it’s difficult to know exactly what happened, though opinions on the subject are strong. However it went down, whether through a handshake between old friends, or thuggery, the consensus is that after six months, Ali was no longer in contention for leadership of the caliphate, and Abu Bakr became the leader of the umma, or religious community of Islam.

Abu Bakr’s Reign

In Mecca, Abu Bakr had been a successful merchant. According to tradition, during the migration to Medina and the tumultuous decade afterward, Abu Bakr devoted his savings to buying converts to Islam out of slavery and shouldering some of the other expenses of the Muslim community in Mecca. He seems to have been physically unimposing, to have lived modestly, and been kind to children. His kunya, or nickname, means “father of the camel” or “father of the young camel” after his youthful affection for camels, and Abu Bakr’s only idiosyncrasy was that he was said to have dyed his beard and hair with henna. He became caliph around the age of 60.

Abu Bakr’s reign was very successful, although very short. After settling the succession controversy with Ali in some way or another in 632, Abu Bakr was confronted by a series of defections from tribal leaders who’d pledged loyalty to Muhammad, and who, upon Muhammad’s death, considered their pledges annulled. These tribal leaders, seeing that the Islamic tribal confederation had a new sheikh, stopped paying their zakat, or alms tax, because Medina was far away, and without a Prophet, it may have just seemed like a foreign economy. And a few tribal sheikhs did something far more impious than not paying their tithes. Some tribal elders alleged that they were now themselves prophets, just as Muhammad had been, and thus, they were eligible for the same prerogatives as the Prophet Muhammad. Some had declared their own ministries and defections while Muhammad was still alive, and so as the Prophet sickened and then passed away, a number of tribes not in immediate proximity to Medina decided to follow their own self-appointed prophets.

What happened next was just as historically consequential as the initial succession of Abu Bakr. As 632 stretched into 633, Abu Bakr took a hard line against upstart prophets and their followers. His policy, which has had a long and sometimes pernicious legacy in Islamic history, was that apostasy was tantamount to treason against the state. Troops based in the Hijaz, many of whom were militarily experienced due to Islam’s eventful previous decade, were sent out to the hot spots of rebellion in Yemen, and the remote Najd district in the central peninsula. They fought a series of engagements with rebels that historians call the Ridda wars, or wars of apostasy. An initial round of engagements against opponents in the interior hinterlands gave way to expeditions into what is today Oman. By 634, the Rashidun Caliphate had moved into the peripheries of the Sasanian and Byzantine empires, having, astonishingly, exerted control over nearly the entire Arabian Peninsula.

As the Ridda wars wound down in 633, to the north of the peninsula, a sort of geopolitical perfect storm unfolded. For seven centuries, Arabia had had a Roman power to its northwest, and a Persian power to its northeast. These two empires, between 602 and 628, had fought one another nearly to annihilation as Muhammad lived out his adult years. Then, in 628, the great Sasanian Emperor Khosrow II had been assassinated, sending the Sasanians into an interregnum and civil war, which grinded on for four years. As for the Byzantines, midway through Abu Bakr’s short reign, the Byzantines won their long war with the Sasanians, recapturing the Levant in the process, though their resources had been exhausted by a generation of battle. The Sasanians, weakened even further, were a mess, disintegrated for a moment into a patchwork of feuding power blocs. And into this disorder marched a Muslim general named Khalid ibn al-Walid.

The Rashidun Invasion of Sasanian Iraq

A few Rashidun period generals stand out for their achievements, and among them, Khalid ibn al-Walid tops the list. Though he is not revered by all, Khalid was inarguably a deft military commander who spent the 630s wherever the fires of the caliphate’s wars were burning the hottest. Khalid had beaten a self-proclaimed prophet named Musaylimah in the Ridda wars during an engagement in central Arabia when he received orders from Abu Bakr to invade what is today Iraq. These are interesting orders to contemplate in hindsight. The general Khalid had indeed just defeated a dangerous and problematic religious insurrection. But putting down some apostates in the remote Najd desert, and launching an invasion of a 400-year-old world empire are things that reflect very different scales of ambition. Perhaps Abu Bakr had good intel that the Sasanians were in shambles in early 633.

Whatever endgame lay behind the Rashidun invasion of Sasanian Iraq, the incursion began in 633. General Khalid, commanding experienced troops from the caliphate’s standing army, along with allied troops from central and north Arabian tribes, directed Muslim forces north, up into what is today Kuwait, and in the first months of 633, the Rashidun caliphate made its offensive. Khalid directed his army into the war-torn borderland between the Byzantines and Sasanians, fighting a series of engagements northward along the lower Euphrates. By the late spring of 633, general Khalid’s forces had captured al-Hira, the old Lakhmid capital and one of the jewels of Mesopotamia. As the year wore on, advancing up from al-Hira, or modern-day Kufa, the Rashidun army went further and further to the northwest, fighting engagements and sacking cities as they proceeded. By the beginning of 634, general Khalid had exceeded caliph Abu Bakr’s expectations by considerable margins. Khalid, having brought Islamic forces from the southeast to the northwest of modern-day Iraq along the Euphrates, had seized a large fringe of the Sasanian empire. Before Khalid could reach the western Sasanian seat of Ctesiphon, however, the talented general was summoned elsewhere. Abu Bakr, early in 634, needed Khalid on the western front.

We will talk extensively, at the end of this show, about the explosive growth of the Rashidun Caliphate and how it happened. Take your eyes off of the Rashidun Caliphate for a few years, and it doubles in size, and then repeats that feat during the next decade, and on and on. For now, it will suffice to say that the caliphate, even between 632 and 634, was a categorically new presence on the peninsula – a tribal coalition powered by the accelerant of Islam as well as the leadership of a series of exceptionally motivated and talented individuals. The older pastoral world of small raids and informal arrangements, its alliances vulnerable to any given feud or slight, buckled pretty quickly when put under pressure from what was effectively a nascent empire, where there had never been an empire before. The Byzantine and Sasanian empires to the north of the peninsula, equally, were not prepared for what was effectively a nascent empire, where there had never been an empire before.

The early Rashidun Caliphate, however, was not without its own feuds and problems. Abu Bakr fell ill in the early autumn of 634. Not mentally debilitated, he decided to formally announce his successor. We might expect, considering the fraught circumstances of Abu Bakr’s initial ascension, that Abu Bakr would have handed the proverbial scepter to Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law Ali. Abu Bakr didn’t do this, though. He proclaimed that that another of Muhammad’s companions, Umar ibn al-Khattab, or often Omar ibn al-Khattab, would follow him as caliph.

This was the second time Abu Bakr had snubbed Ali, and by extension, Ali’s supporters. Many reasons have been proposed as to why Abu Bakr chose Umar over Ali. First, for reasons we are about to learn, Umar was an extremely capable leader, and Abu Bakr must have seen his potential. Second, Abu Bakr may have been iffy about the sheer amount of authority Ali would have if Ali were made Caliph – the younger man, if enthroned, would mix secular sovereignty with sacred pedigree. Finally, some fundamental differences may have lain between them after the considerable strains of being a persecuted minority group – the affair of the necklace, which I mentioned a few episodes ago, might have been at the heart of it. Whatever the reasons, Abu Bakr did not select Ali as his successor, and the younger man, who had given his faith and life to Muhammad and Islam as much as anyone, returned to waiting in the wings, with a slowly growing cadre of supporters.[music]

The Ascension of Umar ibn al-Khattab

In 634 CE, Umar ibn al-Khattab became caliph. There is a famous hadith about Umar in the annals of the chronicler al-Bukhari. In this hadith, the Prophet Muhammad tells Umar, “O [Umar] Ibn Al-Khattab! By Him in Whose Hands my life is, whenever Satan sees you taking a way, he follows a way other than yours!”¹⁰ Large, surly, and always down for a fight, Umar is a figure from early Islamic history that everyone tends to remember. In a well-known story in Muhammad’s early biographers, during the first few years of the Prophet’s ministry in Mecca, Umar heard that his sister and brother-in-law had become Muslims. A committed pagan, Umar was incensed that his sister would defect from the old ways. Umar came to their house and physically assaulted them, but they didn’t fight back. Hesitant due their meekness, Umar asked what the Muslim converts had been reciting when he came in. They gave him a copy of the surah of the Qur’an that they had been reading, and ‘Umar read it, remarking, in the biographer ibn Ishaq, “How fine and noble is this speech.”¹¹ Umar, afterward, converted. Extremely large, combative, and of excellent lineage, Umar was a formidable person, and, like Abu Bakr and the Prophet Muhammad himself, one of the most pivotal people in world history. As scholar Montgomery Watt wrote in 1988, “The establishment of the Islamic era was almost certainly the work of the caliph Umar.”¹² This statement is not a hyperbole. During his ten years on the caliphal throne, with war in his right hand and pragmatic diplomacy in his left, between 634 and 644, Umar Ibn al-Khattab conquered a considerable swath of the planet for Medina, and for Islam.

Umar’s appointment to caliph was, for aforementioned reasons, not without controversy. Umar not only beat out the equally eligible Ali. Umar was also an intense man, subject to fits of anger, and there was some worry that his irascibility would make him an unstable leader. Yet, at the same time, Umar was Muhammad’s son-in-law, just like Ali was, having married Muhammad’s daughter Umm Kulthum. Umar was also Muhammad’s father-in-law, as Muhammad had married ‘Umar’s daughter Hafsa. When Abu Bakr appointed Umar in 634 to be his successor, Abu Bakr knew all of this. The two and a half years of Abu Bakr’s own caliphate had been marked by the constant strife of the Ridda Wars, and perhaps Abu Bakr knew that Islam needed someone who was, above all other things, a warrior.

There is some temptation, when we are new to Islamic history, to see the caliphate’s success in the mid-seventh century as a foregone conclusion. Byzantine and Sasanian power were at a low tide, and North Africa had changed imperial hands a few times in recent centuries. Wasn’t it somewhat inevitable that caliphal armies would rush into the power vacuum and create much of the Islamic world as we know it today? And the answer is of course not. Byzantines and Sasanians were at a low ebb. But they had also been honing military capabilities against one another for a full generation, and both – especially the Byzantines, had navies and walled stone fortifications unlike anything the first Muslims had faced during the Ridda Wars of 632-634 and the perennial battles between Medina and Mecca beforehand. Further, the Caliph Umar ibn al-Khattab was not, like Alexander or Julius Caesar, the scion of military men. Before conversion, as physically big as he was, Umar was just a merchant from a relatively small town. Considering the scope of his achievements, both militarily and organizationally within the first Islamic empire, it’s hard to imagine where his seemingly limitless talents came from.

When Umar assumed leadership in 634, the caliphate was a loose web of allegiances, knit by recent military coercion, economic expedience, genuine conversions, perfunctory conversions, and a novel alms tax that funneled coin and goods to the imperial axes of Medina and Mecca. Had Umar been a different person, the novel varnish of Islamic leadership that had expanded to cover the vast, heterogeneous expanse of the Arabian Peninsula could been buffed out by tribes who wanted to go their own way, just as they had since time immemorial. Had Umar been a different person, Byzantine and Sasanian forces to the north might have crushed the Rashidun caliphate’s invading vanguard, and then broken the caliphate’s newfangled hold over Arabia. Had Umar been a different person, the areas that he ruled over and conquered might have imploded due to mismanagement and internal disorganization. But Umar was Umar, a person of considerable resolution and intelligence, and also gifted with a set talented lieutenants who helped him along the way.

Let’s go step by step, now, through Umar’s ten years as caliph – gain 634-644. We will begin with an overview of the second caliph’s military conquests, and go on to discuss the internal organizational innovations that unfolded in Islamic civilization during this period. We will begin with international relations.

When Umar became caliph, the Byzantine empire had become aware that a pan-Arabian coalition, anchored in the Hijaz, had just finished consolidating its hold on the peninsula. Just to be clear, the Byzantine empire, often called the eastern Roman empire, at that point held what is today most of Jordan, Israel, Palestine, Lebanon and Syria, a rich bundle of provinces that had been controlled by Romans, for the most part, for 700 years. In the recent Byzantine-Sasanian War of 602-628, the Roman Emperor Heraclius was able to take a stripe of land that stretched from Jerusalem up to Antioch back from the Sasanians, and so Heraclius, in the year 634, wasn’t keen on the idea of some new imperial power stabbing upward into the Levant and seizing newly reconquered Byzantine territories. In 634, Heraclius must have been well aware that the previous year, an Arab coalition had come out of nowhere and seized the Sasanian Euphrates. And so in 634, the Roman Emperor Heraclius turned his attention to the Rashidun troops, who were at just that moment marching into southern Syria, and the Romans and the Muslims began a full-scale war.

The Rashidun-Roman War in the Levant

The two groups had faced one another before, albeit inconclusively. In 629, at the Battle of Mu’tah, up in Jordan, Muhammad’s forces had retreated after an engagement with Byzantine forces. In 632, Muhammad ordered a retaliatory raid in the same region, and as Muhammad suffered his final decline, he received the good news that this raid was successful. Syria, as everyone in the Hijaz knew, held great riches, and whoever controlled the Levant controlled a lot of the Mediterranean commerce flowing eastward into Asia. But while Muhammad’s retaliatory raid of early 632 may simply reflect the old Arabian tribal patterns of tit-for-tat offensives, what happened under Umar ushered in a new era.

Muslim armies were dispatched from Medina in 634, and they marched northwest along the calf of the Arabian boot, into the old, porous borderland of the Nabataeans. Four separate Muslim forces then forged northward along the eastern and western sides of the Jordan. As they began to harry Byzantine forts and settlements in the region around the Dead Sea, two other military mobilizations began. The Byzantine emperor Heraclius ordered troops southward to defend Syria. And the aforementioned Muslim general Khalid ibn al-Walid, who had just confiscated the Euphrates from the Sasanian empire, hurried westward in a perilous march across the Syrian desert to join the other Muslim forces who had come up from the Negev, and attack the Byzantines from the east. As of the summer of 634, then, the military might of the Caliphate had converged in the region of the Dead Sea.

The Byzantines tried to stop them in their tracks there, sending troops to meet the Muslims in an engagement that historians call the Battle of Ajnadayn in the summer of 634, which took place about 30 miles southwest of Jerusalem. The Byzantines lost, and the Muslims consolidated their hold on the southern Levant. The general Khalid ibn al-Walid then turned his attention north, to the regional metropolis of Damascus. Not one inclined to delays, Khalid turned his forces northward, intending to take Damascus. The Muslims met the Byzantines at two separate engagements as the caliphal forces moved up through the central Levant midway through 634, beating the armies marshalled against them at the Battle of Yaqusa, then at the Battle of Maraj as Saffer, in July and August of 634, and the Muslims reached Damascus in late August. After a siege – accounts differ on its length – Damascus surrendered. The Byzantine Emperor Heraclius, seeing that the Muslim invasion was becoming an existential crisis, left the city of Antioch to take up residence in Emesa, or modern-day Homs, Syria, so as to superintend military operations in the Levant. The area had not, as of the early autumn of 634, fallen in its entirety, but it had definitely become a war zone, and it was anyone’s guess as to who would win.

The general Khalid ibn al-Walid’s meteoric success during this period, which had begun during the reign of the first Caliph Abu Bakr, and continued during the reign of the second Caliph Umar, may have unsettled Umar, who understood that celebrity generals were threats to domestic leaders almost as much as they threatened foreign foes. The caliph Umar demoted Khalid and put another general, Abu Ubaidah, in charge of the Syrian campaign, though Khalid still continued to play a central role in operations there. With a swathe of the Syrian territory under Islamic control, the Muslim armies began strengthening their holdings in the region around Galilee. Following orders from the new Caliph Umar, Islamic forces began comprehensive efforts to conquer what is today Israel and Palestine, including many of the old coastal cities and ports. By 635, the Rashidun caliphate had conquered the Levant and some of southern Syria, but for the holdout regional centers of Jerusalem, Caesarea, and Ashkelon. The Byzantines tried to recapture Damascus, but the armies that they sent were beaten, and the Muslims held onto the city.

This war in the Levant stretched into 636, and the generals Abu Ubaidah and Khalid ibn al-Walid directed their attention north, to Emesa, again modern-day Homs, and the main front moved northward. A temporary treaty between the Muslims and Byzantines guaranteeing the safety of Emesa was considered to have been violated when the Emperor Heraclius began reinforcing Emesa with additional troops, and so the Muslims attacked the regional center, taking Emesa later in 636. Heraclius had more bad luck in 636. He had planned an alliance with the new Sasanian emperor Yazdegerd. The Persian King was supposed to blitz the Muslim front along the Euphrates, while Heraclius struck back in the Levant. But the Sasanian Empire, barely holding together at that point, did not manage to mount the agreed-on offense, and so Heraclius had to face the Caliphate alone if he wanted to keep his Syrian provinces.

What happened next, in the summer of 636, was one for the history books. The Battle of Yarmouk resulted when the Byzantine and Muslim armies, up to that point more often than not divided and fighting on multiple fronts, each consolidated and met on the battlefield at full strength. The Islamic historians who later wrote about the wars of the Rashidun caliphate, like every ancient historian who came before them, vastly exaggerated battlefield statistics, invented speeches, described dramatic sequences of single combat, and told us that though the Muslims were outnumbered four to one, they only suffered a fourth of the casualties that their enemies did, and that kind of stuff. In studying later Abbasid military histories of the Rashidun Caliphate, we thus have to approach alleged troop and casualty numbers with a bit of caution. That said, the Battle of Yarmouk was a major engagement, with each side fieldling somewhere north of 20,000 troops. Near where modern-day Syria, Jordan, and Israel all come together, Muslim armies defeated the Byzantines after six days of fighting. The Battle of Yarmouk, the general Khalid ibn al-Walid’s masterpiece, broke the Byzantine Empire’s ability to defend the Levant, and it meant that the rich Syrian provinces would soon belong, wholesale, to the Rashidun Caliphate.

The Rashidun Empire’s War on Two Fronts

The Rashidun Caliphate, however, still had another world empire to contend with. If you’ll remember, Muslim military leadership left the Euphrates region in 634 to go and support the Syrian campaigns. As a result, only a small contingent of the caliphal army was left to defend the many Sasanian forts and towns recently conquered in modern-day Iraq. This small contingent, between 634 and 636, was pushed back. Over the course of 634, and in the later part of that year, Sasanian troops fought and defeated the Muslim invasion force trying to defend the territory that it had only recently conquered. A Persian victory in the autumn of 634 at the engagement called the Battle of the Bridge, along with the enthronement of a new Sasanian king named Yazdegerd III, demonstrated that the old Persian empire wasn’t going to fall so easily, after all.

By 635, with the Sasanian resurgence along the Euphrates, the Rashidun caliphate was fighting two major wars simultaneously. The Caliph Umar dispatched a commander named Saad ibn Abi Waqqas northward up from Medina in the spring of 636 with fresh troops marshalled from the burgeoning Muslim world. Saad, as his military colleagues in the Levant began gathering for the aforementioned Battle of Yarmouk, marched northward with his new army into the warzone along the central Euphrates, later joined by reinforcements from the west. In the autumn of 636, the newly elevated commander Saad ibn Abi Waqqas met the forces of the Persian commander Rostam Farrokhzad at a town called Qadisiyyah. What happened next was the subject of later legends, recounted in detail in Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh, which we’ll read in a later season. At the close of four days of fighting along the desert’s edge at the shore of the Euphrates, about a hundred miles south of Baghdad, and following a great many fabled duels and booming battlefield speeches in the history books, the Muslim army won. This was a major victory in the east to equal the victory in Yarmouk to the west. Just as Byzantine Syria now lay open to a decisive Muslim conquest, Sasanian Iraq now did, as well.

There were holdouts in each region. To the west, in the Levant, between late 636 and early 637, the Muslims besieged Byzantine Jerusalem, and then captured the city. This was a great trophy for the Rashidun Caliphate. Islam, being an Abrahamic religion, held Temple Mount to be sacred for many of the same reasons Judaism and Christianity do. In addition, in 621 CE, as chronicled in Surahs 17 and 53 of the Qur’an, the Prophet Muhammad had undertaken a visionary journey up from Temple Mount to heaven, where he had met the angel Gabriel and numerous other prophets. Captured in 637, then, Jerusalem became an important city in the burgeoning Rashidun caliphate, with the Dome of the Rock built there a generation later, still standing today as Islamic architecture’s earliest surviving work. Other Levantine centers still held by the Byzantine Empire followed Jerusalem, making Greek counteroffensives increasingly difficult.

Meanwhile, also from late 636 to 637, incredibly, just as Rashidun armies besieged Jerusalem, Rashidun armies also fought Sasanian forces in Mesopotamia. Pushing eastward to the Tigris, the Muslims first took the ancient city of Babylon. Then, in a coup de grâce to Sasanian Iraq, Muslim forces besieged the city of Ctesiphon, the capital of the Persian empire, conquering it after a few months in the spring of 637.

It is hard to overstate the overwhelming success of the first few years of Umar’s caliphate. The burly former merchant of Mecca, aided by a phalanx of outstanding generals, had managed to sustain the exponential growth of Islamic civilization. Muhammad had started everything. Abu Bakr had finished bringing Arabia predominantly under Muslim leadership. Umar, from 634 to 637, continued Islam’s exponential growth curve, bringing the caliphate from being a minor presence in the southern periphery of two world empires to being an existential threat to both word empires simultaneously. And his reign was not yet halfway over. [music]

Continued Conquests Under Umar: Syria, Iraq, and Egypt

With Jerusalem, Damascus, and Emesa under Muslim control, between 637 and 638, the Rashidun Caliphate pressed northward along what is today the border of Syria and Turkey. The Muslims took the fortress of Chalcis midway through 637, then the city of Aleppo, then Antioch. Countering, the Byzantine emperor Heraclius mustered Christian troops to a Muslim command center in the city of Emesa. During the opening months of 638, as the Rashidun forces controlled more and more of the northern Euphrates, it was easier to send armies back and forth between the Byzantine and Sasanian fronts. By 640, with cities conquered up and down much of the northern watershed of the Euphrates along the southeastern Taurus mountain range all the way up to the Armenian highlands, the caliphate controlled the north of Byzantine Syria, in addition to the rest of the region.

Muslim armies, then, spent the years between 637 and 640 solidifying their command of Syria all the way up to the natural geographical barrier of the Taurus Mountains on the Byzantine front. And on the Sasanian front, they did the same thing. Following the 637 victory at the capital of Ctesiphon, Rashidun armies proceeded to take control of the region around Mosul and the northern Tigris, as well as what is today Basra and the Sasanian garrison near the mouth of the Tigris-Euphrates confluence. By the end of 638, Persian forces had been pushed east of the Zagros mountains. What had been Sasanian Mesopotamia belonged to Islam.

With the massive basin between the Taurus and Zagros mountains now mainly under Islamic control, along with the rich and historical cities of the Levant, the Rashidun Caliphate ran into some trouble. What historians call the plague of Amwas boiled up, particularly in Islamic Syria from 638-639. This was likely a mutation of the Bubonic Plague, which had first surfaced as the Plague of Justinian exactly a century before. The plague of Amwas ravaged Syrian troops and the Islamic high command, though the caliph Umar himself survived. The plague occurred at the same time as a severe drought in Syria, causing both famine as well as crop hoarding, which attracted more rats and fleas, and thus exacerbated the plague. By the autumn of 639, the plague of Amwas had killed those whom it was going to kill, and necessity urged the caliphate to defend its hard-won territories.

The Byzantines, at this point, were reeling after their losses – losses in manpower, but also losses in revenue from the Levant and Syria. Umar, though he had won a stunning number of military victories, now had to consider the expanse of territory that the caliphate now had to defend. By 639, resurgent Persian forces were raiding the new Islamic territories in Mesopotamia, indicating that the Sasanian front was not safe with the fearsome Persian empire still on the other side of the Zagros Mountains. As for the Byzantines, some of Umar’s deputies advised him that, while a Byzantine counterattack could pour down from Anatolia into the now-Muslim cities of northern Syria, a Byzantine counterattack could also come east, over the Sinai, and into the Levant and northwestern Arabia. The year 640 marked Umar’s sixth on the caliphal throne, and the final two years of his time in power were spent superintending continued wars with the Byzantine and Sasanian empires. The fronts of the two wars, however, had moved. Let’s first talk about the Islamic conquest of Egypt.

This conquest was later romanticized in Abbasid and Fatimid chronicles, though it was doubtless considerable in scale and decisive in world history. Two Islamic armies marched westward over the Sinai Peninsula, fighting their way through outer forts and then besieging three Byzantine Egyptian cities in the environs of modern-day Cairo. A major military outpost there has the confusing name of the Babylon Fortress, today in Old Cairo, and a siege at this fortress, together with a battle at Heliopolis, also within the bounds of modern-day Cairo, turned the tide against Byzantine Egypt by the summer of 640. Alexandria, the largest city in Byzantine Egypt, still stood in the northwest. However, when Muslim forces converged there in 642, and besieged Alexandria, the city’s walls were understaffed. Decades of war, including the recent battles upriver in Heliopolis and the aforementioned Babylon Fortress, had sapped Alexandria’s defense forces. After a siege of six months, Alexandria surrendered, signing a capitulation which we’ll take a look at a little later on. With Alexandria gone, and before it, the Byzantine strongholds at the base of the Nile Delta, as of late 641, Byzantine Egypt was finished. Between 642 and 643, Islamic forces pressed westward into what is today Libya, conquering the cities of Cyrene and Tripolitania. For a few years afterward, excepting skirmishes fought to maintain their territorial holdings, the Rashidun Caliphate would hold this swathe of North African territory, and concentrate its military might on the Sasanian Empire.

The Persian King Yazdegerd III, while Muslim armies were taking over Egypt, was mustering a large military force. In 642, in the highlands of what’s today northwestern Iran, a major battle took place between Muslim and Sasanian forces. The Battle of Nahavand resulted in a Sasanian loss, and what followed was a series of Islamic military victories against increasingly frantic and fragmented Sasanian foes. Umar struck the province of Isfahan, first, a west central logistical stronghold important to Persian strategic efforts along the Zagros range, and the Muslims took the city of Isfahan in 642. In 643, the caliphate conquered the southwestern Iranian city of Bishapur in the province of Fars, and then pressed eastward, toward the modern-day city of Shiraz. The Rashidun Caliphate, then, by the time Umar died in 644, had assumed control over much of the southwestern territory of present-day Iran.

By the end of Umar’s reign in 644, the Rashidun Caliphate had seized the Byzantine empire’s most lucrative provinces, and the caliphate was in the process of conquering the Sasanian empire outright. The caliphate controlled more than 2 million square miles of land. It was twelve years old.¹³ It would continue to grow over the reign of the next caliph, Uthman. But before we discuss Uthman, let’s talk about Umar’s work not as a conqueror, but the architect of a growing empire – in other words, the administrative and diplomatic efforts of Islam’s second caliph.

Umar the Rashidun Caliphate’s Domestic Policy

Umar, in managing both Arabia, and newly won provinces to the north, instituted some of the same prudent and farsighted expedients that the most successful conquerors before him had used. The goal of each Rashidun military operation was to eliminate military resistance in a region, to install an amir, or governor, and to extract a per-capita tax, from the conquered populace, and then to let conquered populations do what they had been doing before, albeit with a new tax, and new people in charge. Top-down organizational hierarchies were put into place, in which an amir was in charge of a regional military commander, and various officials dedicated to collecting tax revenue, managing finances, and dealing with local issues. One of the most important innovations of Umar’s era was the diwan, or payroll system, for soldiers. Another was the institution of garrison towns in conquered areas – fortified settlements where high-ranking Muslims and their families could live, insulated from regional instability by military forces stationed there. Some of these garrison towns became important Islamic cities, like the garrisons at Kufa and Basra in Iraq, and the garrison town called Fustat in Egypt, which is today the historical heart of Cairo.

The speed with which the Rashidun Caliphate conquered central Eurasia was unique. The governance of the Rashidun Caliphate, however, was similar to the time-tested approaches of the Roman, and before it, the Achaemenid empire. These older empires had also had a culturally uniform intelligentsia reigning over wide and diverse regions. Rome and the Achaemenid empire had also delegated leadership and law to indigenous authorities who knew what they were doing, and then stood back and counted the money coming in. In the late 630s and early 640s, it would not have been possible to impose Arab cultural norms and Sharia on conquered populations. First, there were far too few Muslim Arabs, and far too many colonized subjects. Second, Islamic law itself was still in its nascency.

In discussing the Islamic conquests of the 600s, we have to steer between the medieval Christian view of Muslims as oppressive, heathen Saracens, and the Abbasid view of Muslims as clement bringers of goodness and truth. The early Rashidun conquests, like other imperial conquests before them, brought a combination of war and economic revolution; social upheaval and new civilizational order; financial ruination and commercial opportunity, and for the masses of agrarian workers and slaves trying to get by in previously conquered territories, a new boss that, after the initial upsets of bivouacking soldiers and confiscated foodstuffs, was about the same as the old boss.

Still, a general inequity haunted Rashidun civilization that was probably as inevitable as it was pernicious in the long term. This inequity dated back to the original hijra, and the decade between 622 and 632 when Muhammad led the first Muslims in the city of Medina. In those days, as we heard earlier, there were muhajirun, or the Meccans who had come to Medina, and then there were the ansar, the helpers from Medina who had converted to Islam. The ansar, as we learned at the beginning of this show, nearly elected their own caliph in 632. Over the next decade, in spite of Muhammad’s vision of a collective umma of believers equal before God, the ineradicable prejudices of ansar against muhajirun, and then Arab clan against Arab clan, and then tribe, and later regional origin and ethnicity would challenge the Qur’an’s egalitarian doctrines. An aristocracy with old roots in the Italian peninsula had once ruled the Roman world. Just so, as the Rashidun Caliphate grew, those with ties to the old Meccan gentility, and particularly the family and companions of the Prophet Muhammad, enjoyed easier ascents to high social position than others. Early Islamic source texts call caliphs the amir al-muʼminun, or the “commander of the believers,” but inevitably, due to the aforementioned social divisions, some muʼminun were more equal than others.

Umar, in Sunni sources, at least, is understood as a beneficent, modest leader who deferred to a high council in Medina and kept a wary eye out for any Muslim generals who were becoming too big for their proverbial britches. Umar, like Abu Bakr before him, also remained wary of caliphal power expanding to include religious authority, as well. However, the tornado of social changes that accompanied the early Rashidun conquests, which sent all sorts of new populations spilling down into the Arabian Peninsula, led to a hegemony Hijazi aristocratic families ruling over a mass of Christians, Jews, and Persian Zoroastrians. One of these Persians, a slave, captured in battle, wound up in the city of Medina. And in the autumn of 644, the Persian slave Abu Lu’lu’a Firuz stabbed the caliph Umar while Umar led prayers in the Prophet’s Mosque. This made Umar, who had conquered much of the world in just ten years, the first Rashidun caliph to be assassinated. He would not be the last. [music]

The Reign of Uthman

The third Rashidun caliph, Uthman, reigned from late 644 until 656. The first two caliphs had engineered a successful power transition from Muhammad, and then, they had superintended a period of explosive growth. Uthman continued this expansion, but as a leader, he began to feel the growing pains of the caliphate, as well. The wars that Umar had fought had been perilous affairs, and fraught with great risks. They had also brought great rewards. Booty from conquered foes cascaded into military camps, four fifths of it going to the troops, while the final fifth was sent on to Medina, along with the new tax revenue secured by the conquest. Ten years of constant annexation of territories had conditioned Rashidun troops to expect substantial paydays more often than was sustainably feasible. Further, as the years of Uthman’s caliphate passed, his dissidents accused him of economic malfeasance and nepotism, accusations which eventually led to his assassination. So, let’s learn about the third Rashidun caliph, Uthman.

Uthman’s elevation to Caliph, as is anything that involves the great Sunni-Shia schism, is a controversial one today, so for the sake of efficiency, let’s try to stick to the most basic facts. As of the year 644, Ali was a candidate for Caliph, as well as Uthman. Ali was younger and had closer ties to Muhammad; Uthman was older, and not of the same clan as Muhammad. However exactly it happened, Uthman, who was around seventy, was selected as caliph, putting young Ali on the back burner for a third time, in spite of Ali’s obvious eligibility. Uthman’s best qualification may have simply been that he was old, well-known, and maintained the status quo of keeping the caliphate in the hands of a clan different from Muhammad’s own.

While Umar had fought major wars on two fronts, the bulk of the caliphate’s military efforts under Uthman went toward the injured but still very dangerous Sasanian empire. The Persians still had a king, and although Muslims had a beachhead beyond the Zagros range in the southwest, Sasanian territory still stretched to the distant east – modern-day Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. Although Uthman did not continue to balloon the Rashidun Caliphate’s territories like Umar had, Uthman was still a militarily successful leader.

Continued Rashidun Incursions into Iran and North Africa

His main challenges, once again, lay in what is today Iran. Rebellions flared up again and again as the 640s gave way to the 650s, and Uthman, with the aid of commanders to whom he delegated the Sasanian war, managed to hold onto Rashidun territories in Iran and slowly expand them. Eventually, the young Sasanian King Yazdegerd III was assassinated by his own countrymen in 651, a good date to remember, as it marks the end of Sasanian Persia’s unity. The next generation born in what is today Iran, and their descendants, lived through one of the great cultural confluences in human history, as the Arab-Islamic world collided with the ancient Persian world on both sides of the Zagros Mountains, setting the stage for the Islamic golden age to come.

Before and after the Sasanian king’s death in 651, Rashidun armies marched all over what is today central Iran, and the caliphate pushed deeper and deeper into the Persian empire. One branch of the military secured a hold over a region today known as Sistan, where Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan all come together. Others went north toward the Caucasus region, conquering an area today called Iranian Azerbaijan – northwest of Tehran and where Armenia, Iran and Azerbaijan come together. Others still seized territories in the ancient Sasanian province of Khorasan – territories today in northeastern Iran, northwestern Afghanistan, and the south of Turkmenistan.

While the third caliph Uthman superintended, from a distance, continued annexations of Persian territory, under Uthman, Muslim armies also seized more North African territory from the Byzantines, from the city of Alexandria all the way west to Tunisia. The eastern Mediterranean Sea, when Uthman came to the throne, was under the control of the Byzantine navy. In the second half of the 640s, although the Rashidun Caliphate controlled the Levant and the north Egyptian coast, they were still vulnerable to Byzantine sea raids. Some time in the early 650s, Uthman directed one of his subordinates to build a Muslim navy. The story behind this military venture is a very important one in Islamic history, for several reasons.

The official whom Uthman asked to set up Islam’s first naval force was named Mu’awiya ibn Abi Sufyan, or commonly just Mu’awiya. Mu’awiya was the governor of Syria, and, following caliphal directives, Mu’awiya the Syrian governor built a navy. Arab Muslims, as of 650 CE, were not a seafaring populace, but their brand-new provinces contained a great many people who knew their way around a ship. The Syrian provinces, in particular, were home to Monophysite and Jacobite Christians and Copts who had never had any particular allegiance to the Byzantines who ruled over them, and who seem to have been happy to pay their tax and help Muslim leadership get started at sea. As with so much related to the Rashidun Caliphate, the first major naval venture carried out was a resounding success. The caliphate’s navy defeated their Byzantine adversaries at sea near the southwest corner of Anatolia in a confrontation called the Battle of the Masts. The eastern Mediterranean, and the Aegean, from the early 650s onward, became fair game for Muslim naval ventures.

The new Muslim naval presence in the eastern Mediterranean was yet another catastrophe for the ailing Byzantine empire. The island of Cyprus, then under Byzantine control, fell under repeated attacks between 648 and 650, attacks led by the Syrian governor Mu’awiya. As the third caliph Uthman pushed Muslim forces to conquer the entirety of Iran, and the caliphate billowed in the easternmost Mediterranean, Uthman was also involved with a different project that would also be of great influence in the future history of Islam.

The Uthmanic Codex

This project, in a word, was the Uthmanic codex of the Qur’an. We talked about this codex in a previous episode, but it’s been a little while, so let’s review the basics. During and after Muhammad’s 23 years as a prophet, the Qur’an flourished as a body of memorized recitations. Parts of the Qur’an were set down piecemeal during Muhammad’s life, on parchment, sheepskin, and even the broad shoulder blades of camels. According to tradition, although Muhammad neither read nor wrote, he worked with numerous companions who wrote down the Prophet’s revelations and cross checked the manuscripts to confirm their accuracy.¹⁴ The first recorder of the Qur’an was Zayd ibn Thabit, a young Medinan who knew Muhammad personally, and was known for his own Qur’anic recitations. Zayd ibn Thabit, once again according to tradition, gathered and collated all Qur’anic texts and put them into a single manuscript, giving this manuscript to the first Caliph, Abu Bakr. Abu Bakr gave the manuscript with the second Caliph, Umar, and after Umar passed away, the manuscript went to Muhammad’s widow and Umar’s daughter Hafsah. By this time, it was 644, and Muhammad had been gone for twelve years. The third Caliph, Uthman, knew that history was moving fast, and he wanted to make sure that the Qur’an was meticulously preserved for posterity, and so Uthman ordered Zayd ibn Thabit, the Medinan who had organized the manuscript in the first place, to consult with others who had the Qur’an memorized, and then to produce a new, cross-checked codex. The codex, called the Uthmanic codex, would have been produced some time around the beginning of Uthman’s reign – again, 644, and another good date to remember, as it saw the completion of the Qur’an as it exists today. The Uthmanic codex was afterward sent out to Mecca, Kufa, Basra, and Damascus, the epicenters of Islam at that time, and the caliph Uthman kept a copy for himself, too. There are some traditions that hold that Islam’s fourth Caliph, Ali, also set down a copy of the Qur’an, and that other companions of the Prophet collected the verses of the Qur’an. But what you just heard is the standard Sunni story of the Uthmanic Codex.

Uthman’s efforts to standardize the Qur’an were not without their critics, critics who include modern day Shiites. Critics of the Uthmanic codex have had different views on the third caliph’s efforts to standardize the Qur’an, and the contemporary Shiite view is that Ali compiled the Qur’an after the death of Muhammad, that Ali’s was the more accurate version, and that Uthman and his cronies formed ranks against Ali. Whatever happened between Uthman and Ali as the Uthmanic codex came together, all sources agree that upon the completion of the Uthmanic codex, Uthman ordered the destruction of all other versions of the Qur’an. This was a controversial proclamation, as books, especially in the seventh century, were precious things, and some saw the caliph’s standardization efforts as oppressive, rather than pragmatic.

The End of Uthman’s Caliphate

By the summer of 655, the Caliph Uthman was around eighty. He had been at the helm of the burgeoning Islamic empire for almost twelve years, and he’d managed to push the caliphate along the North African coast, into the eastern Mediterranean, and out to the furthest reaches of the now defunct Sasanian empire. Uthman had worked, although not to universal acclaim, to standardize the Qur’an. But inasmuch as Uthman had managed to be the third Islamic ruler in a row to continue the caliphate’s meteoric rise, dissent against Uthman seethed in Medina.

As with anything Rashidun, the sources vary on the extent of Uthman’s malfeasance. But Uthman seems to have pushed his own relatives into positions of power as amirs and at other important posts. Uthman’s clan – the Umayyads – had been the overlords of Mecca before Islam, and so to some of the believers, especially those Arabs outside of the Umayyad clan who had revered Islam’s egalitarian doctrines, Uthman represented the recrudescence of a pre-Islamic old guard, mercantile in its agenda, with moral uprightness a secondary concern. Rumors spread that Uthman was misappropriating funds in the state treasury, though he was purportedly a very pious and ascetic convert.¹⁵ Abroad, unrest arose against some of Uthman’s appointees – especially in Egypt, where Uthman’s foster brother was taxing the populace so fiercely that violent protests broke out. As the spigot of fresh loot from conquests slowed to a trickle in recently conquered provinces, and Umayyad leaders left the Islamic garrison towns to seize choice plots of acreage, fractious regions of the newborn empire threatened to go their own way.

655 gave way to 656, and a large delegation from Kufa, Basra, and Egypt bore down on Medina, intending to convince Uthman to change his ways. The old Umayyad caliph refused to hold an audience with them, sending instead Ali, who was at this point evidently still serving loyally in spite of his reservations about Uthman. The leaders of the insurrection were told that their concerns would be taken under consideration, and then sent home. What happened next isn’t very clear. The returning delegates seem to have intercepted a letter. The source of the letter isn’t clear, but it ordered retribution against the very rebels who had come to voice their concerns to the caliph.¹⁶ In response, surely with backing from the Medinans and Meccans already angry at Uthman, the rebels returned and demanded Uthman’s resignation. Uthman wouldn’t do it. When Uthman wouldn’t step down, a cadre of assassins descended on his home, broke in, and stabbed him to death. He was the second Rashidun caliph to be assassinated, and he would not be the last. [music]

Ali’s Ascension to Caliph and Immediate Challenges

Uthman, in his early eighties when assassinated, had been born within a few years of the Prophet Muhammad. He lived to see some profound changes in the culture of the Arabian Peninsula. But Uthman’s generation had not effaced the old social order of Arabia. Tribal and clan allegiances still fissured the Arab citizenry of the caliphate. Uthman himself seems to have been all-too willing to promote his own kin over others, and thereafter ignore their corruption and misconduct. And while Arabia’s ancient social order had been dictated by blood and tribe, the caliphate’s conquests had introduced new social rifts, as well. The far-flung provinces of the Rashidun Caliphate were now home to citizens of all stamps from the former Byzantine and Sasanian empires who had to make their way in the newborn Islamic world. Who would lead this continent-sized patchwork of often incongruous populations, still damp in places with the blood of recent warfare? Could it be led at all?

On one hand, when Uthman died, there was an utterly clear successor. Ali ibn Abi Talib was Muhammad’s first cousin and son-in-law. Ali had been the first male convert to Islam, he had been with the Prophet in both war and peace, and he was the father of Muhammad’s two adult grandsons. Ali had been snubbed for caliph three different times, but had swallowed his pride and agreed to serve Abu Bakr, Umar, and Uthman. Though Ali had a faction that had supported him, and had supported him for 24 years, Ali had repeatedly taken one for the team, and the unity that resulted due to his heroic modesty had allowed the Rashidun caliphate to take over a large swath of the world. As of the summer of 656, when Uthman was assassinated, Ali was in his mid-50s, and had played a uniquely central role in Islamic history, and he was surely quite ready to lead.

But in the face Ali’s considerable qualifications and his likely intentions to try and do what Muhammad would have done, a vortex of different forces was at work. First, there was a faction who, for varying reasons, were against the caliphate of Ali. These included the Prophet’s wife Aisha, and Muhammad’s companion, an important Rashidun period military commander Zubayr, and another of Muhammad’s former companions, Talha, a wealthy member of a different Quraysh clan. Ali’s dissidents also included many in the former caliph Uthman’s clan, the Umayyads. While Ali’s naysayers had various agendas against him, the most consequential among Ali’s naysayers ended up being the aforementioned Syrian governor Mu’awiyah. An important scion of the Umayyad clan, Mu’awiyah had worked on the third caliph Uthman’s behalf to secure naval control over the eastern Mediterranean, and he had probably enjoyed substantial financial gifts and prerogatives as a member of Uthman’s old-money clan. Mu’awiyah knew that if Ali became caliph, the preferential treatment of the Umayyads was unlikely to continue.

Ali was initially reluctant to assume the position of Caliph. First, Ali had seen enough to know what he was getting into. Second, Ali wanted to govern by the popular assent of a stable body of believers, and not because a perfect storm had billowed him into place. Much of Ali’s support, however, was not the thing of a passing moment. He had old, old allies whom he had known back in the 620s, both early Meccan converts to Islam, and those who had joined them later in Medina. Ali also had a large faction of non-Arab converts down in the southern Mesopotamian cities of Basra and Kufa. When the chaos following Uthman’s assassination died down, and some potential rivals resolved to back Ali, he agreed to lead the Caliphate. Only, he wouldn’t call himself a caliph, as he thought that Uthman had besmirched the title. Ali called himself the Amir al-Mu’minun, or the “Commander of the Believers.”

The new ruler got to work. Ali granted forgiveness to the murderers of Uthman. It was time to move forward. The first order of business was to remove the primary source of agitation in the Islamic empire, and that was Uthman’s provincial appointees. Uthman had elevated his clan and cronies to positions of power. While some had likely been decent governors, others, such as the aforementioned foster brother in Egypt, had been cruel and greedy, skinning, rather than shearing the sheep in their provinces, as the old Roman expression goes. Ali knew he had to remove these corrupt officials from their posts. The problem was, old Uthman’s kinfolk had grown very wealthy over the twelve years of the previous caliph’s leadership, and these nouveau-riche politicos were not interested in any leadership that would take away their power and privileges. They refused to step down even when ordered to do so. Their perspective was that power and privilege now belonged to the Umayyads. And speaking of powerful governors from the Umayyad clan, in Damascus, the governor Mu’awiya began a public relations campaign against Ali, emphasizing that Ali was not doing all he could in order to punish the murder of Uthman.

The First Fitna Begins

Closer to home, Muhammad’s young widow Aisha also plotted against the new ruler. Her opposition to Ali, as mentioned before, may have been because, like her father, she didn’t think a caliph should come from the Prophet’s family, or because Ali had not defended her in the affair of the necklace years and years before. Whatever Aisha’s reasons, many in the caliphate seem to have had cause to lock arms against Ali. A governor whom Ali had fired down in Yemen seized funds from the province’s treasury, making them available to Aisha. With money and momentum, the Prophet’s widow gathered an army and marched north – not to Medina, but to Basra, where many of Ali’s loyalists made their home. Aisha’s army attacked Basra and assumed control. This attack began what is known as the First Fitna, or the first civil war fought by Muslims against Muslims.

Knowing that a militarized faction was opposing him within the caliphate, Ali had to act. He left Medina with an army that swelled as he went northward. Aisha, entrenched in Basra, met Ali in a parley when Ali arrived. Some sort of negotiations ensued – the sources on these negotiations vary greatly, but the general sense that they communicate is that some efforts were made to broker peace, and that those efforts failed. On the one hand, the war didn’t make sense. Aisha’s forces were implicating Ali in the death of Uthman, and yet both parties had been opposed to the some of the former caliph’s transgressions as leader. Aisha’s army may have intended to back their general Zubayr as caliph in order to snatch leadership away from the Prophet’s immediate family, and yet Zubayr and Ali were cousins, and the Qur’an emphatically declared the fraternity of Muslims. On the other hand, the caliphate had grown so quickly that the Arab scions of Muhammad’s generation now in power, some more mercantile than pious, no longer had much need for Medinan leadership so thoroughly associated with the Prophet. And in spite of the negotiations at Basra, a battle broke out between the two contingents that has historically been called the Battle of the Camel, so-called because Aisha herself rode into the fighting in an armored howdah atop a red camel to spur her troops on.

Aisha’s forces lost. Her chief lieutenants, the wealthy Talha, and the sturdy commander Zubayr, were both killed, ending what was likely at least in part Zubayr’s bid for the caliphal throne. Ali’s forces were able to capture Aisha. Though Ali won the day, it must have been a bitter victory, and it certainly couldn’t have been the way that Muhammad’s son-in-law and cousin wanted to begin his term as the leader of Islam. He made some sort of peace with Aisha, and leveled no charges against her. Aisha returned to Medina, spending her later years writing some of the most esteemed hadiths about Muhammad. As for Ali, he broke with precedent and he moved the seat of his leadership to Kufa. It made sense. Kufa, about 600 miles northeast of Medina as the crow flies, and 90 miles south of Baghdad, was more centrally located within the new Islamic empire, being precisely between the old Byzantine and Sasanian empires. Ali must have understood that a ruler there could much more easily manage affairs than one down in the Arabian Peninsula. Ali likely also understood that further challenges to his power would come not from foreign armies, but from within the caliphate.

Ali, fresh from the collective tragedy of the Battle of the Camel, knew that in addition to Aisha and her confederates, another powerful force within the empire did not want him to rule. This was Mu’awiya, the governor of Syria, who will be a main character in the remainder of this episode. Mu’awiya, Uthman’s cousin, in the year 657, declared himself caliph. He and his Umayyad confederates had become wealthy and powerful beyond imagination under the leadership of Uthman. If the Umayyads could end the leadership of the Ahl al-Bayt, or the people of the house of Muhammad, then the Umayyad clan would enjoy unchecked dominance over the Islamic world.

As Ali consolidated support in Kufa, to the west, in Syria, Mu’awiya gathered an army around him. Ali and Mu’awiya’s forces squared off against one another near the upper Euphrates and close to what is today Raqqah, Syria. There was, on both sides, as at the Battle of the Camel, a general hesitancy to fight. But after a delay of what some sources indicate was months, the forces of Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law Ali met the forces of the Umayyad governor Mu’awiya. After a few days of fighting, it was clear that Ali’s army had the upper hand. The faltering Syrian forces, however, perhaps at the bidding of Mu’awiya, began employing a desperate tactic. They affixed pages of the Qur’an to the tips of their spears, aiming to open negotiation even though they were losing the battle. Ali and his forces, not wanting to harm the Qur’an, and well aware of Islam’s calls for peace between Muslims, backed down. Ali had wanted negotiation from the beginning.

Ali and Mu’awiya talked. Though we might imagine that Mu’awiya, who had been losing the battle, would surrender and plead to continue his post as the governor of Syria, Mu’awiya did no such thing. At the negotiation table, Mu’awiya, in 657, sought to continue to rule in Syria in a position equal to Ali’s in Arabia, Mesopotamia, and Persia. Ali accepted these terms. And this concession, like so many moments of Rashidun period history, had great consequences. [music]

The Kharijites Emerge as a Power Bloc

Ali’s supporters, as of the summer of 657, were not a unified block. There were those who had simply known him for decades, and understood that he was an intelligent, levelheaded person who was a good choice to lead. There were those who revered him due to his relation to Muhammad and early role in Islam. There were those who saw him as an expedient to the dismantling of Umayyad power. There were those who saw Ali as a staunch, paradigmatic Muslim, holding true to the ethical fiber of Islam. And there were those for whom Ali was a mythic figure, who had heard Ali preaching, or heard of Ali preaching, and believed that Ali had some of the same prophetic stature of Muhammad. When Ali capitulated to Mu’awiya, allowing the Syrian governor control over what had formerly been Byzantine Syria, Ali endangered relations with some of his supporters.

A young, fearsome faction of Ali’s loyalists left him in the weeks after the negotiations with Mu’awiya. Those in this faction are known as the Kharijites, or the “ones who left,” by historians. The Kharijites, as their collective ideology began to solidify, had some very firm and fundamental ideas about what a caliph was. To the Kharijites, a caliph necessarily had to be an exemplary Muslim. Anyone who played it fast and loose with Qur’anic mandates was disqualified. And while the Kharijites were extremely firm on the idea that a caliph had to be devout, they were commensurately flexible on who could be caliph. Background, caste, blood, and nationality? None of that mattered. To the Kharijites, the first sectarian movement within Islamic history, those Muslims who did not uphold strictly Qur’anic values were false Muslims, guilty of apostasy, and deserving of the same punishments as apostates. And so the Kharijites, as they abandoned Ali’s forces in the weeks following the concessions made toward the rebellious Mu’awiya, decided that their caliph had not acted according to Qur’anic mandates.¹⁷ A traitorous, dissipated Muslim – at least this was how the Kharijites saw Mu’awiya, had been allowed to rampage through the caliphate unpunished, and Ali had sanctioned Mu’awiya’s continued rule in Syria.

Ali’s Impossible Situation

A large force of Kharijite dissenters made a camp near Ali’s capital of Kufa. Having at least temporarily solved the problem of Mu’awiya trying to take over the entire caliphate, poor Ali now had a new, volatile situation on his front doorstep. He was able to come to some sort of a settlement with the Kharijites. Nonetheless, the Kharijites wanted Mu’awiya’s blood. Ali was clearly trying for a more cautious approach to the problem of the Syrian governor, but the Kharijites, in spite of reconciliation talks with Ali, in the end went their own way, raising one of their own as a caliph, and causing turmoil just as Ali began making his way west to recommence the war with Mu’awiya. Ali attacked the Kharijite camp in the summer of 658, defeating them and killing the caliph that they had raised. With blood spilled between the Shi’at Ali and the Kharijite separatists, the Kharijites were no longer on Ali’s side. And more problematically, the violence that Ali and his forces had brought to bear against the Kharijites, however much it had been in the interest of peacekeeping, had also estranged some of Ali’s other supporters, who, having followed their leader into multiple battles against other Muslims, were no longer keen to repeat the process. Wanting to muster forces for a campaign against Mu’awiya, Ali found the different power blocs that had supported him moving in ever more divergent directions.

To the west, in former Byzantine territories, Mu’awiya was also very busy. The wealthy governor, while Ali was busy with the Kharijites in Iraq, went down through the Levant to Egypt, declaring himself overlord of the region in 658. As 658 gave way to 659, Mu’awiya went on the offensive, dispatching raids along the Euphrates River, where Ali’s center of power lay in Kufa. Mu’awiya, now in control of Egypt, also dispatched forces down into the Hijaz and all the way down to Yemen. The empire was shuddering. Having few moral hangups about seizing power, Mu’awiya was willing to do what it took to make him sole caliph at any cost. Ali, a graver and more pious person, was more hesitant about spilling Muslim blood than his opponent was. Nonetheless, as Mu’awiya wrested control of more and more of the western caliphate in 659 and 660, in 661, Ali had finally mustered sufficient forces for an attack on Mu’awiya’s forces in Syria, this time, in all likelihood, intending to put the Syrian governor down for good.

Ali never got a chance to lead the campaign. Kharijite purists, enraged at Ali first for letting Mu’awiya off the hook back in 657, and later for striking their base in 658, wanted an uncompromisingly Islamic leader. And during a morning prayer in 661 at the mosque in Kufa, a Kharijite assassin slashed Ali’s head with a poisoned sword. The final Rashidun caliph died shortly thereafter. He was about 60 years old, and he had, after waiting in the wings for 24 years, served as caliph for less than five. His time on the throne had been exhausting, harrowing, and plagued with impossible moral choices. The cousin and son-in-law of Muhammad himself, the second ever convert after Khadija, Ali was murdered by those who deemed him not Muslim enough. His death, in Islam, is collectively understood as a terrible tragedy. Islamic leadership, up until these first months of 661, had been the prerogative of four Meccans from Muhammad’s immediate circle who had been trying to bring the revelations of the Qur’an to bear in a larger world. After 661, as Mu’awiya took over, and the Umayyad clan seized money and privilege everywhere they could, the caliph was simply an emperor.

Hasan’s Arrangement with Mu’awiya

There was, in 661, still some chance that the Ahl al-Bayt, or house of the Prophet, would persist. Ali had two adult sons, the grandsons upon whom Muhammad had doted upon back in Medina in the 620s. Hasan, the older son, was in his mid-thirties, and Husayn, his brother, just a year younger. Ali’s supporters proclaimed Hasan as the new caliph in January of 661. Yet Hasan was plagued by the same problems that had beset Ali. For one, Mu’awiya was stomping around the western provinces making his bid for total control of the empire. For two, Hasan’s supporters, like Ali had been, were reluctant to make war on fellow Muslims, and so Hasan’s power base was ambivalent about open war with the caliphal territories to the west. And third, Kharijite extremists still lurked around Kufa, sharpening their knives in preparation to murder any further members of the Prophet’s family who were not sufficiently pious for their tastes. Hasan, while making preparations to deal with Mu’awiya, was wounded by one such Kharijite dissenter in an assassination attempt early in 661. What happened next, at the cusp between the Rashidun and Umayyad caliphates, has been another controversy in subsequent history.

Hasan, like Ali had back in 657, signed a peace treaty with Mu’awiya. This second peace treaty was even more favorable to the Syrian governor Mu’awiya than the first. The terms of the treaty were that Hasan would relinquish his claims as caliph. In exchange, Mu’awiya would rule unopposed. However, Hasan was sure to stipulate that Mu’awiya would also rule according to Qur’anic doctrine and the customs of the Prophet, promise not to harm Hasan’s followers, and guarantee that his (meaning Mu’awiya’s) successor would be chosen by a committee. The treaty was signed. Historical sources on this treaty and its immediate aftermath vary widely on the extent of Hasan’s exact capitulations, but however exactly it happened, probably in an overall effort to preserve peace, Hasan surrendered his claims to the caliphate, and then went home to Medina. His abdication marks the end of the First Fitna, or first civil war in Islam. His stature differs between Shias and Sunnis, and in his own time he was judged harshly for conceding to Mu’awiya. However, in evaluating how both Ali and Hasan dealt with the Umayyad usurper, it’s worth remembering, for all of us, that Muhammad’s actual son-in-law and grandson both swallowed their pride and opted for peace as greed and extremism billowed around them in the newborn empire. [music]

Ali and the Sunni-Shia Split

The year 661 marks the end of the Rashidun and the beginning of the Umayyad caliphate, and so, having seen Muhammad’s grandsons Hasan and Husayn down to Medina, and the ascension of Mu’awiya in Syria, we can stop our historical narrative for the present. Next time, we’ll move forward into the Umayyad caliphate, which persisted from 661-750, beginning with the story of what happened to Hasan and Husayn. For the present, though, let’s reflect on what we’ve learned in this program.

This show began and ended with Ali ibn Abi Talib. Born around 600, and assassinated in 661, Ali saw Islam grow from a single revelation to a world empire, from the moment that Muhammad came home from the cave atop mount Hira in Mecca to the moment that Ali lay dying in Kufa, knowing that the future of the caliphate lay in the hands of the power-hungry and morally iffy Mu’awiya. Ali was at center stage for events that rocked all of world history. He is revered by all Muslims, but at the same time Ali is the most divisive figure in Islamic history – the figure whom the shi’at Ali, or party of Ali, both during the Rashidun caliphate as well as today, believe should have been Muhammad’s successor. At Ghadir Khumm, following Muhammad’s final pilgrimage to Mecca, in the famous Hadith of the Thaqalayn, Muhammad announced, “He of whom I am the [mawla], of him ‘Ali is also the [mawla]. . .O God, be the friend of him who is his friend, and be the enemy of him who is his enemy.” The word mawla, as we learned earlier, is variously translated as “patron,” “master,” “leader,” and “friend.” Depending on how the word is translated, what Muhammad said can be interpreted as a formal declaration that Ali was his heir, or simply a declaration of solidarity and kinship with his son-in-law. Shias understand mawla as the former, and Sunnis, the latter.

To Shias today, Ali was the first Imam – Imam with a capital “I.” The word “imam” is used in both Sunnism and Shiism – it comes from an Arabic word “leader” or “go in front.” The word is used in the Qur’an several times. God tells Abraham in the second Surah, “I will make you a leader [or imam] of people” (2:124).¹⁸ In a different surah, God, speaking in the royal “we,” proclaims that when Jews became pious monotheists, “We raised leaders [or imams] among them, guiding them according to Our command” (32:24).¹⁹ In Sunnism today, an imam is a prayer leader – what Jews would call a rabbi or Catholics a priest – an imam goes up in front and leads the prayer. But in Shiism, imam means something else.

In Shiism, Imams are specifically a very select set of individuals that include Ali, and the Ahl al-Bayt, meaning the genetic descendants of Muhammad. Imams, in Shiism, are divinely gifted leaders intended by God to guide the Islamic community on earth. In Shiism, Ali, and then his son Hasan, and then his son Husayn were the first three Imams, followed later by Muhammad’s great grandson, and great-great grandson, and on down the line. Different sects of Shiism part company on which of the successors of Muhammad were true Imams, with Twelvers, the largest Shiite sect today, believing there were twelve true Imams, and others contending that there were fewer. While Shiites have variant ideas about how many Imams there were, all Shiites hold that Ali was the first Imam, and that Abu Bakr, Umar, and Uthman should never have been caliphs.

There’s a lot more to say about Shiism and its subsects, but as of the winter of 661, the Shi’at Ali were partisans of Ali ibn Abi Talib rather than a separate religious faction. The Shi’at Ali surely shared modern Shiism’s belief that the Prophet’s cousin and son-in-law was uniquely qualified to lead, and also surely, some of the Shi’at Ali, in the 630s, 640s, and 650s believed, just like modern Shiites do, that Ali had the same divinely granted wisdom that Muhammad did. As we move forward through early Islamic history, we’ll learn more about how Shiism evolved alongside Sunnism, and how cultural differences between Persian Muslims, Arab Muslims, and others propelled this theological parting of ways. However, the bulk of what we’ve covered in this program has been high level military and political history, and it is to this military and political history that I would like to devote the closing minutes of this program.

The Rashidun period is an almost unbelievably eventful one. Those of us who study it can’t help but ask a very simple question. Behind the complex historiography, and underneath the usual exaggerated battlefield statistics and later mythmaking about the period, between 632 and 661, a military and political entity that had thus far been a rather minor presence on the world stage destroyed two ancient empires and gobbled up nearly as much territory as the Roman Empire had held at its height. How did the Muslims do it? How did Abu Bakr subdue Arabia? How did a merchant like Umar manage to conquer a broad swathe of the Earth? How did Uthman continue Umar’s conquests even while practicing nepotism on a transcontinental scale? How did Ali, the poor benchwarmer who ended up having such a difficult and awkward caliphate when all was said and done, become such a beloved figure across Islam and beyond? Let’s explore these questions, beginning with the dawn of the Rashidun caliphate in 632. [music]

Islam: A Religion with Urban Roots

In 632, when Abu Bakr took up leadership of the Islamic faithful after Muhammad passed away, the Arabian Peninsula was still a patchwork of different tribal territories with different levels of commitment to Islam and the new state in Medina. The first caliph began his tenure in power by subduing holdout regions of Arabia, focusing on tribes and confederations that had left off paying taxes to the Muslim state after Muhammad’s death. The Ridda wars, those earliest conflicts that the caliphate fought due to upstart prophets and nonpayment of taxes, at once solidified the fighting force of the Medinan state, and rewarded its infantry and cavalry troops with loot from defeated foes. As historian Fred Donner writes,

[T]he almost ceaseless military activity of the Ridda wars provided the setting in which the loosely organized war parties formed at the beginning of the Ridda wars began to assume the character of a standing army, with a core of devoted supporters (mainly townsmen of Medina, Mecca, and Taif) leading a larger mass of allies drawn from a wide variety of Arabian tribes. It also represented the domination of the pastoral and mountaineer populations of Arabia by the embryonic new state in Medina, which was headed by an elite group composed almost exclusively of settled townsmen.²⁰

This is something that is often forgotten about all three Abrahamic religions. They were, at their outset, urban phenomena – new and sophisticated monotheisms brought to bear against the more hodgepodge world of rural polytheism. The Latin word paganus means villager, or rustic, and when early Christians needed a name for the country folks who didn’t understand the new urban phenomenon of Christianity, seeded in cities by Paul and others around the eastern Mediterranean during the mid-first century, their word for heathens, “pagans,” first meant something more like “bumpkins” or “peasants.”

Over the course of the Ridda wars, Abu Bakr ordered troops often from the urban Hijaz to remote inland districts of the peninsula, and a generation of Arab generals learned to move and direct armies. Abu Bakr is recorded as having said, “If [the apostates] withhold only a hobbling cord of what they gave the Prophet, I will fight them for it.”²¹ On one hand, this is simply a statement indicating that Abu Bakr intended to scrupulously collect all tax revenue promised to Medina. On the other, though, the “hobbling cord” mentioned – a tool for taming camels – indicates that Islam’s first caliph conceived of Medina’s foes as scattered provincials – Bedouin herdsmen who would soon be steamrolled by the organized, economically robust, metropolitan Islamic state.

The caliphate, then, for the Rashidun period, at least, was led by the urban Quraysh against the world, and inasmuch as clan conflicts within the Quraysh tribe eventually destabilized the caliphate, in the beginning, the Ridda wars saw the cosmopolitan west coast of Arabia asserting control over the rest of the peninsula, and in the process, developing a core of military expertise that would only grow stronger over the coming decades. What happened next, which began under Abu Bakr, and continued under Umar and Uthman, was the takeover of a critical mass of Byzantine and Sasanian territories.

Behind the Rashidun Empire’s Success

We are going to learn about the Byzantine-Sasanian War of 602-628 in a couple of programs from now. It’s a blockbuster story, and not told often enough in the English-speaking world. For now, it will have to suffice to say that at the end of this war in 628, a generation of each ancient empire’s military might had been exhausted, each empire’s border regions and defensive fortifications had been atrophied by the long conflict. The Byzantines and Sasanians were used to fighting one another. They were used to using Arab client troops to fight one another. What they were not used to, or prepared for, especially in the wake of a generation-long war, was an invasion from Arabia. Arabia? That was where you hired cavalrymen, and where a few luxury goods came from. Arabia, to the Byzantine emperor Heraclius and the Sasanian king Khosrow II, was not a threat. In the late 620s, exactly a moment of critical weakness for the Persians and a moment of military fatigue for the Romans, Arab-Muslim armies began harrying the southern marchlands of each empire. The financial and military exhaustion of the Byzantines and Sasanians did not make Muslim victories a foregone conclusion, but it certainly helped.

One of the main reasons for the Rashidun caliphate’s military successes against the Byzantines and the Sasanians, then, was that these two empires were beaten up, and tired. Another reason for the Rashidun caliphate’s enormous success, though, were the specific people in charge. Abu Bakr, Umar and Uthman were talented leaders, capable of managing domestic affairs as well as foreign campaigns and adapting as the worlds around them evolved. They were served by a select cadre of battlefield commanders unparalleled during the Middle Ages – Khalid ibn al-Walid, Abu Ubaidah, and others – generals who could command under pressure, but also, who could take commands, coordinate, collaborate, and play supportive roles, as well. Beneath the Roman emperor Augustus was his general Agrippa, and during the early Rashidun period, several superb caliphs had at their disposal a squadron of equally superb tacticians, and in their efficient conquest of two world empires, egotism rarely got in the way. The collectivistic spirit of Islam, fresh in the hearts and minds of its earliest executive and military leaders, helped them bulldoze their way up through the old Byzantine-Sasanian front. Thus, one of the main forces behind the greatest imperial expansion of the first millennium, in addition to outstanding leadership, was a concerted burst of good, old-fashioned teamwork.

There is a final, and very obvious reason the Rashidun caliphate expanded the way that it did. We can certainly cite the exhaustion of the Byzantine and Sasanian empires. We can understand that Quraysh executive and military leadership had been forged in the conflicts of the Hijra and the Ridda wars, and that the first caliphate, from Abu Bakr onward, had an uncommon amount of talent at its topmost levels. However, it would be silly not to emphasize that Islam itself was a significant propellant of the Rashidun caliphate’s success, and perhaps the most important one of all. On the simplest level, in spite of the nepotism under Uthman, Islam was a democratizing ideology that placed all believers in parity under God. First proclaimed in Mecca, in the 610s, Islam was squarely against the old aristocratic social order and Quraysh hegemony of the pilgrimage. It united Arabia as nothing had ever done, taking the nascent monotheism already there and fusing it with the Peninsula’s core values – trustworthiness, patience, gratitude, sincerity – and further, doing so in haunting, beautiful Arabic verses that tended to linger in the minds of those who heard them.

Within the splash zone of the Islamic conquests were hundreds of thousands of Christians, Jews, and Zoroastrians who either lived under Islam as dhimmis, or protected people who paid a small tax, or converted to Islam. One of the biggest misconceptions about Islam, and indeed a major reason I spent so much time producing episodes on Pre-Islamic Arabia, and then the life of Muhammad, and then the Qur’an itself, is that Islam was an alien ideology forcibly imposed on conquered populations. While Islam absolutely did spread due to the wars, looting, and enslavements of the Rashidun caliphate, it also spread because for many, it was an appealing ideology with plenty of familiar materials. We can imagine that Monophysite, Jacobite, and Coptic Christians in Syria, never treated equally by the Byzantine empire, might have found Muslim leadership about the same as Chalcedonian Christian leadership. We can imagine that Jewish citizens of the Levant, actively persecuted by Byzantines from time to time, might have shrugged to learn that the new regional overlords also revered Abraham and Noah and Moses, and felt no more pessimism than before. We can imagine that Sasanian Zoroastrians, once they learned that their conquerors also believed in just one God, and also believed in good deeds and good words, and also believed that evil strove against good, might have found the Arab Muslim invasion somewhat more bearable. A generation or two of cohabitation, with the Qur’an doing its work and a great many Byzantines, Sasanians, and others perhaps not being particularly religious in the first place, and the new ideology proliferated.

The Rashidun Expansion: A Balanced View

However, it is important, as we come to the end of the story of the Rashidun caliphate, not to whitewash the scale of violence and brutality that heralded the birth of a new world empire. As ultimately appealing and familiar as much about Islam eventually proved, the Rashidun caliphate undertook ferocious military campaigns that resulted in lost lives and livelihoods at a transcontinental scale. One of the many ancient cities that the Rashidun caliphate conquered was Alexandria. And while primary historical sources on the Rashidun period are woefully short, we do have one, written by an Egyptian Coptic bishop named John of Nikiû just a generation or so after the death of the fourth caliph Ali. John of Nikiû’s history paints a mottled picture of the Rashidun conquests. The bishop describes the horror of the populace along the Nile when Rashidun armies arrived, and how whole cities fled, leaving their possessions behind. Later, Coptic Christians, John of Nikiû wrote in the 680s or 690s, were butchered when they were caught by Muslim forces, when “[The Muslims] compelled the city to open its gates, and they put to the sword all that surrendered, and they spared none, whether old men, babe, or woman.”²² At a different city, “[T]hereupon the Moslem[s] made their entry into Nakius, and took possession, and finding no soldiers (to offer resistance), they proceeded to put to the sword all whom they found in the streets and in the churches, men, women, and infants, and they showed mercy to none” (188). These are horrific accounts of the Rashidun invasion. Notwithstanding John of Nikiû’s suspect Biblical language, we can imagine that indeed as with any war, there were Rashidun commanders indifferent to, or hostile to, the lives of all whom they conquered.

John of Nikiû also left behind a record of the capitulation of the city of Alexandria, which did not suffer such a genocidal assault. When it became clear that Alexandria could not ultimately defend itself against the caliphate, the Christians and Muslims decided on the amount of money that the Muslims would be paid. And then, in John of Nikiû’s account,

as for the [Muslims], they were not to intervene in any matter, but were to keep to themselves for eleven months. The Roman troops in Alexandria were to carry off their possessions and their treasures and proceed (home) by sea, and no other Roman army was to return. But those who wished to journey by land were to pay a. . .tribute. And the Moslem[s] were to take as hostages one hundred and fifty soldiers and fifty civilians and make peace. And the Romans were to cease warring against the Moslem[s], and the Moslem[s] were to desist from seizing Christian Churches, and the later were not to intermeddle with any concerns of the Christians. And the Jews were to be permitted to remain in the city of Alexandria. (193-4)²³

Under these terms, then, Alexandria, in Roman hands for almost seven hundred years, became the property of the Rashidun caliphate.

The Pros and Cons of Medieval Empires

The story of the Rashidun caliphate has been told in ways that emphasize and de-emphasize the level of violence implicit in its genesis. Arab-Islamic sources from the later Medieval period describe the caliphate’s conquests one way, and Christian and Jewish sources another, and modern historical sources, sometimes adopting a Sunni or Shiite perspective for partisan reasons or simply expediency, describe the scale and carnage of Rashidun warfare according to various perspectives. With our present vantage, in Episode 120 of Literature and History, Islam’s first great imperial expansion is stunning in its magnitude, but in other ways, pretty ordinary. Like Romans under Trajan; like the Macedonians under Alexander; like the Achaemenids under Cyrus, the Rashidun caliphate rose out of blood and loot. As with the aforementioned empires, Rashidun military officers likely ran the range between temperate on one end, and sadistic on the other. As with the aforementioned empires, Rashidun leaders found it most efficient to leave the civilizational gridwork of conquered societies mostly intact. As with the aforementioned empires, the Rashidun caliphate ripped through country and city alike, causing havoc and death, and at the same time laying the foundations for cultural achievements and confluences that otherwise would have never happened. The Rashidun caliphate, in summation, did what giant conquering empires do. And that takes us to the very final thought I want to leave you with for the present program.

As we are now into the second half of the present season, it’s worth taking a moment to remember the first half – the world of al-Jahiliya – of the old Arabian Peninsula, as it had existed up to the early seventh century. Muhammad’s children’s generation fought much of the world. Muhammad’s father’s generation, however, wiled away the years with smaller skirmishes. Muhammad’s modern biographer Martin Lings writes that a clan war that was going on when the Prophet was about 10 years old. Lings writes about this clan war that took place around 580,

In those years Quraysh were not involved in any fighting except for a spasmodic and intermittent conflict which came to be known as the sacrilegious war because it had started in one of the sacred months. A profligate of [the] Kinanah [tribe] had treacherously murdered a man of ‘Amir, one of the Hawazin tribes of Najd, and had taken refuge in the impregnable fortress township of Khaybar. The sequence of events followed the usual desert pattern: honor demanded revenge, so the tribe of the murdered man attacked Kinanah, the tribe of the murderer, and [the] Quraysh were involved, somewhat ingloriously, as allies of Kinanah [tribe]. The conflict dragged on for three or four years in which there were only five days of actual fighting. The head of the clan of Hashim was at that time Zubayr, full brother, like Abu Talib, of Muhammad’s father. Zubayr and Abu Talib took their nephew with them to one of the first battles, but they said he was too young to fight. [Muhammad] was nonetheless allowed to help by gathering enemy arrows that had missed their mark and handing them to his uncles so that they could shoot them back.²⁴

It’s a sad story, in some ways, of a long war fought over honor, and a 10-year-old boy dragged into the fighting. And yet it’s also the tale of Pre-Islamic Arabia in a nutshell – a multi-year tribal conflict in which violence was normal but spasmodic; an epoch when two tribes could technically be at war, but only fight one or two days out of the year.

When young Muhammad was gathering arrows for his uncles, in much of the former Roman empire, territories had reverted to tribal fiefdoms not unlike those in Arabia’s Hijaz. France, Spain, Italy, and Germany did not have sheikhs, but they did have a nascent population of dukes and counts. Western Europe atomized in the sixth, seventh, and eighth centuries into small kingdoms and duchies that fought long and irresolute conflicts over minor peccadillos, clan conflicts with only sporadic violence. Meanwhile, in the sixth, seventh, and eighth centuries, central Eurasia did the opposite, as multiple caliphates succeeded one another. Great empires, like the Roman and Persian ones, and like the Rashidun caliphate, are capable of great civilizational feats, turning the turbines of history. But they also fight wars on vast scales, tearing into the stasis of indigenous societies, setting mass casualty battles in the place of humdrum intertribal strife, putting interstate trade consortiums where caravans and merchants once sufficed, and sinking the bloodstained boots of professional soldiers in the same sand where little boys used to gather up arrows from their uncles’ occasional battles. [music]

Moving on to the Umayyad Caliphate

So that, folks, takes us through the Rashidun caliphate. The next program will offer you the history of the Umayyad caliphate, named after the Umayyad clan of Uthman and his cousin Mu’awiya, which persisted from 661-750, and perhaps most famously, spread westward along the North African coast before crossing into the Iberian Peninsula and conquering what is today Spain and Portugal. We will pick up next time with the story of what happened to Ali’s sons Hasan and Husayn, as of 661 living in their hometown of Medina while Mu’awiya reigned with unchecked power.

This program, on the heels of our recent flurry of shows on Muhammad, and the Qur’an, was a lot of work to research and write. Even modern historical works on the Rashidun caliphate vary widely according to what they omit and emphasize, because there’s a lot at stake for a lot of people when it comes to Islam’s first four caliphs. Fortunately for our purposes as students of history, as we move into the Umayyad period, we start to enter an era that’s a bit less contentious and a lot more historiographically stable. The Umayyad caliphate, again from 661-750, became the largest empire the world had ever known. Its most famous monuments still stand today – the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, the Great Mosque of Damascus, and the Great Mosque of Córdoba in Spain. As awe-inspiringly gigantic as the Umayyad empire was, however, it was also a volatile domain, in which a small, nepotistic elite ruled over large populations that keenly remembered the era before the Arab conquest. In the episode that we’re just wrapping up, we covered the First Fitna, or Islamic civil war. As the name may imply, it was not the last Fitna, and two large scale civil wars would rock Umayyad leadership before the Abbasid revolution overthrew Umayyad power in 750.

Volatile as the Umayyad period was, though, and as poor a reputation as the Umayyad caliphs had, the Umayyad period saw the first flickerings of the Islamic golden age. Between 661 and 750, Persian natives learned Arabic and secured Umayyad court positions. Conquered Greek speakers proved willing to translate texts into Arabic. Arabic in general abetted novel cultural interchanges as the new international language, and over the course of Islam’s second caliphate, the groundwork of a new renaissance to come was securely set down.

I have a quiz on this program at literatureandhistory.com and available there in your podcast app. [thoat clearing] I have a quiz on this program. Anyone want to try it? I do spend time on those, and they do review the most salient facts of every episode, and they are also about four seconds away from your thumbs if you want to review the superbly important basic facts of the Rashidun caliphate. Thanks for listening to Literature and History. I have a song coming up if you want to hear it. If not, see you next time.

Still here? Well, I got to thinking about nepotism. The Umayyad caliphate ended up promoting way too many Umayyads into positions of power, and as is usually the case with the rampant appointment of unqualified people, it didn’t always go very well for them. While, granted, nepotism sometimes results in perfectly decent people getting positions in which they do a good job, more generally, when some king starts appointing his second cousin to this important bureau, and his electrician to that other important bureau, stuff gets messy. So, this tune is called “The Nepotism Song,” and in it, a proudly nepotistic ruler sings about a series of increasingly ill-advised, and strange appointments. Hope you like it, and I’ll be back soon with more wildly important early Islamic history soon.

[“The Nepotism Song” Song]

References

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