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ISLAM, POWER and EMPIRE, to 677 CE (2 of 6)

During the Middle Ages, representative democracy was not considered. It was to his Islamic brotherhood that Muhammad the Prophet looked to maintain political stability.

Tribes across the region began sending deputations to Muhammad, recognizing him as the great power and agreeing to deliver taxes to his government. From those who did not convert -- Christian and Jewish communities -- Muhammad demanded taxes, and in exchange he offered them protection, as rulers had for millennia.

Neither an ascetic nor a celibate, Muhammad is said to have lived his last two years without harsh words about life. He continued the custom of polygamy -- a practice that had helped compensate for the high death rate among Arabs and for a diminished ability to conceive because of Arabia's hot climate. But perhaps as a move against the rich, he limited the number of wives a man could have at any one time to four, except for himself, allowing himself thirteen.

Muhammad was exceptional in ways but also a man of his time, in his so-called monotheism, his belief in a coming Armageddon, his polygamy, ownership of a slave and in his political attitudes. The Arab tradition was not that of dynasties by conquering monarchs. Nor was it the kind of institutionalized democracy that had arisen in ancient Athens. In Arabia there were none of the institution that made a state as opposed to kinship societies. Arab politics had been tribal. Tribes were brotherhoods, and that is how Muhammad saw Islam, as a brotherhood, and brotherhoods, or tribes, were not supposed to need formal political mechanisms for maintaining authority.

Muhammad is not known to have left any directives about succession other than there be no successor to him as a prophet of God. Immediately after his death conflict arose. A group of Muhammad's old companions at Yathrib felt that they should be the ones to select Muhammad's successor. Those from Mecca, who were members of the same tribe as Muhammad, the Quraysh, argued that Arabs would recognize the authority of Muhammad's successor only if he were a Quraysh. And Muhammad's only surviving daughter believed that her husband, Ali (Muhammad's stepbrother as well as son-in-law) should be the successor, an argument for dynasticism -- something that was ancient (and would be around into the 21st century).

Muhammad's old companions met, quarreled bitterly and rejected Ali. The Quraysh group selected one of their own, Muhammad's father-in-law and companion, the fifty-nine year-old Abu Bakr. The Quraysh group attacked and murdered the favorite of the Yathrib group, Sa'd ibn-Ubada. Sa'd ibn-Ubada was said to have been killed by God -- who, according to Islam, directs all, and Bakr was declared the successor, the "Commander of the Faithful," the khalifa -- anglicized to caliph.

The city of Yathrib, meanwhile, had become known as Al Madinah, "the city of the Prophet," which has been shortened to Medina. Bakr ruled from Medina, his powers not well defined, while he claimed no religious authority. Bakr continued to live frugally and simply in a modest household with his wife, receiving no stipend. He conducted government business in the courtyard of what had been the Prophet's mosque.

Across Arabia, Bakr's powers remained doubtful as here and there people believed that with the death of Muhammad they were no longer bound to authority from Medina. Those who had only superficially or reluctantly converted to Islam failed to recognize Bakr's authority. So too did some others, on the grounds that they had not participated in choosing Bakr as Muhammad's successor. And some persons claimed that they had received messages from God and were new prophets and successors to Muhammad.

The new prophets would need sufficient military strength to win the recognition that Muhammad had received, and a few tried to organize a military following. But Bakr and his supporters gathered together the greatest military force Arabia ever had. Bakr's Islamic warriors fought across Arabia for several months. In 633 they defeated the Hanifa tribe in central Arabia, which had supported a new prophet called Musailima, who lost his life in the fighting, Musailima going down in history as a false prophet. Oman was pacified in the winter of 632-33. And Yemen was pacified in the spring of 633.

"Islam and Research" -- sources for medieval Islam