Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

THE UMMA t 131
not legislate. For their guidance, they now had the closed and completed
Quran, and they could not add to that text, which, like
Jewish law, addressed itself in great detail to matters of personal
status but was mute on the political governance of what was rapidly
becoming an immense empire. The caliph and his delegates
resorted instead to many other devices to shape their purpose:
tribal practices, local customs, pragmatic necessities, and, to some
extent, whatever precedents the Prophet’s practice suggested to
them. There is no suggestion that the caliph regarded himself or
was regarded by others as possessing special spiritual powers. He
was the head of the umma, and though the umma was based entirely
on a shared acceptance of Islam, the caliph was not a religious
leader but the leader of a religion.
Tensions in the Community
The caliphs, the earliest ones at any rate, had to face a problem
Muhammad himself had forestalled with great difficulty during his
lifetime. There was a tension in the community from the beginning
between the notion of Islam as a universal religion that claimed the
allegiance of all men, and that of the Arabs as a final version of the
Chosen People. The latter phrase is Judaism’s own, of course, and
speaks to God’s election of Israel as a fellow in his covenant.
Muhammad’s own perspective was perhaps somewhat different.
He knew, from his own understanding of history, that previous
revelations had constituted their recipients a community, an
umma. It had been true of the Jews and Christians and now, in the
final act of the drama of revelation, it would be so with the Arabs.
If this revelation of a “clear Arabic Quran” through an Arab
prophet to Arabs of western Arabia was calculated to create a
sense of unity among those peoples, the project cannot be judged
entirely a success. Muhammad had problems with tribal rivalries
in his own day, between the mighty and the low in the complex
hierarchy of tribes and clans that dominated not only his native
Mecca but most of the peninsula’s Bedouin population. Boasting
and vilification were common pre-Islamic instruments for estab-