Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

132 t CHAPTER SIX
lishing and maintaining that order, and though Muhammad decreed
that the only aristocracy in Islam was that constituted by
piety and merit, the tribal divisions of Arab society long outlived
his efforts to suppress them in the name of either a single Arab
umma or a universal religion for all humankind.
With the Prophet’s death, the umma rapidly began to disintegrate.
Only through the strenuous military efforts of his first successor,
Abu Bakr (r. 632–634), was Islam successfully reimposed
on the tribes across Arabia who had read Muhammad’s death as
the death knell of Islam and declared their secession from the community
by refusing to pay the alms-tithe. What followed was more
subtle and perhaps more insidious in the long run. The enormous
wealth that came to the community as booty and tribute was distributed
according to a system devised by the second caliph, Umar
(r. 634–644). It recognized and rewarded the merit of early conversion
and a concomitant willingness to bear arms against the enemies
of Islam, but in institutionalizing this system of rewards and
pensions, Umar restored the distribution rights to tribal chieftains,
permitted this to be done along tribal lines, and allowed it to be
effected in the new Islamic garrison towns whose social organization
was precisely tribal.
The consequences of these purely administrative decisions were
twofold, and each was far-reaching in its social impact. They preserved
and perhaps reinforced the old pre-Islamic tribal rivalries,
which continued to disturb the equilibrium of the Islamic body
politic for at least a century afterward; and they conspired to create
a distinction between Arab and non-Arab within the bosom of
Islam. It is not certain that Muhammad intended an egalitarian
community. What actually emerged was a society where both
tribal and ethnic rivalries died a lingering death.
Ali ibn Abi Talib (601–661)
The caliphate, though an obvious pragmatic success, did not exhaust
the possibilities of leadership in early Islam. There was