110 No god but God
Part of the reason for the community’s anxiety over Muhammad’s
death was that he had done so little to prepare them for it. He had
made no formal statement about who should replace him as leader of
the Ummah, or even what kind of leader that person should be. Per-
haps he was awaiting a Revelation that never came; perhaps he wanted
the Ummah to decide for themselves who should succeed him. Or
perhaps, as some were whispering, the Prophet had appointed a suc-
cessor, someone whose rightful place at the head of the community
was being obscured by the internecine power struggles already begin-
ning to take place among the Muslim leadership.
Meanwhile, the Muslim community was growing and expanding
faster than anyone could have imagined and was in serious danger of
becoming unmanageable. Muhammad’s death had only complicated
matters, so that some client tribes were now openly rebelling against
Muslim control and refusing to pay the tithe tax (zakat) to Medina. As
far as these tribes were concerned, Muhammad’s death, like the death
of any Shaykh, had annulled their oath of allegiance and severed their
responsibility to the Ummah.
Even more disconcerting, Muhammad’s vision of a divinely
inspired state was proving so popular that throughout the Arabian
Peninsula other regions had begun to replicate it using their own
indigenous leadership and their own native ideology. In Yemen, a man
named al-Aswad, who claimed to receive divine messages from a god
he called Rahman (an epithet for Allah), had set up his own state inde-
pendent of Mecca and Medina. In eastern Arabia, another man,
Maslama (or Musaylama), had so successfully imitated Muhammad’s
formula that he had already gathered thousands of followers in
Yamama, which he had declared to be a sanctuary city. To scholars like
Dale Eickelman, the sudden upsurge of these “false prophets” is an
indication that Muhammad’s movement had filled a definite social and
religious vacuum in Arabia. But to the Muslims, they signaled a grave
threat to the religious legitimacy and political stability of the Ummah.
And yet the greatest challenge facing the Muslim community
after Muhammad’s death was neither rebellious tribes nor false
prophets, but rather the question of how to build a cohesive religious
system out of the Prophet’s words and deeds, the majority of which
existed solely in the memories of the Companions. There is a ten-