The Rightly Guided Ones 111dency to think of Islam as having been both completed and perfected
at the end of Muhammad’s life. But while that may be true of the Rev-
elation, which ended with the Prophet’s last breath, it would be a mis-
take to think of Islam in 632 C.E. as being in any way a unified system
of beliefs and practices; far from it. As with all great religions, it would
take generations of theological development for what Ignaz Goldzi-
her calls “the unfolding of Islamic thought, the fixing of the modali-
ties of Islamic practice, [and] the establishment of Islamic institutions”
to take shape.
This is not to say, as John Wansbrough has famously argued, that
Islam as we know it originated outside Arabia hundreds of years after
the death of Muhammad (if such a person even existed). Wansbrough
and his colleagues have done remarkable work in tracing the evolution
of Islam as it developed in the Judeo-Christian sectarian milieu of
seventh-to-ninth-century Arabia and its environs. But Wansbrough’s
persistent exaggeration of the non-Arabic (mostly Hebrew) sources
regarding early Islam, and his unnecessary disregard of the historical
Muhammad, has too often made his arguments seem more like “a dis-
guised polemic seeking to strip Islam and the Prophet of all but the
minimum of originality,” to quote R. B. Sarjeant.
Polemical arguments aside, there can be no doubt that Islam was
still in the process of defining itself when Muhammad died. By 632,
the Quran had neither been written down nor collected, let alone can-
onized. The religious ideals that would become the foundation of
Islamic theology existed only in the most rudimentary form. The
questions of proper ritual activity or correct legal and moral behavior
were, at this point, barely regulated; they did not have to be. What-
ever questions one had—whatever issue was raised either through
internal conflict or as a result of foreign contact—any confusion what-
soever could simply be brought before the Prophet for a solution. But
without Muhammad around to elucidate the will of God, the Ummah
was left with the nearly impossible task of figuring out what the
Prophet would have said about an issue or a problem.
Obviously, the first and most urgent concern was to choose some-
one to lead the Ummah in Muhammad’s stead, someone who could
maintain the community’s stability and integrity in the face of its
many internal and external challenges. Unfortunately, there was little