58 No god but God
society. What is more, just as membership in the tribe obliged partici-
pation in the rituals and activities of the tribal cult, so did membership
in Muhammad’s community require ritual involvement in what could
be termed its “tribal cult”: in this case, the nascent religion of Islam.
Public rituals like communal prayer, almsgiving, and collective fast-
ing—the first three activities mandated by God—when combined
with shared dietary regulations and purity requirements, functioned
in the Ummah in much the same way that the activities of the tribal
cult did in pagan societies: by providing a common social and reli-
gious identity that allowed one group to distinguish itself from
another.
What made the Ummah a unique experiment in social organiza-
tion was that in Yathrib, far away from the social and religious hege-
mony of the Quraysh, Muhammad finally had the opportunity to
implement the reforms he had been preaching to no avail in Mecca.
By enacting a series of radical religious, social, and economic reforms,
he was able to establish a new kind of society, the likes of which had
never before been seen in Arabia.
For instance, whereas power in the tribe was allocated to a num-
ber of figures, none of whom had any real executive authority,
Muhammad instead united all the pre-Islamic positions of authority
unto himself. He was not only the Shaykh of his community, but also
its Hakam, its Qa‘id, and, as the only legitimate connection to the
Divine, its Kahin. His authority as Prophet /Lawgiver was absolute.
Also, while the only way to become a member of a tribe was to be
born into it, anyone could join Muhammad’s community simply by
declaring, “There is no god but God, and Muhammad is God’s Mes-
senger.” The shahadah was thus transformed in Yathrib from a theo-
logical statement with explicit social and political implications into a
new version of the oath of allegiance, the bay’ah, which the tribe gave
to its Shaykh. And because neither ethnicity nor culture nor race nor
kinship had any significance to Muhammad, the Ummah, unlike a tra-
ditional tribe, had an almost unlimited capacity for growth through
conversion.
The point is that one can refer to Muhammad’s community in
Yathrib as the Ummah, but only insofar as that term is understood to
designate what the Orientalist explorer Bertram Thomas has called a