then turned against the faith. Such a person was no
longer protected by the Quranic ban on Muslims
shedding the blood of Muslims. That was haram, taboo,
in Islam. But since an apostate was to be considered an
active enemy of Islam, to shed his blood was no longer
taboo. It was now halal—permitted under Islamic law.
This was to become a familiar argument, one made
over time by Sunnis against Shia, by Shia against
Sunnis, by extremists against moderates, by legalist
clerics against Suɹ mystics, and most notoriously
perhaps, at least in the West, by the Ayatollah Khomeini
against novelist Salman Rushdie. Declare your opponent
an apostate, and as the Arabic phrasing goes, “his blood
is halal.”
The Wars of Apostasy—the ridda wars—were as
ruthless as Abu Bakr had promised. Within the year, all
resistance had been crushed, and within another,
Muslim forces had begun to strike north out of Arabia. It
seemed that under Abu Bakr, the ɹrst of the four Caliphs
the Sunnis would call rashidun, “the rightly guided
ones,” Islam was poised to achieve its full potential. Yet a
year later, even as his forces prepared to lay siege to the
Byzantine-controlled city of Damascus far to the north,
Abu Bakr lay deathly ill, struck by fever. He would be the
only Islamic leader to die of natural causes for close on
ɹfty years. This time, however, there would be no doubt
about who was to be the successor.