The Rightly Guided Ones 115community to how the community should be led. It was even unclear
who could and could not be considered a member of the Ummah, or,
for that matter, what one had to do to be saved.
Again, as is the case with all great religions, it was precisely the
arguments, the discord, and the sometimes bloody conflicts that
resulted from trying to discern God’s will in the absence of God’s
prophet that gave birth to the varied and wonderfully diverse institu-
tions of the Muslim faith. In fact, just as it may be more appropriate to
refer to the movements that succeeded Jesus’ death—from Peter’s
messianic Judaism to Paul’s Hellenic religion of salvation to the Gnos-
ticism of the Egyptians and the more mystical movements of the
East—as “Christianities,” so it may be more appropriate to refer to
what followed Muhammad’s death as “Islams,” clumsy as that sounds.
Of course, early Islam was not nearly as doctrinally divided as early
Christianity. But it is nevertheless important to recognize both the
political and (as will be discussed in the following chapter) the reli-
gious divisions within the early Muslim community that were so
instrumental in defining and developing the faith.
To begin with, the selection of Abu Bakr as Caliph was by no means
unanimous. By all accounts, only a handful of the most prominent
Companions were present at the shura. The only other serious con-
tender for the leadership of the Muslim community had not even been
informed of the meeting until it was over. At the same time that Abu
Bakr was accepting the oath of allegiance, or bay‘ah, Ali was washing
the Prophet’s body, preparing him for burial. The Banu Hashim
fumed, claiming that without Ali, the shura was not representative of
the entire Ummah. Likewise, the Ansar, who considered both Ali and
Muhammad to be as much Medinan as Meccan—in other words, “one
of their own”—complained bitterly about Ali’s exclusion. Both groups
publicly refused to swear allegiance to the new Caliph.
Many in the Muslim leadership—especially Abu Bakr and Umar—
justified Ali’s exclusion on the grounds that he was too young to lead
the Ummah, or that his succession would appear too much like hered-
itary kingship (mulk): arguments that Muslim scholars and historians
are still repeating to this day. In the first volume of his Islamic History,
M. A. Shaban claims that Ali was never really a serious candidate for