The City of the Prophet 67all of North Africa, and reduced the Christian Byzantine Empire to
little more than a deteriorating regional power. Fifty years after that,
Islam had pushed its way deep into Europe through Spain and south-
ern France.
As Muhammad’s small community of Arab followers swelled into
the largest empire in the world, it faced a growing number of legal and
religious challenges that were not explicitly dealt with in the Quran.
While Muhammad was still in their midst, these questions could sim-
ply be brought to him. But without the Prophet, it became progres-
sively more difficult to ascertain God’s will on issues that far exceeded
the knowledge and experiences of a group of Hijazi tribesmen.
At first, the Ummah naturally turned to the early Companions for
guidance and leadership. As the first generation of Muslims—the peo-
ple who had walked and talked with the Prophet—the Companions
had the authority to make legal and spiritual decisions by virtue of
their direct knowledge of Muhammad’s life and teachings. They were
the living repositories of the hadith: oral anecdotes recalling the words
and deeds of Muhammad.
The hadith, insofar as they addressed issues not dealt with in the
Quran, would become an indispensable tool in the formation of
Islamic law. However, in their earliest stages, the hadith were mud-
dled and totally unregulated, making their authentication almost
impossible. Worse, as the first generation of Companions passed on,
the community had to rely increasingly on the reports that the second
generation of Muslims (known as the Tabiun) had received from the
first; when the second generation died, the community was yet
another step removed from the actual words and deeds of the Prophet.
Thus, with each successive generation, the “chain of transmis-
sion,” or isnad, that was supposed to authenticate the hadith grew
longer and more convoluted, so that in less than two centuries after
Muhammad’s death, there were already some seven hundred thousand
hadith being circulated throughout the Muslim lands, the great
majority of which were unquestionably fabricated by individuals who
sought to legitimize their own particular beliefs and practices by con-
necting them with the Prophet. After a few generations, almost any-
thing could be given the status of hadith if one simply claimed to trace
its transmission back to Muhammad. In fact, the Hungarian scholar