Free Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes by Tamim Ansary

Medina? No, that they could no longer tolerate: no more payments to Medina!
    A few tribal leaders went further. They claimed that they themselves were now Allah’s living Messengers. They claimed they were receiving revelations and had permission to issue divinely authorized laws. These upstarts thought to use the model pioneered by Mohammed to forge sovereign “sacred” communities in competition with the Umma.
    Had Abu Bakr allowed these departures, Islam would surely have gone in a very different direction. It might have evolved into a set of practices and beliefs that people embraced individually. But Abu Bakr responded to the crisis by declaring secession to be treason. The Prophet had said, “No compulsion in religion,” and Abu Bakr did not deny that principle. People were free to accept or reject Islam as they pleased; but once they were in, he asserted, they were in for good. In response to a political crisis, Abu Bakr established a religious principle that haunts Islam to this day—the equation of apostasy with treason. Braided into this policy was the theological concept that the indissoluble singleness of God must be reflected in the indissoluble singleness of the Umma. With this decision Abu Bakr even more definitively confirmed Islam as a social project and not just a belief system. A Muslim community was not just a kind of community, of which there could be any number, but a particular community, of which there could be only one.
    The new khalifa proved himself a formidable strategist. It took him a little over a year to end the rebellion known as the Apostate Wars and reunite Arabia. At home, however, in his dealings with the Muslim community, he exhibited nothing but the modesty, affection, and benevolence people knew and loved him for. A stoop-shouldered man with deep-set eyes, Abu Bakr dressed simply, lived plainly, and accumulated no wealth. His one affectation was to dye his hair and beard red with henna. When disputes arose, he dispensed justice with an even hand, involving a council of elders in all his decisions, ruling as first among equals, and asserting no claim to religious elevation. His word had no greater weight than any other Muslim’s, and his authority came only from his wisdom and his devotion to the revelation. No one was obliged to follow his rulings except when he was right, the caveat being, he was pretty much always right.

    Back in Mecca, before the Hijra, Abu Bakr had been a prosperous merchant. By the time Muslims emigrated to Medina, however, he had spent much of his fortune on charitable causes, especially buying freedom for slaves who converted to Islam, and he forfeited the rest of his wealth in the course of the move. As khalifa, he took only a small salary for guiding the Umma and continued to ply his old trade to make a living, getting by as best he could on the fruits of his shrunken business. Sometimes, he even milked his neighbor’s cow for extra cash. 1 As portrayed in the religious stories ofIslamic tradition, children would run up to him shouting, “Papa! Papa!” when he walked through the streets of Medina, and he would pat their heads and give them candy—he was that kind of guy.

THE SECOND KHALIFA: 14 - 24 AH
    One August day, two years into his khalifate, Abu Bakr stepped out of a hot bath into a blast of chill wind, and by nightfall he was running a high fever. Realizing that death was near, he called in a few of the community’s top notables and told them he wanted to nominate Omar as his successor so there wouldn’t be any arguments about it later.
    The notables balked, because Omar could not have been more different from the gentle, understated Abu Bakr. He was a giant of a man, looming half a head above anybody else—in a crowd he was said to stand out like a man on horseback. His head was completely bald, his face ruddy, his whiskers huge. He was ambidextrous and strong as a bull, and he had an epic temper. 2
    Before his conversion, Omar had been