The day the Arabs came apart

When the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ died in 11 AH, the tribes of Arabia began to abandon Islam. Some rejected the religion outright. Some kept the prayer but refused zakat. Umar told Abu Bakr: leave them, we have enough to fight. Abu Bakr answered: by Allah, if they refuse me even a rope with which a camel was tied, I will fight them for it.

The Prophet Muhammad ﷺ died in Medina on 12 Rabi al-Awwal, 11 AH (June 632 CE). Within days, the ummah he had built began to come apart at the edges. Tribes across Arabia that had accepted Islam only in the last year or two, in the great tide of the Farewell Pilgrimage, began to send envoys to Medina with a message. They said: we accept Allah and we accept the salat. But we will not pay zakat to Medina. The Prophet is dead. Our contract was with him.

It was a political-theological deconstruction. The tribes were telling Medina that zakat was a personal loyalty to Muhammad, not a fixed pillar of the religion, and that with his death their obligation had lapsed. Meanwhile in central Arabia the false prophet Musaylima was gathering forty thousand men. In Yemen the false prophet al-Aswad was moving. In the north the false prophetess Sajah was moving toward Musaylima to marry him.

Umar came to Abu Bakr, newly elected caliph, in the great mosque of Medina. He said, as he later reported: I said to Abu Bakr, be gentle with the tribes on the matter of zakat. We are outnumbered on every side. The false prophets have armies. The apostate tribes have swords. If we insist on zakat, we will have every clan of Arabia against us at the same time. Let them pay it or not pay it, until we have consolidated. Then we will require it.

Abu Bakr answered Umar with words that have been remembered as one of the definitive lines of Islamic political theology: "By Allah, if they refuse me even a rope with which a camel was tied to give in zakat, as they used to give to the Messenger of Allah, I will fight them for it. Zakat is a due Allah has fixed upon their wealth. I will not distinguish between salat and zakat, because Allah has not distinguished between them."

Umar, who himself was known as the fiercest man in the ummah, said later: I saw Abu Bakr's face when he said this, and I knew Allah had opened his heart to the truth of it, and I knew he was right.

Abu Bakr's decision was consequential. He mobilised the Muslim veterans of Medina and sent out eleven armies at the same time, each under a commander, each to a different quarter of Arabia. The largest force, under Khalid ibn al-Waleed, went to central Arabia to face Musaylima at Yamama. Others went south to Yemen. Others went east to Bahrain and Oman. Others went north to the border with Byzantium. Every apostate tribe was pursued at once. Every false prophet was engaged at once.

The Ridda Wars, as they came to be called, lasted about a year and a half. They were brutal. Yamama alone cost the ummah over twelve hundred dead, including many huffaz. But by the end of 12 AH, the Arabian peninsula was unified under Medina. Islam had held. The tribes that had left it had, by and large, come back into it. The pillars of the religion had been affirmed as pillars in law, not merely as gestures of personal loyalty to a man now buried. Islam had become a system, not a movement around a person.

Umar, who had counselled leniency at the start, said afterward: "I saw that Abu Bakr had understood what Allah had willed and I had not. He held the ummah together in the year the ummah could have come apart. By Allah, if Abu Bakr had listened to me that day, Islam would have been finished before the year was out."

Abu Bakr ruled for only two years. He died in 634 CE at sixty-one and was buried beside the Prophet ﷺ in Aisha's chamber, at the Prophet's feet. He is called al-Siddiq because he confirmed the Isra and Mi'raj when others doubted, and because his answer on the day of the Ridda wars kept Islam whole.

What the story teaches

The story of the Ridda wars is one of the founding moments of Islamic political theology. Abu Bakr's refusal to distinguish between salat and zakat became the constitutive act of the Sunni caliphate. He said, in effect: the Prophet's death does not dissolve the religion. Islam is a whole, and its parts hold together, and no clan may pick out the parts it likes and discard the parts it dislikes. That decision has been quoted by every Muslim jurist who has ever needed to hold the ummah together against internal fragmentation. It is a decision remembered as an act of decisive, unglamorous, absolute courage: a soft-spoken merchant caliph, weeks after burying his best friend, refusing to accept the natural politics of the situation and choosing instead to fight eleven wars at once so that Islam would still exist a year later.