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The Caliphs

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The Rightly-Guided or ‘Patriarchal’ or ‘Orthodox’ Caliphs (al-Khulafā’ al-Rāshidūn)

11–40/632–61

On the Prophet Muhammad’s death at Medina in 11/632, four of his Companions, all closely related to him either through marriage or through blood, succeeded him as temporal leaders of the infant Muslim umma or community. They assumed the title of Khalīfa or Caliph (literally, ‘he who follows behind, successor’), with responsibility for the upholding and spreading of the new faith and the well-being of Muḥammad’s people, and – at least in the case of the first three of these caliphs – general recognition as the interpreters of the faith and religious leaders of the community.

Abū Bakr was the father of the Prophet’s virgin wife and favourite, ‘Ā’isha, and was one of his oldest and most trusted supporters. It was he who imposed the authority of the capital Medina over the outlying parts of the Arabian peninsula, such as Najd, Baḥrayn, Oman (‘Umān) and Yemen, after many of the Bedouin tribes had renounced their personal allegiance to Muḥammad (the Ridda Wars). ‘Umar’s daughter Ḥafṣa was also a wife of the Prophet, and it was under ‘Umar’s vigorous direction that the martial energies of the desert Arabs were turned outside the peninsula against the Byzantine territories of Syria, Palestine and Egypt and against the Sāsānid Persian ones of Iraq and Persia. ‘Umar was also a capable organiser, and both the introduction of a rudimentary civil administration for the conquered provinces and the invention of the register or dīwān system for paying the Arab warriors’ stipends are attributed to him. It was he who abandoned the increasingly clumsy title of ‘Successor of the Successor of the Messenger of God’ in favour of the simple term ‘caliph’ and who further adopted the designation of Amīr al-Mu’minīn ‘Commander of the Faithful’, perhaps implying a spiritual as well as a purely secular, political element in his leadership.

‘Uthmān was, through his wife Ruqayya, the Prophet’s son-in-law, and was elected caliph after ‘Umar’s murder by a small council (shūrā) of the leading Companions, but his reign ended in a rebellion by discontented elements and his death in 35/656. This assassination inaugurated a period of strife and counter-strife (fitna, literally ‘temptation, trial [of the believer’s faith]’), and for this reason it was later often referred to as al-Bāb al-maftūḥ ‘the door opened [to civil warfare]’. The last of the Rightly-Guided Caliphs, ‘Alī, was doubly related to Muḥammad as his cousin and, through his marriage to Fāṭima, as his son-in-law, and as a child had been brought up with the Prophet. Thus in the eyes of certain pious circles, those who later formed the nucleus of the shī‘at ‘Alī or ‘party of‘Alī’ (or simply, the Shī‘a), he was particularly well fitted to succeed to the Prophet’s heritage. But he was never able to enforce his authority all though the Islamic lands, for Syria and then Egypt were controlled by Mu‘āwiya, governor of Syria (see below, no. 2). ‘Alī moved his capital out of the Arabian peninsula to Kūfa in Iraq, and attempted to rally the Arab tribesmen of Iraq to his side. He confronted Mu‘āwiya in battle at Ṣiffīn on the upper Euphrates in 37/657, but had no decisive success. He was murdered in 40/661 by one of the Khārijīs, a radical, egalitarian group which had seceded from ‘Alī’s army; his son al-Ḥasan half-heartedly succeeded to the caliphate in Iraq, but was speedily bought out by Mu‘āwiya and renounced his rights to the caliphate, which now passed to the Umayyads (see below, no. 2).

In later centuries, the age of the first four caliphs came to be regarded, through a somewhat romantic and pious haze, as a Golden Age when faith, justice and the pristine Islamic virtues flourished. Hence the title ‘rightly-guided’ was applied to them, thereby distinguishing them from their successors the Umayyads, who in the eyes of the religious classes came to be regarded as impious and worldly mulūk ‘kings’ rather than religiously-inspired leaders of the community.

Lane-Poole, 3–5, 9; Zambaur, 3.

EI¹ ‘‘Omar b. al-Khaṭṭāb’, ‘‘Othmān b. ‘Affān’ (G. Levi Delia Vida), EI² ‘Abū Bakr’ (W. Montgomery Watt), ‘‘Alī b. Abī Ṭālib’ (L. Veccia Vaglieri).

L. Veccia Vaglieri, ‘The Patriarchal and Umayyad caliphates’, in P. M. Holt, A. K. S. Lambton and B. Lewis (eds), The Cambridge History of Islam, Cambridge 1970, I, 57–103.

H. Kennedy, The Prophet and the Age of the Caliphs, The Islamic Near East from the Sixth to the Eleventh Century, London 1986, 50–81, with genealogical table at p. 402.

A. Noth, ‘Früher Islam’, in U. Haarmann (ed.), Geschichte der arabischen Welt, Munich 1987, 11–100.