Abu Bakr Becomes Caliph: Islam Unites and Expands

The Prophet Muhammad died on June 8, 632 AD, in the arms of his wife Aisha in Medina, and the community he had built nearly tore itself apart over the question of who would lead it. Within hours of Muhammad’s death, a meeting at the Saqifah, a roofed courtyard in Medina, produced a successor: Abu Bakr al-Siddiq, Muhammad’s closest companion, father-in-law, and one of the first converts to Islam. The selection was neither unanimous nor peaceful, and its contested nature planted the seed of Islam’s deepest and most enduring division. Abu Bakr was approximately sixty years old, a prosperous Meccan merchant who had spent his fortune supporting Muhammad’s mission during its most vulnerable years. He had accompanied Muhammad on the hijra, the migration from Mecca to Medina in 622 that marks the beginning of the Islamic calendar. When Muhammad fell ill in his final weeks, Abu Bakr led the community prayers in his place, a gesture that many interpreted as an implicit designation of succession. The Saqifah meeting was dominated by three factions: the Ansar (Medinan converts), the Muhajirun (Meccan emigrants), and the supporters of Ali ibn Abi Talib, Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law. Umar ibn al-Khattab, a forceful Meccan leader, seized Abu Bakr’s hand and pledged allegiance, prompting others to follow. Ali’s partisans did not immediately accept the result. The disagreement over whether leadership should follow companionship or bloodline eventually split Islam into Sunni and Shia traditions, a rupture that shapes the politics of the Middle East fourteen centuries later. Abu Bakr’s caliphate lasted only two years before his death in 634, but in that time he consolidated Muslim control over the Arabian Peninsula. Several tribes attempted to break from Medina after Muhammad’s death, and Abu Bakr waged the Ridda Wars to suppress the revolts and maintain the unity of the nascent Islamic state. He also launched the military campaigns into Syria and Iraq that, under his successors Umar and Uthman, would create an empire stretching from North Africa to Central Asia within a single generation.