The reader is warned that there are a lot of names, dates, and Arabic terms in this chapter. The first four caliphs, the first civil war, and its aftermath form part of the elementary vocabulary without which one cannot even begin to understand what medieval Muslims said about government. What follows is an attempt to serve the requisite knowledge in as short and simple a manner as possible.

The succession to the Prophet

We saw in the previous chapter that the leader of Muḥammad's community (umma) was called the imam. The dictionaries define an imam as somebody to be imitated, whether head of state or not. A simple prayer leader was an imam: you stood behind him and did as he did in performing the ritual prayer. Other righteous leaders were imams too: one modelled oneself on what they said and did. Great scholars, for example, came to be known by that title. But the head of state was the supreme imam. His imitators were not merely a small group of people at prayer or a major school founded by a great scholar, but rather the entire community of believers, the entire umma. At some point his leadership was dubbed ‘the great imamate’ (al-imāma al-kubra/‘uẓmā) to distinguish it from leadership of other types. Unless otherwise specified, the imamate always means the great imamate in this book.