Episode 4: Abu Bakr

The man chosen to lead the muslims after their prophet's death was his close friend, Abu Bakr. He thus became the world's first caliph, and was faced with the unenviable task of keeping all the peninsula's fiercely independent-minded tribes united. His short reign had many successes, ensuring him a vaulted position in Arab memory. Images Image 1: Khalid ibn il Walid's battles against the Arab tribes which now supported a new prophet. The first few were against Tulayha's supporters, and other wayward tribes. Yammamah was where the Hanifa tribe mainly roamed, and you can see its proximity to the peninsula's (relatively) fertile eastern coast. Image 2: Khalid's path through the Sassanid empire followed the western bank of the Euphrates, and kept the desert close. Despite Lakhmid instigation, there is little evidence of support from the local tribes against their recent patrons at this stage. The Lakhmid tribes controlled these lands until recently, and the shahenshah had only appointed a Persian loyalist to govern them two or three decades earlier. Image 3: This is what the initial muslim invasion into Ghassanid territory probably looked like. Abu Ubaida al Jarrah, Amr ibn il As, and Yazid ibn Abi Sufyan were all from Quraysh, only Shurhabil was of Medinan ansar. Each of these (again, probably) led 9,000 men, but were stopped by a larger Byzantine army amassed nearby. Image 4: Khalid's unconventional route from Iraq to Syria to support muslim efforts in the west. The bit in red took two days as the men could only march when the sun allowed, and was devoid of water sources of any kind. His arrival from this usually forbidding border allowed Khalid to surprise his enemies and win successive victories. Shout out to the Wikipedia contributor who put these maps together!! Glossary Abu Bakr: Arab sources don’t actually agree on the real name of Islam’s first caliph. The nickname Abu Bakr was given to him as a child on account of how much he liked tending to and playing with camel calfs: a camel calf was called a bakr, so his nickname is akin to calf guy or calf man. The name Philip has the ancient Greek roots ‘philo’ (lover) and ‘hippos’ (horses), so feel free to draw parallels with that. The most important thing that goes unsaid about Abu Bakr in this episode is that his daughter Aisha was married to the prophet. This marriage was decided after the prophet’s first wife Khadija had passed away, towards the end of the year of sadness in which Mohammad’s cause seemed to have been all but defeated in Mecca. The news about Mohammad being promised the hand of the daughter of Abu Bakr, chief of the Taym clan, must have seemed defiant to the Quraysh, a sure signal that the muslims did not intend on abandoning their religion yet.This is my interpretation at least. Some unsympathetic Shi’a sources claim this match can only be explained by Abu Bakr’s insistence, painting him as someone who always craved more influence over the prophet. Sunni histories relate Abu Bakr’s surprise at the suggestion that his daughter marry the prophet, asking whether prophets were even allowed to marry. Whatever the different attitudes about it were, the match took place, Abu Bakr’s daughter Aisha was promised to the prophet, and would move in to live with him a few years later after the hijra to Medina.This is all of course repugnant to our modern sensibilities, so maybe I should say a bit more about this strange phenomena of promising young prepubescent girls in marriage to other, sometimes much older men. It was an extremely common practice for the nomadic Arabs at the time, and - while I have no way of decisively proving it - it seems to have been most common amo...