The Rashidun (“rightly guided”) is a collective term used to refer to the first four caliphs of the Muslim community following Muhammad’s death: Abu Bakr (c. 573-634), Umar ibn al-Khattab (c. 584-644), Uthman ibn Affan (c. 573-656) and Ali ibn Abi Talib (c. 600-661). All four of the Rashidun knew Muhammad personally and were therefore viewed by the early Muslim community as uniquely qualified to continue his religious mission. Having inherited leadership of the faith from Muhammad, the Rashidun were faced with several crucial political challenges. As summarized by Armstrong:

The Quran had… followed public and current events, bringing divine guidance and illumination to politics. Muhammad’s successors, however, were not prophets, but would have to rely on their own human insights… The ummah that they ruled would be much larger and increasingly more complex than the little community of Medina, where everybody knew everybody else and there had been no need for officialdom and a bureaucracy (57).

The first of the Rashidun, Abu Bakr, faced the immense challenge of maintaining the unity of ummah following Muhammad’s death, as many subgroups began to defect for political reasons during the first years of his reign. He quelled these uprisings with a tactical combination of military and diplomatic methods, eventually uniting the whole of the Arabian peninsula. His successor, Umar, incentivized disloyal groups to remain Muslim subjects by increasing the frequency of tribal raids, a pre-Islamic practice that had been largely ended under the rule of Muhammad because it did not adhere to Islamic ideals of peace and community. Without the raids, however, some communities were facing a debilitating shortage of resources, and bringing back the practice pacified those communities through economic means. This shift from a passive to an offensive cultural attitude towards outside groups allowed the ummah to expand beyond the Arabian Peninsula into Northern Africa and Western Asia.

Armstrong notes that these wars of expansion would prove difficult to justify under a literal reading of the Quran, which condones violence only in self-defense. Umar maintained a tenuous peace with conquered populations by prohibiting soldiers from invading their communities; instead, invading Arabs established their own separate garrison towns. By the time of the fourth Rashidun, Uthman, the military complex of the Arab empire was overextended. When he began appointing members of his own family, the Umayyads, to important government positions, the already discontent soldiers and non-Umayyad elites were primed to revolt. Uthman was assassinated in 644, and Ali was named Caliph by the rebels, leading to the first Fitnah, Islam’s first civil war.

Ultimately, Ali was also assassinated in 661, despite his best attempts to subdue violent rebel groups and reestablish peace. Of the Rashidun, Shia Muslims only accept Ali as having been a legitimate caliph, since he was Muhammad’s closest living male relative, and they designate him the first Shia Imam. They view the assassination of Ali in 661 as proof of the moral corruption of the Umayyads, as well as the other Rashidun. Armstrong writes, “The fate of Ali, a man betrayed by his friends as well as his enemies, became a symbol of the inherent injustice of life” (68). Moving forward, this schism between the Sunni and Shia factions of Islam would have immense political and religious consequences.

The Umayyad Caliphate, sometimes called the Second Caliphate, is the political dynasty that gained control of the Muslim world following the end of the first Fitnah in 661. Under the Umayyad Caliphate, Islam expanded westward all the way to Morocco and Spain and eastward into the edges of the Asian steppe. Armstrong characterizes the Umayyads as having cornered themselves into absolute monarchy: Logistically, there was no other way to govern an empire as large as theirs at the time. “They would find that in order to preserve the peace they would have to become absolute monarchs,” she writes, “but how would this cohere with Arab traditions, on the one hand, and with the radical egalitarianism of the Quran on the other?” (71). This conflict of interest highlights The Tension Between Religious and Secular Approaches to Government.

Of the Umayyad caliphs, Armstrong highlights the achievements of Muawiyyah (d. 680), who reunited the ummah following the First Fitnah through military prowess and strict policy. After his death, however, there ensued another dynastic war which would come to be known as the Second Fitnah. Although the Umayyad dynasty ultimately prevailed, this war proved that the political instability of the time of the Rashidun had not fully dissipated. In its aftermath, Armstrong argues that the Umayyad caliphs tended toward increasingly absolutist policies. Abd al-Malik (d.743), best known for ordering the construction of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, managed to solidify a hereditary policy of succession. But by the early eighth century, the caliphate was weakening. As more devout caliphs prioritized religious over economic policymaking, the general population grew discontent, and an uprising in the 740s finally toppled the Umayyad government. In what is now Spain, however, the Umayyads retained political control, and their civilization would flourish there until the Late Middle Ages.

The Abbasid Caliphate, sometimes called the Third Caliphate, emerged following the collapse of the Umayyad Caliphate in the 740s. Under the Abbasids, the capital moved to Baghdad, and despite the continuation of hereditary monarchy, policies that afforded Arabs higher status than other ethnic groups ended. Persian culture influenced the lifestyle of Caliphs heavily, and they lived in increasingly isolated luxury. Meanwhile, the Shia conceded that their Imams posed no political threat to the Caliphate and would instead serve the Shia population as spiritual leaders only. The Abbasids set about codifying Islamic law, Shariah, and an elite class of legal scholars, the ulama, soon emerged. Shariah united Sunni Muslims throughout the caliphate and helped to ensure that the Abbasids would reign longer than the Umayyads had.

In the capital city of Baghdad, access to the classical philosophical texts of Greece and Rome influenced Muslim spirituality heavily, leading to what has been called the Islamic Golden Age. Philosophy, science, and the arts all flourished. Formal university systems, fueled in part by the demand for legal scholarship, also developed for the first time. Ultimately, Armstrong asserts that the Abbasid Caliphate collapsed because of its sheer size, rather than because of any major political missteps, as had been the case for the Umayyads.

The Safavid Dynasty emerged in Iran in what Armstrong dubs the Age of Islamic Empires, between 1501 and 1736. Having survived the brutal rule of the Mongols, Islamic Iran remained in a state of political instability for some time afterwards. Unlike many of the other major Islamic political dynasties, the Safavids practiced Shia Islam, and Iranians remain predominantly Shia in the present day. Because the Shia imams had insisted on abstaining from political rule since the time of the Abbasids, the notion of a Shia dynasty seemed (according to Armstrong) oxymoronic, and sparked a heated political debate. Nevertheless, the Empire’s founding Shah, Ismail I (r. 1501-1524), waged a war of religion against the Iranian Sunnis, converting Iran into a predominantly Shia region through military means.

Subsequent Shahs continued Ismail I’s political project in the cultural realm. The arts bolstered Shia doctrine. However, the ulama of the empire began to promote the idea that only they were capable of interpreting Islamic law, and that the ordinary people of Iran should submit entirely to their legal authority. As this idea, organized under a movement called Usulism, gained traction, it undermined the authority of the Safavid Shahs and contributed to the downfall of the empire.

Contemporary with the Safavids and the Mughals, but longer-lasting than both, the Ottoman Empire (1299-1922) conquered Anatolia, where the Byzantine Empire had once ruled. The Ottomans expanded their Empire into Europe, where they came into contact with rapidly modernizing societies. As such, Armstrong treats the contact between Ottomans and Europeans as a precursor to what would eventually occur in the rest of the Islamic world. Some Ottomans were enchanted by European technology and philosophy and sought to incorporate them into Muslim culture. But simultaneously, ulamas pursued a culturally conservative agenda that dissuaded much of the general population from engaging with European culture. The cultural inflexibility of these religious leaders, Armstrong argues, boded poorly for the political resilience of Islamic governments everywhere.

The Mughal Empire (1526-1857) came to power in India during what Armstrong dubs the Islamic Imperial Age. India’s preexisting mixture of diverse religious traditions, including Hinduism, Sikhism, and Buddhism, demanded that the Mughal Emperors adopt a tolerant approach to religion in order to maintain their power. Some Muslims in India felt that this tolerant attitude was a betrayal of the faith. Influenced by these thinkers, the later Mughal emperors destroyed Hindu and Sikh temples at the same time that they deprioritized economic policymaking. Armstrong treats this trend towards religious intolerance as emblematic of the cultural insecurity that she claims defined post-Mongol Islam.