Abu Bakr

Abu Bakr (c. 573-634) is, in the Sunni account, the first adult free man to accept Islam and the closest of the Prophet Muhammad's companions. A respected Meccan merchant of the Quraysh, he is remembered by the honorific al-Siddiq, the truthful, and as the father of Aisha, whom the Prophet married. He is the second of the two who sheltered in the cave during the migration to Medina, a moment the Qur'an is traditionally read as commemorating.

As with all the earliest Islamic history, the sources stand at a distance from the events. The narrative material comes from the sira and hadith literature, the biography of Ibn Ishaq in Ibn Hisham's later recension, and the ninth-century collections of al-Bukhari and Muslim, written down generations after the first Muslims and evaluated within the tradition through the science of the chains of transmission.

Across that literature Abu Bakr is portrayed as steadfast, austere and self-effacing, the man who ransomed persecuted slaves who had converted and who steadied the community at moments of crisis. When Muhammad died in 632, it was Abu Bakr who, by the tradition, addressed the stunned Muslims: whoever worshipped Muhammad, Muhammad is dead; whoever worships God, God is living and does not die.

On the Prophet's death in 632 the community faced its first succession crisis. At the gathering known as the Saqifa, Abu Bakr was acknowledged as khalifa, successor or caliph, the beginning of the institution that would govern much of the Muslim world for centuries. His reign lasted only about two years, but two developments are ascribed to it.

The first was the Ridda wars, the campaigns against Arabian tribes who, after Muhammad's death, withheld the alms-tax or followed rival prophets and so, in the caliphate's view, broke from the community. Abu Bakr's insistence on holding the tribes together, by force where necessary, is credited in the tradition with preserving the nascent state and clearing the way for the great conquests under his successors.

The second is the beginning of the collection of the Qur'an. A widely reported tradition holds that the death of many who had memorized the revelation in the battle of Yamama prompted Abu Bakr, urged by Umar, to have the scattered texts gathered, a first step in the process that the caliph Uthman would later complete. The historicity of the details is debated by modern scholars, but the tradition assigns to Abu Bakr the crucial initiative of preservation.

No figure marks the fault line between the two great branches of Islam more sharply than Abu Bakr, and the difference is not a quarrel about his character but about legitimacy itself.

For Sunni Muslims he is the first of the Rashidun, the four Rightly-Guided Caliphs, and after the prophets the most excellent of human beings, the rightful successor, chosen by the community's consensus, whose brief reign saved Islam at its most vulnerable hour.

Shia Muslims hold that authority had been designated by the Prophet to Ali, his cousin and son-in-law, and that the succession at Saqifa set that designation aside. In the Shia account the caliphate of Abu Bakr is therefore a usurpation, and his reign is remembered through its conflicts, above all the dispute in which the Prophet's daughter Fatimah was refused her claim to the estate of Fadak, an episode of lasting grievance. Some currents of Shia piety have gone as far as ritual repudiation of him, which Sunni tradition regards as a grave offence against a revered companion.

The disagreement is thus foundational rather than incidental: it concerns whether legitimate authority passes by the community's choice or by the Prophet's designation, and it has structured Islamic history from the first days after his death.