Tradition

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Islamic Councils gathers three assemblies thirteen centuries apart, chosen because together they show the same underlying question, who leads the community and by what authority, answered by force of circumstance the first two times and by declaration the third.

The Saqifah of Banu Sa'ida was the meeting at a covered hall in Medina, convened by a faction of the Ansar within hours of Muhammad's death while his closest kin were occupied preparing his body for burial. A debate among the Ansar over choosing their own leader turned, once Abu Bakr and Umar arrived, into the selection of Abu Bakr as the first caliph, on the argument that only a man of Muhammad's own Quraysh tribe would command the whole community's allegiance. The Council of Six was the six member body the second caliph, Umar, appointed on his deathbed after being fatally stabbed, charging it with choosing his successor within three days; Abd al-Rahman ibn Awf, who held the deciding voice, put the same two conditions to the two remaining candidates, Ali and Uthman, and Ali accepted the first but not the second, so Abd al-Rahman's allegiance, and the caliphate, went to Uthman.

The Amman Message Conference is the nearest thing modern Sunni and Shia Islam has produced to a council of its own, its three point declaration recognising eight schools of Islamic law as valid and forbidding the declaring of their followers to be unbelievers, careful in a way the earlier two successions, decided by argument in a hall and by a dying caliph's committee, never had the chance to be.