The issue of leadership following Muhammad’s death caused immediate tensions within the Islamic ummah even as the first four caliphs, the Rashidun, oversaw significant territorial expansion. Tensions between the family of Muhammad—especially his son-in-law Ali, the fourth caliph—and the Umayyads resulted in a civil war that brought Islam’s first dynasty to power.

Within a century of Muhammad’s death, an Islamic state ruled over the world’s largest empire at that time, first unifying the Arabian Peninsula through the Ridda Wars and then taking territory previously ruled by the flagging Byzantine and Sasanian Empires. Mimicking the leadership and culture of their Byzantine and Persian predecessors as a means to legitimize their own role, the Umayyads began the process of articulating what made Islamic culture unique among the other cultures of the region. By the later period of their rule, they began to privilege the position of the ethnically Arab members of the empire and to increasingly “Arabize” the government and its functions, despite the fact that the Arab-Muslim conquerors remained a minority population and did not promote or support the conversion of non-Muslims to the new faith.

All images referenced in this podcast can be found at https://openstax.org/books/world-history-volume-1/pages/11-2-the-arab-islamic-conquests-and-the-first-islamic-states

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