Chapter 5: The Prophet's Revolution

In the year 622, a man left his home city because it was trying to kill him.

Muhammad ibn Abdullah had spent thirteen years in Mecca doing something that looked, from the outside, like preaching. He was telling people that their gods were false, that the wealthy owed obligations to the poor, and that the tribal aristocracy — whose authority rested on blood, lineage, and the sword — had no special claim to rule. The Quraysh, Mecca's dominant tribe, understood exactly what he was doing. He was not merely proposing a new theology. He was proposing a new social architecture. So they tried to stop him — first with ridicule, then with economic boycott, then with assassination plots.

When he arrived in Yathrib, two hundred and fifty miles to the north, the city was already unravelling. Its population — roughly forty-five percent pagan, forty percent Jewish, fifteen percent Muslim — was fractured along tribal lines. Two Arab clans, the Aws and the Khazraj, had been locked in a cycle of blood feuds that nobody could stop. The Jewish tribes — Banu Qaynuqa, Banu Nadir, Banu Qurayza — maintained their own networks of alliance and rivalry. Yathrib was a city that had forgotten how to cohere.

And into this fracture walked a man with a document.

The Constitution of Medina — the Sahifat al-Madinah — is not a long text. In Michael Lecker's translation, it runs to forty-seven articles. It was drafted within months of Muhammad's arrival, making it one of the earliest surviving political documents from the Arabian Peninsula and, by some readings, the first written constitution in history.

What it establishes is a revolution in miniature.

The opening move is the most consequential: "They form one nation — ummah wahidah — to the exclusion of all other people." One nation. Not one tribe, not one clan, not one bloodline. A political community defined by shared commitment rather than shared ancestry. In seventh-century Arabia, where your tribe was your state, your army, your judiciary, and your social security system — where a person without tribal affiliation had no legal standing, no protection, and no name — this was not an abstraction. It was a demolition of the fundamental organising principle of Arabian life.

But the demolition was surgical, not total. The Constitution did not abolish tribal identity. It preserved it — each group maintained responsibility for its own blood money, its own internal obligations. What it did was subordinate tribal identity to a larger framework. Your tribe still mattered. But it mattered within the ummah, not instead of it. You were still Aws or Khazraj. But you were also, now, Medinan. This was not assimilation. It was federation.

The governance provisions were concrete. Collective defence: an attack on one group constituted an attack on all. Standardised compensation for violence: the blood money system was regularised across tribal lines, applied equally regardless of which tribe held power. Centralised dispute resolution: "When you differ on anything, the matter shall be referred to Allah and Muhammad." And a provision that reads, across fourteen centuries, like a statement of individual rights: "No person is responsible for the sins of another." In a world built on collective punishment — where your cousin's crime became your tribe's war — this was radical.

The Constitution's treatment of religious difference is what scholars argue about most, and it is easy to see why. Article 25, in Lecker's numbering, reads: "The Jews of the Banu Awf are one community with the believers — for the Jews their religion, and for the Muslims theirs." Political unity. Religious autonomy. This dual principle extends to each named Jewish tribe: Banu al-Najjar, Banu al-Harith, Banu Sa'idah, Banu Jusham, Banu al-Aws, Banu Tha'labah, and Jafnah. The promises are explicit: social, legal, and economic equality to all loyal citizens. "No Jew will be wronged for being a Jew."

How should we read this? The answer depends on which century you stand in and what question you are asking.

Fred Donner, at the University of Chicago, has argued that early Islam was not initially a separate religion at all but an ecumenical "Believers' movement" — one that included Christians, Jews, and Arab monotheists alongside followers of Muhammad. The Constitution is his central exhibit: a document creating a unified political community across religious lines, with no insistence on doctrinal uniformity. "The conviction that Muslims constituted a separate religious community, utterly distinct from Christians and Jews," Donner writes, "emerged a century later."

Ovamir Anjum pushes back sharply. The Constitution, he argues, "centred entirely on the Prophet's divine mission rather than secular citizenship principles." The modern framing — "first written constitution," proto-pluralism — is politically appealing but historically misleading. It projects liberal categories backward onto a document whose function was pragmatic: facilitating a religious mission while maintaining workable coexistence with non-believers.

Both readings contain truth, and neither is sufficient on its own. The Constitution was genuinely pluralistic by the standards of its time — no contemporary document in the Mediterranean or Near Eastern world offered comparable protections to religious minorities within a unified political framework. But it was not a prototype for modern liberal pluralism. The pluralism had limits. Within a few years, the three major Jewish tribes of Medina were expelled or destroyed, following alleged violations of the pact. Whether these expulsions violated the Constitution's spirit or enforced its terms remains a genuine scholarly disagreement, not one that can be settled by reaching for the version we prefer.

The scale of institutional change is beyond dispute. Before the Constitution, Arabian governance operated through autonomous tribal confederacies with no overarching authority. The tribe was simultaneously state, fortress, judiciary, and welfare system. The sayyid — tribal chief — led by persuasion, not command. There was no codified law; customary practice governed, with blood feuds as the enforcement mechanism. Authority was genealogical. Leadership, honour, safety, even legal personhood depended on which family and which tribe claimed you. An orphan, a slave, a stranger — anyone outside tribal protection was, in the most literal sense, a nobody.

Islam changed this architecture, piece by piece.

The judicial reform was immediate: qisas — retaliatory justice — was retained, but diyah — blood money compensation — was incentivised, allowing families to accept restitution rather than perpetuate violence. Muhammad's amnesty during the conquest of Mecca, where he halted revenge cycles against former persecutors, was a governance decision: breaking the blood-feud architecture deliberately. The economic reform was structural: zakat, a mandatory 2.5 percent annual wealth tax, created what may have been the first systematic redistribution mechanism in Arabian history, replacing sporadic tribal generosity with institutionalised obligation. The Quran specified eight categories of recipients — the poor, the needy, administrators, new converts, those seeking manumission, debtors, travellers, and those in God's cause — and early Islamic government collected and distributed it centrally.

The reforms extended to women, to slaves, to the destitute. Women gained inheritance rights, property ownership, and consent requirements in marriage — improvements that were significant within a patriarchal framework, even though they did not dismantle the framework itself. Slavery was regulated rather than abolished: treatment standards were mandated, manumission was encouraged, and the Quran framed enslaved persons as people with rights rather than pure property. "The placement of slaves in the same category as other weak members of society who deserve protection," as one analysis puts it, "is unknown outside the Quran."

These were real changes. They were also incomplete ones. And understanding that they were both — simultaneously transformative and bounded — is essential to understanding what happened next.

What happened next was the question Muhammad's revolution could not answer.

He died in 632 without leaving an explicit, unambiguous succession mechanism. The feedback loop between leader and community that had held the system together — Muhammad's personal authority, his access to revelation, his capacity to settle disputes by appeal to divine will — had no institutional architecture to sustain it. The prophet was the system. And the system had no plan for what would come after the prophet.

The first three decades unravelled this problem with accelerating violence.

The First Fitna — the first civil war — erupted in 656, following the assassination of the third caliph, Uthman, who had been accused of nepotism and abandoning the consultative model of his predecessors. What followed was not merely a succession dispute. It was a contest between four competing theories of Islamic governance, each claiming fidelity to Muhammad's vision while proposing a fundamentally different answer.

Aisha, Talha, and Zubayr wanted shura — communal consultation. Ali claimed legitimacy through bay'ah — the pledge of allegiance, the same mechanism that had legitimised the first three caliphs. Mu'awiya, governor of Syria, demanded a new consultation conducted on his territory, where his authority was strongest. And the Kharijites — the most radical faction, who had seceded from Ali's own camp — rejected all three human governance models entirely.

La hukma illa lillah. No authority but God's.

The Kharijite position deserves attention because it is the earliest and purest expression of a problem that haunts every revolution built on sacred authority. If sovereignty belongs to God alone, who interprets God's will? The Kharijites answered: any righteous Muslim, regardless of tribe, status, or ancestry. They were radically egalitarian — "any Muslim, regardless of social status, including enslaved individuals, could become caliph." They rejected the Qurayshi monopoly on leadership that both Sunni and Shia positions maintained. Some modern historians consider their ideals "representatives of proto-democratic thought in early Islam."

But radical egalitarianism, enforced through absolute moral standards, produced its own pathology. The Kharijites held that a Muslim who commits a grave sin becomes an apostate who forfeits all rights, including the right to life. A leader who sins is no longer a Muslim and therefore no longer legitimate. In practice, this meant no stable government was possible — every leader eventually sins — and the community existed in a state of perpetual potential revolution, with violence as the enforcement mechanism for divine sovereignty. In 661, a Kharijite assassin killed Ali in the Grand Mosque of Kufa. It was the first political assassination in Islamic history justified by theological principle.

The Kharijites lost every battle. Their military threat faded by the late eighth century. But their question — who has the authority to speak for God? — never went away. Their surviving descendants, the Ibadi community in Oman and North Africa, number roughly 2.5 million today, a moderate branch that rejected the violent methods while preserving the core conviction: sovereignty belongs to God, and human authority is always provisional.

The First Fitna ended with the Umayyads. Mu'awiya took power. Then he designated his son Yazid as successor without any consultation, and the caliphate became what it would remain for centuries — a hereditary monarchy wrapped in religious language. The feedback loop was severed. The revolutionary values survived as aspiration. The revolutionary architecture reverted to the oldest pattern in governance: dynasty.

The Second Fitna deepened the fracture. Husayn ibn Ali, Muhammad's grandson, refused to accept Yazid's legitimacy and was killed at Karbala in 680 with a small band of followers. For Shia Islam, Karbala became the defining event — not merely a military defeat but a cosmic injustice, proof that the authentic voice of the Prophet's family had been silenced by brute power. The governance question hardened into theological identity. Sunni theory held that authority derives from community consensus and adherence to law — that the caliph is contractually accountable and removable. Shia theory held that authority flows through the Prophet's bloodline — that the imam is both political and spiritual leader, divinely designated, beyond the reach of popular election. Two answers to the same question. Both answers produced from the same revolution. Neither answer willing to concede that the other might contain part of the truth.

How does Muhammad's revolution look through the lens that runs through this chronicle? The three questions of coherentism: Was the gap between claimed and actual coherence real? Did the transition preserve or sever feedback loops? Did the new system design for resonance-detection, or merely install new people in the same architecture?

The gap was real. Pre-Islamic Arabia claimed no coherence — it was nakedly a system of blood and power. Islam introduced a coherence claim: that all people are equal before God, that justice can be codified, that the poor have rights enforceable by divine law. This was a genuine transformation of values, not merely a reshuffling of personnel. Wael Hallaq at Columbia has argued that Islamic governance operated through a fundamentally different architecture than anything that came before or after — "moral by excellence," with political power confined to "executive rulers of rotating dynasties that remain external to the embryonic tight embrace between jurists and community."

But the system's feedback architecture — the connection between the community's experience and the leader's decisions — depended on prophetic authority. When the prophet died, the feedback loop died with him. No institutional mechanism had been designed to replace the personal connection between Muhammad and his community. The Fitna wars were the catastrophic result of that design gap: a system that had worked brilliantly under its founder, tearing itself apart the moment it had to work without him.

Ali Shariati, the Iranian intellectual who framed Islam as the "Religion of Revolution," would insist the fire never went out — that the original revolutionary impulse survives in every generation's struggle against injustice. Khaled Abou El Fadl at UCLA would argue that the seeds of democratic governance remain in the Islamic tradition, waiting to be cultivated. Fazlur Rahman would say the ethical core was captured and bureaucratised by legalism. Abdullahi An-Na'im would say the original impulse is best served by separating religion from state power entirely.

They disagree about everything except one thing: Muhammad's project was not purely "religious" in the modern sense of private belief. It was a comprehensive reorganisation of social, political, economic, and moral life. It changed the value system — and then, within a generation, the institutions built to carry those values were overtaken by the oldest pattern in human governance. New faces, same architecture.

The revolution was real. Its capture was equally real. And the tension between the two — between the values Islam proclaimed and the empires that claimed to embody them — became the defining question of Islamic political thought for fourteen centuries. It has not been resolved. It may be the kind of question that doesn't get resolved — only inherited, generation after generation, by people who insist that the original promise still matters.

The cages of Medina were opened. The question is whether they stayed open.