Literature and History.com

Hello and welcome to literature and history.

Episode 120, the Rashidun Caliphate.

In this program, we will explore the main events of early Islamic

history from 632 to 661, and the careers of the first four caliphs, Abu Bakr, Omar,

Othman, and Ali. This 29-year period completely changed the history of the world. Over the course of four

short, tumultuous caliphal reigns, Islamic leadership consolidated control over the Arabian Peninsula,

and then conquered what is today Iraq, Jordan, Israel, Palestine, Syria, Armenia, Azerbaijan,

almost all of Iran and parts of Afghanistan, Turkey, Egypt, and Libya.

The scope of Islam's expansion after the Prophet Muhammad's death in 632 has always been astounding.

But the tumultuous internal history of the caliphate during these same decades is equally astonishing.

From end to end, the Rashadun Caliphate rumbled with internal conflicts.

Three of the first four caliphs assassinated, old Arabian tribal

schisms, fissuring the new Islamic oom, or citizenry, dissension within conquered territories,

and most consequentially the Sunni-Shiah split, along whose lines Islam is still divided today.

The Rashidun Caliphate, like so many other subjects in early Islamic history, is also historiographically complex,

its events not systematically chronicled until a century after it ended.

As complex as the saga of the Rashidun era is, however,

the entire epic can perhaps be summed up in a short explanation of what Rashidun Caliphate, or Al-Hilafa Rashida, means.

The word Caliph, or Khalifa, means successor. Initially, of course, it meant successor to the

prophet Muhammad. The word Rashida gets translated as rightly guided. And the central issue of Islamic

history after Muhammad's death was who his successor ought to be, and which of the

...