Muhammad a Prophet For all Humanity
6. The Path of the Prophet
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Prophet. With his death in A.H. 10, Abu Bakr was
appointed as the first Caliph, and it was he who
finally gave the order to march on Syria.
After the death of the Prophet, news had started
pouring into Madinah of mass apostasy among
Arab tribes. Most of the Arab tribes that embraced
Islam after the conquest of Makkah in A.H. 8, had
converted, impressed by the political dominance of
Islam, rather than from having undergone any
profound intellectual transformation or from
having attained any such conviction as had the
earlier followers of the Prophet. They had been
accustomed to a free and easy life, and some of the
Islamic injunctions—especially
zakat
5
were more
than they could tolerate. Some months before the
death of the Prophet, demagogues had arisen in
Yemen and Najd who exploited this situation
putting forward a new brand of Islam, according to
which there was no need to pay
zakat.
To give their
words more weight, these demagogues—notably
Aswad
and
Musaylamah—laid
claim
to
prophethood, for only then could they throw down
a challenge to the
zakat
system.
