This history explores the ceremony of the oath of allegiance to the caliph from the time of the Prophet Muhammad until the fragmentation of the caliphate in the late ninth and tenth centuries in Syria and Iraq. The book examines how caliphs sought to proclaim their status as the representatives of God's covenant on earth through syntheses of Roman and Iranian royal ritual and customs and practices brought from pre-Islamic and early Islamic Arabia. The study of royal rituals of accession and succession in Christian Rome, Byzantium and the early Medieval West has generated an extensive literatur ... More

This history explores the ceremony of the oath of allegiance to the caliph from the time of the Prophet Muhammad until the fragmentation of the caliphate in the late ninth and tenth centuries in Syria and Iraq. The book examines how caliphs sought to proclaim their status as the representatives of God's covenant on earth through syntheses of Roman and Iranian royal ritual and customs and practices brought from pre-Islamic and early Islamic Arabia. The study of royal rituals of accession and succession in Christian Rome, Byzantium and the early Medieval West has generated an extensive literature. This has however remained unexplored in scholarship on the Islamic world. This book redresses that by examining the ceremonial of accession to the caliphate in early Islam, covering the place of ritual in political practice, changes and continuities in that practice, and the problem of how best to understand accounts of ritual. The book also offers a contribution to major, current debates in Islamic history — development of Arab-Muslim identity and the formation of the ‘Islamic state’. Engaging with current debates about the reliability of the Islamic tradition for early Islamic history, the book identifies key turning-points in the formation of classical Islamic political culture. An early chapter discusses the importance of the Qur'an as a historical source for the time of the Prophet Muhammad.