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they were distinct.
    The questions surrounding the parameters of the caliph’s authority demonstrate that most Muslims understood the distinction. No one questioned that Abu Bakr, as caliph, would lead the armies. But most rejected the notion that he had inherited the doctrinal authority of Muhammad. Respected for his wisdom and acclaimed for his piety, Abu Bakr ordered his soldiers to attack the tribes who had used Muhammad’s death as an excuse to break away from the community of Islam. The fragmentation of the community after Muhammad’s death was a crucial test: if Abu Bakr had not been able to maintain the coalition that Muhammad had assembled, it is more than likely that Islam would have wilted before it had even bloomed and that the message would never have made its way out of the desert. The brief, bloody wars waged by Abu Bakr to reestablish the federation may have been couched in the religious terms of apostasy, but the political dimension was just as important.
    These wars not only cemented the legacy of Muhammad, but also established a hierarchy of priorities that remain until today. Many of the Arab tribes that Abu Bakr defeated had only recently become Muslims; others had never truly converted in the first place. All were treated as enemies of the faith who deserved (and were given) no mercy. Ever since, apostasy has been the most severe offense against the Muslim community, greater by several orders of magnitude than anything that a non-Muslim can do. Only a Muslim can be a Muslim apostate, and only apostates are marked as unforgivable. Neither Christians nor Jewsroused that level of animosity, not in Muhammad’s lifetime and not for most of the next fourteen hundred years.
    Within two years of Muhammad’s death, most of the Arabian Peninsula was under the control of the caliph. In a few instances, there was slaughter, but Abu Bakr’s greater aim was to subjugate and unite the tribes, not annihilate them. One of the best ways to ensure loyalty for the future was to reward the faithful in this world with material riches. Usually, tribal chieftains consolidated their authority by leading their followers on successful raids. But with Arabia more or less unified, and intertribal raiding no longer permissible, the caliph had to look elsewhere for booty, and the most promising targets were the rich empires of the Persians and the Byzantines to the north.
    In the space of less than a decade, Arabs conquered the area now covered by Egypt, Israel, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, southern Turkey, western Iran, and the Arabian Peninsula. At the time, Iran and Iraq were controlled by the Persian Sasanian Empire, and the regions to the west of the Euphrates River were ruled by the Byzantine emperor in Constantinople. Both were elaborate, centralized states, with monotheistic state religions—Zoroastrianism in Persia and Christianity in Byzantium. Both had existed for centuries, and had inherited state structures, armies, and imperial traditions that stretched back centuries more. The Sasani-ans were the latest in a long line of dynastic potentates that had governed Persia, part of a heritage that included Darius and Xerxes and the armies that had nearly overwhelmed classical Greece five hundred years before the birth of Christ. For their part, the Byzantines were the direct offshoot of the Roman Empire, and Christianity had become the state religion after the conversion of Emperor Constantine in the first decades of the fourth century.
    On the face of it, the fact that Arab nomads swept out of the desert and crushed these dynasties is difficult to fathom. But in history as in life, timing is everything. The Sasanians and Byzantines had just concluded an especially bitter and taxing war against each other. The Sasanians had taken Jerusalem and Damascus and penetrated deep into Asia Minor, cutting off Egypt and North Africa and jeopardizing the integrity of the Byzantine Empire. The emperor Heraclius had simultaneously