Content area
Full text
Hamid Dabashi: Authority in Islam: From the rise of Islam to the Establishment of the Umayyads. New Bruncwick, New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, 1989. xviii, 169 pp.
Dabashi' s study is a healthy addition to the study of Islam in its formative period. The distinctive feature of the book is its focus on the religious changes in the immediately postMuhammadan period. In this regard, he has selected the challenge of the demise of the Prophet Muhammad as a charismatic figure to the nascent community. In some sense the study is an excursus to confront sociologically the decision of the Saqîfah Banî Sâ'idah; and the implications and outcomes of the Battles of the Camel, Siffin, and Kerbala.
Dabashi is not so much concerned with "what happened"; but this does not mean that he is not concerned with history. He takes the critical historian's view of the early period and proceeds to analyse it in terms of Weber's understanding of charisma. However, he does not entertain the notion that the entire religious sense of the Prophetic period was a later construction of the 'Ulama'. He assumes that, notwithstanding the political and social processes within Arabia, the Prophetic period was a radical transformation of Arab society.
Dabashi's main contention is that after the death of the prophet, Muslims were confronted with the challenge of leadership. Taking the leadership of the Prophet as a charismatic type, he contends that there were three approaches to its sudden disappearance from...