The First Islamic State (622-32 CE‪)‬

Muḥammad (d. 632), hailed by the white separatist Michael H. Hart as the “the most influential person in history,” introduced Islam to the world in the seventh century CE as a new religion and state. The rapid rise and expansion of Islam is regarded by many historians as “one of the most memorable revolutions” (Gibbon), “a marvel” (Nöldeke), with “few parallels in the history of mankind” (Ali). Many scholarly attempts have been made to account for the remarkable phenomenon of Islam through various secular paradigms.
In this original narrative entitled The First Islamic State (622-32 CE), Dr. F. Shuayb uses a masterly interdisciplinary paradigm to describe the cultural processes that led to its formation, explaining its conduct of state on the basis of the native logic found in Islam’s axial texts. Was the first Islamic State a theocracy, totalitarian regime, monarchy, or ‘voluntaristic’? The author argues that Prophet Muḥammad founded an innovative Islamic political system, which retained some pre-Islamic structures (e.g. lex talionis, wergild, jiwār, etc.), anticipated a few modern concepts (e.g. constitutionalism, international law, social contract, territorial sovereignty, etc.), and exhibited several distinct features not found among polities at the time (e.g. a new category of political authority and leadership, divine law or Sharia, a monotheistic political ideology, an archetype welfare state, etc.).
The First Islamic State (622-32 CE) is enlightening, a major contribution to our knowledge about the rise of Islam, a fascinating account of the last ten years of Prophet Muḥammad’s rule in the city-state of Medina, and a unique political biography of the world’s most successful religious figure, drawing from primary Arabic literary sources in conversation with the western works of Orientalists, historians, and Islamicists. It is a must-read for laymen, academicians, students of political history, intelligence officers—all readers who are interested in the original civilizational impetus in 7th century Arabia that led to Islam becoming one of the largest empires ever known and one of the five most powerful empires in history.