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    frie

    nd, Abu Bakr, the first male adult to embrace the Koran.36  From the

    moment of his conversion, Abu Bakr had stood by The Prophet with an

    astonishing loyalty.  When Mohammed fled from Mecca, the only man

    he trusted to travel with him was Abu Bakr.  When Mohammed had

    moments of doubt or weakness, it was Abu Bakr who sustained him.

    In 632, Mohammed grew sick and feverish.  Then he weakened

    and died.  His last words: "No one is needed now but that friend

    [Allah]."  But someone else was needed: a Caliph, a successor.  Abu

    Bakr became that successor.  He organized armies of Arabs and sent

    them out to conquer.  And conquer they did, beginning the process

    that would quickly dismantle the ancient empires of the Byzantines

    and Persians, digesting them as segments of an entity whose name the

    world was only now beginning to hear--the Empire of Islam.37

    Ali waited patiently in the wings as Abu Bakr led the faithful.

    The young man was certain that his day of justice would come.   When

    Abu Bakr died, Ali and his Shiite followers were confident the mantle

    of power would descend on him.  But it did not.  Instead, it passed to

    members of the Banu Umayya tribe.  The Banu Umayya, like

    Mohammed himself, were Mecca's merchants.  They were men of the

    world, accustomed to dealing with the polished citizens of Damascus,

    Cairo and Baghdad.  They were organizers, able to understand and

    administer the affairs of state.  All these skills were desperately needed

    in a superorganism that would go from the possession of one town to

    the digestion of Persia, Armenia, Syria and Egypt in only 33 years.38

    But the Shiites were not willing to take the Banu Umayya's

    succession lying down.39  They claimed that the usurpers had stained

    the holiness of Islam.  With their captured wealth and expropriated

    palaces, their elegant robes and princely ways, the Shiites claimed that

    the Umayyads had strayed from the spiritual path of Mohammed's

    truth.  The followers of Ali staged a series of battles and murders to

    purge The Prophet's legacy.  And they lost.40

    On one level, the conflict between the Shiites and the Umayyads

    (whose successors are today's Sunni Moslems41) was over religion.  It

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