ABSTRACT
The time before the Prophet is viewed by Muslims as an age of great wickedness and barbarity (jahiliyya), but the original Muslim community under the Prophet’s leadership (and in a different way, the great age of the caliphate) was a golden age, an exemplary time that later societies will never excel but can only hope to emulate. Because Muhammad was the Seal of the Prophets and his revelations completed God’s message to humankind, there will be no future prophecies and no improvements on the rightly guided life of the Prophet’s community. To turn away from that model is to renounce God and to slip backward into the darkness of jahiliyya. Innovation (bida), in the sense of forsaking the essential elements revealed by Muhammad and practiced in the Islamic golden age, is the slippery slope to apostasy. The early Islamic period was an era of unequaled cohesion and expansion, a fact that reinforces the association of political success with piety and political decline with apostasy.
