ABSTRACT
Muhammad gained political control of Medina, but Mecca remained the center of his attention. In 630, he returned to Mecca in triumph and then set off to convert the Bedouins of the desert. The tenets of the faith include surrender to Allah—people were asked to make al-Islam, or “the surrender.” Those who surrendered became Muslims and joined the umma muslima—a community in which membership depended only on the belief in Allah and acceptance of Muhammad as Allah’s prophet. In the early decades of Islam, the Five Pillars built up a sense of community. After Muhammad’s death, his closest followers organized his recitations into 114 suras, or chapters, and gathered them in the Koran, which contains legal wisdom and moral teachings, as well as regulations on diet and personal conduct, much like the Christian and Jewish Bibles. After Muhammad’s death in 632, the Meccan elite chose Abu Bakr as caliph, or “successor to the prophet.”.
