Four caliphs (successors) followed Muhammad at Medina. They kept close to the primitive ideal of the warring prophet of Islam. They were Abu Bakr, ‛Umar, ‛Uthman and ‛Ali. They fall within the thirty years after the death of the prophet. They were followed by a dynasty of rulers of less Muhammadan characteristics which established the government at Damascus. (661–750 A.D.) They were succeeded by still a different type of rulers, the princes of the House of Abbas at Bagdad. The Damascus House, known as the Umayyads, had wrested the power from ‛Ali and the Prophet’s family, but their success was always resented by the more southerly Arabs and fought especially by Iraq (Mesopotamia) and the Arabs near Persia. Thus the political unity of Islam was early broken up and is less and less likely to be restored. The real strength of Islam was abroad where Arabian soldiers were quartered in camp cities or were engaged in victorious armies and where their fateful fighting qualities and intense loyalty to the missionary idea of Islam made a distinctly contrasted class as against the populations they overcame by the sword or by conversion.
In all historic times desert Arabia has been a political hollow between the great powers. It was empty of the things for which civilization fought, but it was the home of a virile stock of nomads who possessed comparative freedom at least. In the deserts the type of life has not changed for thousands of years. Such a life is free because the outsider does not covet it. The native will relinquish it only gradually. The roaming Arab is bound by the inexorable natural conditions of his world and the social conventions which those conditions impose. His treasures are his family, his horse, and his instruments of petty warfare. Before Muhammad’s time, there were on the Eastern borders of Arabia princes who were practically subsidized by the Persian emperors. On the Western side were other princes under the protection of the Byzantine rulers, while in the far South were still other kingdoms and loyalties to political patrons, influenced at times by the kingdom of Abyssinia. Muhammad and his four successors gave this divided Arabia the completest unity it has ever known. At present it is reaching vaguely for something approaching that same unity. During the World War the Shereef of Mecca, with his sons, threw off the control of Turkey and made the Hijaz, which includes the sacred cities of Mecca and Medina, a free kingdom. Into this sacred land no Christian or other non-Moslem is supposed to step. Lawrence the intrepid went there to counsel with Emir Faysal, third son of the shereef, by special and dangerous arrangement. He found the Arabs resting after their initial campaign and stirred them to aggressive action, northward, to destroy the Turkish communications and to stir the more northerly Arabs to combine and to furnish support on the East and right of the operations under Allenby who was working up from Egypt through Palestine.