No, said Abu Bakr’s proponents, what the community needed at this point was steady judgment, not youthful passion. Ali was just over thirty years of age at this time; Abu Bakr was almost sixty. In the Arabia of that time, choosing a thirty-year-old man as leader over a sixty-year-old probably struck most Arabs as unthinkable. Why, the word sheikh, the title for tribal leader, literally meant “old man.”
