DEVOTED MUSLIMS SEE the whole of Mohammed’s life as a religious metaphor illuminating the meaning of existence, but the religious event does not end with the Prophet’s death. It continues through the terms of his first four successors, remembered as the Rashidun, “the rightly guided ones”: Abu Bakr, Omar, Othman, and Ali. The entire drama, from the revelation in the cave through the Hijra to the death of the Prophet’s fourth successor almost forty years later, forms the core religious allegory of Islam, analogous to the last supper, the crucifixion, and the resurrection of Jesus Christ in
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