Non-fiction: Mahomet and His Successors

Overview

Mahomet and His Successors (1850) offers a compact, narrative account of the life of Muhammad and the formative period of the early caliphate. It follows Muhammad from his origins in Mecca through the revelation, the Hijra to Medina, the consolidation of authority, and the rapid political and military expansion under his immediate successors. The work aims to make the story accessible to a general 19th-century English-speaking readership by blending biography, political history, and moral commentary.

Narrative and Structure

The book is organized as a chronological biography of Muhammad followed by a survey of the reigns of the first caliphs and the political developments that shaped the nascent Islamic polity. Episodes of revelation, tribal politics, pitched battles, and diplomatic maneuvers are treated with a storyteller's emphasis on character and consequence rather than dense archival apparatus. The prose is deliberately literary and moralizing, using anecdote and succinct analysis to move the narrative forward.

Portrayal of Muhammad

Muhammad is depicted as a figure of extraordinary energy and determination, a religious founder who combined prophetic conviction with practical political skill. The account highlights his capacity to unify disparate Arabian tribes, to craft institutions that bound religious and civic life, and to inspire intense loyalty among followers. At the same time, the depiction reflects 19th-century Western ambivalence, alternating admiration for Muhammad's accomplishments with judgments shaped by Christian cultural assumptions.

The Early Caliphs and Expansion

Attention shifts to the immediate successors in exploring how the community attempted to translate prophetic charisma into stable governance. Abu Bakr's role in preserving unity, Umar's administrative reforms and military expansion, Uthman's controversial tenure and its attendant factionalism, and Ali's troubled caliphate and the ensuing civil strife are sketched with an eye to political causality. The narrative traces how conquests across the Levant, Egypt, and Persia remade the map and set patterns of imperial administration.

Religious and Political Themes

Irving treats religious revelation and political exigency as intertwined forces, emphasizing how theological claims buttressed authority while practical concerns shaped institutional forms. Questions of succession, the tension between tribal customs and emergent communal norms, and the legal and administrative responses to rapid territorial growth recur as central themes. The work foregrounds the formative nature of these early decades for the subsequent development of Islamic law, ritual life, and caliphal legitimacy.

Historiographical Approach

The analysis is rooted in available translations and earlier Western narratives rather than direct engagement with Arabic manuscript traditions or modern critical scholarship. The interpretive frame bears the imprint of 19th-century historiography, favoring sweeping character studies and moral judgments over technical philological debate. This approach makes the narrative readable and vivid but limits its precision on contested points of chronology, source reliability, and doctrinal nuance.

Style and Tone

The prose combines elegiac description with brisk historical summary, reflecting the author's background as a popular historian and essayist. Character sketches are prominent, and episodes are arranged to illustrate broader moral or political theses. Occasional rhetorical flourishes and period idioms underscore the piece's provenance in Victorian literary culture.

Legacy and Criticism

The work enjoyed readership among contemporaries curious about the origins of Islam and the East more generally, and it contributed to popular English-language knowledge of early Islamic history. Modern readers and scholars, however, critique its reliance on secondary sources, its occasional factual errors, and its orientalist assumptions that mirror broader nineteenth-century attitudes. Despite these limitations, the narrative remains of interest as a literary and historiographical artifact that illuminates how Muhammad and the early caliphate were understood in mid‑Victorian Britain and America.