Historically speaking, the turbulent events of the year after the death of Prophet Muḥammad turned out to be quite decisive in Islamic history. The political unity forged by Muḥammad under the aegis of the new religion he proclaimed was seriously challenged by the undetermined order of succession and the struggle of the tribes on the Arab Peninsula to cut their bonds of political allegiance created during the Prophet's lifetime (ridda). It is thus hardly surprising that later generations remembered these events, and with the rise of Arabic history writing, a series of historiographical compositions were dedicated to this topic. Although none of the original texts are known to have survived, the information they contained was presumably integrated into later, more comprehensive depictions of Muslim history. The Kitāb al-futūḥ is a good example of this principle.

As I will try to demonstrate in the second part of the present chapter as well as in section 6.4, Ibn Aʿtham's ridda narrative was treated by its author as a fairly independent unit within his book. Unfortunately, but typical for him, he did not reveal his sources on the events of the ridda wars to his readers in a straightforward manner, so in Chapter 5 we set out to explore them more systematically. But before doing so, in Chapter 4 we establish the broader context by recapitulating what we know of the lost topical monographs (section 4.1), some of which might have been available to him as well, and the parallel accounts on the same events known to us in slightly earlier, contemporaneous, and later comprehensive histories (section 4.2).