This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Wilferd Madelung's study of the succession to Muhammad traces, from the earliest Islamic sources themselves, exactly how contested a founding religious polity's claim to legitimate authority could be from its very first transition of power, with competing candidates, competing arguments about who held the strongest claim, and a division that has shaped Islamic political and religious history ever since.
That close, source based method matters for a polity entry because it shows succession disputes were not a later corruption of an originally settled arrangement but a documented feature of religious political authority from its earliest recorded moment, worth recording in the same careful detail a modern history would give to any other founding constitutional crisis.
A polity entry that only records who eventually held power, without recording how contested that succession actually was and on what grounds each side argued its claim, risks presenting as settled and uncontroversial an authority that was in fact established only after real, documented dispute, which Madelung's own sources show was frequently the rule for a religious polity rather than the exception. That same documented pattern recurs across many polities recorded here, wherever the surviving evidence allows a succession dispute to be reconstructed in comparable detail.