The Ritual of Accession in Early Islam provides a history of the ceremony of the oath of allegiance to the caliph from the time of the Prophet Muhammad until the fragmentation of the caliphate in the late ninth and tenth centuries.

The study of royal rituals of accession and succession in Christian Rome, Byzantium and the early Medieval West has generated an extensive literature. This has however remained unexplored in scholarship on the Islamic world. This book redresses that by examining the ceremonial of accession to the caliphate in early Islam, covering the place of ritual in political practice, changes and continuities in that practice and the problem of how best to understand accounts of ritual.

It also offers a contribution to major, current debates in Islamic history: the development of Arab-Muslim identity and the formation of the 'Islamic state'.