Immediately following the Prophet's death...

Immediately following the Prophet's death, the transfer of power to Abu Bakr was based on what came out of the limited discussions at the Saqifah session.[^5] `Umar later ascended to the Caliphate after being appointed by Abu Bakr[^6]; `Uthman followed suit through an undesignated appointment by `Umar.[^7] Accommodation, a third of a century after the Prophet's passing, led to the infiltration to positions of power by the offspring of all those Meccans who had held out to the last ( al-Tulaqa )[^8] and who just yesterday had been fighting Islam.

All that relates to political authority in its exercise of power. Intellectual authority, on the other hand, was difficult to institute in the members of the Household. Independent legal judgement therewith led to dispossession of their political authority, since the latter's institution entailed the creation of objective conditions for a transfer of power to them and a merging of the two kinds of authority.

However, it was equally difficult to acknowledge intellectual authority in a power-wielding Caliph, the requirements of intellectual authority being different from those of the exercise of power. The feeling that a person is qualified to exercise power did not automatically imply that his installation as intellectual leader - the highest authority after the Qur'an and Prophetic Tradition in matters of theoretical understanding - was thought feasible.

This kind of leadership required a high degree of refinement and theoretical comprehension, and clearly none of the was more adequately endowed with it than the rest, if the members of the Household are excluded.[^9] The result was that the balance of intellectual authority continued to swing for some time. The Caliphs, in many instances, dealt with Imam `Ali on the basis of his intellectual authority, or something approaching that.

So much so that the Second Caliph repeated many times that “If not for 'Ali, `Umar would surely have perished. God forbid that there be a problem and no Abu Hasan to [solve] it...”[^10] Nevertheless, after the Prophet's passing, the Muslims in time became accustomed to see Imam `Ali and the Household as ordinary subjects, whose intellectual authority was not indispensable, but transferable to some reasonable substitute. That substitute was rot to be the Caliph himself, but the Prophet's .

The principle of the ' collective authority was gradually postulated thus, in place of the authority of the Household.