and thirty.” He said:

Ahmad said, in the report transmitted by Ibn al-Hakam, relating from al-Zuhrī that for five years nothing in Mu‘āwiyah’s rule was objected to: “This accorded with the Prophet’s statement—may Allah bless him and grant him peace—‘thirty-five years.’”

Ibn al-Hakam said: I asked Ahmad, “Who said that the years in Ibn Mas‘ūd’s hadith, ‘The millstone of Islam turns for thirty-five years,’ are counted from the Prophet’s migration—may Allah bless him and grant him peace?”

He replied: “He has indeed reported this. What objection is there to the Prophet—may Allah bless him and grant him peace—describing Islam’s course in relation to wrongdoing? He is merely describing the years that would follow him.”

He said: The apparent meaning of Ahmad’s words is that he understood the hadith according to its apparent meaning, and that Mu‘āwiyah’s caliphate was included within those thirty-five years. He also mentioned that a man asked Ahmad about the caliphate, and he replied: “Every pledge of allegiance given in Medina establishes, in our view, a prophetic caliphate.”

The judge said: “The apparent implication is that whatever was established outside Medina was not a prophetic caliphate.”

I say: Ahmad’s explicit statements that the caliphate reached its completion with Ali are very numerous.

The judge then raised against this the Prophet’s statement:

“The caliphate will last thirty years, then become kingship.”

The questioner said: “Since he limited the caliphate after him to thirty years, ending with Ali’s final days, and stated that thereafter there would be kingship, this indicates that what followed was not a caliphate.”

The judge replied that what might be meant was that the “caliphate” after him, untainted by kingship, would last “thirty