The Shahada (or profession of faith) plays a key role in Islamic rituals and religious identity, so much so that it is regarded as the cornerstone of the Islamic creed. Its development, however, is still in need of study, especially that what is often taken as the Shahada is its articulation by Sunnis (There is no god except God and Muhammad is the messenger of God), as contrasted to that of the Shiʿis (There is no god except God, Muhammad is the messenger of God and ʿs n is the sovereign of God), neither of which is attested in the Qurʾan. There are, however, statements in the Qurʾan that could have functioned as separate shahadas, which throughout the course of the seventh century became imbedded in the processes of Islamic identity formation (within and without). These processes with respect to the Shahada culminated in an intense period of experimentation under ʿAbd al-Malik, resulting in a formula, albeit in different versions, that we could call the proto-Shahada; the most popular one was the proto-Sunni version: There is no god except God, he alone with no associates, and Muhammad is the messenger of God. What we see in the proto-Shahada are two prior shahadas coalescing into one statement, and it became known in Islam as the Dual-Shahada (al-shahadatayn). The Shiʿis, whose formulation of the Shahada in the seventh century (as proto-Shiʿis) is pretty much unknown, came to call their shahada about ʿAli's guardianship as the “third” Shahada, and used it alongside the Dual-Shahada.

The seventh century is a touchstone for the assertion of behavior by contemporary Muslims. Whether in the orthodox prescriptions of the sunna or in efforts to reimagine Muhammad and his companions as proponents of feminism or pluralism, the events of this period remain central to the Muslim imaginary. One part of this seventh century context was the futuh, the divinely approved conquest of the Middle East. Aside from providing much of the raw material for the biographies of early Muslim leaders, especially the Rashidun caliphs, the futuh also a history to a shared Muslim identity as an umma, an identity that has become especially significant in a modern global context. The futuh provides a moment of struggle that brings about Muslim triumph, which shows the personal characteristics of ideal Muslim leaders and demonstrates God's endorsement of Muhammad's mission through military victory. For the English-speaking Muslim diaspora, accounts of the futuh offer a strangely Janus-faced image. On one hand, public accounts often downplay the military aspects of the sources: a narrative of the “spread of Islam” fits into a discourse of Islam as the religion of peace, occasionally contrasted to Christian violence in the Crusades. In this chapter, I seek to survey the representation of the futuh in English-language school textbooks in the United Kingdom and on English-language Internet sites to inquire into the role this period plays in Muslim self-fashioning in a contemporary context.