This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
For one generation, Sunni tradition holds, shura governed the succession of an empire. Sunni Muslims remember the first four caliphs as the Rightly Guided Caliphs, and the traditional account holds that each reached power through some form of consultation among the community rather than through inheritance, though the claim is contested: some scholars argue the Rashidun caliphs did not in fact seek consultation, either in governing or in choosing a successor, and that the shura narrative was built up after the fact. That contested run, real or reconstructed, ended with them. The dynasties that followed, the Umayyads, the Abbasids and later the Ottomans, largely abandoned consultative selection in favor of hereditary succession, and the historical record is blunt about how far the practice fell: few of the later caliphs exercised anything but nominal control over the empires that bore their name, and none of them reached the throne through shura. Sunni scholarship still holds the principle in high regard, with some jurists treating consultation as obligatory on a ruler rather than merely advisable, but the gap between the doctrine and the dynastic reality it was supposed to govern opened in the seventh century and never fully closed. Shia Islam, for its part, never rested succession on consultation at all, holding instead that legitimate leadership passes through a divinely appointed line.