Even within the lifetime of Mohammed, the 'capital' of the Islamic state was Medina, and not Mecca, being a city with stronger historical support for Islam as a result of Mohammed's threatening of the Quraishi social order. Medina's loss of power would come in the reign of the caliph Ali, who would shift the capital to Kufa, the source of the majority of his support base due to his reliance on the disenfranchised bedouin groups forced to settle after the early phase of conquest. Upon Ali's death, the caliphate would once more shift, this time to Syria, the traditional power base of the line of Abu Sufyan, the first ruling clan of the Ummayad dynasty. Why all this hopping away from Mecca? I would posit that the problem has something to do with the fact that the cities of the Hejaz, though enriched somewhat by their position on the trade routes from Yemen out of Arabia, lacked the agriculture to sustain major settled civilization on the same scale as the fertile plains of Mesopotamia (that would later support the Abbasids in their capitals of Baghdad, Raqqah, and Sammara) or the nile river valley (that would allow the supremacy of the Fatimid line), or the fertile rivers of northern syria, that had sustained cities like Damascus for Millenia. The only possibility for a return of dominance in the early phase of Islam to Medina came with the Second Fitna following the death of the Umayyad Caliph Mu'awiya in 680, where the Anti-caliph Ibn-Zubayr would attempt to restore control of the faith to Arabia. Abd al Malik's defeat of Ibn Zubayr at the siege of Medina, and his restoration of the Umayyad line, would guarantee that the seat of the caliph would remain in Syria.