The Ridda begins, Abu Bakr ﵁'s stance on the zakat

The Stillness of a Great Storm

When the army of Usama ﵁ had departed from Medina for the Roman frontier and the prayers over the Messenger of Allah ﷺ had been performed, the city breathed out a brief rest. It was a dangerous rest, the rest the sea takes before it gathers itself into a flood. In the deserts around Medina, in the oases of Najd, in the wadis of Yamamah, in the sand-flats of Bahrain, in the mountains of Hadramawt, in the hills of Oman and in the oases of Yemen, men scrambled to their feet who years earlier had embraced Islam and who now, with the news of the death of their Prophet ﷺ, put out their foot to draw it back again.

Their motives were various, as tribes are various. Some denied Islam as a whole and returned to their ancestral idols. Others still accepted prophethood, but of a new man: Musaylimah in al-Yamamah, Tulayhah in Banu Asad, al-Aswad al-ʿAnsi in Yemen (already killed just before the Prophet ﷺ himself had died), Sajah among Banu Tamim. Yet others kept the shahadah and the prayer, but refused to pay the zakat to the khalifah in Medina. For them, so they reasoned, the zakat had been a covenant between their tribe and the Prophet ﷺ personally; when the Prophet ﷺ departed, the covenant departed with him. They acknowledged Allah ﷻ and they acknowledged Muhammad ﷺ, but they acknowledged no obligation toward a little town in the Hijaz that came to collect a tenth of their livestock.

It was this third group, the zakat-refusers, that formed the juridical heart of the whole crisis. They were not openly apostate, and some of the senior Companions ﵃ around Abu Bakr ﵁ argued that the matter should be reconciled with them. It was not a second ʿAswad al-ʿAnsi. They still uttered the shahadah. They still performed the prayer. Was that not enough? Was it truly worth waging war upon them, in these precarious first months of the khilafah, when Medina itself was scarcely defended?

Upon this question everything turned. Upon this question turned the whole future of Islam as an organised community, not merely as a personal faith. And upon this question Abu Bakr ﵁ stood alone, against the counsel of nearly everyone around him.

The Pen of ʿUmar ﵁

ʿUmar ibn al-Khattab ﵁ came to Abu Bakr ﵁ with the proposal to take up a moderate position. He was not the only one; many other senior Companions ﵃ shared his view. ʿUmar ﵁ gave voice to what a large part of Medina thought. He argued, with an attention to the text that was his own, that the Prophet ﷺ had said: I have been commanded to fight the people until they say Lā ilāha illā Allah. When they say it, they have protected from me their blood and their property, except by its right. Well then, said ʿUmar ﵁, these people say Lā ilāha illā Allah. They utter the shahadah. Their blood and property is therefore protected. The khalifah has no ground to fight them over zakat.

It was a respectable reasoning, rooted in a well-known hadith, and it convinced a large part of the first rank in Medina. ʿAli ﵁ shared a similar concern, not over the principle, but over the timing and the exposure of the khalifah to personal danger. Talhah ﵁, az-Zubayr ﵁ and ʿAbd ar-Rahman ibn ʿAwf ﵁ were anxious. Abu Bakr ﵁ stood as good as alone.

And then he spoke. Suyuti ﵀ preserves his words in a form that we, after fourteen centuries, cannot read without a certain shudder.

The reproach was sharp. ʿUmar ﵁, the man who in the jahiliyyah was known as hard toward women and slaves, who in his young years had struck his sister when he heard of her conversion, who had once set out to kill the Prophet ﷺ himself, had now in Islam become the man of conciliation. Abu Bakr ﵁ rubbed it in. The man who had been strict where the matter did not ask for strictness had now become soft where the matter asked for strictness. No reproach is more painful than one that reverses the very order of a person’s life.

Then came the substantive argument. The Prophet ﷺ has departed and the revelation is cut off. In other words: no new revelation can come to lighten the old. The law that stands, stands forever. Zakat is a pillar of Islam, no loose duty, no optional contribution. He who distinguishes the zakat from the prayer distinguishes what Allah ﷻ has joined together. And he who pulls apart the command of Allah ﷻ has not accepted the command of Allah ﷻ.

And then came the oath. By Allah ﷻ, I will fight them as long as the sword remains in my hand, even if they should refuse me a collar of a camel. In the Arab context a collar of a camel, an ʿiqāl, is the smallest conceivable gift; in another narration it is an ʿanāq, a young kid. However slight, when it is the right of Allah ﷻ, Abu Bakr ﵁ will fight for it. This was no escalation of a political conflict, it was the juridical declaration that the Sharīʿah has no parts that may be left out at will.

The Acknowledgement of ʿUmar ﵁

ʿUmar ﵁ stood in the mosque, and what he felt when Abu Bakr ﵁ spoke he later described himself with an honesty that no one compelled from him. It was not immediately clear to him that his elder companion was right. He went away and reflected. He weighed again the hadith about Lā ilāha illā Allah. He weighed the addition except by its right that the Prophet ﷺ had himself attached to it: blood and property are protected except by what is due upon it. The property of a Muslim is protected except for the zakat that rests upon it. The Prophet ﷺ had given the exception in the same breath as the rule.

ʿUmar ﵁ returned to Abu Bakr ﵁, and he spoke words that stand in all the history books of Islam as a gloss upon the Saqifah, because they define precisely the nature of the leadership of Abu Bakr ﵁.

This is a remarkable sentence. ʿUmar ﵁ does not declare that he was convinced by logical arguments. He does not declare that after study of the hadith he had revised his position. He declares something deeper. He declares that he saw in Abu Bakr ﵁ what he had not seen in himself: an expansion, a calm, a resolve that came not out of human calculation but out of an inner space that Allah ﷻ had opened. Sharḥ aṣ-ṣadr, the expansion of the breast, is in the Qur’an a gift of Allah ﷻ to His Messengers, and ʿUmar ﵁ recognises that same gift in his khalifah. It is for this reason that he follows, not out of political discipline, but out of faith.

This is also the inner meaning of the khilafah. Not that the khalifah is infallible, for he is not. Not that his counsel always holds the highest light. But that Allah ﷻ in certain hours chooses a servant to receive in his breast what the whole ummah does not see, and that the community then does well to follow him, even against its own preference. ʿUmar ﵁ did so, and he lost nothing by it. On the contrary, he won the insight that would later, when he was khalifah himself, let him know that same sharḥ of his own breast when he fought out Yarmuk and Qadisiyyah, and took the interior of the Sassanid empire into his hand.

The Image of the Sword and the Pen

Suyuti ﵀ also preserves the subsequent meeting with ʿAli ﵁. ʿAli ﵁ too was anxious, not over the position itself, but over the person of Abu Bakr ﵁ in a time when the khalifah marched out personally with the army to hold off the apostates around Medina. ʿAli ﵁ went to him, one day, while Abu Bakr ﵁ had girded his sword and was on the point of mounting.

Abu Bakr ﵁ listened. He stopped for a moment. He understood what ʿAli ﵁ was telling him: the khalifah is not merely a soldier among other soldiers. He is, in this one moment of history, the anchor-point of the whole community, for when he falls, the order itself falls. Abu Bakr ﵁ allowed himself to be persuaded to remain in Medina, and to hand over the command of the army to Khalid ibn al-Walid ﵁ and to the other commanders who were sent out across the deserts. But the decision to fight, to fight over zakat as he would fight over the prayer, remained unchanged.

The Juridical Core: Zakat as a Pillar

What had Abu Bakr ﵁ seen that ʿUmar ﵁ and the others at first did not see?

He had seen something simple, and precisely for that reason difficult. Islam is no menu, for there are five pillars and one cannot choose four and skip the fifth. The shahadah alone is not Islam; the shahadah with the prayer alone is not Islam; the shahadah with the prayer and the fasting alone is not Islam. What makes ad-dīn is the coherence of its ordinances, and he who rejects one pillar rejects the whole, whether he sees it or not.

Abu Bakr ﵁ gave voice to it in two sentences that Suyuti ﵀ preserves, and that explain the whole juridical foundation of his policy.

The zakat is ḥaqq al-māl. It is no voluntary contribution, it is no generous gift, it is the right that rests upon property, as the prayer is the right that rests upon the body and the fasting the right that rests upon the day of Ramadan. He who possesses property possesses it under the condition that its right be paid, and he who refuses the right fails to recognise that the property is not truly his. The property belongs to Allah ﷻ, and it is entrusted to the possessor on the condition that he fulfils what rests upon it.

This was no new doctrine that Abu Bakr ﵁ had devised from his own reflection. It was what the Prophet ﷺ had proclaimed in his farewell address on the Mount of ʿArafat, and what was set down in the many zakat narrations. The new thing was not the rule; the new thing was the readiness to uphold the rule with the sword now that the rule was threatened.

The Hadith of Handhalah

In the same context Suyuti ﵀ preserves a hadith that sums up the whole matter in a sentence. Handhalah ibn ʿAli al-Laythi ﵁ relates that Abu Bakr ﵁ sent out Khalid ibn al-Walid ﵁ and commanded him to fight the people over five things.

Five things. Not one, not two. Five. And Khalid ﵁ received the command to fight over all five, not because his khalifah pretended to extend the truth to the five, but because the Prophet ﷺ in his last khutbah had given the five as one whole, and in that whole every pillar weighed as heavily as the others.

This is, for the jurists who come after him, the foundational text of the whole dossier of qitāl al-baghy, the fighting of rebellion against the juridical order of Islam. The command of Abu Bakr ﵁ by way of Handhalah ﵁ is cited in al-Mughni of Ibn Qudamah ﵀, in Bidayat al-Mujtahid of Ibn Rushd ﵀, in the Hanafi codifications and in the Shafiʿi handbooks. What Abu Bakr ﵁ did in his first month as khalifah established the juridical ruling of the whole ummah over what it means to be a Muslim in an organised community.

The Strategic Consequence

What began as a question of principle soon became a military reality. Abu Bakr ﵁ assembled eleven armies, not from Medina alone, for Medina did not have so many men, but from Muhajirun, Ansar and the tribes that had remained loyal. He set a commander at the head of each, he gave each a line of march, and he gave each the same message: offer the apostates first the return, and when they refuse, fight them.

It is well to pause here for a moment upon the structure of the command. Abu Bakr ﵁ gave no qitāl without daʿwah. Before the sword came the call, before the attack came the invitation. The apostate was not treated as an unbeliever before he had been given the chance to confirm what he had rejected. He who returned received his life, his wife, his property and his rank. He who refused cast himself into the fight.

That is what the scholars would later call al-istitābah, the invitation to return preceding punishment. Abu Bakr ﵁ anchored it in practice from the first day of the Ridda. No raid upon the tribes, no revenge for old grievances, no easy spoils, but a structured call to return, followed, when necessary, by structured qitāl. Therefore Khalid ﵁ could fight in Najd and afterward shake the hand of those who had returned. Therefore ʿIkrimah ﵁ could fight in Oman without bringing a stain upon his ordinary conduct. The Sharīʿah led the fight, not the anger of a vengeful tribe.

The Spiritual Core

It is in this episode that Abu Bakr ﵁ becomes visible in his deepest character. He was tender-hearted, all around him knew that, for ʿAʾishah ﵂ had even pointed out to the Prophet ﷺ that her father was too soft to address the mosque without his tears. He was kind, he was gentle, he was modest. But what also lived in him, and what came out in these months, was an inflexibility for the cause of Allah ﷻ that surpassed all kindness toward the creatures. When the cause of his Lord was at stake, there was no hesitation, no negotiation, no half solution. He was aṣ-Ṣiddīq, the Truthful, and his truthfulness showed itself precisely there where others inclined to conciliation.

In the words of a later sage: Abu Bakr ﵁ was the softest of people in matters that concerned himself, and the hardest of people in matters that concerned his Lord ﷻ. A scoundrel who insulted him personally received forgiveness. A tribe that refused the zakat to his Lord ﷻ received the sword. It was no contradiction, it was one disposition. What was his, he gave away. What was Allah’s ﷻ, he did not give away, even if he had to fall in the earth for it.

The Home Quarter in as-Sunh

The whole affair was fought out from a simple house in a suburb of Medina, in a place called as-Sunh. Abu Bakr ﵁ lived there in a little building of clay and stone, not large, not adorned. There ʿUmar ﵁ visited him as adviser, there he had Khalid ﵁ and Usama ﵁ come to him after their return, and there he kept what in these first months became the bait al-mal, the community treasury. No treasure-chamber with armed guards, but a door that locked, with a simple lock, in a simple house. When someone proposed to set a watchman beside it, Abu Bakr ﵁ answered: There is a lock upon it.

From this house he sent the eleven armies into the desert. From this house he dictated the letters to the tribes. From this house he received the first spoils brought back. And from this house he kept, day by day, contact with the mosque in the centre, where for his last days he still led the prayer when his health allowed it.

The Judgement of History

When the dust of the Ridda had settled, the Arabian jazīrah was once again united under the banner of Islam. The apostates had been fought where they did not return, and they had been restored in mercy where they did. The zakat-refusers in particular were taken back into the ummah, on the condition that they henceforth honoured their obligation. No one was sold as a slave for what he had done in these months; no woman was humiliated, no child was taken away. The ummah returned to its full state.

And what was established in the juridical sense remained established. The five pillars are one whole. The zakat is a right upon property. He who makes a distinction between the pillars fails to recognise the nature of the faith. Every school of fiqh that would later arise would take these rules of Abu Bakr ﵁ as a foundation. Every state that would later be formed in the name of Islam would preserve the Ridda wars of Abu Bakr ﵁ in its constitutional history.

The words of ʿUmar ﵁ lingered. By Allah ﷻ, it was only that I saw that Allah ﷻ had expanded the breast of Abu Bakr ﵁ for the fighting, and I knew that it was the truth. A community that distinguishes a person by the breadth of his breast, not by the loudness of his voice, is a community that can find its leadership. And in her first khalifah she found the man whose breast was expanded at the very moment she needed him most.

Sources

• Jalal ad-Din as-Suyuti ﵀, Tarikh al-Khulafa (tr. Abdassamad Clarke, Ta-Ha Publishers, 3rd ed. 1995), pp. 59, 61–62.