A Caliph on the Road to ʿArafat
It was Dhul-Hijjah of the year 12 after the Hijra, and the caravans gathered once more around Medina. The Ridda was broken, the Mushaf was bound into loose sheets that Abu Bakr ﵁ had taken into his own keeping, the armies of Khalid ibn al-Walid ﵁ were marching eastward toward Ubullah, the armies of ʿIkrimah ﵁ were combing the southern coast of Oman, and in Bahrain al-ʿAlaʾ ibn al-Hadrami ﵁ had retaken Jawatha from the apostates. For the first time in two years the peninsula breathed quietly again, and in that quiet the Caliph resolved to set out for Makkah. No longer as deputy, no longer as the man whom the Prophet ﷺ sent ahead, but as the one who carried the leadership of the ummah in his hands.
The year before, it had had to be otherwise. In 11 AH, in the first months of his caliphate, Abu Bakr ﵁ had not gone to the Hajj himself. Suyuti ﵀ summarizes it concisely: “When the Messenger of Allah ﷺ died and Abu Bakr ﵁ was appointed caliph, he placed ʿUmar ﵁ over the leadership of the Hajj, and afterward Abu Bakr ﵁ performed the Hajj the following year.” Two sentences that conceal a deep history. The Caliph, in the first year of his office, could not leave the city. The Ridda raged up to the hills around Medina: Tulayha by the marshes opposite Najd, Musaylimah in al-Yamamah, the tribes around the capital who still appeared daily at the gates to test the weakness of the young state. Whoever left Medina handed the Ridda the heart of the caliphate.
And so Abu Bakr ﵁ sent ʿUmar ﵁, not as a deputy for himself, but as the bearer of the leadership of the pilgrimage. The Caliph remained in as-Sunh, by the bait al-mal that had no guard, and sent his closest counselor ahead. ʿUmar ﵁ led the Hajj of 11 AH in a caliphate that did not yet exist as it would a year later. He stood on ʿArafat while in the region of Najd the swords still clashed, he cast the pebbles at Mina while the messengers still arrived daily from the front, and he spoke the talbiyah for a community that was not yet certain whether in a month it would still be a community.
In those same days many asked the Caliph why he did not go himself. Suyuti ﵀ does not render Abu Bakr’s ﵁ answer verbatim in this passage; it is given implicitly in his action. He did not go because the ummah needed his presence at its center, he did not go because the hand on the helm was at that moment more precious than the hand on the Black Stone, he did not go because love of the House sometimes demands that one remain far from it, precisely in order to protect those who journey to the House from the chaos that might flood the path.
The Silence Between Two Hajj-Years
Between ʿUmar’s Hajj of 11 AH and Abu Bakr’s own Hajj of 12 AH lies a year that weighs more heavily than almost any other year in the early history of Islam. The Battle of al-Yamamah fell in Dhul-Qaʿdah or early Dhul-Hijjah of 11 AH, just before or just after ʿUmar’s ﵁ Hajj. Wahshi ibn Harb ﵁, the same man who had killed Hamzah ﵁ at Uhud, this time hurled his spear at Musaylimah the Liar. Seventy sahabah ﵃ fell on that day, among them ʿAbdullah ibn Abi Bakr ﵁ shortly afterward in Shawwal of that same year, the Caliph’s own son. When the Hajj season came, the peninsula was strewn with fresh graves.
In the months between the two Hajj-years something else was also completed, something that in the years to come would determine everything. ʿUmar ﵁ came, after al-Yamamah, to Abu Bakr ﵁ with a concern in his heart. “The slaughter of the people was very great on the Day of al-Yamamah, and I fear that the killing will spread to the reciters in these battles, so that much of the Qur’an will vanish, unless you have it gathered.” The Caliph hesitated, and then gave his permission. Zayd ibn Thabit ﵁ was charged with the task. “You are an intelligent young man, and we do not doubt you. You wrote the revelation for the Messenger of Allah ﷺ. Seek out the Qur’an and gather it.” When Abu Bakr ﵁ set out for the Hajj in 12 AH, he carried in his baggage a responsibility that no Caliph before him had borne: the loose sheets of what would become the Mushaf, in hands that would let no other carry them.
So the Caliph set out. Not the figure of a ruler whom the Romans or Persians would recognize, not an emperor with a retinue of thousands, no enthroned head with guards and banners. He went as he walked in Medina, in simple garments, on a camel he had himself bought for the Hajj from the stipend the people had assigned him out of the bait al-mal. ʿAʾishah ﵂ later related what her father had done with the gifts he had accepted from the community. He had reckoned them, and out of his own estate had charged her to return whatever remained at his death to the bait al-mal. Even in his Hajj-provisions he was a man who brought back more than he took with him.
On the Sacred Paths
When the caravan left Medina and travelled southward along the old roads that lead to Makkah, it walked the same paths the Prophet ﷺ had trodden less than three years earlier in the Hajjat al-Wadaʿ, the Farewell Hajj. Every halt spoke. Dhul-Hulayfah, where the Prophet ﷺ had donned the ihram and uttered the words Labbayk Allahumma labbayk for the first time as Messenger and pilgrim at once. ar-Rawhaʾ, al-Juhfah, ʿUsfan. At each of these places the Muslims had let their talbiyah ring out in 10 AH, in the last year of the Prophet ﷺ. In 12 AH those same places were crossed again, this time by a man who was no longer a companion among companions, but the Khalifat Rasul Allah, the deputy of the Messenger of Allah ﷺ, and who himself was among the few who could still recall every word of that last Hajj exactly.
Suyuti ﵀ does not give us the geography of the journey in detail; he simply mentions that the Caliph performed the Hajj. But behind those few words lies an experience that every Sahabi heart knew. Whoever journeys to Makkah after a year of war enters a different land than whoever comes there in time of peace. The muhrim who at Dhul-Hulayfah ungirds the sword-belt and dons the unsewn garment steps down from his power. The Caliph on the sacred paths is, for those days, no longer a Caliph. He is a servant of Allah ﷻ among servants, a pilgrim among pilgrims, with only the call of Labbayk to distinguish him from whoever rides beside him.
For Abu Bakr ﵁ there was one personal weight that no other shared. In 9 AH, in the Year of the Delegations, the Prophet ﷺ had appointed him over the Hajj when he himself did not go. That was the Hajj in which Surah at-Tawbah was recited publicly for the first time, in which ʿAli ﵁ overtook the Prophet ﷺ to convey the revelation to the tribes, in which the oath was proclaimed that after that year no mushrik might draw near to the Sacred Mosque. Abu Bakr ﵁ had led then, in the shadow of the Messenger ﷺ. In 10 AH the Prophet ﷺ had led in person in the Hajjat al-Wadaʿ. In 11 AH ʿUmar ﵁ had led on behalf of the Caliph.
And now, in 12 AH, Abu Bakr ﵁ led himself, for the first time as bearer of the caliphate. He stood once more on the same ground as in 9 AH, but the hand that had appointed him was no longer on this side of the veil.
On ʿArafat
The morning of the ninth of Dhul-Hijjah was clear and cold. The sun climbed over the black ridges of the mountains around ʿArafat and cast the long light of a desert morning across the plain. Hundreds of thousands of pilgrims, or as many as Medina and the tribes not yet returned from the Ridda could supply, arrayed themselves at the foot of Jabal ar-Rahmah, the Mount of Mercy. It was here that the Prophet ﷺ, less than three years before, had delivered his Farewell Sermon. Here that he had asked: Have I not conveyed? And the crowd had answered: By Allah, yes. Here that Surah al-Maʾidah had been completed with the revelation that the Religion had been perfected.
What Abu Bakr ﵁ delivered to the pilgrims on that day, Suyuti ﵀ does not give verbatim in this passage. We know only that he led, that he let the talbiyah ring out, that he joined and shortened the prayers as the Prophet ﷺ had shown, that he led the crowd toward Muzdalifah around sunset, and that at Mina he cast the stones and slaughtered the sacrifice. The Caliph did what every pilgrim does, and it was precisely that sameness that was the message of his presence. He wished to make no distinction between himself and the least pilgrim in the crowd. He stood on ʿArafat as a servant of Allah ﷻ.
It was this bearing that had marked him throughout his caliphate, and that found on ʿArafat its most concentrated expression. At his accession he had said from the minbar in Medina: “People, I have been placed in authority over you and I am not the best of you. If I do well, support me; and if I do wrong, set me straight.” What he had said then to the Ansar and the Muhajirun ﵃ in the Masjid an-Nabawi, he repeated in silence on ʿArafat before Allah ﷻ. He was no king, no ruler by grace of blood; he was a servant in the front row, a man who served the community in the name of One above him.
The Return to Mina
At Mina, on the days of the stay after ʿArafat, the Caliph was surrounded by pilgrims from every corner of the peninsula that had just passed through the Ridda. Tribes that a year before had risen in rebellion now knelt beside him in prayer. Banu Tamim, Banu Hanifa, Asad, and Ghatafan, all together, their delegations wrapped in the white garment of the pilgrim. Some of them still bore on their swords the scars of Buzakhah or al-Yamamah, others were brothers, uncles, cousins of the seventy sahabah ﵃ who had fallen on the Day of al-Yamamah. On the paths of Mina, victor and vanquished crossed, mourner and mourner, and in the talbiyah they called together there rang a unity that no sword could have forged.
The Caliph asked for no guard of honor. He asked for no separate tent. He ate with whoever was there, slept where he slept, and listened to the complaints of whoever came to him as he listened in Medina to the complaints of the people at his gate. Suyuti ﵀ relates elsewhere that Abu Bakr ﵁, after his accession to the caliphate, had continued to milk the goats of the widows of his neighborhood as he had done as an ordinary citizen. When a girl had complained that the new Caliph would now be too busy for so simple a service, he had said: “By Allah, I shall keep milking them for you. I hope that this appointment to caliph will change nothing in me of what I used to do.” The man who milked the goats in as-Sunh was the same who led the pilgrims on ʿArafat. And that, as ʿAli ﵁ would later remark, was the deepest secret of his authority.
The Vanishing of a Shadow
In the late afternoons of Mina, when the heat came to lie over the tents and the pilgrims rested in the shade, the Caliph must often have thought of what had happened in this same plain just over two years before. He had been there, beside the Prophet ﷺ, when the last word of the Farewell Sermon rang out. He had seen the Prophet ﷺ raise his finger to the sky and heard him ask: Have I conveyed? He had answered with the thousands of others: By Allah, yes. And he had seen how the Prophet ﷺ afterward returned to Medina, how the first signs of weariness announced themselves, how at last in Rabīʿ al-Awwal of 11 AH the chief voice of Islam fell silent.
In 12 AH the shadow of the Prophet ﷺ had vanished from ʿArafat, and at the same time had not vanished. What had rung out in that narrow valley hung in every word the pilgrim after him would utter. The talbiyah itself was freed of the old shirk; the pure formula that Ibrahim ﵇ had restored was established anew. Labbayk Allahumma labbayk, labbayka la sharika laka labbayk. Here I am, O Allah, here I am. No partner beside You. Nothing more added. The six centuries of idolatry had been dissolved in ten years of Medina and definitively pruned away in the Hajj of 9 and 10 AH. What Abu Bakr ﵁ led in 12 AH was the first Hajj of a community that stood in that valley entirely without the voice of its Messenger ﷺ.
He knew this. He knew it better than anyone. And one may, without overstepping Suyuti ﵀, imagine that on the evening after ʿArafat, when the sky darkened over Muzdalifah and the pilgrims gathered the stones for the jamarat of the following day, he sat for a moment alone on a rock with his face toward the Kaʿbah. He thought of his companion ﷺ, he thought of the Hajj of nine, of the Hajj of ten, of the talbiyah that had dwelt in the same mouth as the revelation itself, and he thought of how little time there had been and how much time had yet to come.
The Turning of a Cycle
When the Caliph, after the eleventh, the twelfth, and the thirteenth of Dhul-Hijjah, left Mina and returned to Makkah for the farewell tawaf, the circle that had begun in 9 AH was complete. In 9 AH he had led the Hajj on behalf of the Prophet ﷺ, to proclaim with Tawbah that the Sacred Mosque henceforth belonged to the Muslims alone. In 10 AH the Prophet ﷺ had led in person to complete the Book and round off the community. In 11 AH ʿUmar ﵁ had led because the Caliph was indispensable in Medina. And in 12 AH Abu Bakr ﵁ led again, no longer as deputy of the Messenger ﷺ, but as the Khalifat Rasul Allah, the bearer of his office.
He knew, and those who saw him felt it, that this would likely be his only Hajj as Caliph. He was fifty-nine or sixty at that time, older than the median age at which the Arabs of his day laid down their work, and the governance of the caliphate in a peninsula that had just passed through the Ridda had not spared his health. Suyuti ﵀ mentions elsewhere that in these years he had grown grey as few men grow grey, that his face was gaunt and his body light from fasting and vigil. Whoever saw him at the farewell tawaf saw a man whose days were no longer many.
In Suyuti’s text itself stands the bitter confirmation. Two pages earlier he notes that it was in that same year 12 AH that the army of ʿAmr ibn al-ʿAs ﵁ was sent to Syria, and that the Battle of Ajnadayn would be fought in Jumādā al-Ūlā of 13 AH. And he adds: “Abu Bakr ﵁ received the glad news when he was near to death.” Between the Hajj of 12 AH and the victory of Ajnadayn lay a good six months. In those six months the Caliph would take the fever that would not let go of him, he would dictate his testament to ʿUthman ﵁, and he would return his soul to Allah ﷻ.
But all this he did not yet know when he performed the farewell tawaf around the Kaʿbah. He knew only that he stood where Ibrahim ﵇ had stood, where Ismail ﵇ had piled the first stones, where the Prophet ﷺ had played as a child and as a man had cast down the idols. He touched the Black Stone as his companion ﷺ had touched it. He drank from Zamzam as Hajar ﵍ had run between Safa and Marwa to seek that water for her son. And in the soft twilight of that afternoon in Makkah he raised his hands and spoke a duʿa that no man recorded.
The Last Image
When one wishes, at a distance of fourteen centuries, to carry away an image from the Hajj of 12 AH, then it is this. A man advanced in years, in two white garments, standing on the slopes of ʿArafat beneath a desert sun, surrounded by the community he had brought back from apostasy. Not the ruler who had defeated the tribes, not the Caliph who had sent the troops out to Ubullah and Ajnadayn, not the man who had taken the Mushaf into his keeping, but the pilgrim who had laid his forehead in the sand. The sand of the place where his companion ﷺ had stood less than three years before and asked: Have I conveyed?
He had conveyed. And the man who led in those days conveyed what he had received onward to those who would come after him. That was his Hajj. That was his office. That was the meaning of his life.
When he rode out of the city again, the caravan travelling southeast back to Medina, he was still Caliph. Upon his arrival in Medina, in the first weeks of 13 AH, the fever would begin. And in Jumādā al-Ākhirah of that same year he would be buried beside the man with whom he had stood next to the Kaʿbah in 9 AH, and with whom he had called the talbiyah in the shadow of Jabal ar-Rahmah.
But now, at the turning point of his office, in the high Hajj-days of 12 AH, he still stood on ʿArafat. A Caliph among pilgrims. A servant among servants. A man who knew what he carried, and with whom he would leave it.
Sources
- Jalal ad-Din as-Suyuti ﵀, Tarikh al-Khulafa (tr. Abdassamad Clarke, Ta-Ha Publishers, 3rd ed. 1995), pp. 64, 65–67, 69.