Governance, bait al-mal, humility and poverty

A Caliph Who Owned Nothing

When one seeks the image that captures the entire caliphate of Abu Bakr ﵁ in a single scene, one finds it not on a battlefield, not on a minbar, not in a court of law. One finds it in a house on the edge of Medina, in the outlying quarter called as-Sunh. There stood a room with a wooden frame around a simple door. Behind that door, on the earthen floor, lay some sacks of grain, a few coins in a leather purse, and the surpluses of the zakāt that had come in that year from Najd and from Bahrain. That was the bait al-mal of the caliphate, the treasury of the community of which the peninsula at that moment formed a precarious unity, and which within fifteen years would inherit the palaces of Kisra and the treasuries of Caesar. No guard stood at the door, no key hung from the belt of a servant, only a padlock, simple, a trifling security against the only thing that truly threatened him: the thought of the ordinary Muslim that his Caliph ought to be protected against his own people.

Someone once asked the Caliph, with the concern of one who took governance seriously. “Will you not appoint someone to guard it?” And Abu Bakr ﵁ answered, in a sentence that says everything about what the caliphate was in these first years: “There is a lock on it.” He said it without irony, he meant it. A community in which the people fast because the Prophet ﷺ had taught them to, in which the prayers five times a day stilled the streets, in which the weakest widow knew that her goats were milked by the Caliph in person, had no need of a guard for its treasury. The lock was a formality; the real lock was in the hearts.

And the proofs of this come to us through Suyuti ﵀, in a chapter he places between the military stories of Ubullah and Ajnadayn and the long death-narrative that follows. It is a kind of interlude in the text, a few pages in which the writer turns to what this caliphate actually was, not what it did. And what he gives us is a series of scenes in which Abu Bakr ﵁ diminishes himself until he is almost no longer visible, precisely at the moment his office became the greatest a man could bear.

Half a Sheep a Day

When Abu Bakr ﵁ was raised to Caliph, on the morning after the passing of the Prophet ﷺ, he was a merchant. He had traded in cloth all his life in Mecca, and that trade he had continued after the Hijra in Medina as a companion continues his prayer. On the first morning of his caliphate, so Suyuti ﵀ relates, he took his cloths upon his shoulder and walked to the souk. He wished to sell what he had to offer, as he had done the evening before and the evening before that and all those evenings of his adult life. What else was he to do? A man has a wife, he has children, he has a father still living. He feeds them.

On the way he met ʿUmar ﵁ and Abu ʿUbaydah ibn al-Jarrah ﵁. They asked where he was going. He answered: “To the souk.” They said: “What have you to do in the souk, while you have been placed in authority over the affairs of the Muslims?” Abu Bakr ﵁ turned, astonished: “And how am I to feed my family?”

Thus came into being the first stipend a Caliph of the Muslims would ever receive. Not out of greed, not out of claim, but out of the simple necessity that a man who must govern the community has no time left to trade in cloth, and that his wife and his children must nonetheless eat. He did not set the amount himself; the community did that, after consultation, and arrived at a stipend that is variously reported in the sources. One report gives half a sheep a day for his household, another names a fixed sum in dirhams that came to roughly the same. What we know is that the amount was meagre, meagre enough that ʿAʾishah ﵂ would later testify that they ate of the coarse meal of which the people also ate, and clothed themselves in the rough weave with which the people clothed themselves. No luxury, no abundance. The stipend was no privilege; it was a lifelong wage for lifelong service.

The Bait al-Mal of as-Sunh

Abu Bakr ﵁ lived in as-Sunh, a quarter on the edge of Medina where he had taken a house since the Hijra. It was, by Arab reckoning, not central. The Masjid an-Nabawi lay a walk away; whoever wished to reach the Caliph had to walk a little distance. When he became Caliph, he did not move. No office changed the pattern in which he slept, where he ate, where he had lodged his wives and children. For six months he rode every morning from as-Sunh to the Masjid an-Nabawi, led not always the ʿAsr-prayer but certainly the Fajr and afterward the general affairs, and returned in the evening. Only later, after the first months, did he take up a dwelling nearer the mosque, and that only for practical reasons.

In as-Sunh stood also, in his first phase as Caliph, the bait al-mal of the Muslims. Suyuti ﵀ gives it in two sentences, and in those two sentences lies a whole doctrine of governance:

“Abu Bakr ﵁ had a bait al-mal at as-Sunh that no one guarded. Someone said to him: ‘Will you not appoint someone to guard it?’ He said: ‘There is a lock on it.’ When he died, they opened the bait al-mal and found nothing in it, neither a dinar nor a dirham.”

Two movements in one passage. The first is the guarding. The Caliph refuses to appoint a guard. He trusts the lock and the people. He knows that the community is still close enough to what the Prophet ﷺ taught it not to be a robber of its own treasury. No army, no tower-watchmen, no sealed keys, but a padlock. The second movement is the reckoning at death. When the Caliph dies and his successor ʿUmar ﵁ together with the counselors opens the bait al-mal, it is empty. Not nearly empty, entirely empty. Neither a dinar nor a dirham. What came in went out, to the people for whom it was intended. The Caliph was no way-station where money lingered; he was a conduit.

Suyuti ﵀ relates that ʿUmar ﵁ wept when he saw that. The Caliph had kept not a single coin for himself. There was nothing, not even in store for his widow ʿAʾishah ﵂ or for his newborn daughter Umm Kulthum ﵂. They had even had to wash the garment in which he was buried because in his sickbed he had said it must be so. ʿUmar ﵁ would later say with tears in his eyes that Abu Bakr ﵁ had left those after him a standard heavier to bear than any treasure could have been.

The Goats of the Widows

Before he became Caliph, Abu Bakr ﵁ had in his neighborhood a habit that the young women at the well named with respect and tenderness. He milked the goats of the widows. In old Medina the goats were milked morning and evening. That was women’s work, but for widows without sons, or with sons still too young, it was hard. Abu Bakr ﵁, a man of middle age even then, went past the little houses where there was no man, milked their goats, and set the bowl inside the gate for the woman who was in the house.

When he became Caliph, the girls who whispered this service to one another feared that it would cease. A Caliph is busy. A Caliph sits on the minbar, receives delegations, consults with ʿUmar ﵁ and Abu ʿUbaydah ﵁. A Caliph no longer goes to milk goats. A young girl from the neighborhood even said aloud what they all thought:

And he did it. For months, until his illness prevented him from going out into the street, the Caliph went early in the morning past the widows with the milking pail, milked, and set down the bowl. No ceremony, no heralds, no speech. A man with a pail, a goat or camel on a leather rope, an earthen bowl, a brief greeting, and gone.

What happened here in silence is hard to overstate. The Caliph of a peninsula that had just passed through the Ridda and was just then sending armies out to Iraq and to Syria did the work of a household servant for the poorest women of his neighborhood. He declared, in the whole line of his conduct, that the dignity of his office lay not in withdrawing from the people; it lay in remaining near them. The Prophet ﷺ had strung the bow himself before Hudaybiyyah, dug out the sand with the spade in his hand at the Khandaq, led his own camel before the Battle of Badr. The Caliph followed him in everything, in this too.

How the Caliph Ate and Slept

Whoever visited Abu Bakr ﵁ in his caliphal years found him rarely in a state of excess. He ate what the ordinary people ate, he slept on a mat. A date and a bowl of milk were an ordinary meal, a piece of mutton on the high days a feast. ʿAʾishah ﵂ later testified that in all her months with her father as Caliph they had not had bread of white wheat on the table a single day. It was always the barley bread of the poorer laborers.

His clothing was to match. Two white shirts of the rough weave of Yemen, a cloak he had had mended more than once, a turban he changed every two days. At his accession to Caliph the community had asked him to dress properly for delegations that would come from Najd or from Bahrain. He had consented, but the “proper” clothing remained what an ordinary merchant in Medina wore, not what a prince would have donned.

Once he sat, so a passage in the same section of Suyuti ﵀ relates, on the minbar in a washed shirt whose hem had here and there been darned, and addressed the people on the duty of honesty in trade. A new convert from a distant tribe, who saw the Caliph of the Muslims for the first time, whispered to his neighbor: “Is this then the Caliph? This is the Caliph?” His neighbor answered: “Yes, this is he. And yes, this is his only shirt.” The man wept, it is related, until he could say nothing more.

The Consultation and the Gate

The Caliph was available. That is the first and most remarkable feature of his governance. Whoever had need of him could approach him; no girdle of guards stood between the people and him. A Bedouin who had come from Najd with a dispute over a camel could sit on the bench before the mosque and wait until the Caliph would come for the Asr-prayer, and lay his case before him. A widow whose son had fallen on the Day of al-Yamamah could knock at the door of as-Sunh and put her question about her share of inheritance to the Caliph in person.

In governance itself Abu Bakr ﵁ had a council laid down in no treaty, but formed in practice by the eldest and wisest companions. ʿUmar ﵁ was his closest adviser, sometimes his opponent, more often his instrument. Abu ʿUbaydah ibn al-Jarrah ﵁ managed the finances and the organization of the stipends. ʿAli ibn Abi Talib ﵁ was consulted in legal questions in which his deep knowledge of the revelation and the Sunnah offered a way through. ʿAbd ar-Rahman ibn ʿAwf ﵁ and ʿUthman ibn ʿAffan ﵁ took part in the great deliberations. No decision about war and peace was taken by the Caliph alone. The shura, the mutual consultation, was a fact of his governance before it became a term in the books.

When the deliberation was done and the direction set, the Caliph was inexorable in execution. What in 11 AH had led to his decision concerning those who refused the zakat was here the source of his authority. He had said: “By Allah, I shall fight them as long as the sword remains in my hand, even if they refuse me a camel’s halter.” Whoever had seen him as a decision-maker recognized a man who did not hesitate. But whoever met him as a person in as-Sunh found a servant.

Honesty in Execution

One anecdote, which Suyuti ﵀ cites somewhere in this passage, shows the style of governance more sharply than any rule. An envoy from a distant region brought a gift, a fine cloak, for the Caliph. Abu Bakr ﵁ looked at the cloak, admired the softness of the weave, and gave it back. He said: “This is not for me. What is given to a Caliph because he is Caliph belongs to the Muslims, not to the Caliph.” The cloak was taken into the bait al-mal, and distributed among those who had a right to it. The Caliph walked back to as-Sunh in the shirt he had put on that morning.

Once ʿUmar ﵁ caught him sorting his own receipts. The Caliph had given his wife ʿAʾishah ﵂ a handful of coins that he had left over after the week, to buy food with. When ʿUmar ﵁ came in, he saw the Caliph take out a second handful and set it aside in a separate purse. He asked what that was to mean. Abu Bakr ﵁ said: “This is what I received too much this week. It goes back to the bait al-mal.” ʿUmar ﵁ stood, the report tells, speechless for a moment. Then he said: “By Allah, you have made it hard for us who come after you.”

In the same spirit it is related that Abu Bakr ﵁ said to ʿAʾishah ﵂: “See how much this stipend has yielded me over the years, and give it, when I die, back to ʿUmar ﵁ out of my estate.” She told later that after his death she had checked the reckoning: it came to a few thousand dirhams. And she gave it, as her father had said, back to ʿUmar ﵁, with the message: “My father said that this was not his property, but that what he received as a stipend out of the bait al-mal in fact remained the possession of the Muslims. He returns it.” ʿUmar ﵁ wept. He said: “May Allah ﷻ have mercy on Abu Bakr ﵁. He has made it so much harder for those after him than they would otherwise have had it.”

The Humility on the Minbar

The style in which Abu Bakr ﵁ addressed the people was cut from the same cloth as the style in which he lived his daily life. He spoke briefly and without ornament, he avoided metaphors, he avoided grand words. On the minbar of his inauguration he had said: “Now, people, I have been placed in authority over you and I am not the best of you. So if I do well, support me; and if I do wrong, set me straight.” What he had said then he repeated throughout his caliphate in ten different formulations. He asked for correction, he asked for supplement, he asked for the community’s judgment on his conduct.

And the community gave it. Once a man rebuked him in public for a command he had issued. The Caliph listened, asked for clarification, considered, and revoked his decision on the spot. Another time an envoy raised an objection to a distribution of troops. The Caliph turned to his council, deliberated anew, and altered the instruction to the commander. No Caliph in the centuries to come would be corrected in public so openly as this first Caliph. And no Caliph would accept the correction so without shadow.

The Last Word to ʿAʾishah ﵂

On the threshold of his death, while the fever consumed him week by week, Abu Bakr ﵁ called ʿAʾishah ﵂ to him. He pointed out to her a number of matters and gave her the message she was to convey to ʿUmar ﵁ after his death. One of those messages was not political; it was a retrospect. Suyuti ﵀ rendered the words as they are related by ʿAʾishah ﵂:

In this sentence the whole governance stands summarized in two movements. What they took was nothing; what they ate and what they wore was what the people ate and wore. No difference between Caliph and laborer in the plate and in the garment, no private wealth built up from the office, no inheritance left to children that was not controlled by the mosque and the bait al-mal. A life so simply woven that death could leave almost no stain upon it.

The Conclusion

In the thousand years that would follow this passage, in every corner of the Muslim world where sages and scholars would debate what a just ruler was, this one sentence would run through the texts like a red thread. We took for ourselves neither a dinar nor a dirham. It was taken up in the mirrors for princes, in the counsels to sultans, in the sermons to caliphs who lived entirely otherwise than this example. It was cited, contradicted, praised, forgotten, rediscovered, professed in the mosque and denied in the palace. But it stood.

And it stood, in the first place, not as a theoretical ideal, but as a fact. The man who spoke it had lived it. The bait al-mal of as-Sunh stood empty. The lock was opened, and there was nothing. The reckoning balanced to the last dirham, for no second accounting was needed: everything that came in went out. The Caliph died in his own washed shirt, which he had lent to his daughter ʿAʾishah ﵂ for the burial, with the instruction to use it again after the washing of his body. The living have more right to it than the dead, he had said. So frugal, so careful, so faithful to the community was his last farewell.

It is for this reason that the Caliph needed no guard for his bait al-mal. A guard one needs when there is something to guard. When the treasury is always nearly empty because it always flows out to the people, then the best guard is the lock, and the best key the awareness of the community that their Caliph lives on what they themselves eat. That awareness Abu Bakr ﵁ had planted so deeply in the ummah in the brief two years and three months of his office that, despite all later deviation, it would never wholly ebb from its memory.

He is the standard. He remains the standard. Not the standard that seems attainable, but the standard against which without exception one must measure. Not to judge every ruler at once, but to show every ruler the horizon on which the caliphate once stood. A house in as-Sunh. A lock on a wooden door. No guard. Neither a dinar nor a dirham. And a man who in the morning milked the goats of his neighbor-women and in the afternoon received envoys from Bahrain in the same cloak he had worn since the Hijra.

That was Abu Bakr as-Siddiq ﵁ as Caliph. And that is, in the strict formulation of Suyuti ﵀, what the first khalifat rasul Allah was for his community.

Sources

• Jalal ad-Din as-Suyuti ﵀, Tarikh al-Khulafa (tr. Abdassamad Clarke, Ta-Ha Publishers, 3rd ed. 1995), pp. 65–68, with reference to pp. 54 (the inaugural address) and pp. 61–62 (the Ridda decision).