The death of Abu Bakr ﵁ and the appointment of ʿUmar ﵁

A Year Before Death

It should have been an ordinary meal. A dish, a few guests, a date-powder of the season, a thin sauce of goat-fat and herbs. In the first months of his caliphate Abu Bakr ﵁ had once taken a meal in as-Sunh in the company of al-Harith ibn Kaladah ﵁, the old physician of the Arabs, one of the few men on the peninsula who carried in his head the medicine of the Persians and the Yemeni healers. He had converted in the south of Hijaz and had settled in Medina after Mecca. At the table, while the Caliph brought his hand to the dish, the physician suddenly seized his arm with a cry.

Who had put the poison in, he did not know, and who had prepared the dish, he could not prove. It had been a Bedouin meal, offered by someone from a distant region where the name of Abu Bakr ﵁ was not blessed. The peninsula had just passed through the Ridda, and there were tribes that would rather see the Caliph dead than alive. The physician knew from his study the smell and the color of a poison that can carry in the body for years before it does its deadly work. He smelled it, and he spoke.

Abu Bakr ﵁ lifted his hand. He had already taken a bite, perhaps one, perhaps two. The physician too. Neither withdrew further; the Caliph because ʿAʾishah ﵂ would later testify that her father had kept his composure as though nothing had happened, the physician because a doctor makes no drama at another’s table. But between the two of them something had been spoken that lingered in their eyes. You and I shall die on the same day. A word, in the hour of an ordinary meal, that had already fixed the hour of a death.

A year passed. It was the year of al-Yamamah, the year of the Mushaf, the year of the Hajj of 12 AH, the year of Ubullah and Ajnadayn on the horizon. The Caliph did his work. He spoke from the minbar, he received envoys, he sent armies, he milked the goats of the widows. And the poison worked. Slowly, imperceptibly, it crept through his veins and lodged in his organs. In the last year of his life he grew thinner than he had ever been. His face drew taut, his hands grew frail. Whoever saw him thought of the work of the caliphate; whoever knew him suspected more.

A year later, in the second month of 13 AH, the physician al-Harith ibn Kaladah ﵁ would die. On the same day, or in the same night, Abu Bakr ﵁ returned his soul.

The Cold Monday

It began on a cold Monday. It was the seventh of Jumādā al-Ākhirah of the year 13 after the Hijra. A gust of wind had come down from the north over Medina, one that the old people in the city knew as the wind that goes before the winter. On such a day a woman bathed her child only in lukewarm water, on such a day a man with grey hair stayed in the mosque rather than go to the souk himself. But Abu Bakr ﵁ performed his ghusl that Monday, the full ritual washing, with water that held no warmth. He did not know that it would usher in the washing of his suffering.

That same night the fever came. First a chill that would not go, then a heat that rose, then a coldness that seemed to pass through the skin. He kept it to himself the first day. The second day ʿAʾishah ﵂ noticed it, and she called in her mother Asmaʾ bint ʿUmays ﵂. On the third day it became clear that this was no passing chill. He ate no more, he drank little, he fell asleep as a man falls, not as a man sleeps. On the fourth day ʿAʾishah ﵂ and Asmaʾ ﵂ resolved that the fever would not yield before he yielded.

For fifteen days he lay ill. Fourteen full nights in a room whose walls were of stacked clay, with a wooden doorpost and a floor of trodden earth. He held the Qur’an, the loose sheets he had taken into his own keeping after the compilation, and now and then let ʿAʾishah ﵂ read him a verse. He sat sometimes upright, leaning against a back, and spoke with the visitors who were admitted. He lay sometimes for hours motionless. Between those two states the community on the far side of the wall went on with its existence, while in the room another existence was coming to its end.

Someone asked him on one of those days whether he had let a doctor look at him. He answered:

It was a quotation. Faʿʿālun limā yurīd, Doer of what He wills, a formula that occurs twice in the Qur’an: in Surah Hūd 11:107 and in Surah al-Burūj 85:16. The Caliph spoke it as a man recites a verse of the day, with the calm of one who experiences his own illness as a charge from a higher chancery. No complaining, no praying for recovery, no asking why. Only a quotation, and a smile.

The Question of the Succession

On the third or fourth day of his illness, when it became clear that the fever would not soon yield, Abu Bakr ﵁ called ʿAbd ar-Rahman ibn ʿAwf ﵁ to him. He was one of the Ten to whom the Prophet ﷺ had promised Paradise, one of the oldest companions, a man whose judgment he trusted. The Caliph had something to discuss, and he wanted a counselor at hand.

A second conversation Abu Bakr ﵁ held with ʿUthman ibn ʿAffan ﵁. He asked the same. ʿUthman ﵁ answered that ʿUmar ﵁ was inwardly better than outwardly, and that there was no man among them his equal. The Caliph nodded. He then called also Saʿīd ibn Zayd ﵁ and Usayd ibn Hudayr ﵁, and he asked them too. No consultation was taken lightly, no decision was made before the old companions ﵃ had given their heart.

Then a man came from the mosque to the gate of the house. He had heard something. He wished to impress upon the Caliph that he should be cautious with ʿUmar ﵁, for the people were afraid of his harshness. Abu Bakr ﵁ let him in. He heard him out. And then, with the voice that had grown weak but still carried its old sharpness, he spoke:

No hesitation, no wavering. He knew what he was doing, and he knew for Whom he did it. The appointment of ʿUmar ﵁ was no political calculation, and it was no favor to a friend. It was, in the conviction of the dying Caliph, simply the right choice, and for it he would later have to answer in a place where no rhetoric counted any longer.

The Testament

When he felt the end drawing near, Abu Bakr ﵁ called ʿUthman ibn ʿAffan ﵁ to him with a writing-reed and parchment. He wished to dictate a testament. Not about money, not about goods, for there was nothing. A testament about the office. A written appointment, in black and white, so that after his death no second Saqifah need exist. What at Saqifah had gone well by the wisdom of the hour need not again be left to the wisdom of the hour.

ʿUthman ﵁ sat down and dipped his reed in the ink.

The last words, and those who do wrong shall know to what place of overturning they shall be brought, were a quotation from Surah ash-Shuʿarāʾ 26:227. The Caliph did not close his testament with a formulation of his own. He closed it with the Qur’an, in a verse whose warning extended to whoever after him would do wrong under the umbrella of the office. Even in the last document of his life he gave the last word not to himself, but to the Book whose keeping he had undertaken.

During the dictation, just after the naming of ʿUmar ﵁, Abu Bakr ﵁ lost consciousness. He could not speak further. ʿUthman ﵁ wrote what he knew he was going to say, for the Caliph had already pronounced the name. When Abu Bakr ﵁ came to, he asked what ʿUthman ﵁ had written. ʿUthman ﵁ read it out. The Caliph smiled weakly and said: “You feared that the people would quarrel if I were to pass without completion. May Allah ﷻ reward you for it.” And he added: “And this I would have done in your place.” It was praise of the highest order for the man who eight years later would himself become the third Caliph.

ʿAlī ibn Abi Talib ﵁ in the Courtyard

Before the gate of the house gathered the companions who had not been admitted within, among them ʿAlī ibn Abi Talib ﵁. He stood still. He knew what questions were whispered among the crowd. He himself, at Saqifah two years before, had had a consideration of his own, and some feared that he might now, with the Caliph on his deathbed, sound a claim of his own.

ʿUmar ﵁ stood on a raised place in the mosque when the name from the testament was read out to the crowd. He called the people to silence. And ʿAlī ﵁ rose from the crowd and spoke with a voice that all could hear:

He said it aloud. He wished that no one could claim that he silently harbored another wish. What at Saqifah two years before had been marked by circumstance was now, in view of the end of Abu Bakr ﵁, confirmed in public by ʿAlī ﵁ himself. The choice of the Caliph was no appointment against a majority, no pacification of an opponent; it was the choice that the community, in the hour at which it had to decide, wished with its heart.

When the testament was completed, the Caliph charged ʿUthman ﵁ to go out and read it to the people. ʿUthman ﵁ read. The people listened. When somewhere a voice rose asking whether there was any among them who did not consent, those present were silent. No one objected. ʿUmar ibn al-Khattab ﵁ was, for the second time in two years and three months, accepted by consensus as the man who would lead hereafter.

The Day of the Messenger ﷺ

On one of his last days, when his strength had almost ebbed away, Abu Bakr ﵁ asked ʿAʾishah ﵂ what day it was.

He wanted no stately funeral. He wanted no ceremonies, no gathering of envoys, no days of mourning. He wanted to be nearer the Prophet ﷺ, in time and in place. If he were to die on a Monday night, then on that Monday night he must also be washed, shrouded, and buried. The most beloved of days and nights to me is the one that lies closest to the Messenger of Allah ﷺ.

In the old love between those two there was a logic of its own. Abu Bakr ﵁ had served the Prophet ﷺ from the first day of his mission. He was the first man of the free Quraysh who believed when there was as yet nothing to believe except an unbelievable man. He had been with him in the cave of Thawr, three days long, while Quraysh passed by the mouth of the cave. He had been with him at Badr, at Uhud, at the Khandaq, at Hudaybiyyah, on the Farewell Hajj. He was the man of whom the Prophet ﷺ in his last khutbah had said that all the doors to the mosque must be closed except the door of Abu Bakr ﵁. He had wished to live no otherwise than in his nearness; he wished to die no otherwise than in his nearness.

The Last Verse

It was the evening of Tuesday, or as Suyuti ﵀ names it in the Arabic reckoning, the night of Tuesday the eighth-to-last day of Jumādā al-Ākhirah of the year 13 after the Hijra. The corresponding Gregorian year was 634. He was sixty-three years old, exactly the same age at which the Prophet ﷺ had died. The fever rose. Asmaʾ bint ʿUmays ﵂, his last wife, sat at his feet. ʿAʾishah ﵂ sat at his head, beside the wall. Outside, Medina had already fallen silent in the rest of the night.

ʿAʾishah ﵂, in her pain, had drawn an old verse from her memory. It was a line of pre-Islamic poetry, a line of lament that the Arabs would let ring out at a deathbed. She spoke it softly, not knowing that her father would hear her words:

“What does wealth profit a young man, when one day the death-throe overtakes him and the chest chokes him?”

Abu Bakr ﵁ heard her. He opened his eyes. He spoke against her, not harshly, but clearly:

And he recited, with a voice that was audible in the silence of the room, the verse that he himself had kept in his heart in his death-throe:

In this moment lies all that Abu Bakr ﵁ was. He died with the Qur’an on his lips. Not the poetry of his people, not the wisdom of his ancestors, not the lore of his father. The verse he chose to speak last was no verse of consolation. It was a verse of confrontation, a verse that makes the dying man look truth in the face. The intoxication of death will bring the truth. That is what man was wont to avoid. Whoever has served the truth does not avoid his own dying, for dying is the last truth that meets him.

With that verse he took from ʿAʾishah ﵂ not only her old poetry; he gave her the right language for the hour. This was no pre-Islamic complaint to a fate that was doing its work. This was a reception of what Allah ﷻ had announced in truth. The Caliph died not with the words of the jahiliyya, but with the words of Him who had sent down the revelation.

The Last Word

After he had spoken the verse, he closed his eyes again. ʿAʾishah ﵂ wept quietly. Asmaʾ ﵂ did not move. A long silence hung over the room. Then he opened his eyes once more and spoke a last duʿaʾ. Suyuti ﵀ relates it as it is known in the tradition:

“O Allah, let me die a Muslim, and join me to the righteous.”

It was no oration. It was the concise duʿaʾ of a man who wished to waste no further moment on anything other than his Lord. With those words he departed. Suyuti ﵀ notes it in the brief language that the old historians lend to such moments: he died on the evening of Tuesday, eight days before the end of Jumādā al-Ākhirah of 13 AH, at the age of sixty-three, the same number of years at which the Messenger of Allah ﷺ had passed away.

The Washing

He had charged Asmaʾ bint ʿUmays ﵂ with who would wash his body. “You shall wash me, together with my son ʿAbd ar-Rahman ibn Abi Bakr ﵁.” It was an unusual choice. By custom a man was washed by men, but Asmaʾ ﵂ was his wife, and in the Sunnah it is related that a man may be washed by his wife. He wished that she do it.

Asmaʾ ﵂ rose. She was herself not yet early in her grief, for it was still that same hour, but she did what she was charged. ʿAbd ar-Rahman ﵁ came in. They washed him together, with the water that stood in the house, three times, with the care with which a Muslim washes a Muslim. His body had grown gaunt, lighter than it had ever been. He was a thin man worn down by a life of fasting and prayer, and the fever of fifteen days had taken still more of him. Asmaʾ ﵂ would later say that she could lift him easily, as though she were lifting a child.

The garment they chose for the burial was not new. It was, in accordance with his emphatic wish, a twice-washed shirt that he had worn in his last months. To ʿAʾishah’s ﵂ question whether a new garment would not be better, he had answered: “The living have more right to it than the dead. This shirt is enough for me. It will soon be dust anyway, as I will be dust.” No man who was ever Caliph was returned to the earth in simpler cloth.

The Prayer Between the Grave and the Minbar

At the coming of the night after his passing, for he had expressly commanded that they not wait until the following day, they carried him on his bier into the street. From as-Sunh to the Masjid an-Nabawi. It was short enough that the bearers could cover it in a short march. ʿUmar ibn al-Khattab ﵁, now the second Caliph of the Muslims, rose and did what the practice of the Prophet ﷺ required at the death of a believer.

He placed the bier between the grave of the Prophet ﷺ and the minbar of the Masjid an-Nabawi. The place between those two was, in a hadith he knew well, one of the gardens of Paradise. Between my grave and my minbar is a garden from the gardens of Paradise. There he placed the bier of Abu Bakr ﵁. There he stepped forward. And he performed the prayer with four takbirs.

Four takbirs. No bowings, no kneelings, no prostrations. The salat al-janazah is a prayer of standing. Four times Allahu akbar. Between each takbir the praise of Allah ﷻ, the blessing of the Prophet ﷺ, the prayer for the deceased, the prayer for the living. When ʿUmar ﵁ spoke the last salam, Abu Bakr as-Siddiq ﵁ had been returned to Allah ﷻ in the prayer of the community.

The Shoulder of the Prophet ﷺ

When the prayer was performed, they asked where the grave would be dug. ʿAʾishah ﵂ had her answer ready, for her father had pointed it out to her in his last days. It would be in the room, in al-Hujrah ash-Sharifah, where the Prophet ﷺ lay buried. In the same small space that was her dwelling. She had given that room over to her father, as she had once given over her place beside the Prophet ﷺ when he had died in her room and been buried there.

The grave-diggers, ʿAbd ar-Rahman ibn Abi Bakr ﵁ and some others, entered the room. They dug beside the grave of the Prophet ﷺ. The work was not great, for the earth was loose from the earlier digging. When it was deep enough, they brought the body in.

ʿAbd ar-Rahman ibn Abi Bakr ﵁ descended into the grave to receive his father. He laid the head of Abu Bakr ﵁ exactly on the place that had been chosen: at the shoulder of the Messenger of Allah ﷺ. “They dug him a grave and set his head at the shoulder of the Messenger.” So Suyuti ﵀ formulates it, in a sentence that says everything about the order of that room. Ahead of the Prophet ﷺ, a hand’s breadth behind his head, now lay the head of his closest companion. Whoever came to the back of the room saw them both lying there, the one ahead of the other, the shoulder of the one beneath the head of the other.

It was all that Abu Bakr ﵁ had desired in his last months. He had not asked for a palace, he had not asked for a tomb-monument, he had not asked for engraved stones. He had asked for a shoulder. And even that was, in his view, not his own right. He was, as he had declared all his life, the second of the two. Second in the cave, second in the public call, second in all that he had ever shared with the Prophet ﷺ. And now, in the grave, second again.

The Silence of the Night

It was deep night when they left the room and sealed the grave. Outside, Medina was in the sleep it had denied to the living of the evening before. A single lantern burned in the mosque. ʿUmar ﵁ stood for a long time by the grave, without saying anything. ʿAlī ﵁ stood beside him. Talhah ﵁ and az-Zubayr ﵁ stood a little farther off. Asmaʾ ﵂ and ʿAʾishah ﵂ were within, behind the wall, and wept no loud weeping any longer; they were in the silence that follows the long lamenting.

Someone broke the silence with a simple sentence. “The banner of truth has fallen, and we walk in a land sealed by his footsteps.” No one knows for certain who said that. Suyuti ﵀ does not note it verbatim. But it was, in the mood of that night, the true word.

What the community felt was not only grief for a man. It was grief for an age. The Prophet ﷺ had passed away two years and three months before. Abu Bakr ﵁ had been, in a sense, the shadow that had let the light of that departed sun still fall upon the earth of Medina. He was the man who in 11 AH had risen and said that whoever worshipped the Messenger must know that he had died, and that whoever worshipped Allah ﷻ must know that He lives and does not die. Who will now, with the same voice, rise in the next crisis? ʿUmar ﵁ could and would, but his voice would sound otherwise. An era had closed in the night in which the shoulder of the Prophet ﷺ had received a second head.

The Tidings to Abu Quhafah ﵁

A few weeks later the tidings arrived in Makkah. Abu Quhafah ʿUthman ﵁, the father of Abu Bakr ﵁, had been a convert since the conquest of Mecca in 8 AH. He was old, very old, somewhere in his ninety-seventh year. He had gone blind with age, and his legs barely carried him. He sat on a mat before his house at the foot of the hills, and waited for what would come.

A messenger from Medina arrived and greeted him. He asked to come in. He spoke with the old man, and brought him the news. Abu Quhafah ﵁ did not start. He raised his hands, and in a soft voice he said:

His companion. Two words. A father who outlives his son hears which man takes the office, and recognizes in that one name the old bond between son and companion. ʿUmar ﵁ had been the companion of Abu Bakr ﵁ in every hour. In the Hijra not, for then ʿUmar ﵁ had migrated openly while Abu Bakr ﵁ departed in secret. But in every hour after that ʿUmar ﵁ had stood at his side. At Badr, at Uhud, at Hudaybiyyah, on the minbar, in the council-hall of as-Sunh. When Abu Quhafah ﵁ in Makkah, a blind old man on a mat, heard that ʿUmar ﵁ had accepted the office, then to his sense nothing had changed. The office had, in an essential way, simply passed to the man who had already stood within it, beside his son, in all the hours in which it truly mattered.

He let his hands sink. He asked where his son was buried. They told him: beside the Messenger of Allah ﷺ. He nodded, and he was silent a long time. Then he raised his hands and prayed the old Bedouin duʿaʾ for the dead, in the brief words that every father in Arabia knew for his dead son. No extra words, no elaborate grief. A father who outlives his son knows that all language in such an hour is small.

Abu Quhafah ﵁ lived another six months. He died in Muharram of the year 14 after the Hijra, at the age of ninety-seven. He was buried in Mecca, far from his son, far from the shoulder of the Prophet ﷺ, but in a land of which his son had been the Caliph, and where his son’s companion had taken the governance into his hands. What he thought in that last half year about the chain of things is not recorded by any source. But in his one word, his companion, there rang already all that he understood in silence.

The Caliphate Has Passed On

In Medina the governance went on. ʿUmar ibn al-Khattab ﵁ stepped onto the minbar the morning after the burial. He addressed the people with the concise humility that his predecessor had shown him. He said that he could not be the equal of Abu Bakr ﵁, and he asked the community to support him, as it had supported Abu Bakr ﵁, when he acted well and to set him straight when he acted wrongly. He promised that the standard his predecessor had laid down would not be lowered. And he spoke the name of Abu Bakr ﵁ with a reverence that did not escape those present.

The bait al-mal in as-Sunh was, as already told, opened. It was empty. ʿUmar ﵁ wept. He said what he had said before: “He has made it hard for those who come after him.” And he swore that he would not live beneath the standard his predecessor had left behind. The stipend he set for himself would be just as modest. The house in which he lived would remain just as simple. He would no longer milk the goats of the widows, for the times were different, but he would receive the old women at his gate as his predecessor had received them.

The Inheritance of Two Years and Three Months

The caliphate of Abu Bakr ﵁ had lasted two years and three months. Suyuti ﵀ reckons it precisely: from the day after the passing of the Prophet ﷺ in Rabīʿ al-Awwal of 11 AH to the evening of Tuesday in Jumādā al-Ākhirah of 13 AH. Shorter than one would think. Shorter than many merely month-long campaigns of the Romans or the Persians. Shorter than the caliphates that would follow.

But in that short time everything was determined. The peninsula was saved from the Ridda, the Mushaf was gathered between two wooden boards, the armies were set across the borders, to Iraq and to Syria, the shura was confirmed as a form of governance, and the bayʿah was, in two successive examples, established as the manner of succession. The bait al-mal was arranged as a conduit, not as a storehouse. The relation between Caliph and community was, without its standing in any constitution, calibrated for the ages: the Caliph is a servant, not a prince; he asks for correction, not submission; he feeds himself as his people do, not above them.

What he had given in two years and three months, the ummah would hold before itself as a standard for fourteen more centuries. He would be named in every Friday sermon, cited in every standard work on governance, remembered in every lament over a Caliph who did not measure up to him. And his grave would be visited by millions, beside the grave of his companion ﷺ, in the corner of the mosque in Medina where the walls of the old room still mark out the space of what was once a house, the house in which the Prophet ﷺ had died and in which Abu Bakr ﵁ had been buried at his shoulder.

The Room

In the room, in al-Hujrah ash-Sharifah, they lay side by side. The Prophet ﷺ in his direction, with his face toward the qibla. Abu Bakr ﵁ behind him, with his head at the shoulder of the Prophet ﷺ. A hand’s breadth of distance between the head of the one and the head of the other. Two men who had been inseparable in life, and who in death had kept that same nearness. The cave of Thawr, the Hijra, the years in Medina, the Hajj of nine, the Hajj of ten, the two years and three months of the caliphate: all that had passed between the two of them was here condensed into a small, dark room with an earthen floor and two raised graves.

And a few years later a third place would be left open. ʿUmar ibn al-Khattab ﵁ would, on his own deathbed, ask ʿAʾishah ﵂ whether he too might be buried in that room. She would consent, in the knowledge that her father had willed it so. The three would lie together: the Messenger ﷺ on the side of the qibla, Abu Bakr ﵁ at his shoulder, ʿUmar ﵁ at the shoulder of Abu Bakr ﵁. Three men in a small room, a chain of leadership pressed so close together that the visitor of later centuries no longer knew where the shoulder of the one ended and the head of the other began.

But all this still lay in the future. In the night in which Abu Bakr as-Siddiq ﵁ was buried, the room was still half full. Two graves, and a whole space between them and the wall. And in that space, in silence, a first chapter of the caliphate came to its end.

Conclusion

When Suyuti ﵀ at the end of his passage notes the response of Abu Quhafah ﵁, he does so without comment. He gives the tidings, he gives the answer, he reckons forward to Muharram of 14 AH and notes the passing of the old father. And then he turns to the next chapter of his book, the caliphate of ʿUmar ibn al-Khattab ﵁.

But we, readers from the end of the centuries, remain a moment longer with that word of a blind old man on a mat in Makkah. His companion. It is no long sentence, it is no full benediction, it is a recognition. The father recognizes in the name of the successor the old bond with his son. The community, without putting it in so many words, recognized the same. What Abu Bakr ﵁ had borne did not pass to a stranger; it passed to his companion.

In the silence of that transition, in the night between Jumādā al-Ākhirah of 13 AH and the morning on which ʿUmar ﵁ stepped onto the minbar, lay the whole meaning of the caliphate that had begun on the morning after the passing of the Prophet ﷺ. It was no kingship bequeathed to a successor as a possession. It was a responsibility passed on to a companion. And so it would be, in the longing of whoever would look to later times, that the caliphate ought to remain: not an inheritance, but a passing-on; not a possession, but a service; not a kingship, but the chain of companions who succeed one another in truth and in fear of Allah ﷻ.

He died, and he passed it on. At his shoulder lay the Messenger ﷺ. At his foot stood his companion. And so, in the simple words of a blind father in Makkah, the caliphate had passed into no stranger’s hands.

Sources

• Jalal ad-Din as-Suyuti ﵀, Tarikh al-Khulafa (tr. Abdassamad Clarke, Ta-Ha Publishers, 3rd ed. 1995), pp. 69–76, with reference to pp. 67 (the bait al-mal empty after his death) and p. 54 (the inaugural address in retrospect).