The bayʿah of ʿUmar ibn al-Khattab ﵁

A Tuesday in Jumada al-Akhirah

It was a Tuesday in Medina, eight days before the end of the month of Jumada al-Akhirah of the thirteenth year of the Hijra. The summer of the Arabian peninsula stood high above the city. In the room of ʿAʾishah ﵂ lay Abu Bakr as-Siddiq ﵁ on the edge of his last breath. Two years, three months and a few days after his appointment as successor to the Prophet ﷺ, his office came to its end, not through rebellion, not through treachery, not through a lost battle, but as the office of his predecessor had come to its end: by the will of Allah ﷻ, on a sickbed, surrounded by those who stood closest to him.

At his bed sat the man for whom the community was already waiting with bated breath. ʿUmar ibn al-Khattab ﵁ was no stranger to the ailing caliph, and the ailing caliph was no stranger to him. Twenty years earlier they had both grown up under the lash of Quraysh in Mecca within the same message. They had made the Hijra together, they had stood side by side at Badr and at Uhud, and they had borne witness together at Hudaybiyyah. They had tended the Messenger of Allah ﷺ in his final illness, and in the two years that had passed Abu Bakr ﵁ had, at every moment of decision, from the war against the apostates to the first compilation of the Qur’an, sought the counsel of ʿUmar ﵁ and many a time followed it.

Now the first caliph of Islam lay dying, and the question that hung over Medina was not who the second would be, but how he would be appointed.

The nomination by Abu Bakr ﵁

In the preceding weeks Abu Bakr ﵁ had prepared his administration in silence. He had consulted, not in a great assembly, but in separate conversations with the oldest and most weighty men of the community. He called ʿAbd ar-Rahman ibn ʿAwf ﵁ to him and asked him for his judgement of ʿUmar ﵁; he called ʿUthman ibn ʿAffan ﵁ to him and asked him the same. He spoke with Saʿid ibn Zayd ﵁ and with Usayd ibn Hudayr ﵁. He wanted no surprise for the community, and he wanted no setback from a quarter he had not foreseen.

The answer he received each time was the same. ʿUmar ﵁ was severe, that no one denied. He had a harshness that people shrank from; he struck with the lash when need be, he raised his voice, he did not lower his eyes before whoever misbehaved. But beneath that severity, so they all confirmed, lay a justice that Islam needed. The younger generation of the Sahaba ﵃ had made him a touchstone; they feared him not because of his sword, but because of his ability to read their hearts. ʿAbd ar-Rahman ﵁ added that his severity sprang from such sincerity that Abu Bakr ﵁ had sometimes had to temper him, not spur him on. ʿUthman ﵁ answered that what was hidden in ʿUmar ﵁ was better than what was visible in him, and that no one in the community was his equal in devotion to the cause.

Abu Bakr ﵁ listened, and he gave his decision. It was not the choice of a man who could not fail; it was the choice of a man who, in all that was visible and known, was the most fitted for what was to come. The community stood before expansions that no one could have foreseen two years earlier. The Sasanian empire wavered on its western border, Byzantium had lost Syria in anticipation of Yarmuk, and the deserts of Arabia were still after the riddah wars, but their stillness was not the stillness of peace; it was the stillness of a held breath. Whoever now took upon himself the leadership of the Muslims would have to rule with armies, with judges he had to direct from afar, with spoils he had to distribute fairly, with lands he had to administer for the generations to come. It was no office for gentleness alone; it was an office for a man who could carry gentleness and severity within him at the right moments.

ʿUthman ﵁ at the writing seat

When the decision had been made, Abu Bakr ﵁ dictated his written designation. ʿUthman ﵁ sat beside the bed with ink and parchment. Abu Bakr ﵁ began with the words with which every revelation and every writing in the hand of the believers begins: In the name of Allah ﷻ, the Most Compassionate, the Most Merciful. Then he spoke that he, Abu Bakr ﵁, the caliph of the Messenger of Allah ﷺ, set this down as his final declaration to his community, at the moment he left this world and entered the next, at the hour when the unbeliever comes to faith and the sinner to repentance.

Here he fell unconscious. His illness seized him at the very tipping point of his dictation. ʿUthman ﵁ looked at the unconscious caliph, and instead of laying down his pen, he wrote on. He wrote: I have appointed as successor over you ʿUmar ibn al-Khattab ﵁, and I have withheld from you in him nothing of what is good. When Abu Bakr ﵁ came back to consciousness some time later, he asked ʿUthman ﵁ what had been written down. ʿUthman ﵁ read it out to him. Abu Bakr ﵁ smiled and uttered a takbir. He told ʿUthman ﵁ that he had suspected he would seize upon his faint as an opportunity to sow division in the community, but that he was now even more grateful to him, for he had completed what the ailing caliph had been unable to complete. May Allah ﷻ reward him for the good of Islam and its people.

This detail, that the pen of ʿUthman ﵁ had written down the decision of Abu Bakr ﵁ while the latter himself lay unconscious, was no accident. It was a shadow of what was to come. ʿUthman ﵁ himself would become, twelve years later, the third caliph, after a Shura that ʿUmar ﵁ would establish in his final days. But that belonged to a future that on this Tuesday in Jumada al-Akhirah was not yet visible.

The document read before the community

Abu Bakr ﵁ had the document carried outside. He wanted the community, insofar as it was present in Medina, to hear it before he died. He wanted no second Saqifah, no quarrel between Muhajirun and Ansar over who would now take up the leadership, and no men gathering outside the mosque to put forward their own candidate, while the first caliph lay dying within and the second still had to be confirmed.

The document was placed in the hand of a messenger and read from the minbar of the Prophet ﷺ. The mosque was full. ʿUmar ﵁ himself stood among the audience, not in the middle, not at the front, but in the place where he always stood, in a corner where his height lifted him above the heads of the others. He heard his name spoken. He heard the declaration that Abu Bakr ﵁ had designated him. He heard the exhortation to the community to listen and to obey.

And the community, which over that same minbar had given the bayʿah to Abu Bakr ﵁ two years earlier, now gave its assent without hesitation. No objection was voiced, no alternative candidate was put forward, and no tribe laid claim to its own standing. The Muhajirun were silent in assent, the Ansar were silent in assent, and the tribal chiefs from the north and the south of Arabia who were present in Medina were silent in assent. Whoever knew ʿUmar ﵁, and in this city they were all those who knew him, had nothing to add to what Abu Bakr ﵁ had already said in his written declaration.

The dying caliph and his successor

Abu Bakr ﵁ called ʿUmar ﵁ to him in the room where he lay dying. He gave him his last counsel. What has come down to us in the tradition carries the familiar heavy gravity of a man who knew that his words were being spoken to this person for the last time. He directed his successor to the duty of the night prayer that Allah ﷻ expects of the believer, and to the duty of the daytime performance that Allah ﷻ expects of the believer, and to the balance between fear and hope that the believer must carry within himself. He spoke of the people of the Muhajirun and the people of the Ansar, and of their rights in the community. He spoke of the bedouin who had not yet fully grown into Islam, and of the patience that their governance required.

And then he spoke a sentence that, once told, no one forgot: that the office he was handing on was carried not by power but by service. Whoever carried the office for himself fell by it; whoever carried it for the community was carried by Allah ﷻ. ʿUmar ﵁ stood by the bed, heard the words of his predecessor, and was silent.

Abu Bakr ﵁ passed away on the evening of that same Tuesday. His body was washed and shrouded in the same room where the Prophet ﷺ had been washed, by the same hands insofar as they were still available. He was buried in the same room, beside the Prophet ﷺ, as he had wished and as ʿAʾishah ﵂ had permitted him. The city of Medina heard the adhan for his janazah, and it heard at the same time the announcement that the bayʿah to the second caliph would be given publicly the following morning.

The public bayʿah

Az-Zuhri ﵀, who in his long life recorded the tradition of the Sahaba ﵃ in a manner that no later scholar has been able to surpass, puts it thus:

The following morning, on the Wednesday, the community gathered for the second time in two years for what had never before come to pass in the history of any people: the peaceful transfer of governance on the second day after the loss of the ruler, without a fight, without a wound, without a resistance. The mosque of the Prophet ﷺ was full once more. The minbar was ascended once more. ʿUmar ﵁ took his seat on the third step, one step below Abu Bakr ﵁, who had sat on the second, and two steps below the highest, which remained empty out of reverence for the Messenger ﷺ who would return no more.

The men came forward one by one. They laid their right hand upon his, or they took his hand with both hands, and they gave publicly what had already been given by the silence of the day before. ʿAli ibn Abi Talib ﵁ came, and he gave the bayʿah as he had already given it in private the evening before. Az-Zubayr ibn al-ʿAwwam ﵁ came, and he gave the bayʿah with the gaze that had always burned in him since the time he had been the first to draw his sword for the Prophet ﷺ. Talhah ibn ʿUbaydillah ﵁ came, and he gave the bayʿah with the hand that had been maimed at Uhud. Saʿd ibn Abi Waqqas ﵁ came, and he gave the bayʿah with the hand that in the coming months would lead the Sasanian troops at al-Qadisiyyah. ʿAbd ar-Rahman ibn ʿAwf ﵁ came. ʿUthman ibn ʿAffan ﵁ came. Abu ʿUbaydah ﵁ already stood in Syria as a commander, and his bayʿah would be confirmed through messengers.

And after the senior Muhajirun came the Ansar, led by Usayd ibn Hudayr ﵁ of Banu ʿAbd al-Ashhal, who at the Saqifah had spoken most strongly for unity. After the Ansar came the bedouin who were present in Medina. After them came the freed slaves and the young men. The bayʿah lasted into the afternoon.

The gravity of the office

Anas ibn Mālik ﵁, who as a young servant of the Prophet ﷺ had kept in his memory everything that had happened in his presence and in his later life transmitted it to his students with great precision, sums up in a single sentence what marked the rule of ʿUmar ﵁ in the years that followed:

This single sentence is the whole programme of the caliphate that had just begun. He took up the command in full: there was no half-heartedness in his rule, no division of his attention between the office and something else, no room for the thought that he might leave the matter to a confidant and take his own rest. ʿUmar ﵁ walked through Medina at night to provide for the poor, wrote letters to his governors in Syria and in Iraq, questioned the soldiers who returned from the field, received the delegations from Egypt and Persia, heard the legal disputes, judged, executed, and distributed the spoils. In his days there were very many openings: Damascus, Hims, Baalbek, Tiberias, Yarmuk, al-Qadisiyyah, Madāʾin Kisra, Jerusalem, Egypt, Babylon, Alexandria, Nahavand. Ten years, and the known world had changed.

But on this Wednesday morning, while the men came one by one to his hand, none of this future was yet visible. What was visible was a man of middle age, tall of stature, with a face on which lay the gravity of someone who had not sought the office and would not let it go for as long as Allah ﷻ left him in it. His beard was greying, his eyes were clear, and his hands were rough from a life of trade and war.

Who ʿUmar ﵁ was, before he became caliph

To understand why the bayʿah to ʿUmar ﵁ came about in two days without opposition, one must bring the man himself to mind as the community knew him in Medina. He had been born in Mecca into a family of Banu ʿAdi ibn Kaʿb, not one of the most prominent clans of Quraysh, but a family with deep roots in the old city. His father Khattab ibn Nufayl had been a hard man, known for his temper; his mother Hantamah bint Hisham ﵂ was a sister of Abu Jahl, which made the young ʿUmar ﵁ a nephew of one of the fiercest enemies of the Prophet ﷺ. In his youth he had herded under his father’s authority in the desert around Mecca, a labour that had given him the body and the nature of a man of the land, not the softness of a man of the palace.

In the first six years of the prophethood he had been one of the fierce opponents of the young Islamic community. He had persecuted Sahaba ﵃, had punished Muslim ﵂ slave-converts in the streets, and in a famous moment, after his conversion, confessed to the Messenger ﷺ that in his time before submission he had been the most violent enemy of the Islamic faith. His conversion, in the sixth year of the prophethood when he was twenty-seven years old, had brought the Meccan Sahaba ﵃ such joy that the revelation was from that day recited openly in the Kaʿbah. The Prophet ﷺ had called him after his conversion al-Faruq, the Distinguisher, because from that day on he made visible the separation between truth and falsehood within himself and in those around him.

In the Medinan years he had stood beside the Prophet ﷺ in every decisive assembly. He had fought at Badr, at Uhud, at al-Khandaq, at Khaybar, at Hudaybiyyah, at Tabuk. He had given his daughter Hafsah ﵂ in marriage to the Prophet ﷺ, and he had counselled the Prophet ﷺ in many moments of decision, sometimes with views that were confirmed in the revelation itself, as over the hijab and over the treatment of the prisoners of war of Badr. Under Abu Bakr ﵁ he had served for two years as judge, as counsellor, as adviser to the commanders and as organiser of the administration.

What Medina therefore received on this Wednesday morning was no stranger. ʿUmar ﵁ was the man whose daily dealings with the community already spanned twenty years. What made the bayʿah official was the familiarity that preceded it.

The absence of resistance

It is a virtually unknown event in the history of worldly power that a successor is accepted without opposition. When an emperor of Byzantium died, a civil war usually broke out; when a king of Persia died, his sons killed one another in the palace corridor; and when a tribal chief under Quraysh died in the jahiliyyah, the cousins of his cousins formed coalitions to draw the standing toward their part of the tribe. Islam had in two years broken this old pattern. Abu Bakr ﵁ had weathered Saqifah with a bayʿah that was confirmed publicly the next day; ʿUmar ﵁ received the bayʿah without a Saqifah, for Abu Bakr ﵁ had removed every doubt in his dictation.

No one rose to put forward a rival candidate. Saʿd ibn ʿUbadah ﵁, the leader of Khazraj who at the time under Abu Bakr ﵁ had not given the bayʿah and had remained in his house, was by now in Syria and was not in the mosque. But even he sent no messenger to contest the appointment. The community had learned that the unity of Islam was worth more than the honour of a tribe.

When the last hand had been given, ʿUmar ﵁ spoke to the community. But his first khutbah, and the title by which he would be known in history, belong to another story, which is continued in the next article.

What this day meant

For whoever surveys this Tuesday and the Wednesday that followed, there is more at work than a simple transfer of power. Islam stood, twelve years after the Hijra, before a question to which no ancient civilisation had an answer: how does a community that has lost its prophet, and after him also its first caliph, go on without the voice that had shaped it. It does this, as this week shows, by binding itself to an order greater than the life of a few men. The Qur’an is its law, the Sunnah is its example, the Shura is its means of choosing from among them the executor of the Law, and the bayʿah is its ratification of that choice.

On this Wednesday morning in Jumada al-Akhirah of the year thirteen, the community had not only chosen a new caliph; it had confirmed that its manner of choosing a caliph worked. It was no hereditary succession, no military appointment, no senatus consultum. It was a designation by the preceding caliph on the basis of consultation, followed by a public bayʿah in which the community accepted the designation. Two years later, in another article of this cycle, this procedure would be followed again, this time by ʿUmar ﵁ himself, who would entrust his succession not to one man but to a Shura of six. But that belongs to the end of the story that begins here.

On the minbar of the Prophet ﷺ, in the mosque where the revelation had descended, in the city where the Hijra had found its destination, the community gave its loyalty to a man who would lead it for ten years with a severity and a justice of which even his enemies would later bear witness that it had no equal in the history of mankind. The story of those ten years begins here.

Sources

• Jalal ad-Din as-Suyuti ﵀, Tarikh al-Khulafa (trans. Abdassamad Clarke, Ta-Ha Publishers, 3rd edition 1995), pp. 134, 141.