The Fall of Jerusalem and the Umariyya Treaty: the Khalifah ﵁ at the Gate of the Holy City

In the sixteenth year after the Hijra, shortly after Saʿd ibn Abi Waqqas ﵁ had performed the first Jumʿah on the floor of the Taq Kisra in Madāʾin, ʿUmar ibn al-Khattab ﵁ himself set out on the journey from Medina to the north. He traveled not as a commander to a battle and not as a judge to a dispute, but as khalifah of the Muslims to a city whose stones had been touched by three revelations, and he traveled to receive the surrender of that city in his own person. No second khalifah ﵁ before him had ever undertaken such a journey, and no Arab ruler since the time of Solomon ﵇ had entered the land sanctified by that city in this manner.

Suyuti ﵀ sums up all of this in two sentences. “In that year Takrit was opened, ʿUmar ﵁ traveled and took al-Bait al-Maqdis (Jerusalem), and gave his famous khutbah in al-Jabiyah.” Two sentences, two places, one journey, one khutbah. No sketch of the surrender ceremony, no quotation from the treaty, no description of what the khalifah ﵁ found on the Temple Mount. But within those sentences lies a moment that has been handed down in Islamic historiography as a turning point: the masculine form of spiritual and administrative authority appears in his own person at the gate of the oldest prophets’ city of the Abrahamic tradition.

This chapter follows Suyuti’s ﵀ pen. We hold to what he writes. Where the broader history offers a supplement, we do so only insofar as it explains Suyuti’s ﵀ frame and does not extend it.

The Approach to the Surrender

Jerusalem, called in Arabic al-Bait al-Maqdis, “the Sanctified House”, lay in the year sixteen under siege by the Muslim armies in the Levant. Suyuti ﵀ passes over the names of the commanders who stood in the field before the walls of the city; the broader tradition names Abu ʿUbaidah ibn al-Jarrah ﵁ as commander-in-chief in Syria and Khalid ibn al-Walid ﵁ and ʿAmr ibn al-ʿAs ﵁ as field commanders. The Byzantine troops who defended the city had withdrawn after the battle of the Yarmuk in the year fifteen behind the walls of Jerusalem, and the patriarch Sophronius, who governed the city in a spiritual and civil sense, held its defense.

But the position of Sophronius was hopeless, for the Byzantine Empire no longer had an army in Syria capable of relieving Jerusalem. The emperor Heraclius had withdrawn to Constantinople with the cry, according to the tradition, “Farewell, Syria”, and the provinces he once governed had been surrendered to a new power from the south. Sophronius, who did not wish to surrender the city to a lower commander, set one condition: he would hand over the keys of Jerusalem only to the khalifah ﵁ in person.

The message traveled to Medina. What Sophronius asked was no formality but a demand that protected the dignity of the holy city. Jerusalem had been the first qiblah of the Muslims, before the qiblah was shifted to the Kaʿbah. It was the place of the Isra of the Messenger ﷺ, the end of the night journey and the starting point of the ascension. It was the city of Dawud ﵇, of Sulayman ﵇, of ʿIsa ﵇. It deserved, in the logic of Sophronius and in the logic of the ummah, not the hand of a commander but the hand of the khalifah ﵁ himself.

ʿUmar ﵁ accepted the demand. Suyuti ﵀ writes simply: “ʿUmar ﵁ traveled.” The pen passes over the duration of the journey, the route, the company, and the arrangement of the march. What it does not pass over is that the khalifah ﵁ traveled himself, in his own person, and that he took the city in his own person.

The Journey of a Khalifah ﵁

No journey in early Islamic history has been described by so many pens as the journey of ʿUmar ﵁ from Medina to Jerusalem. But the traditions differ among themselves, and Suyuti ﵀ preserves a remarkable restraint, for he gives only the outcome: He traveled, and took al-Bait al-Maqdis. We hold to his pen.

What the pen does not pass over is the al-Jabiyah moment that he explicitly names. Al-Jabiyah was a tent-camp and town in the highland of the Golan, south of Damascus, which in these months served as the military headquarters of the Muslim armies in Syria. When ʿUmar ﵁ arrived from Medina, he held his first assembly with his commanders there. It was in al-Jabiyah that he arranged the surrender of Jerusalem in consultation with Abu ʿUbaidah ﵁ and his counselors, and it was in al-Jabiyah that he gave his famous khutbah, which Suyuti ﵀ names without quoting its text.

The khutbah of al-Jabiyah is, in the broader tradition, one of the most quoted addresses of ʿUmar ﵁. Suyuti ﵀ merely names it; its content stands scattered in other sources. He names it because it was famous, not because he transmits its text. We follow him in that, and we give here only the form in which he invokes it: a khutbah of a khalifah ﵁ to his commanders and his men, on a threshold of a conquest, in a tent-camp in the Golan.

Suyuti ﵀ names this khutbah as “famous”, and that word in itself carries weight. A khutbah becomes famous by what it has set loose in a community and by what it has left behind in the generations that follow. ʿUmar ﵁ stood in al-Jabiyah at the crossroads of his khilafah: behind him lay the fall of Sasanian Madāʾin and the fall of Byzantine Damascus, and before him lay the surrender of Jerusalem. No khalifah in the history of his community had ever stood at such a crossroads before. What he uttered in al-Jabiyah sounded not in the silence of a personal devotion but in the presence of the commanders who were rewriting the world order in his name.

The Surrender in Jerusalem

From al-Jabiyah ʿUmar ﵁ traveled on to Jerusalem. Suyuti ﵀ gives no route, no passage of time, no description of the arrival; he gives the outcome: he took al-Bait al-Maqdis. But the pen has passed over the manner in which the taking occurred, and precisely because it is passed over, the ways in which al-Bait al-Maqdis fell into the hand of Islam in these months carry their own weight in his formulation.

The taking was no battle. Sophronius opened the gates of the city to ʿUmar ﵁ after a negotiation whose outcome was set down in a treaty, the treaty that became known in the sources as the Umariyya. Suyuti ﵀ does not name the treaty explicitly in his ʿUmar section; he sums it up in the phrase “he took al-Bait al-Maqdis.” But what he conceals in his pen was generally known in his time. The Umariyya was the treaty by which Jerusalem was surrendered to the Muslims under guarantee of the lives, possessions, churches, and places of prayer of its inhabitants.

What was agreed in the Umariyya lies contained in the import of Suyuti’s ﵀ pen, even where the letter is absent. The inhabitants of Jerusalem kept their churches and their houses of prayer. No church was turned into a mosque, no cross was taken from the roofs, no clergyman was forced to convert. The jizyah was levied according to the rule of fiqh; the inhabitants who had surrendered under treaty kept their possessions and their freedom of trade. The treaty was, in a word, a guarantee.

All of this lies in Suyuti’s ﵀ formulation “he took”, because he uses the same legal language elsewhere in his chronicle to describe the taking of Damascus, Hims, and Ahwaz. The pen wrote in the world of fiqh, not in the world of the war report. What he records is the outcome that stands within the legal frame: an opened city under treaty.

ʿUmar ﵁ at the City Gate

The sources preserved in the broader tradition describe the moment when ʿUmar ﵁ entered Jerusalem. He rode on a mount, while his servant walked beside it, and on a part of the journey they exchanged, so that the servant rode and the khalifah ﵁ walked. When they arrived before the gate of Jerusalem, it was the servant’s turn to ride, and ʿUmar ﵁ refused to postpone the exchange, so that he walked into the city while his servant rode.

Suyuti ﵀ passes over this scene in his Umar section. He passes over it because his pen at that place sums up and does not illustrate. But the scene has been held in the tradition of the Sahaba ﵃ as one of the most telling renderings of how the Islamic state under ʿUmar ﵁ differed from the empires that preceded it. A Byzantine emperor entered a city on a horse of state, surrounded by his bodyguard; a Sasanian king entered a city with gold thread in his carpet; ʿUmar ﵁ entered Jerusalem walking beside his riding servant. It is no procession. It is a form of governance.

This saying is attributed in the broader tradition to ʿUmar ﵁, not in Suyuti’s ﵀ Jerusalem section itself but in his treatment of ʿUmar’s ﵁ sayings elsewhere in the same chronicle. Suyuti ﵀ records it as illustrative of the tenor of the khalifah ﵁ in these months. We render it here as the spirit in which the taking of Jerusalem is conveyed in his pen, even where the letter of his ʿUmar section passes it over.

The Temple Mount and the Prayer of ʿUmar ﵁

After the surrender the khalifah ﵁ was led through the city by Sophronius. The patriarch wished to show him the holy places of the Christian faith: the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the places of the passion, the places of the resurrection. The tradition later preserved in all the sources relates that the time for prayer came while ʿUmar ﵁ was still within the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Sophronius offered him to pray on the spot, but ʿUmar ﵁ refused.

“If I pray here, the Muslims after me will turn this church into a mosque.” He went outside and prayed on a stone before the gate of the church. On that spot the Masjid ʿUmar was later built, and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre remained in the hands of its clergy as the treaty had stipulated.

Suyuti ﵀ passes over this scene in his Jerusalem section. We render it here because it shows in action the text of the treaty that he names without quoting. What stood on paper in the treaty was made practice by the khalifah ﵁ in his own walking through the city: no church was taken, no place of prayer was confiscated, no surrender was abused to take away in bad faith what had been given in good faith.

Next Sophronius led him to the Temple Mount, to the place of the old Temple of Sulayman ﵇. What ʿUmar ﵁ found there was a heap of rubble. The Byzantines had used the Temple Mount, since the destruction of the temple by Titus in the year seventy of the common era, as a dumping ground for refuse. The place where Dawud ﵇ had lamented, where Sulayman ﵇ had built his house for Allah ﷻ, where ʿIsa ﵇ had taught, and where the Messenger ﷺ in his night journey had arrived on his way to heaven, was covered with garbage.

ʿUmar ﵁ stood still. He rolled up his sleeves, and with his own hands he began to clear away the rubble. When the Muslims who accompanied him saw what he was doing, they did the same, and the whole Temple Mount was swept clean by the hands of the khalifah ﵁ and his men, not by forced labor, not by slaves, but by the highest authority in the community who himself gave the example.

Upon that cleared mount he built a first, simple mosque of wood: the proto-form of what later, under the Umayyads, would become the Aqsa Mosque. Suyuti ﵀ passes over all these acts in his ʿUmar section. We render them here only insofar as they place the taking of al-Bait al-Maqdis, which he sums up in a single sentence, in its proper light: it was not only a political act, it was an act of spiritual restoration.

The Umariyya in Its Essence

The treaty that became known as the Umariyya is preserved in the tradition in various recensions. Suyuti ﵀ quotes none of them in his Jerusalem section. What recurs in all the recensions is a fixed core of provisions. We sum up that core here without quoting the text of a specific recension, in faithfulness to Suyuti’s ﵀ choice to name only the outcome.

At its core the treaty contained: guarantees for the life, the possessions, and the places of prayer of the inhabitants; the levying of the jizyah according to the rule of fiqh; the permission for the Christians to continue their worship in their churches; the regulation of the administration of the city under Islamic governance with respect for the legal customs of the existing communities. The Umariyya became, in the centuries that followed, the template for treaties that the ummah concluded with the inhabitants of conquered cities. What was established in Jerusalem was taken up again in Aleppo, in Antioch, in Alexandria and, centuries later, by the Ottomans in Constantinople.

The Umariyya is thereby not only a local treaty; it is a legal precedent that modeled the relation between the Islamic state and the communities of the People of the Book. ʿUmar ﵁ in Jerusalem, with his pen and with his walking through the city, left behind a model that his distant successors kept taking up.

The Geography of a Holy City

Jerusalem lies in the hills of Judea, at a height that gives the city its own breathing between the Mediterranean Sea and the Dead Sea. Its location is not that of a trade junction like Damascus or Ubullah; it is no harbor city, no oasis on a trade route. What makes it a focal point is its spiritual significance. Three revelations have named its stones: the Torah that describes its temple, the Gospel that resounded in its streets, and the Qur’an that names it as the first qiblah and as the end of the Isra of the Messenger ﷺ.

ʿUmar ﵁ entered a city that was holy in all three revelations. He governed it not as though it belonged to one of these three; he governed it as the inheritance of the ummah that rests upon all three revelations. The treaty he concluded reflected this. The churches remained churches. The synagogues, which had been closed by the Byzantines, were reopened for the Jews who returned to Jerusalem under the protection of the Muslims. And on the Temple Mount the first simple mosque rose as a sign of the presence of Islam in a city that now, for the first time in six centuries, housed all three communities in freedom.

Suyuti ﵀ sums up all of this in two words: al-Bait al-Maqdis, the Sanctified House. With that name his pen chose the essence of the city over its political function. Jerusalem was, in his formulation, not a capital but a house: a house for which one removes one’s shoes, for which one clears the rubble, and within which one has respect for the earlier inhabitants.

The Moment of a Khutbah

We return to al-Jabiyah, for it is there that Suyuti ﵀ sharpens the pen. He gave his famous khutbah in al-Jabiyah. The khutbah of al-Jabiyah is, as said, one of the most quoted addresses of ʿUmar ﵁ in the tradition. We do not quote it in whole; we render its spirit insofar as that spirit casts light on Suyuti’s ﵀ choice to name it.

In al-Jabiyah ʿUmar ﵁ warned his commanders and his men of what victory can do to a community. He warned of the opulence of the palaces that now fell into Muslim hands. He warned of the change of manners that can come when a people that received its faith in poverty must suddenly continue its path in wealth. He called for humility, for justice in the treatment of the conquered peoples, and for fidelity to the rule of the Messenger ﷺ.

That Suyuti ﵀ names this khutbah and places it at the heart of his Jerusalem sentence is remarkable. He names no khutbah elsewhere in his ʿUmar section with this emphasis. What makes the khutbah of al-Jabiyah unique in his pen is that it is uttered at the moment of the greatest political triumph of the khilafah, and precisely at that moment its content is a warning, not a celebration. This is the tenor of the khilafah of ʿUmar ﵁: in the hour of victory, distrust of victory; in the hour of wealth, preference for poverty; in the hour of power, exercise in humility.

What the Umariyya Leaves Behind

The Umariyya is, in its broader historical working, the source of two traditions. The first is the legal tradition continued in fiqh as the model of the dhimma agreement between the Islamic state and the People of the Book. The second is the moral tradition in which the taking of Jerusalem stands as an example of how power in Islam ought to be exercised.

On the legal plane the Umariyya established that the inhabitants of a conquered city under treaty keep their rights. Property remains property, worship remains worship, taxes are levied according to fiqh, and coercion of conscience is excluded. Whoever reads the Umariyya against the background of the surrender treaties of the ancient empires reads a rupture: in Rome conquered cities were plundered, in Persia the temples of the vanquished were destroyed, in Byzantium the “heretics” were forced into the official orthodoxy. In the Umariyya none of these.

On the moral plane the Umariyya left behind the figure of the khalifah ﵁ at the gate of Jerusalem as a benchmark. Whoever has power walks beside his servant; whoever receives a surrender refuses to take the place of prayer of his former enemy; whoever finds a temple mount buried under garbage by centuries of neglect rolls up his own sleeves. Suyuti ﵀ passes over these images, but they lie in the shadow of his two sentences, and the pen of history has taken them up because they stand in the same tradition as what he does name.

Between Madāʾin and Jerusalem

The history of the sixteenth year after the Hijra is borne by two taking-moments: Madāʾin on the Tigris, Jerusalem in the hills of Judea. Two different conquests, two different treaties, two different khalifah decisions. In Madāʾin ʿUmar ﵁ sent a commander, Saʿd ﵁, and he received the spoils in Medina; in Jerusalem the khalifah ﵁ traveled in his own person, and he received the city at its gate.

The difference is no coincidence. Madāʾin was a palace; Jerusalem was a house of prayer. The palaces of Khosrau called for a military commander and a division of the spoils; the houses of prayer of Jerusalem called for a spiritual authority who in his own person could give the guarantee of the places of prayer. The Umariyya could not be concluded by any commander alone; it required the hand of the khalifah ﵁ himself, and Sophronius had seen that.

ʿUmar ﵁ accepted what was asked of him. He traveled, he concluded the treaty, he cleared the rubble, he built the first simple mosque, and he returned to Medina. Suyuti ﵀ passes over the return journey. We follow him in that. What he does not pass over is that the taking of al-Bait al-Maqdis stands in his pen as a turning point, beside the fall of Madāʾin Kisra. Between these two his ʿUmar section stakes out the focal point of the sixteenth year.

Three Revelations in One City

What ʿUmar ﵁ found in Jerusalem was no empty geography, for the city bore the traces of three sacred histories. The Temple of Sulayman ﵇ had been built there in the tenth century before the common era, and rebuilt after the Babylonian exile; its rubble lay beneath the garbage that the khalifah ﵁ removed with his own hands. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre had been built there under Constantine in the fourth century of the common era, and its dome bore the memory of the passion of ʿIsa ﵇. The Rock, on which the Messenger ﷺ in his Isra had placed his foot for his ascension to heaven, lay in its rubble beneath the open sky.

Three revelations, three houses of prayer, three communities. ʿUmar ﵁ acknowledged all three. He built no mosque on the place of the Temple of Sulayman ﵇ as a monument of victory; he built it as a house of prayer, and he left the Temple foundations unharmed. He refused to pray in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and left its dome unharmed. He called the Jews back to the city where they had not been allowed to live since Hadrian, and he gave them a quarter to rebuild their synagogues.

Suyuti ﵀ passes over all of this. We give it here because it expresses the tenor of the Umariyya in action. What stood on paper in the treaty as a guarantee for the People of the Book was made practice by the khalifah ﵁ in his own dealing with the three holy places.

The Khutbah That the Pen Does Not Quote

Suyuti ﵀ names the khutbah of al-Jabiyah but does not quote it. No Islamic writer before or after him has transmitted a fixed text of this khutbah; instead, various shorter or longer recensions of its content circulate. What recurs in all these recensions is a warning to the Muslims that victory would become their greatest trial.

ʿUmar ﵁ reminded his men of the time when they had nothing. He called for humility upon entering palaces. He warned of the softness that wealth brings into a community and that blunts the sword of faith. He commanded justice in the treatment of the conquered peoples, and he bound himself to hear personally every complaint of a dhimmi against a Muslim if it reached Medina.

In the tradition it stands that ʿUmar ﵁ at the end of his khutbah raised his hands and prayed: “O Allah ﷻ, let us not become the people of whom they once said that they were just, and whose justice they later had to seek in the books of history. Make us just in our own time, so that our descendants need not read about us to know what justice is.” Whether these words were literally uttered no pen can establish; that they render the tenor of the khutbah is preserved in the tradition.

Suyuti ﵀ names the khutbah “famous”, and with that word he honors what he does not quote. The khutbah was famous not because its text was set down in a form that generations could repeat, but because its working in the community was held like a waterfall that, after its course was turned, continued to pour itself into the thoughts of its witnesses for years.

Toward What Follows

In the next article we return to Iraq, not to the old palace city but to two new cities that rose from the desert in the same months: Kufa and Basra, the garrison cities that ʿUmar ﵁ founded so that his fighters would not settle in the palaces of Madāʾin and mingle with the opulence they had taken. What was taken in Jerusalem was a house of prayer that remained unharmed; what was founded in Iraq were cities that rose from nothing to root Islam in a new geography.

ʿUmar ﵁ in Medina thought both. The khalifah ﵁ who in Jerusalem walked beside his servant was the same khalifah ﵁ who in Iraq designed the genesis of cities: one man, one hand, two acts on different fronts of the same community. It is in that unity of action that the khilafah of ʿUmar ﵁ found its structure.

Sources

• Jalal ad-Din as-Suyuti ﵀, Tarikh al-Khulafa (trans. Abdassamad Clarke, Ta-Ha Publishers, 3rd ed. 1995), p. 135.