The Year of Ash and the Plague of Amwas

A Year in Which the Heaven Was Silent

In the eighteenth year of the Hijra, which in the Gregorian chronology falls on 638 and 639, the Hijaz lived through a trial that would touch the community of the Muslims into its deepest fibers. It was not the trial of a battle, not the tension of a siege, not the doubt that follows a defeat; it was the trial of what fails to come. Of the rain that did not come, of the grass that did not turn green, of the springs that ran dry, of the animals that lay down on the open plains because they no longer had the strength to seek out pastures that were nowhere to be found in any case. The earth around Medina changed that year from yellow to black, and the people began to call it what it would continue to be named in the books of the historians: ʿĀm ar-Ramadah, the Year of Ash.

At the same time, in Syria and in Palestine, where the Muslim armies had only a few years earlier won Yarmuk and had brought the provinces of the Roman Empire within the caliphate of Medina, a second trial struck. Not of drought, but of pestilence. The plague of Amwas, after the small place between Jerusalem and Ramla where it first became visible, would live on in the sources as the first great epidemic that touched Islamic history. Suyuti ﵀ gathers both events under the same year number in his concise chronicle, and with that he shows that the community under ʿUmar ﵁ was tried not by one front but by two: the one front was the heaven above Medina that was silent, the other front was the breath of the sick in Syria that would take away the whole corps of commanders of the north.

We follow in this article the concise indications of Suyuti ﵀, avoid what he does not say, and stay close to the words he gives. Whoever seeks the names of the specific shuhada under the plague, whoever wants the exact figures of the dead, whoever wants the detailed diplomatic correspondence between Medina and the commanders in Syria, will not find in Suyuti’s concise record of the year 18 AH what he seeks. What Suyuti ﵀ does do is give two sentences, and in those two sentences lies a world of meaning.

The Eighteenth Year According to Suyuti

In the chronological table that Suyuti ﵀ draws up of the caliphate of ʿUmar ﵁, the eighteenth year of the Hijra receives a brief mention. He writes that in that year Jundaysabur was opened by treaty and Hulwan by force. He names the plague of Amwas in the same breath as the surrender of Urfa, of Sumaysat, of Harran, of Nasibin, of a part of Mesopotamia, of Mosul and its environs. It is the manner in which Suyuti ﵀ keeps his year registers: one year receives a few sentences, sometimes half a page, sometimes less, and in those sparing lines the openings, the treaties, and the catastrophes stand unvarnished beside one another. The plague stands among the conquests as though the chronicler wished to say that in the same months in which the eagles of Islam flew over the Tigris, the breath of pestilence passed over the hills of Palestine.

The eighteenth year opened, so the chronicles give, not unfavorably. The armies of the Muslims had in the years before opened Damascus, Homs, Baalbek, and large parts of Jordan. Jerusalem was in the hands of the Muslims, and the Caliph ﵁ had received the transfer there in person, dressed in his patched mantle, on a camel that he rode in turn with his servant. History moved, it seemed, in a line of victory upon victory. And then, in the midst of that advance, the earth itself struck up the silence.

The Black of the Ramadah

The drought around Medina was not the first that the Arabs could remember, for the Arabian peninsula knows its cycle of fat and lean years. But this drought was different, for it held on. The store that wise families kept for such years ran out, and the caravans that should have brought in grain from Syria or Egypt found the roads impassable because of the hungry Bedouins. On the open plains around Medina the cloths of the tents turned dull brown, then gray, and at last black from the dust that flew in every direction with the dry winds. The people began to call the year by its name, not from poetic inspiration but from sober observation: it looked as though the whole land had been burned, as though a great sea of fire had passed over it that had left only ash behind.

The Caliph ﵁ lived that year as his people lived. Whoever reads Suyuti ﵀ on the way of life of ʿUmar ﵁ knows that this meant no change for him; he had always eaten what the poorest laborer ate and had always clothed himself in the coarse weave in which the poorest of his subjects clothed themselves. But in that year of ash he added something to his usual austerity: he swore to touch no fat, no meat, no milk so long as his people were in hunger, and he would eat what they ate and not a mouthful more. The tradition says that his stomach sank in so far that his ribs became countable beneath his mantle, and that his voice grew weaker on the minbar, so that in his khutbah he addressed the people with a rasping in the throat.

He called to Allah ﷻ for rain, in a public supplication that brought the people to tears. He sent letters to the commanders in Syria and in Egypt, to Abu ʿUbaydah ﵁ in the north and to the governors in the newly opened provinces, to send stores to Medina. He himself organized the distribution of what came in, saw to it that no widow and no orphan remained without food, and laid down the rule that first the foreign Bedouins who had taken refuge in Medina in their need received their share, before he or his own house touched anything. Whoever came to Medina in those months found a city whose Caliph ﵁ himself walked along the roads with the sacks of grain to see that everyone who walked also had something in hand.

The Many Who Fell Away in the South

In the hardness of that drought people fell away. Who exactly, we do not know from the concise record of Suyuti ﵀ in this year. He gives the event as a fact. He does not name the plague as the cause of the hunger, nor the hunger as the cause of the plague; he places both beside one another as two trials that came over the community in the same year. The names that later books attach to the dead of those months find no place in Suyuti’s table of the year 18 AH, and we hold to what he gives. Many sahabah ﵁ fell away in those months, many families lost their providers, and many young widows joined the women that the Caliph ﵁ had already taken under his direct care over the years. The loss was borne in silence.

What went through the mouths of the people in those months was not complaint but supplication. ʿUmar ﵁ taught the community, as the Prophet ﷺ had taught it in similar months in Medina, that the drought was a sign, no punishment without reason but a call to return to the supplication, to the fasting, to the generosity toward those who no longer had even their last date. The Caliph ﵁ asked the people to feed one another before they themselves ate; he asked them to slaughter no animal that could still give a drop of milk, to store up no grain that the neighbor still needed, to put away no mantle that could warm a shivering refugee.

In one tradition that later historians have preserved, he called to Allah ﷻ by the hand of his uncle al-ʿAbbas ﵁ as the mediating kinsman of the Prophet ﷺ, and the tradition says that the rain thereupon returned within days over the Hijaz. But this passage does not stand in the short lines of Suyuti ﵀ on the year 18 AH, and we mention it only in a general sense, without using it as our main source. For our article the concise record of Suyuti ﵀ remains the norm. He gives the fact of the Ramadah, he gives the fact of Amwas, he gives the openings of Jundaysabur and Hulwan, and he leaves it further to the other books to deepen what he omits in these lines.

The Plague of Amwas

On the other side of the caliphate, in the hills between Jerusalem and the Mediterranean Sea, the plague struck. Amwas was no great city but a village on the old road between Bayt al-Maqdis and Lydda. It lay in a valley where two waterways came together, and it was a junction of the supply of the Muslim armies that guarded the newly fallen Syrian provinces. The plague became visible first in that village, and it spread from there over the garrisons, over the villages, over the hills. Suyuti ﵀ names it in one line, together with the openings of Urfa and Sumaysat, and with that he enters it into the annals of Islam as an event that stands on the same footing as the great conquests.

What a plague was in the seventh century, only those who survived it knew. A man rose, felt at midday a hardness in his throat, took fever in the course of the evening, developed swellings under the armpits or in the groin, raved in the night, and was stiff by the Fajr. Others stretched it out to two days, three days; a handful survived, the most did not. The physician of that time could do little, and the customs of isolation that the Prophet ﷺ had commanded in his ahadith on the plague were the only effective protection, and even that came late. Whole garrisons were halved, whole villages were depopulated, and the commanders who held the helm in Syria saw half of their officers collapse.

Many sahabah ﵁ fell under that plague. Suyuti ﵀ names no names in his concise record of the year 18 AH, and we hold to his silence. We know that there were among them those who had served the Prophet ﷺ personally in his days, who had stood at Badr, who had shed blood at Uhud, who had fought at Khaybar, who had seen the eagles of Heraclius yield at Yarmuk. They fell not under the sword but under the breath; they died not in the field of battle but on the mats where they had been laid down by the men who a few hours later were laid down themselves. The community mourned deeply, and the Caliph ﵁ in Medina received the reports in the manner in which he was accustomed to receive what reached him as heavy tidings, with innā lillāhi wa-innā ilayhi rājiʿūn, with a downcast gaze, and with a long deliberation over what to do.

ʿUmar ﵁ and the Counsels in Syria

When the reports of the plague arrived in Medina, ʿUmar ﵁ was on his way to the north. He had decided to visit Syria in his own person, to see the state of the provinces, to speak with the commanders, and to deliberate with the people who had come under Islamic governance in the newly opened territories about their needs. When he reached the neighborhood of Sargh, a border post on the road to Syria, he received the official notice that the plague in Amwas raged among his troops. He convened a council, and the question that came to the table was simple and heavy: go on or turn back. The Muhajirun at his side gave their opinion, then the Ansar, then the older Quraish who were with him on this journey. The counsels were divided. Some held that the Caliph ﵁ must not abandon the troops in their heaviest hour; others held that he ought not himself to walk into the epidemic when he had the leadership over the whole ummah.

ʿUmar ﵁ listened, deliberated, and decided to return to Medina. He would continue to govern the provinces from his capital, he would send supply and reinforcement, he would pray for his troops, but he would not himself step into the plague when the Prophet ﷺ had taught in his ahadith that whoever finds himself in a land where the plague is must remain there, and whoever stands outside it must not go in. The Caliph ﵁ applied the hadith to himself. He turned back, and the people understood that the wisdom of the Prophet ﷺ was not broken in the Caliph ﵁ either by his office.

Among the commanders in Syria, Abu ʿUbaydah ibn al-Jarrah ﵁ did what a commander can do. He organized the isolation of the sick, he moved the healthy troops to higher and drier ground, he comforted the men who lost their brothers, he arranged the burials according to the Sunnah, and he held fast the discipline of the garrisons in a time in which every other commander had seen his troops melt away. What further became of his fate has been taken up by the broader biographical literature, and we respect in this article the silence that Suyuti ﵀ keeps in his year register of 18 AH over those specific names. We know that many sahabah ﵁ fell in those months, and we bear their loss in silence. An article about them belongs not here, but in the biographical sketches that the other sources offer.

The Openings In Spite of All

In the same year in which the Ramadah dried the Hijaz and the plague of Amwas thinned the Syrian provinces, the Muslim armies opened Jundaysabur by treaty and Hulwan by force. Suyuti ﵀ names the one without pathos and the other without triumph-song, as though he wished to say that the expansion of Islam in these years did not cease, not even when the heaven above the capital was silent and the breath of the plague passed over the troops. Jundaysabur, a Sasanian city in Khuzestan with a renowned medical school, came into the hands of the Muslims by treaty, which meant that the population was allowed to keep its lives, its possessions, and its faith community under the protection of the Islamic state, in exchange for the jizyah. Hulwan, a mountain city on the pass that separates the Iranian highlands from Mesopotamia, fell by force; its inhabitants had refused to negotiate, and the city was taken by the troops after a short siege.

At the same time the year brought the openings of Urfa and Sumaysat, of Harran, Nasibin, and a part of Mesopotamia, of Mosul and its environs. Some by force, others by treaty, and in some cases Suyuti ﵀ gives the two possibilities beside one another as tradition. What matters is the bed of the whole: in a year in which the drought ravaged the Hijaz and the plague halved the Syrian troops, the borders of the Islamic state continued to advance outward. The one front did not fail because the other stood under pressure, and the Caliph ﵁ knew how to orchestrate these fronts so that loss in the one place did not become loss in the other.

The Spiritual Reckoning

For the community of the Muslims the eighteenth year of the Hijra was a reckoning that it had to take up into its memory. The Ramadah taught the people, in the way that only hunger teaches, that the prosperity they had known since Badr, since Hudaybiyyah, since Yarmuk was not self-evident. Allah ﷻ grants, and Allah ﷻ withholds. The openings of the north, however glorious, did not protect the capital against the black of a dry winter, and the wealth that began to flow in from Syria and Egypt was not the foundation of the community but its gift. When the gift was withheld, the community remained alone with its supplication and with the austerity in which the Caliph ﵁ went before it without exception.

The plague of Amwas taught another lesson. It taught that the people who did not fall in battle could fall on the mat, that the sword was not the only test by which the community was struck, and that the fate of a great part of the first generation of companions, who had served the Prophet ﷺ, was sealed not on the battlefield but on the sickbed, in the midst of people they had liberated, in a valley between Bayt al-Maqdis and the sea. The Caliph ﵁ mourned, the community mourned, but neither broke. The command in Syria was arranged anew, the gaps in the garrisons were filled, the supply kept coming, and the administrative continuity remained maintained.

For ʿUmar ﵁ personally the year was a test of endurance. He who had the habit of deciding swiftly and commanding clearly had to learn that year to wait: to wait for the rain, to wait for the end of the plague, to wait for the reports from Syria that would tell him which of his dear companions whom he had known since Mecca he would lose that year, and to wait for the moments at which the supplication of the community, which he led, would receive the right answer from the heaven. He waited in austerity, he waited in fasting, and he waited without giving up his trust that all of this was bearable, because the Prophet ﷺ had taught in his days that the believer is brought only nearer to his Lord by the trial.

The End of the Year

Toward the end of the eighteenth year of the Hijra the rains had reached the Hijaz again, the garrisons in Syria had completed their rearrangement, the plague of Amwas had subsided to a local remnant, and the openings of Urfa, Sumaysat, Harran, Nasibin, Mosul, Jundaysabur, and Hulwan stood inscribed as facts in the register of Suyuti ﵀. The community had lost, and it had won, and it had borne both under the leadership of a Caliph ﵁ who had not hesitated to suffer along with his people, and who had not hesitated to apply the wisdom of the Prophet ﷺ about the plague to himself, even though it cost him personally the journey he had wished to complete.

In the chapter that follows this, Suyuti ﵀ brings us to Egypt. The armies of the Caliph ﵁ would in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first year of the Hijra bring the old province of the pharaohs within the borders of Islam, and ʿAmr ibn al-ʿAs ﵁, one of the sharpest tacticians among the companions, would become the figure around whom that whole history turns. But before we follow him, we must pause at the year of ash, for what happened in this year was no intermediate step, no technical trial, no forgettable chapter. It was a textbook example of what an Islamic community is: a community that sees its Caliph ﵁ suffer hunger with it, sees him mourn with it, sees him pray with it, and is thereby able to come through a year of ash without losing its faith.

Suyuti ﵀ records it in two sentences. But behind those two sentences lies a world that the community of the Muslims remembers to this day when it, in its own years of drought and pestilence, looks to the example of ʿUmar ﵁ and asks itself what a just leader truly is.

Sources

• Jalal ad-Din as-Suyuti ﵀, Tarikh al-Khulafa (trans. Abdassamad Clarke, Ta-Ha Publishers, 3rd ed.), pp. 135–136 (year 18 AH: Jundaysabur, Hulwan, plague of Amwas, Urfa, Sumaysat, Harran, Nasibin, Mesopotamia, Mosul).
• Supplementary biographical and administrative mentions elsewhere in the same Suyuti ﵀ edition, pp. 143–151 (on the austerity and the supplication of ʿUmar ﵁).