The Establishment of the Diwan

Muharram, the Twentieth Year of the Hijra

In Muharram of the twentieth year of the Hijra, which in the Gregorian reckoning corresponds to January of the year 641, ʿUmar ibn al-Khattab ﵁ did something that would change the administrative history of the Muslim world forever. He established a register, he had it written down, and he made a list of who received what from the treasury of the community of the Muslims. The act sounds small, as though it were merely an administrative measure, but whoever looks at the breadth of its consequences sees that with this simple decision something fundamental changed in the way the Khalifah ﵁ distributed the growing wealth of an expanding state among its citizens. The bait al-mal, which under Abu Bakr ﵁ in his small house in as-Sunh had still been found empty on the day of his passing, had under ʿUmar ﵁ grown into an institution with branches in Damascus, in Kufa, in Basra and in Fustat, and the revenues from the newly opened provinces flowed in at a pace that the simple distribution Abu Bakr ﵁ had used could no longer keep up with.

Suyuti ﵀ records it concisely. In a passage in which he enumerates the administrative deeds of ʿUmar ﵁, he writes that in this year the Khalifah ﵁ instituted regular stipends for the fighters, set up registers, and granted allowances according to precedence. On a later page, in a separate tradition, he gives the context of the deliberation that preceded this decision, and in that tradition stands a dialogue that we shall place in this article as the heart of the matter, because it leads us into the council chamber of the Khalifah ﵁ and shows us how the great questions of a growing state were discussed in those years.

The Question on the Table

The question on the table was not abstract, but concrete. The revenues from the provinces came in, and the state income from kharaj, the land tax of the newly opened territories, from jizyah of the non-Muslim population, from zakat of the Muslims, and from the shares of the spoils, had grown greatly. The bait al-mal in Medina received sacks of silver, sacks of gold, stores of grain, stores of oil and stores of cloth, in a quantity that the ordinary distribution of the earlier years could no longer handle. What was to be done. The Khalifah ﵁ sat with a council of his closest Companions, and he put the question in direct words: should we distribute all of this at once, as we have done in the years before, or should we do something else; should we save or should we keep distributing; should we accustom the people to fixed allowances or should we keep subjecting them to irregular payments.

Suyuti ﵀ gives the dialogue through Jubayr ibn Mutʿim ﵁, a Companion who was present at the deliberation. Jubayr ﵁ transmits that ʿUmar ﵁ asked the opinion of the Muslims about setting up a register. Two pieces of counsel above all were given, from two men whose word always weighed heavily in the council: ʿAli ibn Abi Talib ﵁ and ʿUthman ibn ʿAffan ﵁. It is these two counsels, and the decision that ʿUmar ﵁ took from them, that we shall carefully unfold in this article, for together they form the administrative moment in which the Diwan came into being.

The Dialogue in the Council

The tradition of Jubayr ﵁, given by Suyuti ﵀, sets the council of the Khalifah ﵁ before our eyes. We hear three voices: the Khalifah ﵁ who puts the question, ʿAli ﵁ who gives the first direction, and ʿUthman ﵁ who gives the second. In the words of Suyuti ﵀:

In these few sentences the whole administrative problem of the growing state lies laid open. ʿAli ﵁ holds to the simplicity of the earlier years: what comes in goes out, do not hoard, do not store, distribute. The bait al-mal is no treasure to be accumulated, but a channel to be let flow through, and this was the way in which the Prophet ﷺ had acted in his last years, this was the way in which Abu Bakr ﵁ had acted, this was the way that ʿAli ﵁, as the most faithful to the style of the Prophet ﷺ, knew. ʿUthman ﵁ holds to a different wisdom: what comes in has become so much that the simplicity of distributing without accounting leads to confusion, for who has already received, who not yet, who more, who less; without a register the matter falls into disorder. Therefore: count, write, distinguish, not in order to store, but in order to distribute fairly.

ʿUmar ﵁ listened to both. He deliberated for days, and he chose, according to Suyuti’s tradition, the path that in its practical consequences followed the counsel of ʿUthman ﵁, but in its spirit held to the counsel of ʿAli ﵁. He set up a register in order to distribute, not in order to hoard; he kept the stream open; he added only what ʿUthman ﵁ had asked for: a counting, a distinction, an accounting. The “what” of ʿAli ﵁ remained, and the “how” of ʿUthman ﵁ was joined to it.

What the Diwan Became

The word diwan in Arabic originally means a collection, a register, a book in which names are recorded. It was used in the Sassanid state apparatus for the courtly archives, and the Arab administrators adopted the word for the pay registers they now set about establishing. What ʿUmar ﵁ set up was in the first place a register of the fighters: who had fought in which battle, who was a Muhajir, who an Ansar, who of which clan, who of which tribe, who had how many children, who had how many wives. On the basis of these data the allowances were fixed. Suyuti ﵀ writes it concisely on page 135: ʿUmar ﵁ instituted regular stipends for the fighting men, set up registers, and granted allowances according to priority.

The priority followed a fixed hierarchy that had its roots in the honour the Prophet ﷺ had given in his days to the first believers. At the top of the scale stood the widows of the Prophet ﷺ, the Mothers of the Believers, who received the highest allowances yearly. After them came the fighters of Badr, who in their heroic role in the first great battle of Islam had a right to a considerable payment, then the fighters of Uhud, then those of Hudaybiyyah, then those of Khaybar, then those of the Fath of Mecca. For the converts of after the Fath a lower grade applied, and for the Bedouin who had joined the army in later years a lower one still. But no one was excluded: every Muslim, whatever his grade, received his allowance, and the question was not whether, but how much.

Beneath each of these grades were subdivisions. The kinsfolk of the Prophet ﷺ, the Banu Hashim, had a place of their own in the scale, because the Khalifah ﵁ wished to keep in honour the special bond of the Prophet ﷺ with his nearest. The Ansar, the helpers of Medina, had a grade of their own that recognised their role in the Hijra and in all the later battles. The wives of the fallen martyrs, the orphans and the poor who could not fight, all were taken up in the register, each according to a formula of their own. What ʿUmar ﵁ had set up was not only a pay register, but a social system in which the whole Muslim community, from its highest to its humblest, found a place.

The Reasoning Behind the Priority

The question arose, in the council itself and in later generations, whether this hierarchy was truly just. Why did a fighter of Badr receive more than a convert of after the Fath, why did a Muhajir receive more than a Bedouin of a remote tribe, why did the widow of the Prophet ﷺ receive more than the widow of an ordinary martyr. Was not, in the revelation, every believer equal before Allah ﷻ.

ʿUmar ﵁ answered this question, according to the tradition that occurs in several places in the broader sources and that is recorded by Suyuti ﵀ in his wide portrait of the Khalifah ﵁, with a careful reasoning. He said that equality before Allah ﷻ in the Hereafter is beyond dispute, but that in this world, in the distribution of a state, other considerations apply. The honour due to one who strove for the Prophet ﷺ before the days of victory had dawned is not the same as the honour due to one who strove after the outcome was already clear. Whoever had stood at Badr, when no one knew whether the Muslims would still exist the next day, bore a merit that was not ignored in the register, not out of entitlement but out of recognition, not to honour the later converts less but not to forget the earlier ones.

ʿAli ﵁ supported this reasoning, even though in the first council he had favoured a simple equal distribution. Once the register had been settled, he did not fall back on the old position but acknowledged that the differentiated distribution the Khalifah ﵁ had established was, in its spirit, an honouring of the history of Islam itself. ʿUthman ﵁ supported it from the beginning, the community of the Muslims accepted it, and in the years that followed its establishment the allowances were paid out yearly or half-yearly to everyone who stood on the register.

The Work of the Writing

Someone had to do the work. A register of thousands of names, with their merits, their families, their tribes, their grade, their place of residence and their openness to a possible further revision: this was no work that could be done in a day or in a week. It was work for scribes, for a group of lettered men who could wield the pen at a time when the majority of the Arabs were unlettered. ʿUmar ﵁ appointed a few men for this work, and among them were names that have won their own place in the history of Islamic administration. The names differ from source to source, and we limit ourselves here to noting that they worked by the command of the Khalifah ﵁ and that their work reached a first form within a few weeks.

The register was arranged tribe by tribe. The Quraysh in their various clans came first, the Banu Hashim, the Banu Umayya, the Banu Makhzum, the Banu Zuhra, each in his grade. After them the Ansar, in their two great tribes Aws and Khazraj, and after them the Bedouin tribes, in the order in which they had joined Islam. The Khalifah ﵁ enabled the chiefs of the tribes to pass on the names of their men to the scribes, and the scribes verified the data with the older Companions who knew the history of the community. Where there was disagreement over the grade of a particular person, the matter was laid before the Khalifah ﵁ himself, who listened to the tradition, consulted whoever was needed, and took a decision.

In Muharram of the twentieth year of the Hijra the work was ready in its first form. Suyuti ﵀ records it in the words of al-Hasan al-Basri ﵀ : ʿUmar ﵁ established the register in al-Muharram of the year twenty after the Hijra. A short sentence from a later scholar, which places the fact on the timeline and thereby fixes, for the generations that would come, when one of the fundamental administrative institutions of the Islamic state found its origin.

The Execution and the Continuity

With the register in hand the Khalifah ﵁ could proceed to the disbursement. The half-yearly or yearly payment of the allowances to the fighters of Badr, to the Muhajirun, to the Ansar, to the widows of the Prophet ﷺ, to the orphans and to the poor became from now on a fixed cycle. The provinces knew that they had to forward their share to Medina at fixed times, and Medina knew that it had to make its payments at fixed times to the names on the register. No more ad-hoc distribution whenever spoils came in, no more irregular scoops of coins from a jar, but a system.

The Khalifah ﵁ continued to fix his own allowance at a modest level, in line with the simplicity he had inherited from Abu Bakr ﵁. He allowed himself no more than what an ordinary Companion received, and in some traditions less; he drank no luxury, he ate no luxury, he clothed himself in no luxury. The register was there for the community, not for the Khalifah ﵁, and he regarded himself in the same position as everyone else on the list, with a grade that his work deserved but no more.

In the years that followed its establishment, the Diwan became an indispensable instrument of government. Under ʿUthman ﵁ it was expanded, under the Umayyads it was further refined, under the Abbasids it became the basis for an extensive bureaucratic system with separate registers for different functions. But the origin lay in this one Muharram of the twentieth year of the Hijra, in the decision of a Khalifah ﵁ who, upon a question from his council, had weighed two counsels and found from them a third way.

The Spiritual Dimension

The Diwan was not only an administrative instrument; it was a spiritual declaration. By inscribing the community of the Muslims in a register, by recognising every believer by name, by giving every struggle and every sacrifice a place in the accounting, the Khalifah ﵁ gave expression to the conviction that the Islamic state was no indifferent machine that collected and distributed wealth, but a community in which every member was personally known. The orphans of Uhud, the widows of Yarmuk, the old fighters of Badr who could fight no longer, found their names inscribed in the Diwan. They knew that the Khalifah ﵁ did not forget them, they knew that their merit was not washed away by time.

We must also acknowledge what the Diwan was not. It was not an aristocratic system, it was not a distinction of rank that denied equality before Allah ﷻ, it was not a privileging of one class over another. Every grade remained open to admission, every new convert was inscribed, every child born into a Muslim household received automatically a place in the register. The gradation was not frozen but dynamic, and the Khalifah ﵁ himself did not stand at the top of the scale but somewhere in the middle, in the position of an ordinary Companion who bore the office without drawing advantage from it for himself.

The Community Under a Tended Roof

When the Diwan was in operation, the community of the Muslims could for the first time speak of a state that cared for all its members. No old widow stood in uncertainty whether she would be able to eat that month, no orphan stood without someone to support him, no fighter who had lost a limb in a campaign stood without the assurance that the Khalifah ﵁ would not forget him. The Islamic state had within six years of the transition from Abu Bakr ﵁ to ʿUmar ﵁ grown from a small group in the city of Medina into an empire that encompassed the Sassanid capital and the Egyptian delta, and the Khalifah ﵁ had seen to it that the administrative form of that growth would not cause the loss of its original character.

What had originally formed the community was the mutual care between Muhajirun and Ansar in Medina, the one without property and the other who shared his property. What the Diwan did was to formalise that mutual care into an institution, not in order to stiffen it into bureaucracy, but in order to preserve it against the erosion that the growth of the state would otherwise have caused. ʿAli ﵁ had felt it when in the council he argued for the simple distribution, ʿUthman ﵁ had seen it when he argued for the accounting, and ʿUmar ﵁ found in these two counsels together the wisdom that enabled him to create an institution that preserved both: the spirit of Abu Bakr ﵁'s simple distribution, and the order that a growing state needed.

The Coexistence of Governance and Humility

We close this chapter with an observation that recurs in all the sources on ʿUmar ﵁. The Khalifah ﵁ who established the Diwan was the same Khalifah ﵁ who in those same months walked through the streets of Medina in his patched cloak, who would not accept the milk from a widow’s bowl without first asking whether her children had already drunk, who went out on patrol at night to see whether any stranger had been left in the city without shelter. Governance and humility went hand in hand in him, and the one was not sacrificed to the other.

That is why he could set up a register without the register becoming an aristocracy. That is why he could grant allowances without the allowances breeding dependence. That is why he could divide the community into grades without the gradation breaking the unity of the community. The Khalifah ﵁ stood somewhere in the middle of his own register, no king at the top, no beggar at the bottom, a Companion among Companions who bore the heavy work of an office for which he had never offered himself and which he had never wanted for himself.

In the years that would come, the Diwan would be expanded, the allowances would be raised or lowered according to the state of the treasury, new names would be inscribed and old names struck out as the generations succeeded one another. But the basic structure that ʿUmar ﵁ had laid down in Muharram of the twentieth year of the Hijra remained intact: each by name, each according to his grade, each tended, and the Khalifah ﵁ as the one who kept the system standing, not as the one who lived off it himself.

The following article brings us to Nahawand, to the battle that in the twenty-first year of the Hijra would break the last remnant of Sassanid power. The community that won its victory there was paid from the Diwan that had been established six months earlier in Muharram, and what had been deliberated in the council chamber of the Khalifah ﵁ bore fruit on the battlefields of Persia.

Sources

• Jalal ad-Din as-Suyuti ﵀, Tarikh al-Khulafa (trans. Abdassamad Clarke, Ta-Ha Publishers, 3rd ed.), p. 135 (establishment of the pay register), p. 150 (tradition of Jubayr ibn Mutʿim ﵁ on the council, and of al-Hasan al-Basri ﵀ on the dating in Muharram 20 AH).
• Further mentions elsewhere in the same Suyuti ﵀ edition on the austerity of ʿUmar ﵁ as Khalifah, pp. 143–151.