Governance, Justice and Humility under ʿUmar ﵁

The Man Who Prayed for Gentleness on the Minbar

Whoever wishes to grasp the image of ʿUmar ibn al-Khattab ﵁ as his own contemporaries knew him must begin with his first prayer on the minbar of Medina. He had become Khalifah in Jumādā al-Akhirah of the year 13 after the Hijra, shortly after the death of his companion Abu Bakr as-Siddiq ﵁. The community knew him as the man with the powerful frame and the harshness of character, the man whose step one recognised from afar in the street, the man before whom even the Prophet ﷺ in his lifetime had to hide a smile when a visitor, hearing his approaching footstep, hastily arranged his cloak. When that man ascended the minbar for the first time as Khalifah, he did not say what a ruler usually says, but something that all later generations have kept as the key to his office.

Suyuti ﵀ transmits it in the words of Ibn Saʿd ﵀: “The first words that ʿUmar ﵁ used to say when he ascended the minbar were: O Allah, I am harsh, make me gentle; I am weak, strengthen me; and I am miserly, make me generous.” A prayer of three lines, and in those three lines lies the whole self-portrait of a Khalifah. He admitted his own shortcomings in the highest place of authority; he prayed to become gentle, to be strengthened, to become generous. He did not believe that power would improve his character; he believed that Allah ﷻ alone could do that.

It is from this prayer that his whole caliphate must be understood. The man whom the Romans would fear on the walls of Bayt al-Maqdis, the man whom the Persians would name only as the one who had destroyed them, the man who would later be summed up in the tradition of al-Hasan al-Basri ﵀ as he who ruled “with the harshness that has no arrogance in it, and with the gentleness that has no weakness in it” , was in his own eyes a poor servant who surrendered himself anew to his Lord at every khutbah.

The Faruq and His Origin

His name was ʿUmar ibn al-Khattab ibn Nufayl, of the clan of ʿAdi of the Quraysh. He had come to Islam six years after the Prophet ﷺ had begun his message in Makkah, in the sixth year of the prophethood, and he was then twenty-seven years old. In the years before that he had stood among the fiercest opponents of the Prophet ﷺ, and he was recognised as such throughout the whole city. The Prophet ﷺ had prayed to Allah ﷻ for two men in particular: ʿAmr ibn Hisham, who would later be called Abu Jahl, and ʿUmar ibn al-Khattab. Allah ﷻ gave the second and not the first. The conversion of ʿUmar ﵁ was the fault line on which Islam in Makkah came forth from the chambers of Dar al-Arqam to pray openly at the Kaʿbah.

But the man changed in heart, not in character. What was in him by nature remained in him, and the Sahabah had always known it, and he knew it himself. Suyuti ﵀ preserves for this a remarkable self-evaluation in the tradition from Aslam ﵁, the freedman of the Khalifah. It was Aslam ﵁ who heard ʿUmar ﵁ say, in a moment of frankness:

He did not utter those words as pride, but as a confession. The man who was now Khalifah was aware, every hour of his office, that he was the same man who in his youth had threatened the Prophet ﷺ to his face, the same man who had struck his sister Fatimah bint al-Khattab ﵂ when he heard her reciting Surah Taha, the same man whose character had been marked more by violence than by gentleness. Without that knowledge we cannot hear his threefold prayer on the minbar as it was meant. O Allah, I am harsh, make me gentle. He knew himself what harshness he carried within him, he knew what wounds he had struck before he was converted, and he knew what wounds he could still strike after his conversion if Allah ﷻ did not make him gentle. It was no literary modesty; it was an analysis of his life.

The Title He Had Not Himself Devised

Among the first acts of his office there is one that fixes its whole tone. At the beginning of his caliphate he was, like Abu Bakr ﵁ before him, addressed as Khalifat Khalifati Rasul Allah, the successor of the successor of the Messenger of Allah ﷺ. But the phrase soon became unwieldy, for what would the next Khalifah have to be called, the successor of the successor of the successor. Suyuti ﵀ transmits that a company of the Sahabah ﵃ approached him about this, and one of them, al-Mughirah ibn Shuʿbah ﵁ in most traditions, said to him: “You are the amir (commander) and we are the muʾminun (the believers).” And from then on he was called Amir al-Muʾminin, the Commander of the Believers. It was the first time that title was borne in the history of Islam, and it has remained attached to him and to his successors ever since.

He accepted the title without ado; he regarded it as a name, not as an elevation. Whoever addressed him as ya Amir al-Muʾminin received no other reply than whoever addressed him as ya ʿUmar. The Khalifah in the market of Medina was just as willing to be called by his first name by a poor woman from Ghatafan as by his title by the governor of Kufa. He said later, in a tradition that Suyuti ﵀ does not give word for word but does confirm implicitly on several pages, that he would rather have the dust of the Hijaz beneath his feet than a throne beneath his back.

The Woollen Cloak and the Patches

Whoever wished to recognise Amir al-Muʾminin ﵁ in the streets of Medina was not to look for him in anything that distinguished him from his people. He wore a long woollen cloak, the jubbah, on which later people had counted in several places how many patches were sewn; some traditions say twelve, others more. When a patch was worn through to the thread, he sewed a new one over it. The Khalifah of a state that in his years reached across two continents wore a garment that a poor craftsman in any other city would have thrown away.

His food was of the same austerity. He ate bread and oil, dates and curds, and he forbade himself meat on most days. When he was advised to eat better because he seemed to be growing weak from it, he answered: how could I feel what the poorest in my community feels, if every day I eat what he does not eat. He knew that the Khalifah who could not feel his own people was a Khalifah who could not care for his people, and he knew that an honest stomach judges more honestly than a sated one.

Suyuti ﵀ preserves of this the most telling illustration in the tradition from Salman al-Farisi ﵁, one of the oldest friends of the Prophet ﷺ. Salman ﵁ had come on a visit to Medina, and he had not seen the Khalifah for a long time since his appointment. He addressed him as he had always addressed him, friend to friend, and he put to him a question that no one else had dared put to the Khalifah, in a tone that no one else could have struck:

Suyuti ﵀ adds to this, with a simplicity that expresses the whole situation: “ʿUmar ﵁ took an admonition from it.” He did not react in anger, he did not command Salman ﵁ to be silent, but he accepted the admonition. It is one of those rare lines in history in which one sees how the Khalifah of a rising world empire let himself be taught by an ordinary Companion, and received it as an ordinary Companion. He believed that counsel made the Khalifah, not that the Khalifah stood above counsel.

Harshness Without Arrogance

It is in this context that the saying of al-Hasan al-Basri ﵀ about ʿUmar ﵁ takes on its full weight. He returned later, in the generation after the Sahabah, to the man in an attempt to express in a single formula the whole essence of his governance. Suyuti ﵀ preserves that formula thus: “This affair will not be set right except with the harshness that has no arrogance in it, and with the gentleness that has no weakness in it.” It is a definition of governance that only someone who has understood ʿUmar ﵁ could set down.

Harshness without arrogance: that is the harshness that springs from care, not from superiority, the father who speaks sternly to his child because he loves the child, not because he feels himself above the child, the Khalifah who writes sternly to the governor of Egypt because he fears that the governor forgets the people of Egypt, not because he reckons himself greater than that governor. Whoever saw ʿUmar ﵁ write to Saʿd ibn Abi Waqqas ﵁ in Kufa, or to ʿAmr ibn al-ʿAs ﵁ in Egypt, or to Abu Musa al-Ashʿari ﵁ in Basra, found no ruler’s command but a reminder. He held them to the standard the Prophet ﷺ himself had kept, he let them know that he knew every dirham they took in and paid out, that he knew every official they appointed, that he received every complaint that came from their province, not to keep them small, but to raise them to the height of the office they bore.

Gentleness without weakness: that is the gentleness that does not yield to evil, but that at the right moment can forgive. ʿUmar ﵁ could be implacable towards whoever had struck the poor or stolen from the bait al-mal, but whoever came to him with repentance found in him an arm, whoever came to him with ignorance found in him instruction, and whoever came to him with poverty found in him bread. His gentleness was never a turning aside from the straight path, but an embrace within that path for whoever had strayed from it by accident.

The Night Patrols

Among the best known practices of his caliphate is that of the night rounds through Medina. He rose when the city slept, clad in his woollen cloak, and walked through the streets and alleys to hear with his own ears what was kept silent by day. He believed that the governance that heard only in the palace was a governance that did not hear the truth. The poor did not always complain by day; sometimes they complained only at night, to their children, or to themselves, or in a song that no one was meant to hear, and in those songs, in that soft weeping behind a clay wall, lay the true state of the caliphate.

On one of those nights, in one of the oldest and most beloved traditions that Suyuti ﵀ passes on to us, he walked through a quarter of Medina that he rarely visited. It was deep in the night, the moon stood high, and the street was empty. As he passed a simple hut, he heard from within a voice that had no more tears, but a melody. It was a woman’s voice singing a few lines of verse aloud to herself. He stood still in the shadow of the wall, and listened. The woman did not know that she was heard, and the Khalifah of the Believers, in his woollen cloak with patches, heard her on behalf of Medina.

Suyuti ﵀ transmits this night and these lines in his description of the pattern of ʿUmar’s ﵁ patrols. The Khalifah stood still; he understood what he had heard. Here was a woman whose husband served on one of the fronts, in Sham perhaps, in Iraq perhaps. He had been there for months, possibly years, and the absence had made his wife grave. She had not collapsed, she was not lodging a complaint, she admonished herself in her own words, but in that self-admonition sounded a suffering that the Khalifah felt in his own body.

He returned to his house. He sought out his daughter ﵂, Hafsah ﵂, the Mother of the Believers, widow of the Prophet ﷺ, and put to her the question that troubled him: how long can a woman reasonably live without her husband. She gave him the answer from the knowledge she had received from the Prophet ﷺ, four months, in some traditions six. From that night ʿUmar ﵁ laid down that no soldier could be separated from his wife for longer than four months without the possibility of leave. He wrote it to his governors, he made it a rule in the administration, and the caliphate had, through one song of one woman on one night, received a law.

This is what the governance of ʿUmar ﵁ entailed. He did not rule from a throne over a map, but from his feet on his streets and his ears at his walls. He let the reality of the people dictate his laws, not the other way around, and he held himself constantly to account that a Khalifah who did not know what his people went through was no Khalifah.

The Ear of the Khalifah

He was not among the people only at night; he was among them by day. He sat at the gate of Medina and listened to whoever arrived from Sham, from Yemen, from Iraq. He asked about the prices of bread, he asked about the quality of the cattle, he asked about the health of the old woman he knew somewhere. Whoever had a complaint about a governor knew that he could lay it before the Khalifah directly; whoever had a debt to a Jewish merchant could ask the Khalifah for mediation; whoever had repudiated his wife in anger could ask the Khalifah for counsel as to whether that pronouncement still held.

He let himself be found gladly. He refused the customs of the surrounding rulers by which one first had to pass through a row of guards, a row of officials and a row of advisers to reach the ruler. He said that the Khalifah who hid himself from his people ceased to be Khalifah. He ate with whoever addressed him, he sat on the same side of the carpet, he greeted the youngest labourer with the same attention as the oldest Sahabi, and when a child stood among the crowd, he often bent towards that child to answer his question before he answered that of an adult.

The Letter to Abu Musa al-Ashʿari ﵁

Among the legacies he left behind, the letter to Abu Musa al-Ashʿari ﵁ is one that has fed the whole Islamic juridical tradition. Abu Musa ﵁ was his governor over Basra, and in later years also a judge. When a complicated case came before him and he asked the Khalifah for a directive, ʿUmar ﵁ wrote back to him with a long letter that became in effect a manual for the office of judge. Suyuti ﵀ preserves this letter in his treatment of the juridical thought of the Khalifah.

The letter includes, among other things, the rule that the judge sits among equals, that the parties stand equal before him in place and treatment, that the burden of proof rests on the claimant and the oath on the one who denies, that allowing a fresh attempt at proof never invalidates a judgement already given, that reconciliation between the parties is to be preferred over the execution of the strict judgement where that is possible, and that the judge must restrain himself in anger, hunger, thirst, fatigue and pleasure because in each of those states his judgement can deviate. The letter has remained in force in the whole Islamic legal tradition to this day. It was written by a man who himself sat in judgement, who knew from years of daily practice what temptations the judge encounters, and who distilled the rules from his own experience.

What the letter betrays about ʿUmar ﵁ himself is that he saw the dispensation of justice as the place where his threefold prayer on the minbar was tested every day. The harsh judge who knows no gentleness does injustice; the gentle judge who knows no harshness likewise does injustice; it is only in the joining of both that the judgement is just, and that joining requires an inner discipline that Allah ﷻ alone can grant to His servant. He who had prayed on the minbar for gentleness and strength and generosity asked, in the letter to Abu Musa ﵁, every judge under his office to pray the same prayer.

The Whip and the Threshold

He carried a whip; that was known throughout all of Medina. He no longer carried a sword as Khalifah, no shield, no armour, but he carried a simple leather whip, which in no way equalled the whips that the Roman procurators or the Persian satraps used. He used it to drive off the dogs at the market, to bring a startled camel back onto the path, and, rarely, to deal out a light admonition to a man who had transgressed the rules of public conduct. The whip was never for punishment in the juridical sense; for that there were the official judgements and the official rods.

He passed the whip on to his successors as a symbol of the ordinary authority of the street, not of the stern authority of the judge. And it is no coincidence that Suyuti ﵀ writes, in his enumeration of the first characteristics of the office of ʿUmar ﵁, on p. 142, that he was the first to walk about with a whip with which he addressed the faults of the people. The whip was visible, the man was visible, and no one could say that the Khalifah did not walk among them.

The Minbar and the People

When he stood on the minbar, the first impression was always the same: the tall man with the heavy shoulders, the light countenance, the moving hands. He raised his hands to heaven and prayed, and then he spoke. He spoke in the short sentences that were his own, without rhetorical splendour, with the directness of a man who does not seek applause. He pointed when pointing was needed, he commanded when commanding was needed, he asked when asking was needed.

In one of the first khutbahs he spoke of his relation to the community, and Suyuti ﵀ preserves the words in the tradition of al-Hasan ﵀: “Well then. I have been tried by you and you have been tried by me, and I have succeeded to the khilafah, over you, after my two companions. Whoever is present here, we shall handle their affairs in person, and those who are not with us, over them we shall appoint strong and trustworthy men.” In those words lies the whole model of his governance: for whoever was within reach, in person, and for whoever was far away, a governor whom the Khalifah trusted. And if the Khalifah no longer trusted the governor, he was governor no longer.

The Governors Under His Hand

He held his governors to the sharpest conditions of anyone who in those years ruled a state anywhere in the world. When he appointed someone as governor, he first drew up an inventory of his property, and when the governor returned after a year or two, he drew up an inventory again. If his property had increased in a way that could not be explained from his salary and his legitimate trade, half of the surplus was taken for the bait al-mal. No suspicion, no trial, no defence; it was a simple rule that the governors knew from the outset and that was meant to protect them against temptation.

He wrote them sharp letters, and he kept their actual conduct in view through secret informants whom he sent through the provinces, not to spy on them in their private life, but to gauge the true condition of the people. When a governor made things hard for the people, he received a rebuke, and when a second rebuke did not help, he was removed from his office. The Khalifah believed that the governor who let himself be carried away by his power had become the first enemy of the people.

At the same time he held his governors high in honour when they deserved that honour. He honoured ʿAmr ibn al-ʿAs ﵁ because he had opened Egypt and governed it with the upholding of rights, he honoured Abu ʿUbaydah ibn al-Jarrah ﵁ because he had served Sham without letting himself be exalted, and he honoured Saʿd ibn Abi Waqqas ﵁ because he had defended Iraq and governed it from Kufa. Whoever served honourably served with the full support of the Khalifah; whoever exalted himself served no longer.

The Spirit of Care

What binds everything we have spoken of here is the spirit of care. ʿUmar ﵁ ruled out of care, not out of fear, not out of ambition, not out of the urge to be inscribed in history. He ruled because the community needed a man who cared for it, and he was painfully aware that sooner or later he would render account for every soul that had fallen under his hand.

There is a saying of his that is transmitted in various places, and that Suyuti ﵀ lets resound in essence in his treatment of ʿUmar’s ﵁ piety: that if a lamb in the north of the peninsula along the Euphrates were to perish through his negligence, he feared the question that would be put to him about it on the Day of Judgement. A Khalifah who knew himself responsible for a lamb he had never seen, in a region he had never visited, is a Khalifah who knew himself responsible for every soul that dwelt within the walls of the caliphate.

It is from that spirit of care that all his acts flowed: the night patrols, the justice in the market, the widening of the mosques, the letter to Abu Musa ﵁, the letters to the governors, and the establishment of the diwan in 20 AH, so that no soldier would be without pay, no widow without support, no child without food. He built the structures of the Muslim state not out of theoretical statecraft, but out of a deep care that drew him from his bed at night.

The Khalifah in the Mirror of Himself

When we now, after fourteen centuries, wish to see him, we must see him as he saw himself. Not as the man who defeated the Persians, not as the man who received Bayt al-Maqdis, not as the man who established the Hijri calendar, but as the man who stood on the minbar and prayed: O Allah ﷻ, I am harsh, make me gentle. He believed that he did not have that gentleness, he believed that he did not have that strength, he believed that he did not have that generosity, and he asked his Lord for what he lacked in himself.

And in that humility lay the strength of his governance. For the Khalifah who knew himself small before Allah ﷻ could not imagine himself great before men; the Khalifah who fell short in his own eyes could not condemn another for an insignificant shortcoming; the Khalifah who confessed his own shortcomings every day on the minbar was the Khalifah who knew how to carry his people because he did not forget that he himself was carried.

He never left Medina without care, and he accepted every return to Medina as a spur to continue. For ten years he ruled thus, from Jumādā al-Akhirah 13 AH to Dhul-Hijjah 23 AH. For ten years he put on the woollen cloak, carried the whip, did the night rounds, read the letters, spoke on the minbar, distributed the dirhams, received the pilgrim, and slept little and little deeply. Ten years of a life that he gave wholly to the office.

In the following article we accompany him on his last Hajj, in Dhul-Hijjah of the year 23 AH, the year in which he would also be martyred. A Khalifah who had always led the Hajj himself led it for the last time, and he knew it.

Sources

• Jalal ad-Din as-Suyuti ﵀, Tarikh al-Khulafa (trans. Abdassamad Clarke, Ta-Ha Publishers, 3rd ed. 1995), p. 142 (the whip), p. 143 (the minbar prayer, the title Amir al-Muʾminin, the first khutbah), p. 144 (the Aslam tradition on harshness before the conversion), p. 145 (the Salman tradition, the al-Hasan saying), pp. 145–146 (the night patrol and the song of the woman), pp. 143–151 (general governing practice, the letter to Abu Musa, policy on governors).