Biographical portrait, ʿUmar ibn al-Khaṭṭāb ﵁

The man behind the Khilafah

We have now followed him into his death, and we have followed him into his succession. We have seen him die at the Fajr prayer, we have seen his grave opened beside the Prophet ﷺ and Abu Bakr ﵁ in the chamber of ʿAʾishah ﵂, and we have seen the Shura of Six designate ʿUthman ibn ʿAffan ﵁ as the third Khalifah. But who was the man of whom this was the end, where was he born and how did he grow up, and how did the heart beat that in his younger years wished to kill the Prophet ﷺ only to draw the sword for him shortly afterwards. How did he judge, how did he speak, how did he rule, and what kind of life must a man lead to be admired by his enemies at his death and mourned by his friends with the pain one feels for a father.

What Suyuti ﵀ gathers about him spans roughly eighty pages, from page one hundred and eight to beyond page one hundred and eighty-five. He gives him the most extensive biographical sketch of the entire work, fuller than that of Abu Bakr ﵁ and with more dialogue than that of any other Khalifah. In that material we come face to face with the man as his companions ﵃ knew him: strict without arrogance, generous without wastefulness, learned without vanity, and always, in every breath of his day, occupied with the work he regarded as an account he would one day have to render before Allah ﷻ.

In this article we follow him from his birth to his death, no longer as an administrator but as a man. We follow his lineage and his parents, we follow his childhood in Mecca, and we follow his conversion through three different doorways. We follow his years beside the Prophet ﷺ as the man whose word sometimes ran ahead of the revelation, and we follow his years beside Abu Bakr ﵁ as the first counsellor. We follow his judgments, his sayings, his correspondence with the governors, and his letter to Abu Musa al-Ashʿari ﵁ on the ordering of Islamic law. And finally we conclude with the legacy he left behind for the Ummah.

A line that reaches back to Kaʿb ibn Luʾayy

Suyuti ﵀ opens his chapter on ʿUmar ﵁ with his name in full length, as he does with every preceding Khalifah. The full name, he writes, is: ʿUmar ibn al-Khattab ibn Nufayl ibn ʿAbdu’l-ʿUzza ibn Riyah ibn Qart ibn Razah ibn ʿAdi ibn Kaʿb ibn Luʾayy al-Qurashi al-ʿAdawi al-Faruq. A chain of nine ancestors that goes back to Kaʿb ibn Luʾayy, the same ancestor through whom the line of the Prophet ﷺ also ran, so that his kinship with the Messenger ﷺ could be traced to the seventh or eighth generation. He was, in the language of Quraysh, an ibn al-ʿamm, a distant cousin, not close enough to lay a claim to the inheritance of the Banu Hashim, but close enough to be recognised within the circle of Quraysh as a blood relative.

His tribe was Banu ʿAdi, a branch of Quraysh that had a specific function in the composition of Mecca. They were the sufara’, the envoys and mediators, and when a dispute between two other tribes could not be settled by direct negotiation, a man from Banu ʿAdi would intervene to mediate the matter. It was work that required tact, a good memory for genealogy, an eloquence in the finer points of Arabic, and an impartiality in which neither of the two quarrelling parties could suspect favouritism. ʿUmar ﵁ did not acquire these skills by self-development; he inherited them, and he already exercised them before his conversion as head of the delegations that Banu ʿAdi sent out to the other tribes.

Al-Faruq, the epithet the Prophet ﷺ would give him and which Suyuti ﵀ records already in the opening line, means “the Discerner,” he who separates the true from the false. It was, Suyuti ﵀ writes, the Prophet ﷺ himself who gave him this title on the day of his conversion, because with his acceptance of Islam the Muslims for the first time found the courage to pray openly in the Masjid al-Haram, instead of hiding in houses. With him, truth could for the first time distinguish itself from falsehood, openly and without hesitation.

Hantamah bint Hisham ﵂, his mother

On his mother’s side, and here the matter becomes complicated for his own biography, he was close to the archenemy of Islam. His mother was Hantamah bint Hisham ibn al-Mughirah ﵂, a woman of Banu Makhzum, the tribe of Abu Jahl. She was the sister of Abu Jahl, or in some narrations the niece of Abu Jahl. Through her he was thus the son of an aunt of the man who in the first years of Islam had been the most embittered opponent of the Prophet ﷺ, the man who was later killed on the Day of Badr by the boys of Banu an-Najjar and whose head was laid down before the Prophet ﷺ in the dry pit.

This family bond partly explained why ʿUmar ﵁ stood so embittered against Islam in the first years of the revelation. He belonged to an extended family network in which both his father’s tribe Banu ʿAdi and his mother’s tribe Banu Makhzum had an interest in the continuity of the existing religious and social order in Mecca. What the Prophet ﷺ proclaimed was an assault on the idolatry that had given Banu Makhzum an important position in the pilgrimage system. For the nephew of Abu Jahl the matter was at once personal, social, religious and strategic in its opposition to the new message. That he nonetheless became a Muslim, and indeed within the first decade of the revelation, is one of the clearest signs the tradition has preserved of the transforming power of the Qur’an.

The pre-Islamic ʿUmar ﵁

What kind of man was he before he became a Muslim. Suyuti ﵀ is concise here but clear. ʿUmar ﵁ was hard, he was physically large, stronger than most men of Quraysh, a trained wrestler who had won prizes in the markets of ʿUkaz. He was severe, with a tone in which there was no uncertainty, and he was literate, which was a rarity in Mecca, and could both read and write, a skill that would later serve him enormously in administration.

But he was also a drinker. He was not one of the hunafa who, like Abu Bakr ﵁, had refused wine even before Islam. He drank gladly, drank much, and in the first years after his conversion he kept waiting for a definitive prohibition from the revelation, because he felt within himself no strength to give up the habit without a heavenly command. When that revelation came, in two phases of which the last was the one in Surah al-Maʾidah, he uttered the famous sentence: “We have stopped, we have stopped.” And from that day he never drank again.

He was also someone for whom honour and vengeance weighed heavily. In the pre-Islamic culture of Mecca an insult was a debt paid with violence, and ʿUmar ﵁ was not a man who forgot insults. The combination of his physical strength, his eloquence and his undulled sense of honour made him a man you would rather not have against you. When the decision was taken by Quraysh that the Prophet ﷺ had to be killed, and the tribes put forward candidates for the deed in turn, it was ʿUmar ﵁ who volunteered. He girded on his sword and set out in the direction of the house where the Prophet ﷺ and his companions ﵃ were gathered. What happened on the way is the first of three accounts of his conversion.

First account of the conversion: Surah al-Haqqah

Suyuti ﵀ narrates from Anas ibn Malik ﵁ on page one hundred and eight an account recorded in the mouth of the Prophet ﷺ himself. The Prophet ﷺ once said that he remembered the day on which he saw ʿUmar ﵁ become a Muslim. ʿUmar ﵁ set out towards the Prophet ﷺ with his sword to kill him, and on the way he met Nuʿaym ibn ʿAbdillah ﵁, a man of his own tribe Banu ʿAdi who had secretly accepted Islam but kept his conversion hidden. Nuʿaym ﵁ asked him where he was going, and ʿUmar ﵁ answered that he was on his way to kill Muhammad ﷺ. Nuʿaym ﵁ then said, in the hope of diverting him: “First concern yourself with your own family. Your sister Fatimah and her husband Saʿid ﵁ have also become Muslim.”

At those words ʿUmar’s course changed, no longer towards the house of the Prophet ﷺ, but towards the house of his sister. He walked in unannounced. Fatimah ﵂ and her husband Saʿid ibn Zayd ﵁ were at that moment reading the Qur’an under the guidance of Khabbab ibn al-Aratt ﵁, a freed slave who had become a Muslim already in the first years and who taught the literate believers. When they heard ʿUmar ﵁ come in, they hid their parchment leaves, and Khabbab ﵁ went to take shelter in a back room.

ʿUmar ﵁ asked what they had been reading. They denied it. He struck his brother-in-law, he struck his sister. When Fatimah ﵂ bled from the corner of her mouth and looked at him with the clarity of one who no longer needs to restrain herself, she said: “Yes, we are Muslim, and even if you kill us, it remains so.” The blood of his sister and the resolve in her voice broke something in him that had never been broken in any wrestling match at ʿUkaz. He sat down, he asked to see the parchment. She refused, at first, for he was impure from idolatry. He went to wash, an ordinary ablution in anticipation of something he did not yet know, and only then, washed, did the parchment come into his hands.

What was on it was Surah Taha, or Surah al-Haqqah, in other narrations. Suyuti ﵀ gathers both variants and passes both on, for the chronology of which surah was first heard and which read can no longer be established with certainty.

In one variant he read Surah al-Haqqah, and at the verse:

he said aloud: “Then this must be a soothsayer.” And then came:

He stopped, he read it again. He understood that this book had anticipated and cut off every escape for his intellect, before he had even been able to formulate them. He said: “This is no word of man.”

Second account of the conversion: Surah Taha

In a second narration, also in Suyuti ﵀ on page one hundred and nine, he reads Surah Taha. At the opening verses:

he felt the tension in his shoulders disappear. He read on until:

At that verse, Suyuti ﵀ writes, he closed the parchment. He said to his brother-in-law: “Take me to Muhammad ﷺ.” Khabbab ﵁ emerged from the back room, for he had heard the whole conversation, and he rejoiced with a relief he had rarely felt in his years of persecution. He told ʿUmar ﵁ that he would find the Prophet ﷺ that morning in the house of al-Arqam, the small house at the foot of as-Safa where the first Muslims gathered to receive the revelation in privacy.

ʿUmar ﵁ stood up, girded on his sword, and set out. That same road he had taken two hours earlier to kill the Prophet ﷺ, he now walked again, but with a different heart in his chest. At the house of al-Arqam he knocked. The Muslims inside heard his knock and saw through a crack who it was. Hamzah ﵁, the uncle of the Prophet ﷺ who had himself become a Muslim some days earlier and whose physical strength inspired awe, said: “Let him in. If he comes in peace, then in peace; if he comes in hostility, then we shall receive him with his own sword.”

The door opened, ʿUmar ﵁ stepped inside. The Prophet ﷺ came towards him, seized him by the garment at the height of the chest, and shook him lightly as though waking him from a long sleep. He said: “What brings you, ʿUmar ﵁. By Allah ﷻ, I do not think you will cease until a punishment is sent down upon you.” ʿUmar ﵁ answered: “O Messenger of Allah ﷻ, I have come here to believe in Allah ﷻ and in you, and in what you bring from Allah ﷻ.” The Prophet ﷺ raised the takbir, and in the house of al-Arqam a collective takbir rose up that was audible through the walls into the streets of Mecca.

Third account: Surah al-Hadid

Suyuti ﵀ mentions yet a third narration, on page one hundred and ten, which goes back to the Prophet ﷺ himself through various isnads. In this variant ʿUmar ﵁ meets no Nuʿaym ﵁ on the way, but goes straight to the house of his sister. There he reads not Surah Taha or Surah al-Haqqah, but Surah al-Hadid in its opening verses:

At those words, Suyuti ﵀ writes, he whispered: “What a wondrous book.” And he read on, to the seventh verse in which the believers were called to spend from what had been entrusted to them, and he felt that the book addressed him not only in his intellect but also in his purse, in his actions, in his whole daily life.

The three accounts, however different in detail, all three end in the same outcome: ʿUmar ﵁ goes to the house of al-Arqam, he gives his shahadah, and the Prophet ﷺ raises the takbir with him. What happens afterwards is decisive for the history of Islam. For the first time since the revelation began four or five years earlier, a group of Muslims dares to walk in formation to the Masjid al-Haram. At the head walks the Prophet ﷺ, on one side of him walks Hamzah ﵁, on his other side walks ʿUmar ﵁, and behind them follow the other Muslims. In the Masjid al-Haram they pray the salah openly for the first time, with the idols beside them and the Kaʿbah before them. The Quraysh look on and do not dare to intervene, because the combination of Hamzah’s physical strength and ʿUmar’s sword is a physical deterrent that paralyses them. From that day, says the Prophet ﷺ, we received the epithet al-Faruq for ʿUmar ﵁: he through whom Allah ﷻ distinguished the truth from the lie.

Twenty-six years old, or twenty-seven

ʿUmar ﵁ was, at the moment of his conversion, Suyuti ﵀ writes, twenty-six or twenty-seven years old. He had been born a Muslim in the sixth year of the prophethood. Thirty-two or thirty-three years later he would be killed by Abu Luʾluʾah, at the age of sixty-three. The numbers close like an account. He was Khalifah for exactly as long as the Prophet ﷺ had lived in Medina, and he died at precisely the same age as the Prophet ﷺ and Abu Bakr ﵁. Three lives equal in length and running in succession without interruption.

The years beside the Prophet ﷺ

What ʿUmar ﵁ did at the side of the Prophet ﷺ spans thirteen years from Mecca to Medina and ten years from Medina to the burial in the chamber of ʿAʾishah ﵂. On pages one hundred and sixteen to one hundred and thirty, Suyuti ﵀ gathers the hadiths on the special position of ʿUmar ﵁ within the circle of the companions ﵃, and his collection gives the picture of a man who was distinguished by the Prophet ﷺ himself with an honour that in this precise form applied to no other companion.

The best known of those hadiths is the one Suyuti ﵀ takes over on page one hundred and nineteen, with an isnad that goes back in various ways to ʿUqbah ibn ʿAmir ﵁. The Prophet ﷺ said:

No saying in the mouth of the Prophet ﷺ was ever compared to anything else, for the sealing of prophethood with the Prophet ﷺ himself is a dogmatic certainty of Islam and no one after him would ever be a Prophet. But the hypothesis with which the Prophet ﷺ spoke about ʿUmar ﵁ shows how inwardly he assessed his companion. It was not merely an expression of appreciation; it was a characterisation of the kind of man that ʿUmar ﵁ was: a man whose judgment stood so close to the prophetic ideal that his decisions, even without revelation, often coincided directly with what was later confirmed in revelation.

A second hadith that Suyuti ﵀ takes over, likewise on page one hundred and nineteen, goes in the same direction:

What his tongue spoke and what his heart knew was, according to this saying, placed there by Allah ﷻ. It was not his own sharpness of mind that carried his judgments; it was a guidance he received without asking for it. And indeed the transmitters remember several occurrences in which ʿUmar ﵁ voiced an opinion before a revelation was received that confirmed his opinion. He was, so to speak, one of those men for whom the revelation sometimes worked confirmingly rather than formatively.

Three examples of this “muwafaqat ʿUmar,” the coincidences between ʿUmar’s opinion and the revelation, the hadith collections have preserved for us. In the first case, after the Battle of Badr, he spoke out for the execution of the captured Qurayshi war leaders rather than the acceptance of ransom. The Prophet ﷺ chose the ransom for the time being, but was corrected about it by the revelation of Surah al-Anfal 8:67-68, and ʿUmar’s position was confirmed by Allah ﷻ as the correct one. In the second case he urged the seclusion of the wives of the Prophet ﷺ behind a curtain from strangers, and the revelation of the hijab verse in Surah al-Ahzab 33:53 confirmed his proposal. In the third case he suggested that the Maqam of Ibrahim ﵇ in the Masjid al-Haram should be made into a place of prayer, and the verse in Surah al-Baqarah 2:125 sanctioned precisely that use. Three times his man-to-man judgment ran ahead of a divine ruling.

Suyuti ﵀ also mentions the saying of Ibn Masʿud ﵁ about the knowledge of ʿUmar ﵁, on page one hundred and twenty: “Even if the knowledge of ʿUmar ﵁ were laid in one pan of a balance and the knowledge of every living person on earth were laid in the other pan, the knowledge of ʿUmar ﵁ would outweigh their knowledge.” A hyperbolic expression perhaps, but in the mouth of Ibn Masʿud ﵁ not an empty one. He himself belonged to the most learned among the companions ﵃, and his characterisation of ʿUmar’s knowledge was a characterisation by an expert. What Ibn Masʿud ﵁ admired in ʿUmar ﵁ was not only the breadth of his memory for the Qur’an and for the hadiths, but the sharpness of his ability to derive the correct rule for a new situation from the whole of the revelation. ʿUmar ﵁ was, in modern terms, not only a scholar but a philosopher of law.

The years beside Abu Bakr ﵁

When the Prophet ﷺ died and Abu Bakr ﵁ was chosen as Khalifah, it was ʿUmar ﵁ who was first to give his bayʿah in the Saqifah of Banu Saʿidah. He knew that his own time had not yet come, and he also knew that no candidate other than Abu Bakr ﵁ could be fitted to that moment in history. In the two years of Abu Bakr’s khilafah ʿUmar ﵁ was not only the right hand, but the counterpart and the mirror. Abu Bakr ﵁ was gentle, mild, inclined to forgive; ʿUmar ﵁ was strict, hard, inclined to punish. Together they formed the two hands of governance, and where the one fell short, the other made up for it.

In the matter of the apostate tribes ʿUmar ﵁ at first held a different opinion from Abu Bakr ﵁. He held that it was wise to leave the tribes that refused to pay the zakah in peace for the time being, because the Muslims had just lost their Prophet ﷺ and the political moment was fragile. Abu Bakr ﵁ rejected that opinion categorically, with the well-known words that he would fight against anyone who separated the prayer from the zakah, for the Prophet ﷺ had instituted the two as one duty. ʿUmar ﵁ later acknowledged, Suyuti ﵀ writes, that in this matter he had not understood Abu Bakr’s resolve and that Allah ﷻ had expanded Abu Bakr’s breast for the truth in a way he had not followed in the first hours.

But in most other matters he stood beside his Khalifah as the voice that carried out the execution. Abu Bakr ﵁ decided, ʿUmar ﵁ carried out; Abu Bakr ﵁ gave the directive, ʿUmar ﵁ ensured its compliance. And in the compilation of the Mushaf of the Qur’an it was ʿUmar ﵁ who brought Abu Bakr ﵁ to the idea and who convinced him that gathering the revelation into a single book was no bidʿah but a necessary continuation of what the Prophet ﷺ had left to the scribes of the revelation themselves. When Abu Bakr ﵁ finally agreed and appointed Zayd ibn Thabit ﵁ to set up the collection, it was ʿUmar ﵁ who had the fragments gathered from every scholar conveyed to Zayd ﵁.

In his final illness Abu Bakr ﵁ chose ʿUmar ﵁ as his successor without hesitation and with the assent of nearly all the companions ﵃ present. When some voiced reservations about the strictness of ʿUmar ﵁ and feared that as Khalifah he would treat the community too harshly, Abu Bakr ﵁ answered in a variant that Suyuti ﵀ passes on to us: “He is only strict because he sees me being gentle. When the matter rests on him alone, he will lay aside much of his strictness.” And so it would indeed be. The ʿUmar ﵁ who as Khalifah had left the position of right hand became milder than the ʿUmar ﵁ who as right hand had stood beside the Khalifah. The burden of ultimate responsibility had on him the effect it has on few men: it softened what was sharp, and it deepened what might otherwise prove shallow.

The first khutbah as Khalifah

When Abu Bakr ﵁ died in Jumada al-Akhirah of the thirteenth year of the Hijra, ʿUmar ﵁ ascended the minbar for the first time as Amir al-Muʾminin. What he said in that first address was transmitted by al-Hasan al-Basri ﵀ and recorded by Suyuti ﵀ on page one hundred and forty-three:

Two sentences that sum up the whole ordering of his Khilafah. Personal responsibility for affairs in Medina; strong and trustworthy governors in the provinces. That is, in summarised form, the logic of governance that ʿUmar ﵁ would apply for ten years. He was himself the judge in Medina, personally present, personally approachable for complainants. The provinces he entrusted to men he had personally chosen, men whom he watched closely in correspondence, men whom he did not hesitate to dismiss the moment he received signals that they had transgressed their rules of conduct.

In a later variant of his first khutbah, recorded by Suyuti ﵀ on page one hundred and forty-one, the transmitter claimed that ʿUmar ﵁ at first did not wish to be addressed by the title his predecessor had borne. Abu Bakr ﵁ had been known as “Khalifat Rasul Allah,” the Successor of the Messenger of Allah ﷻ. When someone addressed ʿUmar ﵁ as “Khalifat Khalifat Rasul Allah,” “Successor of the Successor of the Messenger of Allah ﷻ,” he indicated that the title was becoming too long for daily use and that a simpler designation was fitting.

Someone from the crowd, in some narrations al-Mughirah ibn Shuʿbah ﵁, in others ʿAdi ibn Hatim ﵁, then called out:

From that moment ʿUmar ﵁ was called Amir al-Muʾminin, the Commander of the Believers, and the title would henceforth be granted to every Khalifah of Islam into the very last centuries. He was, Suyuti ﵀ writes on page one hundred and forty-one, the first to be addressed thus, and he was the first to have the dating of events reckoned from the Hijra. Two institutions that have remained bound to his name, while a third, the establishment of the Diwan, also stands on his list of first introductions.

“O Allah ﷻ, I am strict”

Before he began his first khutbah for the first time, ʿUmar ﵁ uttered a du’a that Suyuti ﵀ recorded on page one hundred and forty-three on the authority of Ibn Saʿd ﵀:

A du’a that hides nothing. He acknowledged before the community for whom he spoke that he knew how to vex them with his hardness, that he knew how to fail through his own weakness in heavy moments, that he knew how to be miserly with the means of others because he guarded them as his own. He asked in the same breath of Allah ﷻ to overcome those three traits. And Suyuti ﵀ gathers elsewhere in the biography dozens of examples showing that the du’a was answered. The ʿUmar ﵁ whom the community knew as Khalifah was gentler than the ʿUmar ﵁ it had known before his Khilafah, was stronger than his younger self, and was more generous than any merchant in Medina.

Aslam, one of his former slaves whom he had ransomed, narrates on page one hundred and forty-four a saying of ʿUmar ﵁ that completes this self-knowledge:

He did not forget his starting point. The man who stood on the minbar in the first khutbah as Amir al-Muʾminin was the same man who had once set out with his sword to the house of the Prophet ﷺ to kill him. The distance between those two moments had been bridged within one human being by the revelation, and ʿUmar ﵁ remembered that distance so as not to become arrogant about the history he had lived since.

The whip and the minbar

On page one hundred and forty-two Suyuti ﵀ devotes a passage to a characteristic object from ʿUmar’s practice of governance: the whip. He did not walk about with a sword nor with a spear, but with a leather whip, a short dirrah of plaited leather that rested at his waist. With that whip he tapped the shoulder of the boy who stood too noisily behind the market stall, with that whip he tapped the elbow of the drunkard who had still drunk wine despite the prohibition, and with that whip he tapped the hip of the man who had not placed himself fully in the row during the Friday prayer. It was an instrument that gave a light pain, that did not inflict a wound, and it was above all a symbol. Whoever felt ʿUmar’s whip knew that the Khalifah himself was correcting him.

But the community developed a proverb that at the same time placed the whip in its proper proportion. “The whip of ʿUmar ﵁,” people said, “is more terrible than the sword of a tyrant.” Not because the whip wounded more heavily, but because the man who wielded it was justified. Whoever was struck by ʿUmar ﵁ knew that he had done something wrong; whoever was struck by a tyrant knew only that the tyrant happened to be angry. The whip was a part of the system; the sword of the tyrant was the vengeance of an individual. That is why the whip was feared as the justice of the highest court is feared: with respect, not with aversion.

The conversation with Salman ﵁

It is in the conversations that ʿUmar ﵁ had with Salman al-Farisi ﵁ that the self-reflection of the Khalifah becomes sharpest. Suyuti ﵀ narrates one of them on page one hundred and forty-five that has become normative for the whole political philosophy of Islam. Salman ﵁ was a Persian, a former Zoroastrian who had found Islam in Medina, a man who had known both the Sasanian empire from within and would come to know the Khilafah from within. ʿUmar ﵁ had one day asked him whether he resembled more a king or a Khalifah. Salman ﵁ answered:

A dirham, one single silver coin, was enough to transform the rule of a Khilafah into the rule of a kingship. It was not about the scale of the fault; it was about the kind of fault. A Khalifah was a steward of what had been entrusted to him; a king was an owner of what he administered. The boundary between those two identities could be crossed by a single wrongly spent coin. Salman ﵁ spoke it out, ʿUmar ﵁ listened, and the warning was preserved by Suyuti ﵀ for the ages.

In a related saying of al-Hasan al-Basri ﵀ about ʿUmar’s style of rule, on the same page one hundred and forty-five, al-Hasan ﵀ formulated what ʿUmar’s own ideal of governance had been:

Four qualities held in tension. Strictness and gentleness, arrogance and weakness. The Khalifah had to be strict because the community needed leadership, but he was not to become arrogant in that strictness, not to place himself above the people. He had to be gentle because the community needed humanity, but he was not to become weak in that gentleness, not to leave the rights of Allah ﷻ to whoever called for them the loudest.

The four months of military service

In one of his early administrative decisions ʿUmar ﵁ established that no soldier who was married might be separated from his wife for longer than four months at a stretch. It was a rule that was oriented to the fitra of human nature. A man who was away from his wife for longer than four months acquired desires that he could not always channel within the halal, and in an army that sometimes remained for years in a distant province, this could lead to excesses harmful to the morale of the troops. The rule was prompted, Suyuti ﵀ mentions in a variant of what he tells about ʿUmar’s nightly patrols, by a specific incident.

ʿUmar ﵁ walked through Medina at night, as was his custom, and passed a house where in the silence of the late hour he heard a woman reciting verse. Suyuti ﵀ gives the poem on pages one hundred and forty-five and one hundred and forty-six:

This night, whose stars creep slowly, is wearying and keeps me sleepless because I have no friend to play with. By Allah ﷻ, were it not out of fear of Him, the corners of my resting bed would stir.

A woman alone in a bed, with her husband away in a distant garrison, who acknowledged the longing she kept in check through fear of God. ʿUmar ﵁ stood at the door, heard the lines of verse, and felt his responsibility more sharply than his power. He returned home and spoke with his daughter Hafsah ﵂, the widow of the Prophet ﷺ. He asked her how long a woman could reasonably endure the absence of her husband. Hafsah ﵂ answered, after some hesitation because her father’s question drew her out of the ordinary register of father and daughter: “Four months.”

From that day ʿUmar ﵁ issued an ordinance to all his army commanders: no soldier may be in the field for longer than four months without leave or replacement. Whoever wished to remain longer in his garrison had to have his wife brought to him. The rule became in practice the basis of the rotation system of the Diwan, in which soldiers were sent out for fixed periods and returned again after fixed periods. It is an example of how one anxious question on the threshold of one house in Medina worked its way, in the ordering of the empire, as far as Khorasan.

The nightly patrols

Here the figure of ʿUmar ﵁ himself becomes sharply visible. He slept little, at least not in the hours in which Medina slept. He walked through the streets at night, sometimes with Aslam ﵁, sometimes alone, to see how his community lived in the dark. He did not look through windows, he did not listen at doors with the intention of spying, but he wanted to know whether somewhere a child was crying from hunger, or whether somewhere a cry for aid to the sick went unheard, or whether somewhere a case pleaded in the mosque had escaped justice.

The most famous incident is that of the woman with the stones in the pot. He heard a child crying behind a door, he knocked and asked the woman why her child was crying. She said that there was no food and that, in order to get the child to sleep, she pretended that she was cooking something in the pot, stones in reality, so that the child would at last fall asleep from exhaustion. ʿUmar ﵁ returned to the treasury, loaded a sack of flour onto his own back, carried it back himself to the house of the woman, refused Aslam ﵁ when he offered to help him carry it, with the words: “Who will carry my burden on the Day of Judgment,” and with her own hands cooked the bread her child could eat.

Suyuti ﵀ mentions this incident in his collection of sayings and marvellous accounts about ʿUmar’s manner of rule. It is not merely anecdotal; it is a principle. The Khalifah who patrolled the streets bore the care for every stomach in Medina, including that of the sleepless woman for whom the treasury kept no account. Governance was, in his conception, not an administration of numbers but a visit to houses.

The letter to Abu Musa al-Ashʿari ﵁

Among the most important documents that ʿUmar ﵁ left behind is the letter he wrote to Abu Musa al-Ashʿari ﵁ on his appointment as judge and governor in Iraq. The letter, which Suyuti ﵀ renders in spirit and which has been transmitted in several versions in the hadith literature of the first centuries, sums up the whole of Islamic jurisprudence in a few paragraphs. It is the Magna Carta of Islamic judicial procedure.

The letter begins with the words, in paraphrase after Suyuti’s narration: “Judicial ruling is a fixed duty and a followed tradition. Understand, then, when a case is brought before you, for it is of no use to speak a word that has no effect.” Here lies the starting point: a judge does not speak for show, not for his own profile, but for the execution of what he decides. A ruling that would not be carried out was better not given.

The letter continues with equality before the law: “Treat the people equally in your countenance, in your session and in your judgment, so that the noble may not hope for your injustice and the weak may not despair of your justice.” Three qualities in which a judge may show no preference: in the way he looks at someone, in the place where he seats someone, in the judgment he gives. Whoever enters the court must experience that in the three circles he is approached in the same way as the other, regardless of his rank.

Then comes the burden of proof: “The burden of proof rests on the claimant, and the oath on the one who denies. But reconciliation among the Muslims is permitted, except a reconciliation that forbids the lawful or permits the forbidden.” A principle that still holds in modern procedure: whoever asserts something must prove it; whoever denies may suffice with an oath. But above procedural law stands the possibility of amicable settlement, provided that settlement does not violate the rules of revelation.

The letter proceeds with a warning about revision: “Should you have given a ruling yesterday and today come again to that case to realise that it could better have been otherwise, do not hold yourself back from returning to the truth, for the truth is ancient and the return to the truth is better than persistence in falsehood.” A judge who acknowledges his error does honour to the truth; a judge who clings to an error for the honour of his office violates the office itself.

The last part of the letter concerns the study of the sources of law: “Understand what is laid before you from what is not in Qur’an or Sunnah, and compare the cases. Know their similarities and differences and then form your judgment towards what is most beloved to Allah ﷻ and most in accord with the truth.” Here the whole doctrine of qiyas, analogical reasoning, is enclosed. What the revelation does not decide directly, the judge must derive by analogy from what it does decide.

This letter, or the version of it that Suyuti ﵀ renders, was later cited in the learned traditions of the hanafiyyah, malikiyyah, shafiʿiyyah and hanbaliyyah as one of the foundations of Islamic law. What ʿUmar ﵁ wrote to Abu Musa ﵁ when the latter was to take his seat in Basra became the programme by which every Islamic judge after him was to exercise his office. The instructions were not unique to one governor in one province; they were universal guidelines for the whole Khilafah that ʿUmar ﵁ had ordered.

The letter to the Byzantine emperor

In another writing, which Suyuti ﵀ mentions on page one hundred and forty-seven on later isnad authority, ʿUmar ﵁ addressed himself to Heraclius, the Byzantine emperor whose troops had been defeated at Yarmuk and who had withdrawn to Constantinople. In the letter ʿUmar ﵁ called him to Islam, with a reference to the Qur’an:

It was an invitation in the spirit of the Prophet ﷺ himself, who in the sixth or seventh year of the Hijra had written the same emperor a letter and called him to Islam. ʿUmar ﵁ repeated the call, now from a position of clear military superiority, but still in the same exemplary tone: an invitation, not a threat. The emperor read and kept silent, and the call did not issue in a conversion. But for the learned tradition the letter was a document from which they could derive the da’wah style of the second Khalifah: not only militarily powerful, but also textually and argumentatively grounded.

“Stop at my grave”

One day, long before his death, Aslam ﵁ heard ʿUmar ﵁ say to himself, as they walked past the graveyard of Baqi: “When I lie in this earth, the people will pass by my grave and say: ʿUmar ibn al-Khattab ﵁, Allah’s mercy be upon him. What am I in this earth, if Allah ﷻ is not merciful to me.”

He knew that his name would resound and that the community would honour him. But the name and the honour were not for him what the Day of Judgment would determine. What would determine it was what stood in his account and how Allah ﷻ would treat him on the ground of that account. Therefore he worked every day as though it were his last, and therefore he ruled every night as though the community he governed were a trust of which he was somewhere the possessor, somewhere the tenant, but never the owner.

“Perform for me what I have not performed”

On his deathbed, in the three days and nights between the attack and his passing, he called his son ʿAbdullah ﵁ to his side. He gave him not only the message for ʿAʾishah ﵂ and not only the charge to guide the Shura of Six, he gave him also a last personal request. “After my death settle my account. The house in which I dwell, should it be from the property of the Muslims, then buy it back for the treasury. The clothes I wear, should they be from my own money, then give them to the poor. The wool under which I now lie, should it be mine, then wash it and use it in my grave.” He wished that his account with the community should stand at zero before his burial.

ʿAbdullah ﵁ did what his father had asked. He settled the account with the treasury, and he found that the Khalifah had taken nothing that was not his due and that the community had nothing to demand of him. A man who had ruled for ten years over an empire that stretched from the Hijaz to Khorasan and from Egypt to Armenia, who had let millions of dinars pass through his hands in wages, in allowances, in goods, was at his passing without debt and without fortune. The woollen cloak he wore had been his property since the time of the Prophet ﷺ. The house in which he lived was a house he had bought with his own means before his conversion. The stock of flour in his kitchen was what his daughter Hafsah ﵂ had sent him that week. Beyond that there was nothing.

The legacy for the Ummah

What ʿUmar ibn al-Khattab ﵁ left behind for the Ummah far exceeds the compass of a single article. The empire he handed over to ʿUthman ﵁ was administratively ordered in a way that no Khalifah after him would fundamentally change. The Diwan he had set up would retain the same structure into the Abbasid era. The Hijri calendar he had instituted still reckons time in the Muslim world today. The governors he had appointed formed the first generation of administrative officials who received their position not by ties of blood but by competence. The judicial procedure he had formulated in the letter to Abu Musa ﵁ became the procedure of thousands of judges after him.

But his legacy lies not only in institutions; it lies in an attitude. In the attitude of a Khalifah who himself bore the burden, who himself patrolled the streets, who himself slept in a woollen cloak, who himself prayed for forgiveness even before his first khutbah began, and who himself on his deathbed asked after his account with Allah ﷻ before he asked after his successor. That attitude has given Islam a norm that has continued to serve as a benchmark through ten centuries of governance. A governor who wished to be just asked himself what ʿUmar ﵁ would have done in this situation. A judge who took his office seriously consulted the letter to Abu Musa ﵁. An administrator who felt the temptation of wealth remembered the conversation with Salman ﵁ about the dirham that could turn the Khilafah into a kingship.

His name is still spoken today in the childhood prayer of his parents, in the adhkar of the Muslims before the salah, in the honour with which his grave in Medina is passed by pilgrims. The three graves in the chamber of ʿAʾishah ﵂, three lives of precisely the same length, together bear the heart of early Islam. The Prophet ﷺ at the head, Abu Bakr ﵁ in the middle, ʿUmar ﵁ at the side. For the Muslim who pronounces the salaam upon them from the Rawdah, that is the essential geography of Islam: three men who in their earthly life were inseparable and who in their rest have remained inseparable.

And so ends the history of his Khilafah, and so ends the history of his person. A man who had begun his life as an enemy of the message and ended as its second load-bearing pillar, a man who had entered through three different doorways of the revelation and who had departed through a single dagger thrust in the Masjid an-Nabawi. A man whose life was cut across by the history of two former world empires and whose rule had rewritten that history for ever, a man who in his death asked permission to lie beside his companions and received that permission, unbroken through the ages, to this day.

In the next chapter of the history of the Rashidun we continue with ʿUthman ibn ʿAffan ﵁, the third Khalifah, the possessor of the two lights, the man who had been designated by the Shura of Six and who would bear the Khilafah for twelve years. But for the moment we remain standing at the grave of ʿUmar ﵁, which lies in the chamber of ʿAʾishah ﵂, and we speak over him the words the Prophet ﷺ pronounced about him and which stand for history as his epitaph: if there were to be a prophet after him, it would have been ʿUmar ibn al-Khattab ﵁. May Allah ﷻ be pleased with him, and may he be pleased with Allah ﷻ.