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slug: bayah-uthman title: The bayʿah of ʿUthman ibn ʿAffan ﵁ arabicName: بيعة عثمان بن عفان language: en eventDate: 644-06-01 wordCountTarget: 3500

The bayʿah of ʿUthman ibn ʿAffan ﵁

Three nights after the burial

ʿUmar ibn al-Khattab ﵁ had been murdered. His body had been washed in the same chamber where Abu Bakr ﵁ and the Messenger ﷺ had been washed, and he had been buried beside them in the chamber of ʿAʾishah ﵂. What he had left behind in his final days was not a written designation such as the one Abu Bakr ﵁ had dictated upon his sickbed, but something without precedent in the history of the forms of government that mankind had known until then. He had entrusted the choice of his successor to a council of six men, the Shura, and he had given those six men three days to designate from among themselves the third khalifah of Islam.

The six were the remaining members of the ten to whom the Prophet ﷺ during his life had promised Paradise, with the exception of those who had already died. They were ʿUthman ibn ʿAffan ﵁, ʿAli ibn Abi Talib ﵁, ʿAbd ar-Rahman ibn ʿAwf ﵁, Saʿd ibn Abi Waqqas ﵁, az-Zubayr ibn al-ʿAwwam ﵁ and Talhah ibn ʿUbaydillah ﵁. ʿUmar ﵁ had, before his death, instructed them to withdraw into a chamber, and he had posted Abu Talhah al-Ansari ﵁ with fifty men of the Ansar at the door to admit no one and to let the six not leave before they had arrived at a designation. Suyuti ﵀ introduces the account with the tradition that Ibn Saʿd ﵀ preserved from Anas ﵁:

The city of Medina waited. It knew that the outcome was in essence already settled, for ʿUmar ﵁ had expressly excluded ʿAbd ar-Rahman ﵁ from being chosen himself, and he had instead entrusted to him the procedural leadership of the Shura. Whoever knew ʿAbd ar-Rahman ﵁, and in Medina everyone knew him, knew that he was not a man who would leave the choice to chance. For three days he went from door to door, spoke with the senior Muhajirun and the senior Ansar, spoke with the tribal chiefs who were in the city, spoke with the women whom the Messenger ﷺ had left behind in his houses and who in this city were the living witness of the Sunnah. He slept little and he ate little, and he did not disclose his own preference.

ʿAbd ar-Rahman ﵁ at work

What ʿAbd ar-Rahman ﵁ did in those three days was what a man does who is aware that his choice does not merely designate a person but sets a direction for the community. He spoke in separate conversations with ʿAli ﵁ and with ʿUthman ﵁, and he asked them a question that no one in a public assembly had dared to pose. He asked each of them: if I do not give the bayʿah to you, whom would you then designate? ʿAli ﵁ named ʿUthman ﵁. ʿUthman ﵁ named ʿAli ﵁. He then summoned az-Zubayr ﵁ to him and put the same question. Az-Zubayr ﵁ answered that he did not wish to designate either of them exclusively, and that he would give the bayʿah to ʿAli ﵁ or to ʿUthman ﵁ with equal willingness. He summoned Saʿd ﵁, and he put to Saʿd ﵁ the same question in slightly different words, because he himself together with Saʿd ﵁ had not from the outset been a candidate among the six and he did not need to regard Saʿd ﵁ as a contender.

ʿAbd ar-Rahman ﵁ did not write the answers down on a scroll; he counted them within himself. Then he spoke with the senior men among the Muhajirun who did not belong to the Shura, and he spoke with the Ansar, and he spoke with the scholars among the younger Sahabah ﵃, and he spoke with the women of the House of the Prophet ﷺ. He did not go to work without bias even within his own household, for he knew that his own kinship with ʿUthman ﵁ through marriage and clan could be a cause for concern. For that reason he held back in these three days from those of his own Banu Zuhrah and spoke chiefly with those who were not bound by kinship to him or to ʿUthman ﵁.

On the third day, when the term that ʿUmar ﵁ had set was nearly expired, he came to his decision. He had not found a single man who openly rejected ʿUthman ﵁. He had found many men who, if asked to choose between ʿUthman ﵁ and ʿAli ﵁, had pronounced in favor of the former. He had not found a single man who saw in the two figures one another’s equals; people distinguished, and the overwhelming majority distinguished in favor of ʿUthman ﵁. Thereupon he came into the mosque, climbed the minbar, praised Allah ﷻ, testified that there is no god but He and that Muhammad ﷺ is His Messenger, and spoke.

The criterion and the oath

ʿAbd ar-Rahman ﵁ set down his work in a single sentence that Suyuti ﵀ preserves as a tradition and that in every account of the events of that Wednesday was quoted anew:

In another tradition, this time in a private prelude, he addressed ʿAli ﵁ in such a way that the designation was not taken as a rejection of his person, but as a statement of what was alive in the community:

Thereupon he took the hand of ʿUthman ﵁ and spoke the formula that in this public declaration laid down the essence of the transfer:

In this formula lay the entire criterion by which ʿUthman ﵁ would be judged. He had not been appointed to introduce a new government according to his own judgment, not to alter the legacy of Abu Bakr ﵁ and ʿUmar ﵁, not to advance from his own kinship the standing of Banu Umayyah in the community. He had been appointed to continue what had already been begun: the Qur’an as law, the Sunnah of the Prophet ﷺ as example, and the practice of the two preceding khalifahs as the benchmark. Whoever recited this formula, and the community recited it along with him in the bayʿah, gave himself not over to a person, but to an office that was exercised in this person.

The question of whether this criterion would in practice be strictly maintained belongs to a later phase of the story. On this third day after the burial of ʿUmar ﵁ the oath was a promise of both parties: of ʿUthman ﵁ to the community that he would follow the compass of Book, Sunnah and the pair, and of the community to ʿUthman ﵁ that it would support him so long as he followed this compass.

The honest word of Ibn Masʿud ﵁

When the bayʿah had been given, and the Muhajirun after ʿAbd ar-Rahman ﵁ and the Ansar in turn had placed the hand of ʿUthman ﵁ in theirs, Ibn Masʿud ﵁ spoke a word that by its simplicity and its calm set the seal upon what had just come to pass. Ibn Masʿud ﵁, one of the first men to have taken up the revelation from the mouth of the Prophet ﷺ, one of the reciters of the Qur’an whose recitation the community regarded as the standard, a man who in his long life had never relied upon political favors, spoke in the presence of those who were still in the mosque. Suyuti ﵀ preserves the word thus:

Whoever reads this sentence with the ear of a Sahabi ﵁ of the old generation hears three things in it. First: that the office had fallen to a man from the ten whom the Prophet ﷺ had promised Paradise, and that this fact in itself rendered the bayʿah legitimate. Second: that the choice had not arisen from negligence, that the consultative procedure had been conducted as it ought to have been conducted, and that neither ʿAbd ar-Rahman ﵁ nor the Shura had omitted anything. Third, and this is the unspoken thing: that the best of those who remained, however exalted, were lesser than those who were no longer there. The Prophet ﷺ was no more. Abu Bakr ﵁ was no more. ʿUmar ﵁ was no more. Hamzah ﵁ and Jaʿfar ﵁ and the martyrs of Badr and Uhud were no more. The community stood with the best of its survivors, and that was what the community had.

The acknowledgment lay enclosed in this word of Ibn Masʿud ﵁: a hopeful sense of reality that befitted the man who spoke it. He who in the revelations of the first Meccan years had taken up his reading knew the spirit of the message too well to see in the appointment of ʿUthman ﵁ a terminus. He saw it as a continuation, with the best of those one still had, on a path that the Prophet ﷺ had laid out.

Who ʿUthman ﵁ was, when the bayʿah was given

To understand why the public bayʿah came about without opposition, one must call to mind the man himself as the community knew him on this third day of Muharram in the year twenty-four. ʿUthman ibn ʿAffan ﵁ had been born in Mecca into Banu Umayyah, one of the leading clans of Quraysh, in a family that in the time of the jahiliyyah had acquired standing and wealth. He had been a wealthy merchant before his conversion, and he had remained wealthy after his conversion, for he had not given up his trade and his caravans ran on into the Medinan years.

He had been one of the first four men to follow the daʿwah of Abu Bakr ﵁ in the opening days of the prophethood, when the faith was still passed on in a whisper. He had suffered for his conversion under the pressure of his uncle and of his clan, and he had with his wife Ruqayyah ﵂, the daughter of the Prophet ﷺ, made the first hijra to Abyssinia. When Ruqayyah ﵂ later died in Medina, on the very day that the news of the victory at Badr reached the city, the Prophet ﷺ had given him his other daughter, Umm Kulthum ﵂, in marriage. When she too died, the Prophet ﷺ had said, according to the tradition that Suyuti ﵀ preserves through at-Tabarani ﵀:

Because of this twofold kinship with the Messenger ﷺ, ʿUthman ﵁ bore in the community the byname Dhun-Nurayn, the man of the two lights. It was not a title that he had claimed for himself; it had been given to him in the mouths of others and had since stayed clinging to his name. Alongside this kinship he bore in the community two further distinctions. He had purchased the well of Rumah from his own means and given it to the community in the parched years of Medina. He had equipped the Army of Hardship, the army of Tabuk, from his own means in a season in which the Prophet ﷺ had called upon all the believers to contribute and in which many could give nothing. The Messenger ﷺ had said concerning him on that day, in a tradition that Suyuti ﵀ preserves through al-Hakim ﵀, that after this day no deed could harm him.

Alongside this generosity the community knew him as a man of modesty in his dealings. Al-Hasan ﵀ has, as Suyuti ﵀ relates through Ibn ʿAsakir ﵀, described the bashfulness of ʿUthman ﵁ thus:

This was the man whose hand on the third day of Muharram in the year twenty-four received the bayʿah of Medina. A wealthy merchant, a modest worshipper, a twofold son-in-law of the Prophet ﷺ, one of the first four in Islam, a man whose generosity at Rumah and Tabuk was told in every domestic circle, and a sahabi ﵁ of the old generation whose loyalty to the office no man doubted.

The public bayʿah in the mosque

The bayʿah to ʿUthman ﵁ proceeded in the same manner as the bayʿah to Abu Bakr ﵁ and to ʿUmar ﵁ before it. ʿAbd ar-Rahman ﵁ went forward first and laid his right hand upon that of ʿUthman ﵁. Then came ʿAli ﵁, and he gave his bayʿah as he had earlier given the bayʿah to Abu Bakr ﵁ and to ʿUmar ﵁. Then came az-Zubayr ﵁, and then Talhah ﵁, and then Saʿd ﵁. The Muhajirun of the old generation came, and the Ansar followed. For the rest of the day the mosque remained open to those who entered and wished to give their hand, and by the evening of that Wednesday the bayʿah had been carried out in its full breadth.

This is the tradition that Ibn ʿAsakir ﵀ preserved from al-Miswar ibn Makhramah ﵁, and that Suyuti ﵀ takes up in his summary. Ibn ʿAsakir ﵀ adds that Abu Wail ﵀ years later asked ʿAbd ar-Rahman ﵁ how it had been possible that he had given the bayʿah to ʿUthman ﵁ and not to ʿAli ﵁. ʿAbd ar-Rahman ﵁ answered in a word that lays bare the method of the Shura:

In this short answer lies the entire difference between the two men for the office. Both were capable; both were just; both had been with the Prophet ﷺ in his closest circle and had wept at his death. But ʿAli ﵁ had in honesty not wished to pledge without reservation that he would follow the practice of Abu Bakr ﵁ and ʿUmar ﵁ in every detail, because he knew that in some matters his own ijtihad might diverge. ʿUthman ﵁ had pledged without reservation. For the Shura, and for the criterion that ʿAbd ar-Rahman ﵁ had laid down in his formula, this was the difference.

What this bayʿah meant

The third transfer of government in the history of Islam had proceeded without war, without uproar, without pretenders from outside Medina. Three nights after the burial of ʿUmar ﵁ the community stood with its third khalifah. The procedure that Abu Bakr ﵁ had devised upon his sickbed, and that ʿUmar ﵁ in his final days had refined into a council of six, had for the second time in ten years worked without rupture. An empire would have needed for such a transfer a dynasty, or a coup, or a battle. Medina had needed three days of consultation, an hour in the mosque, and a formula with three sources.

At the same time there lay enclosed in this bayʿah a tension that in the years afterward would slowly rise to the surface. ʿUthman ﵁ was decidedly gentler in nature than ʿUmar ﵁ had been. He was wealthier; he had more kinsmen in the related positions; he was older at his accession, for he was approximately seventy years old on the day the bayʿah fell into his hands. Az-Zuhri ﵀ has, in a statement that Suyuti ﵀ later cites in his work concerning the whole khilafah of ʿUthman ﵁, established that the first six years of his rule had passed without criticism. But it is in the Sunnah of history that a community judges its leader by the second half of his office, not by the first. What in the first six years was built up in silence would in the second six years be torn down in clamor. But this belongs to a story that is continued in the following articles.

On this third day of Muharram in the year twenty-four the community was of one mind. It had its khalifah. It had its formula. It had its criterion. It had its promise. And it had, in ʿUthman ibn ʿAffan ﵁, the man who in his youth had memorized the Book in the time of the Messenger ﷺ, and who in his old age would bring the community together to unite that Book into a single mushaf. But this too belongs to another story.

Sources

• Jalal ad-Din as-Suyuti ﵀, Tarikh al-Khulafa (trans. Abdassamad Clarke, Ta-Ha Publishers, 3rd ed. 1995), pp. 163–165.