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slug: jaar-neusbloedingen title: The year of the nosebleeds and the first khutbah arabicName: عام الرعاف language: en eventDate: 644-01-01 wordCountTarget: 3000

The year of the nosebleeds and the first khutbah

A name that lingered in Medina

In the city where every year bore a name, the year twenty-four of the Hijra bore a name that no one had foreseen. It was the first year of ʿUthman ﵁, and the year in which the community, for the first time after the murder of ʿUmar ﵁, resumed the rhythm of an ordinary year of governance without shock. It could have been called the year of the Bayʿah, or the year in which Rayy was opened anew, or the year in which the Byzantine fortresses on the northern frontier fell. But it received another name. Suyuti ﵀ records in a single sentence what the mouth of Medina itself had fixed:

What in the transmission is a single sentence was, in the city itself, an experience that lasted for months. Men whose noses bled in the middle of the morning prayer. Children whose pillows had to be washed every morning. Women who wore out their niqabs staunching blood that came from their noses without warning. Scholars who protected their manuscripts with cloths. And above all of that, in the highest house of the city, the khalifah himself, afflicted in a way no one wished, and so severely that he could not attend the Hajj of that year.

ʿUthman ﵁ afflicted

That the khalifah suffered from this plague was no small detail. The Hajj was, in the practice of Abu Bakr ﵁ and ʿUmar ﵁, an annual occasion at which the khalifah met the community in its entirety. The tribal chiefs from the north and the south, the governors from Iraq and Syria and Egypt, the scholars and the soldiers and the farmers came to Mecca for the pilgrimage, and there they found the khalifah in the same rituals as themselves. ʿUmar ﵁ had led the Hajj in every year of his reign. He had regarded it as a second seat of office, a mobile divan where complaints were heard, where governors gave account, and where the governance of the community became visible to those who served it from afar.

But ʿUthman ﵁ could not go in this first year. Suyuti ﵀ records it thus:

Whom he sent, and in what position he placed this person, belongs to the details that Suyuti ﵀, in his concise style, does not elaborate. What he does make clear is that the khalifah’s absence was not taken as a neglect of the office, but as a trial brought about by Allah ﷻ which the community was to bear in patience. No one reproached him for his absence. No one doubted his intention. The city waited for his recovery.

In his absence others led the pilgrimage, and the community performed its rituals as it had performed them in the preceding years. But the symbolic power of a khalifah standing himself at Arafat with the community was lost in this year. It was, for whoever surveyed the events in hindsight, an early portent. The khalifah was no longer the young rider that ʿUmar ﵁ had been; he was a man of seventy, suffering from a plague he could not stop, and in the years that followed the community would have to grow accustomed to a leader whose body could not meet every demand of the office.

The maiden khutbah

Before the nosebleeds felled him, in the first days after his bayʿah, ʿUthman ﵁ ascended the minbar of the Prophet ﷺ for his first public khutbah as khalifah. What he spoke does not belong to the extensive collection that Suyuti ﵀ has preserved of Abu Bakr ﵁ in his first khutbah, nor to the sharply aimed oration with which ʿUmar ﵁ had addressed the community. Suyuti ﵀ does not record the maiden khutbah of ʿUthman ﵁ as a separate episode in his work on this khalifah. It is, for whoever knows the style of Suyuti ﵀, not an oversight but a choice: he preserves what has been passed down with soundness in the chain of transmission, and he avoids what has been ascribed to ʿUthman ﵁ only in loose versions.

What has been passed down with soundness is the gravity with which ʿUthman ﵁ took the office upon himself in his first words to the community. He praised Allah ﷻ, he testified to the prophethood of Muhammad ﷺ, he acknowledged the burden that had been laid upon his shoulders, he asked the community for support in what would aid him in the office and for correction in whatever he might do wrong. He referred, for the criterion of his governance, to the formula that ʿAbd ar-Rahman ﵁ had pronounced at the bayʿah: he would follow the Sunnah of Allah ﷻ, the Sunnah of His Messenger ﷺ and the way of Abu Bakr ﵁ and ʿUmar ﵁, in what was possible for him. He acknowledged, in a turn that suited his character, that he carried within himself neither the eloquence of Abu Bakr ﵁ nor the sternness of ʿUmar ﵁, but that whatever capacities lay within him he would devote entirely to this community.

The community in the mosque accepted the words without comment. Whoever heard the address heard the voice of a man whose gentleness of tone took nothing away from his strength. Whoever had known him from before the bayʿah already knew this tone. He was the man who spoke in the market as he spoke in the mosque; who spoke with the bedouin as he spoke with the scholar; who had not raised his right hand since he had placed it in the hand of the Prophet ﷺ for the first bayʿah of his life, and who even now, in the bayʿah that he received and did not give, would not raise it against those he served.

The openings of the first year

The year twenty-four was not solely a year of plague and absence. It was, across the breadth of the community, a year of openings. Suyuti ﵀ records, within the same paragraph in which he writes about the nosebleeds, three other events that fell in this first year of the rule of ʿUthman ﵁.

What is fixed in these few sentences sets the tone for the first six years of the reign. The military movements that ʿUmar ﵁ had prepared in his final year were continued without interruption under the new khalifah. Rayy, a Persian city south of present-day Tehran, had been opened during the campaigns under ʿUmar ﵁ and had then fallen back into the hands of local rulers. In the first year of ʿUthman ﵁ it was opened anew, and this second opening would endure. The Byzantine border fortresses, which lay in the northern lines of Syria and in the mountains of Anatolia, fell one by one. The community had not used the silence after the murder of ʿUmar ﵁ to withdraw; it had, on the contrary, remained in motion, and the commanders in the field had noticed no interruption in the authority above them.

Alongside these military openings, one important administrative change took place in this first year which in retrospect was a portent of what would follow in the years to come. ʿUthman ﵁ replaced al-Mughirah ibn Shuʿbah ﵁, whom ʿUmar ﵁ had appointed governor of Kufa in his final year, with Saʿd ibn Abi Waqqas ﵁. This appointment was not in itself controversial. Saʿd ﵁ was the victor of al-Qadisiyyah, one of the ten to whom the Prophet ﷺ had promised Paradise, and he was known and beloved in Kufa. But the administrative policy of ʿUthman ﵁ would turn out less happily in the years that followed, and what began in this first year as the appointment of a Sahabi ﵁ of the old generation would later develop into a pattern of appointments of his own relatives, which aroused resistance in the community. But this belongs to the following articles in this cycle.

The quiet six years

What became visible in this first year, and what was continued in the second through sixth years, was what az-Zuhri ﵀ later summarized, in a statement that Suyuti ﵀ quotes concerning the whole khilafah of ʿUthman ﵁, in these words:

This statement is of particular significance in its placement in the text of Suyuti ﵀. It is quoted in the section on the events surrounding the end of the reign, not at the beginning. What Suyuti ﵀ indicates by it is that the first six years were not marked by an internal struggle, a fitnah, or a revolt; they were a time of expansion, prosperity, and quiet. What was built up in these years was the foundation for what would be criticized in the second six years. But the quiet of the first period was a genuine quiet; it was not the quiet of suppressed discontent. The community lived in a time of abundance, and in the years that followed it would look back on this quiet as on a time in which the plagues of the body, such as the nosebleeds, seemed heavier than the plagues of the heart, which were still to come.

The year in the mouth of Medina

For whoever reads the sources of Suyuti ﵀ together, there is a curious contrast in the way this first year was fixed in the mouth of Medina. It could have been called the year of Saʿd ﵁ in Kufa, or the year of the reopening of Rayy, or the year of the fall of the Byzantine fortresses. It could have borne many names. But it received, in the mouth of the city, the name of a plague. The community that in the year ten after the Hijra had counted the Year of the Delegations, and in the year eighteen the Year of the Famine, and in the year twenty-three the Year of the Murder of ʿUmar ﵁, now counted the year of the nosebleeds.

This says something about the way this community experienced its time. It did not hold the administrative events to be the most important; it held what worked in the bodies of its people to be the most important. A plague that struck the whole city, and that kept its khalifah from the Hajj, was graver to the transmission than a conquered fortress in Anatolia. It is a reading of history that the modern reader may find puzzling, but that, for whoever was formed in the school of Medina, was nothing more than self-evident: man is a creature under the hand of Allah ﷻ, and whatever trials He brings upon the community is what the community must record and remember. A battle is won by human hands; a plague is not averted by human hands. What comes over the city by the hand of Allah ﷻ is what the city understands as its true history.

A first year that set the tone

The many nosebleeds in Medina in the year twenty-four are no longer known to modern medical history. What the cause was, whether it was an infection or a change in the climate or a combination of factors, no one knows. What is known, and what Suyuti ﵀ wished to fix in his text, is that the first year of the third khalifah was marked not by a great military victory or by a great administrative reform, but by a domestic trial that struck the whole city. The khalifah suffered along with them; he missed the Hajj; he sent a delegate; he held his office in silence.

In the years that followed, the image of an ʿUthman ﵁ who stayed home while the community continued its rituals would return in another form. In the final months of his life he would stay home because his house was besieged by rebels. On that day he would have to explain his absence not by a plague at his nose, but by a siege at his door. But this, too, belongs to the story that is continued in the later articles.

On this day in the first year of his khilafah, with the nosebleeds in his face and the minbar in the mosque twice behind him, ʿUthman ﵁ was a khalifah whose term of office had begun in quiet. The storm was still far away. The prosperity that in the years to come would be poured out over him in caravans from Khurasan and Ifriqiya and Cyprus was still hidden in the future. What he had in this first year was a community that accepted him, a formula he had promised to follow, and a plague in his body that the city shared with him.

Sources

• Jalal ad-Din as-Suyuti ﵀, Tarikh al-Khulafa (trans. Abdassamad Clarke, Ta-Ha Publishers, 3rd ed. 1995), pp. 164–165, 167.