The Banishment of Abu Dharr ﵁ to Rabadha

In the year 32 of the Hijra, in a poor hamlet on the edge of the Hijaz, there died a man whom the Prophet ﷺ had personally praised for his truthfulness. He was Abu Dharr Jundub ibn Jinadah al-Ghifari ﵁, the fifth or sixth convert to Islam, a companion who could not look upon wealth without recalling how it would weigh on the Day of Resurrection. Two years earlier he had been recalled from Damascus and sent to Rabadha, and his death in solitude fulfilled a Prophetic ﷺ word that he himself had heard years before and had never forgotten. In this article we follow his path from Damascus to the small hamlet on the pilgrim road, as Suyuti ﵀ preserves it in his treatment of the second half of the Khilafah of ʿUthman ﵁.

Who Was Abu Dharr ﵁?

Before we encounter him in Damascus in his clash with the governor Muʿawiyah ibn Abi Sufyan ﵁, his name must be traced back to the earliest years of Islam. Abu Dharr ﵁ was of the tribe of Ghifar, a Bedouin tribe that in the age of Jahiliyyah lived off raids on the caravans travelling between Mecca and Sham. His tribe had an evil reputation, and anyone who lived in Mecca knew that an encounter with Ghifar on the road north rarely passed without losses. Yet Abu Dharr himself, so the tradition relates, had already in the Jahiliyyah rejected the idols and occupied himself with a kind of private monotheism, long before he had heard of the message of the Prophet ﷺ.

When word of a new Prophet ﷺ in Mecca reached him, he first sent his brother Unays to investigate the matter. Unays returned with the report that the man in Mecca urged people to noble conduct and that his speech did not resemble poetry. That answer did not satisfy Abu Dharr, so he went to Mecca himself. He did not find the Prophet ﷺ at once, for the message was still secret and the converts were being persecuted by Quraysh. He slept for days in the Masjid al-Haram, living on the water of Zamzam, until ʿAli ibn Abi Talib ﵁, who in his youth had noticed the solitary man, quietly led him to the Prophet ﷺ.

At that meeting Abu Dharr ﵁ embraced Islam. In later years the Prophet ﷺ counted him among the first four or five who had accepted the faith. Some sources place him as the fourth, others as the fifth, and still others as the sixth. On page 167 Suyuti ﵀ names him among those who died in the thirty-second year with the esteem that in the time of Abu Dharr ﵁ was shared by the whole Ummah: the truthful one in speech. That was not a formula but a diagnosis, for what Abu Dharr ﵁ said, he said without embellishment, and what he believed, he lived without softening.

Shortly after his conversion, the Prophet ﷺ had sent him back to his tribe rather than letting him remain in Mecca. He went back and within a short time brought half the tribe of Ghifar to Islam, and the other half followed in a second round. In this way the old caravan raiders became a tribe of whom the Prophet ﷺ would say in later years: Ghifar, may Allah ﷻ forgive them; Aslam, may Allah ﷻ grant them peace. It was Abu Dharr ﵁ who had brought his tribe to Islam in two stages.

After the Hijrah, Abu Dharr ﵁ joined the Prophet ﷺ in Medina. He was not present at Badr, because in that period he was still living among his tribe, but he was present at many later battles. What distinguished him, however, was not his presence on the battlefields but the severity of his way of life. He slept on a mat of palm leaves, he ate what he had and gave away what he did not immediately need, and he kept no store. He believed, on the basis of Qur’anic verses that he constantly cited, that a believer who rose in the morning with more provision than he would use that day would be held to account for it on the Judgement of the Day of Resurrection. It was that conviction which, in the days of prosperity under the third Khalifah, would bring him into conflict with the governor of Sham.

The Preaching Against the Hoarding of Wealth

In the first ten years after the death of the Prophet ﷺ, Abu Dharr ﵁ lived between Medina and the northern garrisons. Under Abu Bakr ﵁ and under ʿUmar ﵁ there was little friction between his way of life and the circumstances of the Ummah, for the revenues were modest, the distribution strict, and whoever received more than he could use that month gave it to those who had less. But in the Khilafah of ʿUthman ﵁, as we have followed in a previous article, the revenues multiplied. Gold and silver came from Khurasan, from Ifriqiya, from Armenia, and from Sijistan, and the governors in the provinces received sums whose magnitude had not existed in the time of the first two Khaliefen ﵁. Whoever loved building built palaces, whoever loved horses bought stables, and whoever loved trade increased his stores. The prosperity was real, and it found its way also into the houses of the companions ﵃ who had remained in Medina, and to an even greater degree into the houses of the governors and their secretaries in the provinces.

Abu Dharr ﵁ opposed this in a form that was unambiguous. He appealed to the verse of Surat at-Tawbah, which in the mushaf bears numbers 34 and 35 of the ninth chapter, in which Allah ﷻ proclaims concerning those who hoard gold and silver and do not spend it in the way of Allah ﷻ:

And those who hoard gold and silver and do not spend it in the way of Allah, announce to them a painful punishment. On the Day when this gold and silver will be heated in the fire of Jahannam, and their foreheads, their sides, and their backs will be branded with it: this is what you hoarded for yourselves, so taste what you have hoarded.

For Abu Dharr ﵁ this warning was no historical document about the miserly possessors in the time of the revelation, but a present-day indictment against everyone who in his own days kept more gold or silver in his house than he needed for the sustenance of that day and the next. His interpretation left no room for the saving of a reserve, for whoever had more than he spent that day fell under the warning.

Other companions ﵃ interpreted the verse differently. They argued, with Qur’anic arguments of equal weight, that the verse referred to those who did not pay the zakat. Whoever paid the obligatory zakat, they argued, did not fall under the warning of verses 34 and 35, even though he possessed great sums of gold or silver. Their interpretation was that of the majority, and it was the interpretation that in the fiqh of the later generations was accepted as the prevailing one. But Abu Dharr ﵁ would not be bound by the majority. He maintained that the warning was unlimited and that the believer had to regard his possessions as a deposit that had to be distributed the same day or the day after.

As long as Abu Dharr ﵁ proclaimed his interpretation in Medina, the matter remained within the bounds of private debate. When he travelled to Damascus, however, where Muʿawiyah ibn Abi Sufyan ﵁ was seated as governor over Sham, his preaching took on a different weight, for the court of Muʿawiyah ﵁ in Damascus was of a prosperity unmatched in Medina. There the governor received the revenues of a province that stretched from the southern border of Anatolia to the northern border of the Hijaz, and the treasury he administered was of a magnitude that had been unthinkable in the first ten years of Islam.

The Clash With Muʿawiyah ﵁

In Damascus Abu Dharr ﵁ began a preaching that, according to the tradition of Suyuti ﵀ and the sources he follows, addressed the crowds in the bazaars and at the gate of the main mosque. He read them verses 34 and 35 of Surat at-Tawbah, he pointed to the treasures in the governor’s treasury, and he warned that whoever took part in the hoarding took part in the punishment. He spoke not in the abstract but concretely: These lumps of gold that you keep in your treasure chambers will on the Day of Resurrection be heated, and your foreheads will be branded with them. For the common people of Damascus, for whom the governor’s prosperity was as far out of reach as it was visible, the message struck home; for the governor himself it became unbearable.

Muʿawiyah ﵁ had Abu Dharr ﵁ summoned. The conversation that took place between the two is transmitted in various ways in the traditions, but the core is the same in all versions. Muʿawiyah ﵁ posed the question to which he believed Abu Dharr ﵁ could give no conclusive answer: whether the verse of hoarding referred to him and to the community of Sham, or only to the Jews and Christians of the Ahl al-Kitab to whom Surat at-Tawbah was primarily addressed. Abu Dharr ﵁ gave no ground:

Muʿawiyah ﵁ did not leave the matter there. He set Abu Dharr ﵁ a test that the sources have transmitted to us in the form of an offer he made him one evening. In the dusk he had a thousand dinars in gold pieces brought to his lodging, with the message that this was a gift from the governor. Abu Dharr ﵁ accepted the dinars without resistance. The next morning, however, before sunrise, he distributed all of it down to the last dinar among the poor of Damascus, and when Muʿawiyah ﵁ sent to ask what had become of the gift, Abu Dharr ﵁ answered that he had not slept that night because he still had dinars in the house, and that before daybreak he had given everything away so that he could enter the new day without any store.

For Muʿawiyah ﵁ it was now certain that Abu Dharr ﵁ would not be won over by reconciliation or by gifts. His preaching in Damascus would continue, and it would go on stirring the common people in the bazaars and the mosques. For a governor who served the stability of his province, this was a political problem that he could no longer solve by his own means. He therefore wrote to the Khalifah in Medina, and he asked ʿUthman ﵁ to have Abu Dharr ﵁ recalled from Sham.

The Recall to Medina

In answer to Muʿawiyah’s ﵁ letter, ʿUthman ﵁ wrote an instruction to his governor in which he ordered him to send Abu Dharr ﵁ to Medina on a swift mount and with the necessary escort. The journey across the desert of Sham to the Hijaz was long and, in summer, arduous. Abu Dharr ﵁ accepted the instruction without resistance, and he set out with the escorts Muʿawiyah ﵁ had assigned him.

When he arrived in Medina, ʿUthman ﵁ received him at first with the reverence due to the old companion ﵁ of the Prophet ﷺ. The Khalifah was not insensible to the standing of Abu Dharr ﵁. He knew that before him stood a man whom the Prophet ﷺ had personally called the truthful one in speech. The conversation that took place between them is transmitted by the sources in the form of an attempt at mutual understanding that ended in an impasse.

ʿUthman ﵁ asked Abu Dharr ﵁ whether he was willing to soften his interpretation of verse 9:34. He pointed out to Abu Dharr ﵁ that the majority of the companions ﵃ interpreted the verse differently from him, and that his strict interpretation was causing unrest in the provinces. Abu Dharr ﵁ answered that he would not depart from his interpretation, because he had learned it from the Prophet ﷺ himself and because he would not weaken what he had heard from the Prophet ﷺ in order to please the governors. ʿUthman ﵁ asked him whether he was at least willing not to conduct his preaching in the bazaars and the mosques, but to confine it to the private circle of those who sought him out. Abu Dharr ﵁ answered that he would not conceal the truth from those who needed it, and that wherever he lived he would speak as he had done until then.

The Khalifah thus stood before a choice. He could let Abu Dharr ﵁ remain in Medina and accept that his preaching in the city of the Prophet ﷺ would lead to the same frictions as it had done in Damascus. He could send him back to his tribe of Ghifar, but by that he would not truly have brought him to rest. Or he could direct him to withdraw to a place where he could live according to his own convictions without a public audience.

The Ride to Rabadha

ʿUthman ﵁ chose the third way. He designated Rabadha to Abu Dharr ﵁ as the place where he would henceforth dwell. Rabadha was a hamlet on the pilgrim road between Medina and Kufa, about three days’ journey east-northeast of Medina. It was no city, and it was no oasis of any significance. It was a halting place for caravans, with a handful of houses, a well, and a field where the herds of the Ghifar tribe grazed in winter. Whoever went to Rabadha went to the edge of the inhabited world.

Whether the directive was a banishment or a voluntary withdrawal, the traditions differ on this point. On page 168, in the summary by Saʿid ibn al-Musayyab ﵀ of the tribal grievances, Suyuti ﵀ holds to the neutral formulation that Abu Dharr ﵁ had been brought to Rabadha. Some sources present the decision as a formal banishment by the Khalifah; other sources present it as a voluntary departure by Abu Dharr ﵁ himself, who had recognized that his preaching in Medina could not remain without consequences and who thought it best to withdraw of his own accord to the edge of the desert. What all versions agree on is that Abu Dharr ﵁ did not rebel. He accepted the directive and departed.

His wife accompanied him, and in some traditions also his servant. He took with him what personal possessions he had in Medina, which was not much: a cloak, a camel, a handful of utensils. The ride across the desert to Rabadha took three days. On arrival he settled into a simple dwelling, and there he began to lead the life he had not led very differently in Medina: prayer, fasting, simple meals, the sharing of what he had with those who had less. The difference was that he now had no audience. The pilgrims on their way to Mecca passed by and heard him, and then went on their way, while whoever was in Medina heard him no more.

The Death at Rabadha

Abu Dharr ﵁ dwelt in Rabadha for two years. In the year 32 of the Hijra, as Suyuti ﵀ writes on page 167, he died there. In that year died Abu Dharr Jundub ibn Jinadah al-Ghifari, the truthful one in speech. In a single line Suyuti ﵀ sums up the death, and that line is in the Tarikh al-Khulafa the only place where he names the date of Abu Dharr’s ﵁ death.

The circumstances of the death, however, are preserved in greater detail in the traditions outside Suyuti ﵀, and they fulfil a Prophetic ﷺ word that Abu Dharr ﵁ had heard from the Prophet ﷺ years before. When Abu Dharr ﵁ still lived in Medina in the time of the Prophet ﷺ, the Prophet ﷺ had once made a statement to him that he had not forgotten. He had said:

At hearing that statement Abu Dharr ﵁ had kept silent. In the years thereafter he had passed it on to his wife and to the people around him, with the report that he did not know when or where it would come to pass, but that he knew it would come to pass.

In the last days of his life at Rabadha he fell ill. He knew that he would not recover, and he let his wife know that he was what the Prophet ﷺ had foretold. He asked her to wash his body, to wrap him, and to lay him at the edge of the road, so that the first caravan that passed might bury him. When she asked him whether there was still anyone at Rabadha who would help her, he answered that they were all scattered and that there was no one. He told her that she need not be afraid, for the Prophet ﷺ had foretold that people from Iraq would meet him and would tend to him.

He died. His wife did what he had charged her. She washed him as well as she could, wrapped him in a cloth, and laid him at the edge of the road. There he lay. At first no one came. Then, according to the tradition, a caravan passed by that was travelling from Iraq to the Hajj. At the head of the caravan went ʿAbdullah ibn Masʿud ﵁, one of the first companions ﵃ of the Prophet ﷺ, a man who had himself been in dispute with the Khalifah and who in Kufa had at first refused the official mushaf. ʿAbdullah ibn Masʿud ﵁ saw the body at the edge of the road, recognized it, and when he heard that this was Abu Dharr ﵁, he broke into tears. He cried out: What has become of the saying of the Prophet ﷺ that you would live alone, die alone, and be resurrected alone? He had the janazah prayer performed, he washed him again or confirmed the ablutions the widow had done, and he buried Abu Dharr ﵁ in the earth of Rabadha.

The Prophetic ﷺ word was fulfilled in all its parts. He had lived alone in his last years. He had died alone, for there was no one beside him who knew him ﷺ closely. And he was buried by people from Iraq, as the Prophet ﷺ in Medina had foretold at a time when Iraq had not even been conquered and when no one of Bani Adam could have imagined that a man of Ghifar would owe his grave in the sandy earth of Rabadha to an Iraqi caravan.

Legacy

For the Khilafah of ʿUthman ﵁ the banishment of Abu Dharr ﵁ was not without consequence. On page 168, in the tradition of Saʿid ibn al-Musayyab ﵀ concerning the tribal bonds that had formed in their hearts the rancour which in 35 AH would break out into the fitna, Suyuti ﵀ names Banu Ghifar expressly as one of the four tribes whose bitterness had formed around a particular companion ﵁. Banu Ghifar and their allies and whoever was angry on account of Abu Dharr ﵁ held in their hearts what they held. In one short sentence it became clear that the directive of Rabadha had not been accepted by Banu Ghifar as a merely personal arrangement between the Khalifah and the old companion ﵁. It was experienced by the tribe as a humiliation of one of its greatest sons, and that humiliation was not forgotten in the years leading to 35 AH. When the Egyptians and the Kufans arrived in Medina with their complaints about their governors, Banu Ghifar was among the tribes that silently shared the cause of the rebels, because in the Khalifah they saw the man who had banished their Abu Dharr ﵁.

For the broader Islamic tradition, Abu Dharr ﵁ was not diminished by his banishment but magnified by it. In the generations after him he came to be seen as the prototype of the zahid, the ascetic who could not be corrupted by wealth and who had applied the warning of Surat at-Tawbah literally. Later scholars did not adopt his interpretation of verse 9:34 as the prevailing fiqh, but they preserved it as the strictest possibility, as the standard against which every believer could measure himself even though he was not obliged to follow it. The saying he had constantly cited, that a believer who rose in the morning with more provision than he would use that day would be held to account for it, was preserved for centuries in the literature of the tasawwuf as a touchstone of inner righteousness.

The Prophet ﷺ had made several statements about Abu Dharr ﵁ that are included in the hadith collections. The most frequently cited is the statement in which he said: The sky has given no shade and the earth has borne no foot upon one more truthful in speech than Abu Dharr. That word was cited in all the later traditions whenever he was spoken of, and it was that statement which Suyuti ﵀ compressed into his terse line on page 167 as the truthful one in speech.

As far as Islamic historiography is concerned, the figure of Abu Dharr ﵁ remains bound to two poles. At the one pole is the pole of purity: the man who in every prosperity saw the hoarded gold that would brand him on the Day of Resurrection, and who never allowed himself to keep more than he spent that day. At the other pole is the pole of solitude: the man of whom the Prophet ﷺ had foretold that he would dwell alone, die alone, and be resurrected alone, and who had accepted this prediction in every part without deviating a handspan from the truth he proclaimed.

We close this article with the acknowledgement that his grave in Rabadha was visited for centuries after his death by pilgrims who, on the way to Mecca, made a detour to pray at the earth in which the solitary companion ﵁ of the Prophet ﷺ was buried. Whoever today follows the pilgrim road between Medina and the eastern desert can point on the map to the place Rabadha where in the thirty-second year of the Hijra there died a man whose saying the Prophet ﷺ had foretold, whose truthfulness the Prophet ﷺ had praised, and whose kinsmen never forgave the Khalifah his banishment in 35 AH.

Sources

• Jalal ad-Din as-Suyuti ﵀, Tarikh al-Khulafa, translation Abdassamad Clarke, Ta-Ha Publishers, London 1995, pp. 166–175.
  • p. 167: the death of Abu Dharr ﵁ in the year 32 AH, with the designation the truthful one in speech.
  • p. 168: the tradition of Saʿid ibn al-Musayyab ﵀ concerning Banu Ghifar and their allies as one of the tribal bonds whose bitterness had grown around Abu Dharr ﵁.
  • pp. 166–168: the broader context of the prosperity in the second half of the Khilafah that makes the preaching of Abu Dharr ﵁ against the hoarding of gold and silver visible in its full sharpness.
• Surat at-Tawbah 9:34–35, the Qur’anic warning against the hoarding of gold and silver on which Abu Dharr ﵁ based his preaching in Damascus.
• The Prophetic ﷺ word about his solitary life, death, and resurrection, and the Prophetic ﷺ word about his truthfulness, as transmitted by the later hadith collections and summarized in the biographical literature about the companions ﵃.