Umar

• 1. Introduction

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  Umar ibn al-Khattab, known simply as Umar, did not sneak out of Mecca. In 622, Muhammad told his followers to leave for Yathrib, the town later called Medina. Most of them departed at night, afraid of the Quraysh. Umar is reported to have left in broad daylight, and he issued a dare to anyone who cared to stop him. "Any one who wants to make his wife a widow and his children orphans should come and meet me there behind that cliff." He travelled with his cousin and brother-in-law Sa'id ibn Zayd.

  The man who made that challenge had once wanted Muhammad dead. He would go on to rule a young empire as the second Rashidun caliph, and to be remembered with awe by some and with bitterness by others. How does a man go from threatening a prophet to guarding his legacy? What did he build in ten years that outlasted him? And why do the surviving accounts of his life disagree so sharply about who he really was?

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• 2. The Sword and the Verses

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  Long before any empire, there was a boy herding his father's camels on the plains near Mecca. Umar was born into the Banu Adi clan, whose members settled disputes among the tribes. His father, Khattab ibn Nufayl, was a merchant admired for his intelligence. Umar remembered him differently, saying: "My father, al-Khattab, was a ruthless man. He would make me work until I was exhausted, and if I didn't, beat me." Modern historians add a warning. Genealogies from this era were passed along orally, reshaped with each telling, so they cannot be treated as verified fact.

  Umar grew into a tall, strong man and a celebrated wrestler. Reading and writing were rare in Arabia, yet he learned both. He loved poetry without writing any, became a gifted speaker, and took over his father's role as a tribal arbitrator. He also enjoyed drinking before Islam. As a trader he made journeys into Byzantine and Sasanian lands, where he is said to have studied their societies, but the source calls him unsuccessful at the business itself.

  Then, in 610, Muhammad began to preach. Umar saw the new faith as a wedge that would split the unity of the Quraysh, and he became one of its harshest opponents. He persecuted Muslims and recommended that Muhammad be killed. When a small group of Muslims migrated to Abyssinia, his alarm grew, and he decided to carry out the killing himself.

  The turning point came in 616, when Umar was 39 years old. According to Ibn Ishaq's Sirah, he set out with a sword and met his friend Nu'aym ibn Abd Allah, a secret convert. Nu'aym told him to look first at his own household. At home, Umar found his sister Fatima bint al-Khattab and her husband Sa'id ibn Zayd being taught by Khabbab ibn al-Aratt. They were reciting verses from Surat Ta-Ha.

  Umar attacked Sa'id, and when Fatima stepped in, she was left bleeding from the mouth. Sources disagree on whether he slapped her deliberately or struck her by accident. Ashamed, he asked to see the text. Fatima refused until he had washed, because an unclean person could not touch the pages. He washed, read, and wept. "Surely this is the word of Allah. I bear witness that Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah." Khabbab then emerged from hiding with news. Muhammad had prayed the day before that Islam be strengthened by either Umar or Abu Jahl.

  Umar went to Muhammad carrying the very sword he had meant to use against him, and accepted Islam in front of the companions. Afterward he prayed openly at the Kaaba while Quraysh figures watched without stepping in, a first for any Muslim.

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• 3. Making a Caliph

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  On the 8th of June 632, Muhammad died, and Umar refused to believe it. He declared that the Messenger of God had only gone to his Lord, as Moses had hidden from his people for forty days before returning. He promised to strike anyone who said otherwise. Abu Bakr spoke to the community in the mosque, saying that whoever worshipped Muhammad should know he was dead, while Allah never dies. Abu Bakr then recited Quran 3:144. Umar fell to his knees. Sunni tradition reads his denial as a sign of how deeply he loved Muhammad.

  While Muhammad's funeral was still being arranged, the Ansar, the Medinan helpers, gathered at the Saqifah Bani Sa'ida without the Muhajirun, the emigrants from Mecca. Umar heard of it and hurried over with Abu Bakr and Abu Ubayda ibn al-Jarrah. The assembly was united and unwilling to accept Meccan leadership. After one or two days of strained talks, Umar split the Ansar back into their old rival factions, the Banu Aws and the Khazraj. He then placed his hand on Abu Bakr's as a candidate everyone could accept. Others followed. The Khazraj and their leader, Sa'd ibn Ubadah, were left isolated.

  Umar himself later called the outcome a faltah, a hasty and ill-considered deal, and warned that it must not set a precedent. The historian Wilferd Madelung notes that Umar and his followers physically jumped on the sick Sa'd ibn Ubadah. That, he argues, shows the Ansar had not all come around peacefully.

  The Saqifah also produced one of history's sharpest disputes. Twelver Shia sources and Madelung describe the episode as a political coup against Ali. Some reports say Umar led an armed party to Fatimah's house and threatened to burn it unless Ali pledged loyalty. Those reports come mainly from sources written about three hundred years later, including al-Tabari's History. Sunni scholars generally reject them. Madelung doubts any force was used and thinks Abu Bakr would have restrained Umar. Some Sunni and Shia sources say Ali pledged allegiance only after six months, after Fatimah died.

  Under Abu Bakr, Umar served as chief adviser. He first resisted war against the rebel tribes of Arabia, hoping for their help against a Roman or Persian invasion, but later accepted the strategy of crushing the revolt. After 300 memorizers of the Quran died at the Battle of al-Yamama, Umar urged Abu Bakr to gather the Quran into a single book. Abu Bakr gave the task to Zayd ibn Thabit.

  In 634, Abu Bakr named Umar his successor. High-ranking companions objected, since Umar was strict, autocratic and unpopular among Medina's notables. Abu Bakr answered that Umar's severity came from his own softness and would ease under the weight of office. He had Uthman write the will, which also told Umar to press on with the conquests on the Iraqi and Syrian fronts.

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• 4. Machinery of Rule

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  About one hundred districts made up the provinces Umar governed, and he chose the provincial governors, the wali, with great care. Each appointment was put in writing with a set of instructions, and the new governor had to read them aloud to the people in the main mosque. Beneath him served a chief secretary, a military secretary, a revenue collector, a police chief, a treasury officer and a chief judge. The provinces included Basra, Kufa, Syria, Upper and Lower Egypt, Khorasan, Azerbaijan and Fars.

  Umar's standing instruction to his officers was blunt. "Remember, I have not appointed you as commanders and tyrants over the people. I have sent you as leaders instead, so that the people may follow your example." He told them not to shut their doors against the public and not to act as if they were superior to it. Governors had to travel to Mecca for the Hajj, where anyone could bring complaints against them. To discourage bribery, he paid high salaries, five to seven thousand dirhams a year for provincial governors.

  To enforce all this, Umar created a department that investigated complaints against state officers. It worked as an administrative court, and he often presided in person. Muhammad ibn Maslamah, one of his most trusted men, ran it and sometimes went to the scene himself. Accused officers could be summoned to Medina. Umar's intelligence service kept officials accountable, though it was also said to frighten his subjects.

  The rules about money were strict. Governors and agents could not trade while in office. Al-Harith ibn Wahb was once found with more wealth than his salary explained, including camels and slaves he had sold for two hundred dinars. He said he had used his expense funds to trade. Umar answered: "By God, we have not sent you out to trade, using the wealth of the Muslims. Pay them back."

  Umar also limited every governor's time in power to no more than two years, so that none would gather too much local strength. He applied the same logic to his greatest general. He dismissed Khalid ibn al-Walid to counter the cult of personality around him and to remind people that victory comes from Allah.

  In the new garrison cities called amsar, among them Basra, Kufa and Fustat, Arab soldiers lived apart from the settled population. They were forbidden to own land outside Arabia. Umar was the first to adopt the title amir al-mu'minin, Commander of the Faithful. He ordered a census of Muslim territories and started a canal of about nine miles to bring water to Basra from the Tigris.

  In 638, he began enlarging the Prophet's Mosque in Medina, sparing the homes of Muhammad's wives. The new enclosure measured 57.49 by 66.14 metres, and he spread pebbles across the floor. In the same year, the seventeenth since the Hijra, he decreed that the Islamic calendar would be counted from Muhammad's journey from Mecca to Medina.

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• 5. Famine, Plague and Welfare

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  In 638, drought struck Arabia, and a famine followed that came to be called the Year of Ashes. Medina's food reserves began to run dry. Umar called for caravans of supplies from Syria and Iraq and supervised their distribution himself. Abu Ubayda ibn al-Jarrah, governor of Syria, was the first to answer, and later he came to Medina to help run the relief effort. Umar hosted a nightly dinner for displaced people. By one estimate, more than a hundred thousand people attended. One narration says the effort of those months darkened his skin.

  While the famine eased, plague hit Syria and Palestine. Umar set out for Syria, and at Elat, Abu Ubayda met him with the news. He urged Umar to turn back to Medina. Umar pressed Abu Ubayda to come with him, but Abu Ubayda would not leave his troops in such a crisis. He died of the plague in 639, and 25,000 Muslims in Syria died with him. Late that year, Umar visited Syria to reorganize its government, since most veteran commanders and governors had died.

  He is credited with founding the first welfare state, centred on the Bayt al-mal. In 641, it began paying annual allowances to Muslims. It also supported poor and needy people, the elderly, orphans, widows and the disabled, including non-Muslims. Umar introduced a child benefit and pensions for children and the elderly. The institution ran for hundreds of years, through the Umayyad period of 661-750 and into the Abbasid era.

  Umar lived in a simple mud hut with no doors and walked the streets every evening to look for anyone in need. A modern researcher gives his priorities in one line. "If a dog dies hungry on the banks of the River Euphrates, Umar will be responsible for dereliction of duty." The same writer says he declined to cut off the hands of thieves because he felt he had failed to provide work.

  Edward Gibbon was struck by the same austerity. In The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, he describes a ruler whose "food consisted of barley bread or dates" and whose "drink was water". He adds that a Persian satrap, arriving to pay homage, found Umar asleep among the beggars on the mosque steps of Medina.

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• 6. Jerusalem and Beyond

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  In 637, the people of Jerusalem offered to surrender, but only to the caliph in person. Sophronius, the Byzantine Patriarch, refused to yield the city to the Muslim commanders, so Umar travelled from Medina. Traditional accounts say he arrived with a single servant. They took turns riding the camel, and when they reached the city it was Umar who led it by the rope. Islamic historians read this as a sign of humility.

  He issued the document known as the Pact of Umar, or the Covenant of Umar. It guaranteed the lives and property of the inhabitants, protected their places of worship, and forbade forced conversion. When prayer time came, Sophronius invited him to pray inside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Umar declined, fearing that later Muslims might use his prayer as an excuse to turn the church into a mosque. He prayed outside, on the spot where the Mosque of Omar now stands.

  Jewish sources preserve their own version. A Judeo-Arabic text says Umar allowed seventy Jewish households from Tiberias and its surroundings to settle in the southern part of the city. Bishop Eutychius recounts that Umar asked Ka'ab al-Ahbar, a convert from Judaism, where to build a place of prayer. Ka'ab pointed to the Temple Rock, buried under rubbish. Umar had it cleared, and after three heavy rains washed the Rock, he began prayers there. The lexicographer David ben Abraham al-Fasi wrote that the Muslim conquest brought relief to Jews who had been barred from praying on the Temple Mount.

  Umar's skill at strategy mattered as much as his piety. In 636, the Byzantine Emperor Heraclius and the Persian ruler Yazdegerd III were preparing a joint attack on the Muslims. Yazdegerd failed to coordinate with Heraclius. Umar took advantage by sending reinforcements to the Battle of Yarmouk in small bands, one after another, so the Byzantines believed a steady stream was arriving. They fought too early. Meanwhile, Yazdegerd was busy negotiating, which gave Umar time to shift troops from Syria to Iraq, where they proved decisive at the Battle of Qadisiyyah.

  In 638, Christian Arabs of the Jazira, backed by the Byzantine emperor, besieged Emesa. Umar answered with a three-pronged attack on their homeland from Iraq. He also told Sa'd ibn Abi Waqqas to send reinforcements to Emesa, and he led more troops there himself. The besiegers withdrew before they arrived. After the Battle of Nahavand, he launched a coordinated invasion of the Sasanian heartland that left Yazdegerd a fugitive.

  War paused in 638 and 639, during the famine and plague. By the time Umar halted all expeditions to consolidate Egypt and the former Sasanian lands, his rule reached from present-day Libya to the Indus river and the Oxus river. One estimate counts more than 4,050 cities captured.

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• 7. The Double-Bladed Dagger

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  On Wednesday, the 26th of Dhu'l-Hijja in the year 23 of the Islamic calendar, Umar led the congregational prayer in Medina's mosque. A Persian slave named Abu Lu'lu'a Firuz stabbed him with a double-bladed dagger, a weapon one source calls unique, with two sharp edges and a handle in the middle. Versions of the attack differ. In one, he also killed Kulayb ibn al-Bukayr al-Laythi, who stood behind Umar. In another, he stabbed thirteen people who tried to restrain him.

  Who was Abu Lu'lu'a? Reports describe him as a Zoroastrian from Nahavand, though others call him a Christian. He was a skilled joiner and blacksmith, probably captured by his master, al-Mughira ibn Shu'ba, at Nahavand in 642. Other sources say he was taken at Qadisiyya in 636 or sold to al-Mughira by the Persian officer Hormuzan. Non-Arabs were usually barred from Medina, yet al-Mughira sent him there to serve the caliph.

  Most accounts blame a tax dispute. Al-Mughira demanded a daily kharaj of two dirhams, or three dirhams a month in other versions. Abu Lu'lu'a appealed to Umar, who refused to lift it. Other accounts say he was angry that Umar raised the tax on al-Mughira. Madelung suggests Umar's biased policies toward non-Arab captives may have mattered too. The true motive remains unclear.

  The date of Umar's death is also disputed. Some accounts say he died the day he was stabbed, which was the 3rd of November 644 on the Julian calendar or the 6th of November on the Gregorian. Others say he survived three more days. His burial place was the Green Dome of al-Masjid al-Nabawi, beside Muhammad and Abu Bakr, with Aisha's permission, given to his son Abd Allah ibn Umar at Umar's request.

  On his deathbed, Umar named a committee of six to choose the next caliph: Abd al-Rahman ibn Awf, Sa'd ibn Abi Waqqas, Talha ibn Ubayd Allah, Uthman ibn Affan, Ali ibn Abi Talib and Zubayr ibn al-Awwam. His cousin Sa'id ibn Zayd was excluded because Umar never gave authority to relatives. He posted fifty armed soldiers to guard the meeting and named Suhayb ibn Sinan al-Rumi as caretaker. He also reportedly said that if Abu Ubayda ibn al-Jarrah or Muadh ibn Jabal had lived, he would have chosen one of them. Modern historians suspect such remarks were tributes to dead friends.

  Then came the claim of a plot. Abd al-Rahman ibn Awf said he had seen Hormuzan, Jufaynah and Abu Lu'lu'a whispering the night before, and the dagger fell. Abd al-Rahman ibn Abi Bakr said he had seen it in Hormuzan's hands days earlier. Umar's son Ubayd Allah killed Hormuzan, Jufaynah and Abu Lu'lu'a's daughter, and threatened to kill other foreign captives. Amr ibn al-As persuaded him to surrender his sword. Sa'd ibn Abi Waqqas, Jufaynah's foster brother, attacked him in anger. Umar ordered Ubayd Allah jailed until the next caliph could decide his fate.

  Uthman became caliph on the 7th of November 644. The tribunal paid blood money and freed Ubayd Allah, reasoning that executing Umar's son the day after would inflame people further. Ali protested and vowed to apply the usual punishment for murder if he ever became caliph.

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• 8. Memory and Doubt

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  Eyewitnesses disagreed even about Umar's skin. Some described him as ruddy or white, and one writer, Ibn Sa'd, doubted the claims of yellow skin. All agreed he was very tall and bald, towering over the crowd in the markets, and that he could use both hands equally well. These small contradictions hint at a larger problem. Most early Islamic history was passed on orally until the Abbasid Caliphate rose, and surviving sources are thin.

  The historian Stephen Humphreys, quoted by Antoine Borrut, says stories of this era followed a pattern of pact, betrayal and redemption. Later regimes and scholars, the source notes, created flawless heroes to justify their own actions. Yet Tom Holland holds that Umar's historicity is beyond dispute. An Armenian bishop, writing about a decade after Qadisiyya, described him as a "mighty potentate coordinating the advance of the sons of Ismael from the depths of the desert".

  Sunnis remember Umar as al-Faruq, the Distinguisher, and as the second of the rightly guided caliphs. In their accounts, he patched his clothes, rode a donkey without a saddle, rarely laughed, and wore a ring engraved "Enough is Death as a reminder to you O' Umar". Abd Allah ibn Mas'ud wept whenever Umar came up in conversation. "Umar was a fortress of Islam. People would enter Islam and not leave. When he died, the fortress was breached."

  Twelver Shia literature sees him very differently, often as a usurper of Ali's right to lead. Most Twelver scholars hold that Fatima was assaulted at her door, causing a miscarriage of her child Muhsin and soon her death. The scholar Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah rejected these accounts as a myth, though he allowed that his judgment was a probability. The Zaidiyyah split. The Jarudiyya reject both Umar and Abu Bakr. Others accept them as legitimate, though below Ali, citing Zayd ibn Ali, who heard nothing but good said of them in his family.

  Umar married nine women over his life and had fourteen children, ten sons and four daughters. One daughter, Hafsa, married Muhammad in 625. Centuries later, the Farooqui dynasty that ruled Khandesh, in what is now Maharashtra, India, from the 14th century to the 16th century, claimed descent from him. They did so even though Umar had refused to promote his own relatives.

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