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Umar bin al-Khattab, the Second Khalifa of the Muslims
IN THE TIMES OF IGNORANCE, Umar made his living as a
broker. Shibli, his biographer, says that in his youth he grazed camels. Before accepting Islam, Umar was one of the most
rabid enemies of Muhammad, the Messenger of God. When Muhammad proclaimed his mission, many people
acknowledged him as the Messenger of God. Umar acknowledged him as Messenger of God after
six years. Some historians claim that Umar was a most
awe-inspiring man, and when he accepted Islam, the idolaters were gripped with fear for
their lives. But this is only a case of a dominant myth being in conflict with ugly facts.
When Umar accepted Islam, the idolaters remained where they were, and nothing changed for
them; but it was Muhammad who was compelled to leave his home, and had to find sanctuary
in a desolate ravine. He spent three years in that ravine, and during those years of
exile, his life was exposed to deadly perils every day and every night. During this entire
period of more than 1000 days, Umar, like many other Muslims in Makkah, was the silent
spectator of the ordeals of his master. He made no attempt to bring those ordeals to an
end. Muhammad Mustafa established brotherhood among
Muslims both in Makkah and in Medina. In Makkah, he made Umar the "brother" of
Abu Bakr, and in Medina, he made him the "brother" of Utban bin Malik. For his
own brother, Muhammad chose Ali ibn Abi Talib in both cities. In 3 A.H., Umar's daughter, Hafsa, was married to
the Apostle. Umar was one of the fugitives of the battle of Uhud
(Baladhuri). He himself said later: "When Muslim were defeated in Uhud, I ran toward
the mountain." (Suyuti in al-Durr al-Manthoor). At the siege of Khyber, Umar made an attempt to
capture the fortress but failed. Umar was one of the fugitives of the battle of
Hunayn. Abu Qatada, a companion of the Prophet, says: "In Hunayn when the Muslims
were fleeing, I also fled, and I saw Umar with others." (Bukhari and
Kitabul-Maghazi). In 8 A.H. the Apostle sent Umar as a ranker with
many others to report for duty to Amr bin Aas, their commanding officer, in the campaign
of Dhat es-Salasil. In 11 A.H. the Apostle of God organized the Syrian
expedition and he appointed Usama bin Zayd bin Haritha as its general. He ordered Umar to
serve as a ranker in the expedition. Though Umar spent eighteen years in the company of
Muhammad Mustafa, the Messenger of God, the latter never appointed him to any position of
authority – civil or military. When the Apostle of God was on his deathbed, he
asked the companions to bring pen, paper and ink so he might dictate his will but Umar
defied him. He did not let the Apostle dictate his will and testament. Umar was not present at the funeral of the Prophet
of Islam. He was brawling with the Ansar in the outhouse of Saqifa when the body of the
Prophet was being buried. Umar was the khalifa-maker of Abu Bakr. During Abu
Bakr's khilafat, Umar was his principal adviser. The Banu Umayya were the traditional champions of
idolatry and the arch-enemies of Muhammad and his clan, the Banu Hashim. Muhammad had
broken their power but Umar revived them. The central component of his policy, as head of
the government of Saqifa, was the restoration of the Umayyads. He turned over Syria to
them as their "fief," and he made them the first family in the empire. A modern student of history might find claims made
on behalf of some companions of the Prophet rather extravagant and baffling. He might
notice in them the clash of popular imagination with historical reality. But if he wishes
to make a realistic evaluation of the roles they played in the lifetime of the Prophet,
there is no better way of doing so than to turn away from rhapsody and rhetoric, and to
focus attention on facts and facts alone. Principal Events of the Caliphate of Umar When Umar took charge of the caliphate, the Muslim
armies were fighting against the Persians in Iraq and the Romans in Syria. The army in
Syria was under the command of Khalid bin al-Walid, the favorite general of Abu Bakr.
Umar's first act as khalifa was to dismiss him from all his commands, and to appoint Abu
Obaida bin al-Jarrah as the supreme commander of the Muslim forces in Syria. Shibli says that Umar had, for a long time, nursed a
secret hatred of Khalid because of the latter's excesses. Umar had indeed dismissed Khalid
because of his excesses but it appears that personal rancor was also at work. He was
jealous of Khalid's fame and popularity. If he disliked Khalid's transgressions, he ought
to have formally indicted him, and should have ordered full investigation of his crimes in
murdering Malik ibn Nuweira and in appropriating his widow. If Khalid had been proven
guilty, then Umar ought to have passed sentence on him according to the Islamic law. But
there was no indictment and no investigation. Khalid was summarily dismissed and he died
in poverty and obscurity in 21 A.H. Umar's caliphate is notable for its many conquests.
His generals conquered Iraq, Iran, Azerbaijan, Kirman, Seistan, Khurasan, Syria, Jordan,
Palestine and Egypt, and incorporated them into the empire of the Muslims. All of these
were permanent conquests. The Romans lost Syria, Palestine and Egypt for ever; and in
Persia, the Sassani empire ceased to exist. Among other events of the caliphate of Umar, were
the first outbreak of plague in Syria in 18 A.H., and a famine in Hijaz in the same year.
Between them, the plague and the famine killed more than 25,000 people (Suyuti and Abul
Fida). Civil and Military Administration and Policy Since the empire had grown enormously in all
directions, Umar had to establish an administrative system. But the Arabs did not have any
experience in administration. Umar, therefore, left the Persian and the Roman framework of
administration in the conquered provinces undisturbed. The Persian and the Roman staff
carried on the day-to-day work as before. Umar founded numerous military cantonments in Iraq,
Syria and Egypt. Since he wanted the Arabs to be a purely fighting and ruling class, he
did not allow them to buy land and to settle down or to become farmers in the conquered
territories. To assess land revenue, Umar again had to retain the
Persian and the Romans systems. But in Iraq it was found necessary to survey the arable
lands and to assess tax on them. Arabs knew less than nothing about assessing land
revenue. There was, however, one exception in Uthman bin Hunaif of Medina. He was a man of
outstanding ability as a revenue expert. Though it was Umar's policy not to appoint the
citizens of Medina (Ansar) to any important positions, in this particular case he had no
choice, and he appointed Uthman bin Hunaif as the commissioner of land development in
Iraq. Qadi Yusuf says that Uthman bin Hunaif was an authority in all Arabia on taxation,
assessment of land revenue and land reclamation (Kitabul-Kharaj and Siyar-ul-Ansar). Within less than a year, Uthman bin Hunaif had
completed the job of taking measurements of the whole new province, and of making
assessments for the collection of land revenue. He was, thus, the first Financial
Commissioner of Iraq, and incidentally, one of the few Ansaris to hold any position of
authority in the caliphates of Abu Bakr, Umar and Uthman bin Affan. When Syria, Jordan and Palestine were conquered,
Umar appointed Yazid bin Abu Sufyan the governor of Syria; Shurahbil bin Hasana governor
of Jordan, and Amr bin Aas the governor of Palestine. Abu Obaida bin al-Jarrah was
appointed governor of the city of Damascus. When Amr bin Aas conquered Egypt, Umar made
him its governor. Yazid bin Abu Sufyan, the governor of Syria, died in
the plague of 18 A.H. When Umar heard the news of his death, he went to see Abu Sufyan to
offer condolences to him. But Abu Sufyan interrupted Umar's commiseration, and asked him,
"Whom are you going to appoint governor of Syria in place of my late son,
Yazid?" Umar said: "Of course, his brother, Muawiya." Abu Sufyan
immediately forgot his sorrow at his son's death, and rejoiced in the elevation of
Muawiya, his second son, as governor. Umar appointed Muawiya the new governor of Syria.
When Abu Obaida died, Umar placed Damascus also under Muawiya's jurisdiction. He fixed his
salary at 60,000 pieces of gold a year (Isti'ab, Volume I). After dismissing Khalid bin al-Walid as supreme
commander of the forces in Syria, Umar had appointed him, for a time, governor of the
district of Kinnisirin but dismissed him again for his alleged "pomposity." Saad bin Abi Waqqas, the victor of the battle of
Qadsiyya fought against the Persians, was Umar's governor of Iraq. He too was dismissed in
21 A.H. Amr bin Aas was Umar's governor in Egypt. Umar did
not dismiss him but curtailed his powers by appointing Abdullah bin Saad bin Abi Sarah as
a "watchdog" over him in fiscal matters. Umar was a most exacting taskmaster for all his
generals and governors. He was quick to lend his ears to any complaint against them, and
he was even quicker to dismiss them –with one exception – Muawiya! He was
forever indulgent to the sons of Abu Sufyan and the clan of Banu Umayya. Muawiya, the son of Abu Sufyan and Hinda, the
governor of Syria, lived in Damascus in imperial splendor, surrounded by a glittering
retinue. It was a lifestyle that Umar did not tolerate in any other governor. But Muawiya,
for him, was a "special," and the rules which applied to others, did not apply
to him. Tabari has recorded the following incident in Volume
VI of his History. Umar was in Damascus and Muawiya came to see him every day –
mornings and evenings – bedecked in regal outfit, with splendidly caparisoned mounts
and escorts. When Umar commented, rather acidly, upon his pageantry, he said that Syria
was swarming with Roman spies, and it was necessary to impress them with the
"glory" of Islam. His pageantry, he said, was only the outward emblem of that
glory - the glory of Islam. But Umar was not convinced, and remarked: "This
is a trap laid by the slick and guileful man." Muawiya answered: "Then I will do whatever you
say, O Commander of the Faithful." Umar said: "If I raise an objection to
anything, you baffle and bewilder me with words. I am at a loss to know what to do." Here Umar can be seen utterly "helpless"
before his own protg. He could condone Muawiya anything and everything. He, in fact,
appeared to be ostentatiously courting Abu Sufyan and his sons. Once he placed them at the
helm of affairs, they consolidated their position, and it became impossible to dislodge
them. It was in this manner that the secular, predatory, imperialist and economically
exploitative Umayyads were foisted upon the Muslims. The cultivation of the Umayyads, it
appears, was one of the constants in Saqifa's policy equation. Some Reflections on the Conquests of the Arabs Umar's generals had conquered Persia, Syria and
Egypt. His successors in the Umayyad dynasty pushed those conquests as far as southern
France in the west, and the western frontiers of China and the Indus valley in the east.
The students of history have expressed amazement at the speed and the extent of the
conquests of the Arabs in the seventh/eighth centuries. They achieved all those conquests
within 100 years – truly one of the most remarkable series of conquests in world
history. Many centuries later, the search goes on for the
answer to the question: How did the Arabs conquer so much so soon? Many reasons have been
given by the historians for the success of the Arab arms, among them: civil war and
anarchy in Persia; a war between Persia and Rome that lasted for 26 years, and which left
both empires utterly exhausted, bleeding and prostrate; the disgruntlement of the Roman
subjects in Syria and Egypt who welcomed the Arabs as liberators, and the loss to Rome of
the "umbrella" of local support; the dependence both of the Persians and the
Romans upon mercenaries and conscripts who lacked morale; persecution on grounds of
religion of dissident sects and creeds by both the Persians and the Romans; and the
enormous burden of taxes that the alien races ruled by Persia and Rome, and the peasants
in both empires, had to carry. Also, the Persians and the Romans were handicapped by heavy
baggage, and they lacked mobility. The Arabs, on the other hands, were highly mobile. They
could strike at a target of their choice, and then retreat into the desert on their swift
camels where the enemy cavalry could not enter as it did not have logistical support. In their campaigns, the Arabs were invariably
outnumbered by their enemies but this was not necessarily a handicap for them. History
abounds in examples of small forces of volunteers standing up to and defeating large
conscript armies. But the Muslims themselves, discount most of these
reasons for their success. According to many of them, the secret of their success was in
the piety and the religious zeal of the Muslim soldiers. The propulsive power behind the
Arab conquests of the seventh century, they say, came from Islam, and every Arab who left
the peninsula to attack the Fertile Crescent, was a mujahid or a holy warrior, fighting
for the glory of God. This claim, however, is only partly true. Without a
doubt there were those Muslims who wished to spread the light of Islam in the world but
also there were others, and they were the overwhelming majority, who fought for the
material rewards that the conquests promised to bring to them. They had developed a
distinctly secular appetite for power and riches. Joel Carmichael The predominant incentives that drove the Bedouin
out of the peninsula were bodily hunger and greed, natural consequences of the straitened
circumstances there and of the endless opportunities for enrichment offered by the
cultivated societies they overran. Thus, though there were doubtless also men who
"killed for the sake of the hereafter," the masses of tribesmen surely
"killed for earthly lust." The otherworldly aspects of Mohammed's preaching
were completely eclipsed during the conquests by the incredible booty that could be won:
thus a Qurayshite notable, who was considered so pious that he was one of the ten men to
whom Mohammed could give his personal word during their lifetime that they would get into
paradise because of their zeal for Islam, left behind an estate whose net worth seems to
have been between 35 and 52 million dirhems; he had eleven houses in Medina alone, as well
as others in Basra, Kufa, Fustat and Alexandria. Another of these ten pious men personally
promised paradise by Mohammed owned real property in the amount of 30 million dirhems; on
his death his steward had over two million dirhems in cash. Once this process is seen in perspective, it becomes
clear how remarkably obtuse is the old, traditional conception of the Arab expansion as
being a pietist movement aroused by Mohammed's personal religious zeal. ...there seems to be no doubt that the last thing
the Muslim Arabs were thinking of was converting anyone. More particularly, the pietism
that was to become the hallmark of later Islam, at least in certain of its manifestations,
was utterly alien to the initial Arab conquerors. It has been pointed out, the driving force behind
the Muslim Arab conquests was not religious in the least, but a migratory impulse rooted
in the millennial condition of the Arabian peninsula. Men like Khalid and Amr (bin Aas),
for instance, were obviously no pietists or mystics; their interests were thoroughly
practical. The switching over of the Meccan aristocracy to the
side of the Muslims is a telling illustration of the swift and irresistible injection of
purely secular elements into the earliest enterprises of the Umma, which though formulated
on the basis of religion, was articulated on the basis of politics. (The Shaping of the
Arabs, New York, 1967) It is true that religion was the factor that
propelled the Muslims out of Arabia; but once it had done so, it did not play any
significant role in the conquests that followed. Its role was catalytic in the eruption of
the Arabs. If religion and piety were the cause of the success of the Muslims in their
campaigns, then how would one explain the success of the nations which were not Muslim?
Some of those nations were the enemies of Islam yet they were, at one time, triumphant on
a scale that matched, and sometimes surpassed, the conquests of the Muslims. The conquests of the Arabs were astounding in their
vastness but they were not, by any means, unique. Almost one thousand years before the rise of Islam,
Alexander the Great, a young Macedonian, conquered, within ten years, all the lands from
the Balkan peninsula to the frontiers of China, and from Libya to the Punjab in India. He
was a polytheist. Wherever he went, he worshipped the local gods. He worshipped Zeus in
Greece, Ammon-Re in Libya; Marduk in Babylon; and Ahura in Persepolis. His conquests were
not inspired by any religion. In fact, religion did not figure anywhere in his conquests.
If he had not died at 32, he would have conquered the rest of the world. After the ancient Greeks, the Romans were the
greatest conquerors and administrators. They built one of the greatest and most powerful
empires of history, and one that lasted longer than any other empire before or since. Like
the Greeks before them, they too were worshippers of idols, though the Eastern Roman
Empire was converted to Christianity in early fifth century A.D. In the thirteenth century, the Mongols, led by
Genghiz Khan, shook the whole earth. They were the most dangerous enemies that Islam ever
met. All of Asia was at their feet, and they came within an ace of blotting out Islam in
that continent. Their conquests were more rapid and on an even grander scale than the
conquests of the Arabs. Within fifty years, they had conquered all of China, all of
Russia, all of Central and Western Asia, and had penetrated into Europe as far as Hungary.
While the Muslims in their career of conquest, were defeated at Tours in the West, and at
Constantinople in the East, the Mongols were consistently victorious everywhere. They
retreated from Central Europe only because of the death, in distant Karakorum, of their
Great Khan. The Mongols did not have any religion at all. What
was it that launched them on the career of world conquest? Certainly not religious zeal
and piety. In the 16thcentury, the Castilian
Conquistadores put Spain in the front rank of the nations of the world. A mere handful of
them left the shores of Spain, and conquered the whole new world. They laid two continents
at the feet of the king of Spain. It is true that they were inspired by religious zeal
even though they did not have much piety – but it was Catholic zeal. Their zeal was
not so much unIslamic as it was anti-Islamic. Just before discovering and conquering the
Americas, they had defeated the Muslims of Granada in 1492, had expelled them from Spain,
and had obliterated every vestige of Islamic culture from the Iberian peninsula. In the 17thcentury, the Dutch rode the
crest of glory. Their story of that epoch reads like a saga of great and heroic deeds. At
home they had been locked up in a deadly struggle against two enemies – the Spaniards
and the sea, and they had overcome both. They had expelled the Spaniards from the
Netherlands, and they had tamed the wild and the rampaging North Sea. Having conquered these two enemies, the Dutch looked
outward for new worlds to conquer. The dynamics of war against Spain and the North Sea,
gave them a momentum of victory and success that carried them around the world. In an
outburst of energy, the Dutch girdled the earth, conquering, colonizing and building. The Dutch were not only good sailors and navigators;
they were also good merchants and colonizers. They built factories in India, and they
founded colonies in North and South America, and in South Africa. Their colony in South
Africa became one of the most successful in the history of settlement and colonization in
the whole world. The Dutch were empire-builders too. Twelve thousand
miles away from home, they conquered the East Indies which was much the richest of all the
empires of the Age of Imperialism, and they held it for 350 years. And yet, in their Golden Age, the 17th
century, the Dutch were so few in number. But as few as they were, their quality was
superb. They did not allow lack of numbers to put a crimp upon what they could accomplish,
proving in this manner that there is no correlation between large numbers and
achievement. It's a most remarkable record of achievement for
such a small nation as the Dutch. They also proved that there is not, necessarily, a
correlation between religion and achievement. Centuries before the dawn of their
greatness, the Dutch had been devout Christians but it was only in the 17th century
that their dizzying and dazzling rise began.
