by Tamim Ansary
Abu Bakr gathered some of Mohammed’s closest companions, crashed the meeting, and begged the Medinans to reconsider. Muslims should elect a single leader for the whole community. He pleaded, not a prophet, not a king, just someone to call meetings, moderate discussions, and hold the community together. “Choose one of these two,” he suggested, pointing to the irascible Omar and to another of the Prophet’s close companions.
Omar himself was appalled. Take precedence over Abu Bakr? Unthinkable! He grasped the older man’s hand and told the assembly that only Abu Bakr could serve as leader, now that the Prophet himself was gone. Through tears, he swore allegiance to Mohammed’s closest friend, a dramatic gesture that electrified the room. Suddenly Abu Bakr did seem like the obvious and only choice, this sensible, lovable man who had distinguished himself all his life by his wisdom, courage, and compassion. In a gush of enthusiasm, the meeting gave unanimous consent to letting Abu Bakr assume the modest title of khalifa (or, as most Western accounts would have it, “caliph”), which meant “deputy.”
This title did not exist until Abu Bakr took it on. No tribe or nation at that time was headed by a khalifa. No one knew what the title meant or what powers it conferred. The first titleholder would have to fill in those details.
For now, Abu Bakr went to the mosque, where a crowd had gathered. His accession was announced. In a gracious inaugural speech he told that assembly, “I am not the best of you. If I do well, support me. If I make mistakes, do not hesitate to advise me. . . . If I neglect the laws of God and Prophet, I forfeit claim to your obedience.” Everyone at the mosque gave him the same acclaim he had received from everyone at the meeting.
“Everyone,” however, was not at the mosque or the meeting. One leading candidate for the role of successor did not even hear that the issue was being discussed. The Prophet’s cousin Ali was washing the Prophet’s body when the elders met. By the time he heard anything about the discussion, the decision had already been made.
You can see how this might have rankled. In the last months of Mohammed’s life, Ali may well have felt like he was the Prophet’s successor, no discussion needed, for he stood closest to the Prophet in every way. Mohammed had several cousins, but Ali was special because his father Abu Talib had adopted Mohammed and raised him as a son, which essentially made Ali and Mohammed brothers.
But Ali was almost thirty years Mohammed’s junior, and in tribal Arab culture a much-older brother had a near paternal status with his sibling. In fact, as a little boy, Ali had moved in with Mohammed and Khadija and had grown up mostly in their household, so in addition to being practically like a brother to Mohammed, Ali was practically like a son to him too. What’s more, Ali was the first person after Khadija to accept Islam: the first male Muslim.
When the assassins were coming to murder Mohammed in his bed, it was Ali who wrapped himself in the Prophet’s blankets and risked taking the knife meant for Mohammed. In Medina, when the Muslims were in danger of annihilation, it was Ali who proved himself repeatedly as the virtual Achilles of Islam—for in those days, battles often began with individual challenges leading to single combat, and at each confrontation, when the Quraysh called on the Muslims to send out their best, Mohammed nominated Ali.
At the battle of Uhud, when all seemed lost and some Muslims fled for home, Ali was among those who rallied around the Prophet, and bore him home wounded but safe.
As the community flowered and the Prophet became a head of state, he kept Ali by his side as his right-hand man. Indeed, on the way home from his last sermon, Mohammed told the people, “Any of you who consider me your patron should consider Ali your patron.” Now, didn’t that amount to saying that after he was gone, the Umma should consider Ali their leader?
While all of Mohammed’s close companions had charisma, Ali’s glow seemed uniquely spiritual to a committed group of partisans, many of them younger Muslims, who felt something of the same authority radiating from Ali that everyone had felt radiating from Mohammed.
All the points mentioned marked Ali as special, but one further factor elevated him above all others, and it might have been the most important factor of all, or so it seemed in retrospect to later Muslims: Mohammed had no sons. Only one of his daughters produced sons who lived past childhood, and that one daughter was Fatima, who was married to Ali. Ali’s sons were therefore Mohammed’s grandsons, and Ali’s descendents would be the prophet’s descendents. Ali and Fatima were Mohammed’s family.
Set all this aside, however, and picture Ali indoors with the womenfolk, drowning in grief as he bathed the Prophet’s body. Then, picture him emerging finally into the terrible first day of the rest of his life, still reeling from the enormity of what had happened, only to find that while he was preparing Mohammed’s body for burial, Mohammed’s peer-group companions had been picking a successor for Mohammed, not only passing over Ali but failing even to consult him, failing even to inform him that the meeting was taking place. Surely, Ali felt he deserved some greater consideration than that!
On the other hand, every point in Ali’s favor counted against him from another perspective. Ali was close to the Prophet? Part of his family? Good for him, but when did Allah ever say He was conferring special privileges upon a particular family? Dynastic succession was the old way, the sort of thing Islam proposed to overturn!
Besides, the Prophet had said there would be no more Messengers after him. If this was true, Ali’s charisma had no religious significance, in which case, shouldn’t Muslims separate the Prophet’s bloodline from leadership roles in the community to prevent undue concentrations of power from distorting the egalitarian universalism of the Islamic message? Seen in that light, in fact, wasn’t Ali’s charisma precisely the quality that made him questionable? Might it not encourage his more fervid partisans to declare him a new prophet?
No, said Abu Bakr’s proponents, what the community needed at this point was steady judgment, not youthful passion. Ali was just over thirty years of age at this time; Abu Bakr was almost sixty. In the Arabia of that time, choosing a thirty-year-old man as leader over a sixty-year-old probably struck most Arabs as unthinkable. Why, the word sheikh, the title for tribal leader, literally meant “old man.”
Some say it took Ali six hard months to concede the election, during which some of Abu Bakr’s more unruly followers threatened him and roughed up his family. In one such shove and scuffle, they say, a door was slammed against his wife Fatima’s belly, who was pregnant at the time, and this manhandling may have caused her to miscarry what would have been Prophet Mohammed’s third grandson.
Others claim that Ali swore allegiance to Abu Bakr just a few days after the latter took office; they minimize the abuse that Fatima suffered and attribute her miscarriage to an accident. A disagreement like this can never now be resolved by an appeal to evidence. It can only reflect the position one takes on the theological schism that developed out of the succession, for the disagreement between proponents of Abu Bakr and Ali eventually engendered two different sects of Islam, the Sunnis and the Shi’i, each of whom has a different version of these events. Ali’s partisans developed into the Shi’i, a word that simply means “partisans” in Arabic, and they remain convinced to this day that Ali was the Prophet’s only legitimate successor.
In either case, within six months the rift had closed, and just in time, for a new crisis was threatening the survival of Islam. All across Arabia, tribes were seceding from the alliance that Mohammed had forged. Most claimed they had never pledged allegiance to Abu Bakr or the Umma but only to Mohammed himself, and that pledge had been voided by Mohammed’s death. Nominally, these tribespeople had all converted to Islam, and many of them insisted they were still Muslims. They still acknowledged the singleness of God and Mohammed’s authority. They would still pray, still fast, still try to keep the drinking and debauchery under control—but zakat? The charity tax payable to the treasury at Medina? No, that they could no longer tolerate: no more payments to Medina!
; A few tribal leaders went further. They claimed that they themselves were now Allah’s living Messengers. They claimed they were receiving revelations and had permission to issue divinely authorized laws. These upstarts thought to use the model pioneered by Mohammed to forge sovereign “sacred” communities in competition with the Umma.
Had Abu Bakr allowed these departures, Islam would surely have gone in a very different direction. It might have evolved into a set of practices and beliefs that people embraced individually. But Abu Bakr responded to the crisis by declaring secession to be treason. The Prophet had said, “No compulsion in religion,” and Abu Bakr did not deny that principle. People were free to accept or reject Islam as they pleased; but once they were in, he asserted, they were in for good. In response to a political crisis, Abu Bakr established a religious principle that haunts Islam to this day—the equation of apostasy with treason. Braided into this policy was the theological concept that the indissoluble singleness of God must be reflected in the indissoluble singleness of the Umma. With this decision Abu Bakr even more definitively confirmed Islam as a social project and not just a belief system. A Muslim community was not just a kind of community, of which there could be any number, but a particular community, of which there could be only one.
The new khalifa proved himself a formidable strategist. It took him a little over a year to end the rebellion known as the Apostate Wars and reunite Arabia. At home, however, in his dealings with the Muslim community, he exhibited nothing but the modesty, affection, and benevolence people knew and loved him for. A stoop-shouldered man with deep-set eyes, Abu Bakr dressed simply, lived plainly, and accumulated no wealth. His one affectation was to dye his hair and beard red with henna. When disputes arose, he dispensed justice with an even hand, involving a council of elders in all his decisions, ruling as first among equals, and asserting no claim to religious elevation. His word had no greater weight than any other Muslim’s, and his authority came only from his wisdom and his devotion to the revelation. No one was obliged to follow his rulings except when he was right, the caveat being, he was pretty much always right.
Back in Mecca, before the Hijra, Abu Bakr had been a prosperous merchant. By the time Muslims emigrated to Medina, however, he had spent much of his fortune on charitable causes, especially buying freedom for slaves who converted to Islam, and he forfeited the rest of his wealth in the course of the move. As khalifa, he took only a small salary for guiding the Umma and continued to ply his old trade to make a living, getting by as best he could on the fruits of his shrunken business. Sometimes, he even milked his neighbor’s cow for extra cash.1 As portrayed in the religious stories of Islamic tradition, children would run up to him shouting, “Papa! Papa!” when he walked through the streets of Medina, and he would pat their heads and give them candy—he was that kind of guy.
THE SECOND KHALIFA: 14 - 24 AH
One August day, two years into his khalifate, Abu Bakr stepped out of a hot bath into a blast of chill wind, and by nightfall he was running a high fever. Realizing that death was near, he called in a few of the community’s top notables and told them he wanted to nominate Omar as his successor so there wouldn’t be any arguments about it later.
The notables balked, because Omar could not have been more different from the gentle, understated Abu Bakr. He was a giant of a man, looming half a head above anybody else—in a crowd he was said to stand out like a man on horseback. His head was completely bald, his face ruddy, his whiskers huge. He was ambidextrous and strong as a bull, and he had an epic temper.2
Before his conversion, Omar had been known to do a certain amount of brawling and drinking. Back then, he had hated Islam and Mohammed. Then came his oft-recounted conversion: one day, tradition reports, he announced that he was going to kill the Messenger of God and be done with it. He grabbed a sword and went striding across town to commit the deed, but on the way he spotted his beloved sister sitting under a tree, studying a leaf with some sort of text on it. “What are you doing?”
“Reading,” she said.
“Reading what?”
She looked up timorously. “The Qur’an. I’ve become a Muslim.”
“What? Give me that!” He snatched away what she was reading. It was a verse called Ta Ha, and to Omar’s astonishment the words seemed addressed directly to him. At that moment Omar went through a transformation. He dropped his sword, ran through the streets of Mecca, and banged on the Prophet’s door, shouting, “I believe you! You are the Messenger of God! I believe!”
After that, he became one of Mohammed’s closest companions, but he always remained a tough guy’s tough guy, subject to outbursts of frightening rage, and though he had a good heart beneath it all, many wondered if the khalifate could be entrusted to a man whose very demeanor frightened children. At that critical moment, however, Ali stepped forward to endorse Omar, and his word tipped the scales: the Umma accepted their second post-Mohammed leader.
Upon taking office, Omar told the community that he knew he was more feared than loved, but he assured people, they had seen only one side of him so far. Both the Prophet and Abu Bakr had been tenderhearted men, he explained, yet leaders sometimes must take tough action, and when such a need had arisen, Omar had been their instrument. He had needed to be a sword all the time so that the Prophet, and later Abu Bakr, would have a sword available to them any time. Now that Omar was khalifa, however, he would not be a living sword all the time, because he knew that a leader must sometimes be gentle. From now on, therefore, the community would see both sides of him. Wrongdoers and tyrants who trampled on the weak would see the old Omar. The poor, the weak, the widows, the orphans, all who sought the good and needed protection, would see the tender Omar.
The Umma soon realized their second khalifa was a towering personality, even more imposing than Abu Bakr, perhaps. Omar directed the Umma for ten years, and during that time he set the course of Islamic theology, he shaped Islam as a political ideology, he gave Islamic civilization its characteristic stamp, and he built an empire that ended up bigger than Rome. Any one of these achievements could have earned him a place in a who’s who of history’s most influential figures; the sum of them make him something like a combination of Saint Paul, Karl Marx, Lorenzo di Medici, and Napoleon. Yet most people outside Islam know him only as a name and perhaps a one- or two-sentence descriptor: he’s the second khalifa, a successor of Mohammed—that’s about it.
Perhaps this is because Omar made lack of pretension his core principle. This is so much a part of his legend that Omar becomes in Islamic tradition the embodiment of a principle. His word was not law; his will did not rule; he ceded all authority to God—such was his storied claim. He envisioned Islam as an absolutely just and egalitarian community and he intended to make that vision a reality. In the Muslim community, he said, no one ever needed to fear the whims or will of any human power because this community had the Qur’an as its law, and the example of the Prophet’s life as its guide, and nothing else was needed. Omar declared that his role was merely to keep the Umma united and moving forward along the track indicated by the revelations.
Omar had never been a rich man, but Ali and others urged him to take a suitable salary from the public treasury, arguing that since Islam now included all of Arabia, the Umma could no longer afford a part-time khalifa who milked a cow for extra cash. Omar agreed but appointed a commission to calculate how much he needed to live like the average Arab, no better and no worse, and supposedly set this amount as his salary. (Imagine the CEO of a modern multinational corporation doing that.)
In imitation of the Prophet, Omar habitually patched his own clothes, sometimes while conducting important state business. At night, after his official duties were done, the stories portray him shouldering a bag of grain and roaming through the city, personally delivering food to families in need. Once, somebody who saw him at this labor offered to carry the bag for him, but Omar said, “You can carry my burden for me here on Earth, but who will carry it for me on t
he Day of Judgment?”
It’s easy to suppose such stories are purely apocryphal, or that, if true, they merely show Omar the politician demonstrating a common touch for show. Personally, I think he must have been strikingly pious, unpretentious, devoted, and empathic, just as the stories suggest: the anecdotes are too consistent to dismiss, and something must account for this man’s overpowering impact on his contemporaries. Whatever the reality, however, the legend he planted in the Muslim imagination expresses an ideal of how rulers should behave.
Omar adopted a title that became an enduring addendum to khalifa: Amir al-Mu’mineen, or “commander of the faithful,” a title that conflated his spiritual and military roles. As a big-picture military strategist, Omar ranked with Alexander and Julius Caesar, but how he acquired such savvy is hard to fathom. Until Islam came along, he was just another small-town merchant. He took part in those iconic early battles of Muslim history, but in military terms those were little more than skirmishes. Now, suddenly, he was studying “world” (i.e., Middle World) maps, calculating the flow of Byzantine or Sassanid resources, gauging what geography dictated for strategy, deciding where to force a battle and where to retreat—he was operating on a global scale.
Fortuitously, at this historical moment, the Umma produced an extraordinary array of brilliant field commanders such as Khaled bin al-Walid, hero of the Apostate Wars, Amr ibn al-A’as, conqueror of Egypt, and Sa’d ibn Abi Waqqas, who beat the Persians.
As soon as Omar took office, he finished a piece of military business that Abu Bakr had started. Toward the end of the Apostate Wars, seeing Arabia in turmoil, the Byzantines had moved troops to the border, intending to absorb this “troubled” territory. Abu Bakr had sent men to keep them at bay, but even before his death the Muslims had pushed the Byzantines back into their own territory. Shortly after Omar took the helm, they set siege to the city of Damascus. From that time on, Muslims had the Byzantines on the run, and in 636 CE, at a place called Yarmuk, they destroyed the main Byzantine army.