Umar

Umar ibn al-Khattab (c. 584-644) is, after Abu Bakr, the most commanding of the early figures of Islam. The tradition remembers him first as a fierce opponent of the new faith who underwent a dramatic conversion, in the best-known account, softened on finding his own sister reciting the Qur'an, and became thereafter one of its most formidable adherents. He carries the honorific al-Faruq, the one who distinguishes truth from falsehood.

The evidence for his life is the same sira and hadith literature that supplies the rest of early Islamic history, set down generations later in the collections of al-Bukhari and Muslim and in the great chronicles, and subject to the same source-critical cautions. Across it Umar is drawn as a man of towering severity and personal austerity, plain-living to the point of legend, quick to anger and equally quick to justice, and so respected by the Prophet that a well-known tradition has Muhammad say that if there were to be a prophet after him it would be Umar.

On the Prophet's death he was the decisive voice in securing the acknowledgement of Abu Bakr as caliph, and when Abu Bakr died in 634 he named Umar to succeed him.

Umar's decade as caliph (634-644) transformed a young polity in Arabia into an empire. Under his command Muslim armies took Syria and Palestine from the Byzantines, seizing Damascus and Jerusalem; overran Egypt; and shattered the Sasanian Persian empire at Qadisiyya and Nihavand, opening Iraq and Iran. Few conquests in history moved so far so fast, and later Islamic memory credits his generalship and, above all, his administration.

For Umar is remembered less as a warrior than as the organizer of the state. Tradition ascribes to him the diwan, the register through which conquered revenue was distributed; the retention of existing Byzantine and Persian bureaucracies; the founding of garrison cities such as Kufa and Basra; and the establishment of the Hijri calendar, dating the Muslim era from the migration to Medina. He is said to have taken the title Amir al-Mu'minin, Commander of the Faithful, thereafter borne by the caliphs.

The treatment of conquered non-Muslims under his rule became a lasting reference point. The so-called Pact of Umar, a set of conditions governing the protected dhimmi communities, is attributed to him, though scholars judge much of it to have taken shape later and been projected back onto his authoritative name.

In 644 Umar was assassinated in Medina, stabbed while leading the dawn prayer by Abu Lu'lu'a, a Persian captive said to have held a personal grievance. Dying, he appointed a council of six senior companions to choose his successor, from which Uthman emerged, an arrangement meant to avert a disputed succession.

His memory, like Abu Bakr's, divides the tradition. For Sunni Muslims Umar is the second of the Rightly-Guided Caliphs and the very model of just and incorruptible rule; stories of his nocturnal walks through the city to see that none went hungry became a template for the ideal of Islamic governance, and his conquests are seen as the providential spread of the faith.

Shia Muslims, holding that the succession rightfully belonged to Ali, regard the caliphates of Abu Bakr and Umar as a diversion of legitimate authority, and some Shia traditions view Umar critically for his role at the Saqifa and in the disputes that followed the Prophet's death. The assassin has even been venerated in some later Shia settings, a fact that has been a source of profound and sometimes violent friction between the communities. Here again the division is not about the man's competence, which few deny, but about the legitimacy of the office he held.