Umar ibn al-Khattab

Umar ibn al-Khattab of the Adi clan of Quraysh was born in Mecca around 583. Literate, physically imposing, and a trusted arbitrator in tribal disputes, he was in his first years one of Islam's fiercest opponents. Ibn Hisham transmits the famous account of his conversion around 616: setting out armed against the Prophet, he was diverted to his sister Fatima's house, found her reciting the surah Ta-Ha, and was overcome by it. Tradition records that Islam in Mecca was prayed openly at the Kaaba for the first time behind his shoulders.

In Medina he stood at Badr, Uhud, and the campaigns that followed, and became the Prophet's father-in-law through his daughter Hafsa. On Abu Bakr's death in 634 he became caliph by written designation, taking the title Amir al-Mu'minin — Commander of the Faithful — which every caliph after him would bear. His ten years of rule turned a reunified Arabia into a world empire and built the administrative machinery to hold it. In November 644 he was stabbed at dawn prayer in the mosque of Medina by Abu Lu'lu'a Firuz, a Persian captive, and died three days later, having confined the succession to a council (shura) of six senior companions. With Aisha's permission he was buried beside the Prophet and Abu Bakr.

Before his conversion he was a persecutor; after it, tradition records, the persecuted party gained its most fearless public voice — the Prophet's prayer "strengthen Islam with one of the two Umars" is transmitted in al-Tirmidhi. His caliphate's great trials were not military but administrative and natural: the Year of Ashes (18 AH), a famine that emptied Arabia's markets and drove him to ration his own food and suspend, the jurists record, the fixed penalty for theft while hunger lasted; and the plague of Amwas in Syria (639), which killed the empire's senior commanders, Abu Ubayda among them, and forced hard doctrine-and-policy decisions about flight from plague lands that the hadith collections preserve.

His personal discipline was itself a struggle against the office: the histories of Ibn Sa'd and al-Tabari transmit the patched cloak, the night patrols of Medina, the refusal of treasury privilege for his family, and his letters demanding his governors appear for public audit at the hajj.

Umar's rule produced institutions more than texts. He established the hijri calendar (16 AH), the diwan register of stipends, the office of the qadi in the garrison towns, and the congregational tarawih prayers of Ramadan. The pact he gave Jerusalem on its surrender — al-Tabari transmits its text — guaranteed the safety of its churches and inhabitants, and the account that he declined to pray inside the Church of the Resurrection lest it be claimed for Islam is one of the tradition's most cited images of scrupulousness toward other faiths.

His recorded maxims run to accountability above all: al-Tabari and Ibn Sa'd transmit his standing question, "If a mule stumbled on the road in Iraq, I would fear that God should ask Umar: why did you not level the road?" The title al-Faruq — the one who separates truth from falsehood — attached to him early, and his insistence that the ruler eats last in famine and answers first at audit became, for the later juristic tradition, the working definition of the just imam.

Under his command the conquests became an empire. In Syria: Damascus fell in 635 and the decisive battle of Yarmuk in 636 broke Byzantine power; Jerusalem capitulated in 637/638, receiving its assurance of safety from Umar in person; Caesarea and the coast followed. In Iraq and Persia: al-Qadisiyya (636/637) broke the Sasanian field army, Ctesiphon the capital fell in 637, and Nahavand (642) — "the victory of victories" in the Arabic annals — ended organized Sasanian resistance. In the west, Amr ibn al-As took Egypt between 639 and 642, founding Fustat beside the old fortress of Babylon.

As much as the victories, his system marked the age: the garrison cities of Basra, Kufa, and Fustat that became the metropolises of early Islam; the decision, recorded by al-Baladhuri, to leave conquered land with its cultivators under tax rather than divide it as spoils; and the stipend rolls that turned the conquering tribes into a paid, registered army. Al-Tabari's annals and al-Baladhuri's Futuh al-Buldan remain the classical accounts.

Umar stands differently in the two great traditions, and the disputed episodes are themselves part of the documentary record. At the Prophet's deathbed, when the Prophet asked for writing materials "that I may write for you something after which you will never go astray," it was Umar, Sahih al-Bukhari records, who said the Prophet's pain was severe and "the Book of God is sufficient for us" — the episode Ibn Abbas called "the calamity of Thursday." Shia tradition reads it as the deliberate prevention of a written designation of Ali; Sunni scholarship has read it variously, as deference to the Quran's completeness or fear of burdening the community, and does not read it as obstruction of a known appointment.

At Saqifa his was the decisive hand raised for Abu Bakr, which the Shia critique inherits. The reports that the pledge was afterwards enforced at the house of Fatima — where Ali's supporters had gathered — appear in early sources (al-Ya'qubi's history among them, and works of disputed attribution such as al-Imama wa-l-siyasa) and are affirmed in Shia memory as a confrontation that wronged the Prophet's daughter; Sunni scholarship disputes the violent versions of these reports as weakly transmitted or fabricated. His rulings forbidding the two mut'as — temporary marriage and the tamattu' form of pilgrimage — are documented in Sahih Muslim and remained points of juristic divergence, the Shia schools retaining what he forbade. These positions are presented here as the traditions hold them, not judged.

Ten years of his rule fixed the political and fiscal shape of the Islamic world for centuries: the calendar dates from his decision, the great cities of Iraq and Egypt from his garrisons, the land-tax settlement from his refusal to parcel the conquests, and the title Commander of the Faithful from his chancery. Sunni Islam counts him the second of the Rashidun and its archetype of incorruptible justice, cited by jurists and reformers from al-Mawardi to the modern age. Shia Islam remembers him critically, as the chief architect of the order that set the Prophet's household aside.

His assassination gave early Islam its first martyred caliph and his shura of six produced the third; the method — designation to a council rather than a person — remained a model invoked, if rarely followed. The Dome of the Rock esplanade's earliest mosque tradition and the "Umari" mosques across Syria and Palestine carry his name, and his pact of Jerusalem is still cited wherever the tradition discusses the protection of non-Muslim worship.