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 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.
For his own brother, Muhammad chose Ali ibn Abi Talib in both cities. Umar was one of the fugitives of the battle of Uhud Baladhuri. Umar was one of the fugitives of the battle of Hunayn. In 11 A. 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. 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. When Umar took charge of the caliphate, the Muslim armies were fighting against the Persians in Iraq and the Romans in Syria.
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.
Umar's caliphate is notable for its many conquests. All of these were permanent conquests. Among other events of the caliphate of Umar, were the first outbreak of plague in Syria in 18 A.
Between them, the plague and the famine killed more than 25, people Suyuti and Abul Fida. 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.
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. When Umar heard the news of his death, he went to see Abu Sufyan to offer condolences to him. Umar appointed Muawiya the new governor of Syria.
He fixed his salary at 60, pieces of gold a year Isti'ab, Volume I. He too was dismissed in 21 A. Amr bin Aas was Umar's governor in Egypt. 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. 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.
His pageantry, he said, was only the outward emblem of that glory - the glory of Islam. I am at a loss to know what to do. 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. 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.
They achieved all those conquests within 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? 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.
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.
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.
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, 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. 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.
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 , 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. 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 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. In the 19th century, the British carved out an empire for themselves over which the sun never set.
Umar believed the role of the leader was to protect the people. This concept seems very unusual now days when we see presidents and prime ministers surrounded by bodyguards and willing to trample over anyone to protect themselves and their power. Umar Ibn Al-Khattab, although he was the leader of an empire, never felt it necessary to have a bodyguard.
He walked the streets of Madinah like any ordinary citizen, even at night. In fact, it was during the nights that he roamed the streets checking up on those under his protection and anonymously distributing charity. This year was a great test for the Muslim Ummah. It was a time of drought and famine, when the wind was so hot it burnt the skin as if with hot ashes. Meat, butter, and milk became unavailable, and the people existed on little more then dry bread sometimes dipped in oil.
Umar took an oath that he would not eat or drink anything that was not available to the people. Even when foodstuffs became available in the markets again, Umar refused to buy them for inflated prices. Muhammad c. See all related overviews in Oxford Reference ». Abd Allah ibn Umar ibn al-Khattab d. Second caliph of Islam — He presided over the first major wave of Arab conquests, which were the work of great captains such as Khalid ibn al-Walid. Hostile at first to Muhammad, he became an ardent convert.
The bond between them was strengthened by Muhammad's marriage to Umar's daughter Hafsa. Umar was an expert jurist and is best known for his justice, in the same way for Muslims and non-Muslims.
His Asceticism:. His food was very coarse and he would patch his cloth with leather. He used to carry a water skin on his shoulders in spite of his great esteem. He used to laugh little and never joked with anyone. When he was appointed as the Caliph, he said: "Nothing is permissible for me from the treasury more than two clothes, one for the cold season and the other for the dry season. The sustenance of my family will be the equivalent of an average man of Quraish and not the rich amongst them, for I am just an ordinary man among the Muslims i.
At the time of drought, Umar R. When Abu Bakr's R. Hence they came back to him and said:. So he looked out over the people and said to them:. Then Abu Bakr R. He said:. Umar Ibn Al-Khattab R. The above conversation clearly shows that Abu Bakr's R. Hence, we see that the appointment of Umar R. Hence, Umar R. His Reign as Caliph:. His achievements, during his reign as Caliph, are so many and cannot be mentioned in this article. Jerusalem first Qiblah was conquered during his reign alongwith the whole Sassanid Persian Empire and two thirds of the Eastern Roman Empire.
He was also the first person ever to appoint police forces to keep civil order. Another important aspect of Umar's R. His Martyrdom:. Imam ibn Kathir said that when Umar R. Allah indeed kind to whom He wishes. He stabbed him three times, one of these below the naval. He asked Abdul Rahman bin Awf R. Abu Lulu withdrew with his dagger but kept stabbing whoever came his way in the mosque until he stabbed thirteen people out of which six died as a result of their injuries.
Abdullah bin Awf R. All of these occurred before sunrise. He requested for a drink of milk. When he drank it, the whiteness of the milk could be seen oozing out from his wounds and it was clear for them that he would die. Then, his soul was taken. He was sixty-three years old and his era extended for ten years.
As per Umar's R. Sayings of Umar R. Think positively of your brother until you are certain that he is not like that. Do not swear a great deal lest Allah humiliate you. There is no better reward for one who disobeys Allah concerning you that your obeying Allah concerning him.
0コメント