“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 som
etimes 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 mo
st 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 the 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.
Meanwhile, the Persians were doing their best to unravel the upstart Muslim community with spies and provocateurs. Instead of swatting at individual Persian agents, Omar decided to throttle the threat at its source. He called on Muslims to topple the Sassanid empire, a proposal of breathtaking audacity: ants vowing to fell a mastiff.
Omar’s decision to call a war of conquest a “jihad” has obvious ramifications for modern times and has been much debated. In Mohammed’s day, the word
jihad
did not loom large. Etymologically, as I said, it didn’t mean “fighting” but “striving,” and though it could be applied to fighting an enemy, it could also be used to discuss striving against temptation, struggling for justice, or trying to develop one’s compassion. The word
jihad
as “fighting” does come up in the Qur’an, bound explicitly to self-defense. Those verses were revealed at a time when the Quraysh were trying to erase Islam and Muslims from the face of the earth. In that context, it was no stretch to argue that fighting had a moral dimension: if the community of bel
ievers was what made justice possible on earth, then those who let hostile forces extinguish it were helping Satan, while those who put lives and property at risk to defend it were serving Allah.
But calling upon Muslims to leave home, travel to distant lands, and fight people with whom they had virtually no previous interaction—how could wars such as these be called defensive? And if they weren’t defensive, how could they qualify as jihad?
They were connected through an idea that originated in Mohammed’s time and that Muslim thinkers began fleshing out during Abu Bakr and Omar’s khalifates: the idea that the world was divided into the mutually exclusive realms of Dar al-Islam and Dar al-Harb, “the realm of peace” and “the realm of war.” This schema depicted Islam as an oasis of brotherhood and peace surrounded by a universe of chaos and hatred. Anything a person did to expand Dar al-Islam constituted action in the cause of peace, even fighting and bloodshed, because it shrank the realm of war.
Personally, I wonder how many people in the seventh century thought wars of conquest needed justification. In any case, calling a campaign of conquest a jihad met with no dispute among the Umma. Having survived the shock of Prophet Mohammed’s death, they had regrouped, and Omar probably understood that setting them a heroic quest at this juncture would consolidate and deepen their unity.
In 15 AH (or thereabouts), near a town called Qadisiya, an Arab force traditionally numbered at thirty thousand warriors found itself facing a Sassanid army of sixty thousand crack troops. Only a river separated them. Several times, the Arab commander Waqqas sent envoys to negotiate with Rustum, the commander of the Sassanid force. As the story goes, Gene
ral Rustum asked one envoy if he headed up the Muslim army. The man replied, “No, we’re Muslims. Among us, there is no highest and lowest.”
Rustum said, “Look, I know you Arabs are hungry and poor, and I’m sure you’ve been causing trouble out of desperation. So I tell you what, I’ll give each of you two suits of clothing and a bag of dates. Will that convince you to go back where you came from?”
The Muslim envoy said, “We’re not here to take anything from you, General. We’re here to give you Islam! You are headed to hell; we offer you an opportunity to go to heaven.”
Rustum just laughed. “You remind me of the mouse that crept into the granary through a hole in the wall and ate till he could eat no more. Then he tried to go home, but he had grown too fat to fit back through the hole. His greed trapped him in the granary and the cat killed him. Now, you greedy Arabs have stolen into our granary and you’re trapped. All of you will die here, like that mouse.”
Eventually, in all this back and forth, the Muslims told Rustum, “If you don’t want to convert, just pay the tax, and you won’t be harmed.”
“Harmed?” scoffed Rustum. “Tax?” He told his servants to give the Muslims a bag of dirt, by which he meant to symbolize the grave.
But the Muslims received it cheerfully. “You give us your soil? We accept!”
Both sides then prepared for battle. Despite his own greedy-mouse anecdote, Rustum made the mistake of crossing the river to attack the Muslims, so his were the forces backed up against the river with nowhere to flee. The battle of Qadisiya lasted four days, the Persians riding elephants, the Arabs camels. On the third day, the battle went on through the night and into the next day. When the Sassanids gave way at last, thousands of their routed warriors tried to swim the river in heavy armor and drowned.
Along with warriors, many poets (including some women) went to this battlefield and generated a rich trove of stories, elevating Qadisiya to a mythic status, like a (shorter) Trojan War.
For example, as soon as victory was certain, a courier jumped on a horse and headed for Arabia to deliver the good news. Approaching Medina, he passed a geezer by the side of the road, some simple fellow in a patched coat, who jumped to his feet and asked the courier if he had come from Qadisiya.
“Yes,” said the courier.
“What’s the news, then? What’s the news?” the old man asked eagerly.
But the courier said he couldn’t stop to chat and he rode on. The old man trotted after him, pestering him with questions. When they passed through the city gates, a crowd gathered. “Out of my way!” the courier yelled importantly. “I must see the khalifa at once. Where is Khalifa Omar?”
The crowd burst out laughing. “That’s him right behind you.”
No pomp—that was Omar’s style, according to legend.
After Qadisiya, the Arabs took the Sassanid capital of Ctesiphon and then just kept marching, eating into the centuries-old Sassanid Empire, until the entire territory belonged to Muslims and the Sassanid Empire was no more: in three years they put an end to an empire that had gone toe-to-toe with Rome for centuries.
Meanwhile, other armies were routing the Byzantines along the Mediterranean coast, down through Egypt, and into North Africa. The crown jewel of these conquests was Jerusalem, which ranked just behind Mecca and Medina as a holy site for Muslims, in part because Mohammed had reported a vision of being briefly lifted to paradise from this city during his lifetime. One of the most famous Omar stories took place after this city fell. The khalifa made his way to Jerusalem to accept its surrender in person. He traveled with a servant, and since they had only one donkey between them, they
took turns riding and walking. When they reached Jerusalem, the servant happened to be riding. The people of Jerusalem mistook him for the khalifa and hastened to pay him obeisance. They had to be told, “No, no, that’s nobody; it’s the other guy you should be saluting.”
The Christians assumed that the khalifa of Islam would want to perform the Muslim prayer in their most hallowed church as a token of his triumph, but Omar refused to set foot in there. “If I do,” he explained, “some future Muslim will use it as an excuse to seize the building and turn it into a mosque, and that’s not what we’ve come here to do. That’s not the sort of thing we Muslims do. Continue to live and worship as you please; just know that from now on we Muslims will be living among you, worshipping in our way, and setting a better example. If you like what you see, join us. If not, s
o be it. Allah has told us: no compulsion in religion.”
3
Omar’s treatment of Jerusalem set the pattern for relations between Muslims and the people they conquered. Christians found that under Muslim rule they would be subject to a special poll tax called the
jizya.
That was the bad news. The good news: the jizya would generally be less than the taxes they had been paying to their Byzantine overlords—who
did
interfere with their religious practices (because the nuances of ritual and belief among various Christian sects mattered to them, whereas to the Muslims they were all just Christians.) The idea of lower taxes and greater religio
us freedom struck Christians as a pretty good deal, and so Muslims faced little or no local resistance in former Byzantine territory. In fact, Jews and Christians sometimes joined them in fighting the Byzantines.