3 Birth of the Khalifate

11-24 AH 632-644 CE

Devoted Muslims see the whole of Mohammed’s life as a religious metaphor illuminating the meaning of existence, but the religious event does not end with the Prophet’s death.

Islam emerged well within literate times. People were writing journals, diaries, letters, bureaucratic documents, and other works. For this period a rich documentary record exists. It seems, then, as if the origins of Islam should lie squarely within the realm of journalism rather than legend. And yet, what we know about the life and times of these first four successors de­rives largely from a history written decades later by the writer Ibn Ishaq, who died in 151 AH (768 CE).

Ibn Ishaq came from a long line of traditionists, the archivists of oral culture: men and women whose job it was to gather, remember, and retell significant events. He was the first of his line to write the whole story down, but most of his book has been lost. Before it disappeared, however, other writers quoted from it, referred to it, included excerpts from it in their own works, wrote synopses of it, or paraphrased its stories. (Recently, in fact, some academics have been trying to reconstruct Ibn Ishaqs work from the fragments of it found in other works.)

One historian who used Ibn Ishaq as his major source was Ibn Jarir al­Tabari, who died about three hundred years after the Hijra. He wrote the thirty-nine-volume History of the Prophets and Kings that begins with Adam and ends in the year 292 AH (915 CE).

Overall, these stories chronicle a tumultuous human drama that un­folded in the first twenty-nine years after the Prophets death, a story of larger-than-life characters wrestling with epic issues, a story filled with episodes that evoke wonder and heartbreak. It’s quite possible to take sides in retelling these stories, for there are sides to take, and it’s quite possible to speculate about motives and make judgments about people’s decisions.

On the other hand, these anecdotes have acquired allegorical status: different judgments and interpretations support different doctrines and represent various theological positions. We cannot know the hard facts of this story in a journalistic way because no untouched eyewitness account has survived. We have only the story of the story of the story, a sifting process that has drawn the mythological significance of the raw events to the surface.

THE FIRST KHALIFA (I I —13 AH)

The moment Mohammed died, the community faced an overwhelming problem. It wasn’t just “ Who is our next leader?” but “ What is our next leader?” When a saint dies, people can’t simply name some other saint in his place, because such figures aren’t created by election or appointment, they just emerge; and if they don’t, oh well; people may be disappointed, but life goes on. When a king dies, by contrast, no one says, “Wouldn’t it be nice if someday we had another king?” The gap must be plugged at once.

When Prophet Mohammed died, it was like a saint dying but it was also like a king dying. He was irreplaceable, yet someone had to take his place. Without a leader, the Umma could not hold together.

The new leader had to be more than a king, however, because this was not a community like any other. It was, its members believed, the embod­iment of the revelations, existing to express Allah’s will and thereby trans­form the world. The leader of this community could not get by on brains, bravery, strength, and such traits. He had to have some special religious grace or power. Yet Mohammed’s successor would not be a God-guided messenger, because Mohammed himself had said there would be no more of those. So if the leader wouldn’t be a king or a God-guided messenger, what would he be?

Curiously enough, the nascent Muslim community had given no con­sideration to this question before the Prophet died; and it gave no consid­eration to it in the hours immediately after his death either, for this was not a time for grand philosophical discussions. With the Prophet’s body scarcely cold, Abu Bakr heard a disturbing report: the native Muslims of Medina were meeting to elect a leader of their own, as if they and the im­migrants from Mecca were separate groups: here, quite possibly, was the beginning of the end of the Umma!

Abu Bakr gathered some of Mohammed’s closest companions, crashed the meeting, and begged the Medinans to reconsider.

Omar himself was appalled. Take precedence over Abu Bakr? Unthink­able! He grasped the older mans 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 zzithe mosque or the meeting. One lead­ing candidate for the role of successor did not even hear that the issue was being discussed. The Prophets cousin Ali was washing the Prophets 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.

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 Prophets 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, All’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 All’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, All’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 All’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. All’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 Mus­lims, 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 neighbors 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 (13-24 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 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 Sas- sanid 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 self­defense. 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 believers 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, General 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. Were 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, so 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 religious 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.

By the time Omar died, Islamic rule covered more than 2 million square miles. How was this possible? Religious Muslims offer the simple explanation that Muslims had the irresistible supernatural aid of Allah. Academic historians explain that the Byzantine and Sassanid empires had just fought a ruinous war with each other, and despite their seeming might, they were both rotten to the core and ready to fall. Another often- cited explanation holds that Muslims fought more ferociously than others because they believed that they would go directly to heaven if they were killed and get seventy-two virgins. I can’t comment on that, but I will sug­gest some other factors.

Those early Muslims had a sense that they were fighting for something apocalyptically great. They felt that fighting for their cause made their lives meaningful and would give their deaths meaning as well. People have proven time and again that they will attack extraordinary obstacles and en­dure tremendous hardships if they think the effort will impart meaning to their lives. The human hunger for meaning is a craving as fundamental as food and drink. Everyday life gives people little opportunity for this sort of nourishment, which is one reason why people get swept along by narra­tives that cast them as key players in apocalyptic dramas. Muslim warriors in the time of Khalifa Omar had that sense about their lives.

Developments back home kept their idealism alive, because Omar en­forced what he practiced and practiced what he preached. Under his guid­ance, Medina did reflect the values that Muslims said they were bringing to the world: fellowship, fairness, harmony, decency, democratic participa­tion in decision making, equality, and compassion. At the very least, the Muslim community during the early khalifate exemplified these ideals so much more than ordinary empires, that later Muslims could easily polish the accounts of that time into a memory of lost perfection.

On the other side of the line, people heard story after story about Mus­lims scoring military victories against astounding odds. Resistance seemed useless against such a force; besides, common folk had little incentive to re­sist, since the conquest wouldn’t affect their lives. Their potentates would lose their treasures, but the masses would keep what they had and go on as before. Had the Arabs been fighting civilian populations defending their homes, it would have been a tougher fight that probably would have eroded their idealism over time. But instead, even far from home they were mostly fighting mercenaries and draftees.

Let me not minimize a final factor intertwined with the hunger for meaning. War gave Muslims opportunities for plunder. Under Omar, however, soldiers had no permission to seize the fixed property of common citizens. They got battlefield loot and the treasuries of the monarchs they conquered—which, incidentally, was plenty. Four-fifths of whatever they won was divided equally among the soldiers, supposedly with no distinc­tion among commanders and foot soldiers, generals and privates—that was the Muslim way.

One-fifth of the plunder went back to Medina. In the Prophets day much of that money was distributed immediately to the needy, and this policy persisted though in ever more diluted form through Omar’s day. Add all these factors together, and the sudden expansion of Islam was not so inexplicable after all.

Conquest led the surge but conquest was kept separate from conver­sion. There was no “conversion by the sword.” Muslims insisted on hold­ing political power but not on their subjects being Muslims. Instead, wherever Muslim armies flowed, cultural transmission followed. News of the Muslim social project proliferated quickly because the expansion cov­ered pretty much exactly the world historical area sewn together by those ancient trade routes running between major seas and waterways. In its first fifty years, Islam expanded to the western edge of the Indian Ocean, to the eastern lip of the Mediterranean Sea, to the Nile, to the Caspian Sea, to the Persian Gulf. In this area, this intercommunicative zone so richly perme­ated with preexisting channels of interaction, Muslim stories and ideas

went humming from person to person through gossip and tale-telling, street talk and scholarly debate, flowing easily because the ideas were not that new. The Zoroastrian world hovered on the brink of monotheism. The Byzantine world had come into it with Christianity. And of course, ages ago, Judaism had introduced radical monotheism to the Levant (the region between Mesopotamia and Egypt).

The whole time Omar the conqueror was directing the territorial ex­pansion of Islam, Omar the spiritual leader was directing the consolidation of Muslim doctrine and defining the Islamic way of life. Abu Bakr had es­tablished that Islam was not just an abstract ideal of community, but one particular community with a wo rid-changing destiny. Omar formalized this by declaring a new calendar that began, not with the birth of Mo­hammed, nor with the first revelations, but with the Hijra, the migration of Muslims to Medina. Omars calendar enshrined the conviction that Islam was not just a plan for individual salvation, but a plan for how the world should run. Many religions say to their followers, “The world is cor­rupt, but you can escape it.” Islam said to its followers, “The world is cor­rupt, but you can change it.” Perhaps this was inherent from the earliest days of Mohammed’s preaching, but Omar confirmed this course for Islam and set it on tracks of iron.

Abu Bakr had ruled with legendary humility, trying never to impose his own will but merely administering the directives set forth by the Qur’an and the Prophet. Omar made this attitude a cornerstone of Muslim doc­trine, a seminal decision because in vowing to do only what the revelations directed, he committed Muslims to determining what the revelations di­rected in every possible case, great and small.

During Abu Bakr’s khalifate, at Omar’s suggestion, all the pieces of the Qur’an were compiled in one place. It was a miscellaneous collection at first, because when the revelations were coming in, people recorded them on anything that came to hand—a sheet of parchment, a piece of leather, a stone, a bone, whatever. As khalifa, Omar began a sorting process. In his presence, each written verse was checked against the memorized version kept by the professional reciters whom this society regarded as the most re­liable keepers of information. Scribes then recorded the authorized copy of each verse before witnesses, and these verses were organized into one com­prehensive collection.

Whenever a difficult decision came up, Omar looked here for the an­swer. If the Qur’an didn’t provide an answer, he consulted with the com­munity to find out what the Prophet had said or done in a similar situation. In this case, “the community” meant the several hundred men and women who had been Mohammed’s “companions” during his life­time. Every time the community made a ruling in this way, Omar had scribes record it and sent the ruling out to provincial governors to use as a basis for their decisions.

Omar funded a body of scholars to spend all their time steeping them­selves in the revelations, the stories of Mohammed’s life, and other perti­nent data, so that when he needed expert advice he could get it from these “people of the bench,” a seed that grew into one of Islam’s major social in­stitutions, the ulama,^ or “scholars.”

Even as he was shaping Muslim law, Omar was busy applying the doc­trine to social life in Medina, which brings us to his stern side. Omar had no tolerance for slackards. For example, he banned drinking outright, even though the Qur’an had been somewhat ambiguous on this question, seem­ing in some early verses to disapprove more of drunkenness than of drink­ing per se (although later verses ban it more definitely).

The Qur’an specified no particular punishment for drinking, but Omar deduced one by analogy. The analogy in this case went as follows: the Qur’an prescribed the lash for slander; drinking, said Omar, made a person spout slander. Therefore, the punishment for drinking must also be the lash. This mode of argument by analogy (qiyas) created a stencil used prolifically by later Muslim legal thinkers.

Dreading the destructive power of unlicensed sex, Omar enforced the sternest measures against adultery. In fact, he mandated stoning for adul­terers, which is not mentioned in the Qur’an but does appear in the law of Moses, dating to pre-Qur’anic times (Deuteronomy 22:22). He also banned the Arab custom of temporary marriage, which allowed men to marry women for a few days: the khalifa recognized prostitution when he saw it. (Shi’ite jurists later relegitimized this practice in their codes.)

Omar’s detractors charge him with misogyny, and his rulings do sug­gest that he held women responsible for the bad behavior of men. To defuse the disruptive power of sexuality, Omar took measures to regulate and separate the roles of men and women, mandating, for example, that women and men pray separately, presumably so they wouldn’t be thinking about sex during that ritual.

This was, however, a far cry from the separation of the sexes and the dis­empowerment of women that developed in Islamic societies centuries later (and persists to this day). It’s true, of course, that gender relationships in Medina did not conform to modern feminist ideals. Tribal Arabs (and most early cultures) saw separate and nonoverlapping roles for men and women, and Islam confirmed the separation. In Omar’s day, however, education was compulsory for both boys and girls in the Muslim community. Women worked alongside men; they took part in public life; they attended lectures, delivered sermons, composed poetry for public orations, went to war as re­lief workers, and sometimes even took part in fighting. Important decisions facing the community were discussed in public meetings, Omar partici­pated in those meetings as just another citizen of the community, and women as well as men engaged him fearlessly in debate. In fact, Omar ap­pointed a woman as head of the market in Medina, which was a position of great civic responsibility, for it included duties such as regulating construc­tion, issuing business permits, and policing the integrity of weights and measures. Even so, Omar did plant seeds that eventually developed into a severe constriction of women’s participation in public life.

In the seventh century CE, every society in the world permitted slavery, and Arabia was no exception. Islam did not ban the practice, but it did limit a master’s power over a slave, and Omar enforced these rulings strictly. No Muslim could he a slave. If a man impregnated a slave, he had to marry her, which meant that her child would be born a Muslim and therefore free. Slavery could not result in breaking up a family, which lim­ited a master’s options: he could only buy or sell whole families.

Masters could not abuse or mistreat slaves, who had the same human rights as free folks, a theme stressed in the Qur’an and specifically reaf­firmed in Prophet Mohammed’s final sermon. Omar ruled a master had to give his slaves the same food he was eating and in fact had to have his slaves eat with his family. If Omar’s rulings had been carried to their logi­cal conclusions, slavery might have ended in the Muslim world in the early days of the khalifate. (Instead, Muslim societies regressed in this matter.)

Ironically, Omar’s own career ended when an emotionally unstable Per­sian slave drove a knife into his belly at the mosque. On his deathbed, some of the community’s notables asked him to nominate his successor as Abu Bakr had done, in order to ensure a smooth transition. “How about your son?” they suggested.

Omar flew into his last rage: “Do you think I did this job to benefit myself and my family?” He died later that day, but before his death he es­tablished another consequential precedent. He named a six-man consulta­tive committee (a shura) to select a new khalifa and seek the consensus of the Umma on their choice. Many later Muslim thinkers looked to the shura as the basis for democratic institutions in Islam. The shura discov­ered that two men, Ali and Othman, were everybody’s first and second choices, some favoring Ali and some Othman. (Ali, remember, was Mo­hammed’s son-in-law who had already been passed over twice.)

The chairman of the shura interviewed both men in front of an assem­bly of the people, posing one key question to each: “If you become khal­ifa, will you be guided by the Qur’an, the sunna, and the precedents set by Abu Bakr and Omar?”

Ali said yes to the Qur’an and yes to the sunna (the example set by Mohammed’s life), but as for the decisions of his predecessors—no: Ali said he had a mind of his own and would consult his own conscience and best judgment for his decisions. Othman, by contrast, said yes to every­thing: “I am not an innovator.” So the chairman declared him the right man to head the Umma, the people approved, and Ali, not wanting to rock the boat, took the oath of loyalty.