Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes (10 page)

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 sev
enty-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 t
hat 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 th
ey 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 Prophet’s 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 Medi
terranean 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 world-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. Omar’s calendar enshrined the conviction that Islam was not j
ust 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 ver
se 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 exam
ple, 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
be
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.

Othman was Mohammed’s fifth cousin once removed, and he took office as Islam’s third khalifa at the age of sixty-eight. To understand his stormy twelve-year term, it’s useful to look at who the man was and how he came to head up the community that ruled the Middle World.