The Rightly Guided Caliphs: ‛Umar

After Abū Bakr's death in 634, his formally designated successor ‛Umar ibn al-Khaţţāb became caliph. On the formal succession planning, Hans Küng in Der Islam (2004) writes, "One had learned something from the crisis after the death of the Prophet."

‛Umar (also called ‛Umar I)set out to give greater emphasis to the Islamic nature of the caliphate. He did this be selecting close associates of Muhammad for high governmental positions. He also declared himself to be not only the Deputy of the Prophet but the Commander of the Faithful. This combination bound him "as caliph with the traditional authority of the elected tribal leader and the new authority as the top official of the Muslim community." (Küng) The elites of Mecca and Medina were still the dominant leadership group in the caliphate, and Medina was still the seat of the caliphate.

‛Umar built Abū Bakr's on the victory over Byzantium at Ağnādain in 634 by pressing the Muslim conquests further. He seized the Syrian capital of Damascus in 635. He took Jerusalem in 638; Byzantium would later recapture it, but could only hold it for a few years. In 641, Muslim forces seized Egypt from the Byzantian Empire. Byzantium continued as a power in Europe, but its eastern territories were now largely reduced to Anatolia (present-day Turkey).

In combat with the Sasanian (Persian) empire, ‛Umar seized their capital, Ctesiphon and other Persian cities including Isfahan. His conquests extended as far as Aserbadjan. Although the caliphate fought over various principalities for decades still, the great Sasanian Empire was destroyed by ‛Umar's forces.

How could the Muslims do it?

Küng stresses how remarkable it was that by the the time ‛Umar's death in 644, the two great empires of the area, Byzantium and the Sasanian Empire, were defeated and lost such large amounts of territory to the Muslim movement, whose existence dates from Muhammad's first revelations in 610. Up until Muhammad, the Arab tribes were were a weak collection of tribes squeezed between the two great empires next to them.

Relying in particular on Fred McGraw Donner's 1981 Early Islamic Conquests, Küng thinks that the traditional Muslim historiography is basically right when they give credit to Islam as a motivating and unifying force which made possible this historically rapid and far-reaching shift in regional power relations. The Islamic provided a common ideology and inspiration, and the political structures and leadership of Muhammad and the first two caliphs created a practical governmental form that made such conquests achievable by the heretofore scattered Arab tribes.

It's worth noting that Küng's reading of the role of the Islamic religion contrasts with that expressed by Karen Armstrong in her Islam (2000):

It is important, however, to be clear that when the Arabs burst out of Arabia they were not impelled by the ferocious power of "Islam." Western people often assume that Islam is a violent, militaristic faith which imposed itself on its subject peoples at sword-point This is an inaccurate interpretation of the Muslim wars of expansion. There was nothing religious about these campaigns, and Umar did not believe that he had a divine mandate to conquer the world. The objective of Umar and his warriors was entirely pragmatic: they wanted plunder and a common activity that would preserve the unity of the ummah. For centuries the Arabs had tried to raid the richer settled lands beyond the peninsula; the difference was that this time they had encountered a power vacuum. Persia and Byzantium had both been engaged for decades in a long and debilitating series of wars with one another. Both were exhausted. In Persia, there was factional strife, and flooding had destroyed the country's agriculture. Most of the Sassanian troops were of Arab origin and went over to the invaders during the campaign. In the Syrian and North African provinces of Byzantium, the local population had been alienated by the religious intolerance of the Greek Orthodox establishment, and were not disposed to come to their aid when the Arabs attacked, though Muslims could make no headway in the Byzantine heartlands ofAnatolia.

Küng's book also deals with the weakness of the two large empires against which the Muslim armies were fighting. But he gives a stronger weight to the contribution of Islam as such to making those conquests happen. And I'm inclined to agree with him, at this stage of my own knowledge about that period. And I'll even go out on a limb and speculate a bit about why Küng's reading differs from Armstrong's.

The main reason is probably that Armstrong is relying more on the Western liberal tradition of historiography. To digress a bit, historians in the nineteenth century started giving much more weight than their predecessors to economic and social considerations in looking at the causes of wars. And in the European context, the efforts to establish democratic institutions had to contend with the power of the institutionalized state Christian churches, both Catholic and Protestant. Part of the result was that religious explanations for events, including the traumatic and extremely destructive Thirty Years' War (1618-1648), were given much more intensive scrutiny.

This tradition has carried over into present-day historiography, which tends to de-emphasize religious motivations in political conflicts and to view such expressed motivations as superficial justifications for deeper-lying causes. And such caution in giving credence to official explanations for wars is certainly in order. Americans in 2005 shouldn't really need any reminders about that, given what we know know about the nonexistent "weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq.

But religious belief is also an historical fact. And today's accounts of the Thirty Years War are more willing to look at the religious conflicts that were involved. In fact, the century following the Protestant Reformation saw the set of conflicts in Europe now known as the Wars of Religion and then the Thirty Years War, which began with the revolt of Bohemian Protestants (Bohemia is part of today's Czech Republic) in defense of their right to practice Protestantism. It's also clear that other key events of the early modern period in Europe - the witch hunts, the settlement of the Americas, the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492 (yes, the same year that "Columbus sailed the ocean blue" financed the the Spanish "Catholic Monarchs" Ferdinand and Isabella), the Spanish Inquisition - clearly involved religious motivations, whatever other forces may also have been at work. All of North America was first explored by Jesuit missionaries, the shock-troops of the Pope in the Counter-Reformation, because they were willing to go to the most God-forsaken corners of theNorth American wilderness to win the souls of the heathen savages for Jesus and the Catholic Church.

And a big part of Küng's approach is to try to take an honest and realistic look at the role religion plays in historical events.

I suspect another factor is that Karen Armstrong is trying hard to present the most benign face of Islam to her readers, especially in Islam, which is part of the Modern Library Chronicles series, which tries to provide readers with a brief and "popular" but substantial overview of the current state of scholarship in the various topics covered. Don't get me wrong. Armstrong is a serious and respected religious scholar, and I would highly recommend her books to anyone interested in Islam or the other subjects she covers. And her ecumenical outlook certainly compatable with Hans Küng's. In the passage I quoted, for instance, she's at pains not to give ammunition to those who try to paint Islam as a "violent religion."

But I do think on this particular question, Küng's view which gives much greater weight to the religious factor is the more realistic one.

But Küng also makes clear, as Armstrong does, that the Muslim expansion in this period was not a matter of, in her words criticizing such a view, "a violent, militaristic faith" imposing "itself on its subject peoples at sword-point " In fact, Küng also gives credit to the Muslims' relatively accomodating attitude toward the conquered populations as an important factor in the successful expansion. There was no question that the Muslim Arabs ruled in those situations, and the people of the conquered territories had to recognized their authority and provide tax revenue for them. But they also did not force conversions among the conquered populations. In fact, at this stage, conversions to Islam were not particularly welcomed, in part because non-Muslims had to pay taxes from which Muslims were exempt. As he puts it:

Islam was understood at this time primarily as an Arab religion, a religion for Arabs. And it was thought that it should remain so. ...

And the missionary-religious zeal to convert others? The Arabs hardly developed any such thing. There are nowhere reports [from either Muslim historians or Western ones] of the conversion of wholecities, villages or regions, and certainly none of forced conversions.

Given Küng's ecumenical outlook, it's not surprising that he takes particular note of the fact that the new Muslim rulers were more tolerant of Jewish and dissident Christian communities and their religious observances than the previous Byzantine Christian empire had been. He writes that Jews in Palestine as well as the Coptic Christians in Egypt and Nestorian Christians in Iraq experienced the new Muslim rule as a genuine improvement from the previous restrictions placed on them. Muslims also allowed Jews to live in Jerusalem, which Byzantium had not. The Muslims regarded adherents of other monotheistic religions - Jews, Christians and Zoroastrians - as "people of the book" who would be protected as long as they recognized Muslim political supremacy in the conquered lands.

The past isn't even past (as Faulkner once wrote)

The following is an interesting example of how the actions of the Rightly Guided Caliphs are used by contemporary Muslims to reflect on the Islamic approach to issues. The The Taliban, the Buddhas, and Islamic Teaching by Azizah al-Hibri, Beliefnet.com (which has an annoying habit of not providing the dates for articles; this one is apparently from the first half of 2001). She refers here to ‛Umar as the third caliph, apparently counting Muhammad as the first, though normally Muhammad is not counted as a caliph.

For centuries, Islam has preserved and even maintained all prior cultural expressions, including the Egyptian Sphinx, the Persian Persepolis, ancient houses of worship belonging to other religions, and the pictures, images, artifacts and possessions housed in those sanctuaries. In fact, had it not been for Islamic protection, these structures and artifacts may not have survived. Khalifah 'Umar, a companion of the Prophet and the third Muslim Caliph, provides an excellent example. Upon entering Jerusalem in the seventh century, he prohibited the destruction of any Christian images or places of worship.

The point of reference was the plan of Aghanistan's former rulers, the Taliban, to demolish two historic giant statues of Buddha,a plan which they carried out.

‛Umar was killed in 644, as Küng puts it, "murdered by a, so it is said, discontented slave. The "Successor to the Messenger of God"and the "Commander of the Faithful," violently killed by a slave! That is for Muslims a shocking experience. It would not remain the only political murder of a caliph ..." (The ellipse is Küng's.)

The traditional reading of ‛Umar's death, which the Persian slave carried out in the mosque of Medina, was that it resulted from a personal grudge. Küng clearly doesn't buy it. He refers to explicitly as a "political murder." Maybe that was an early version of what today we might call a "lone gunman" theory. (Although I do believe that Oswald was acting alone, but that's a whole other discussion.)

There would be no question about the political nature of the ultimate fates of the final two Rightly Guided Caliphs. And both the political and religious implications of them still reverberate in the world today.

Tags: abu bakr, a'isa, islam, hans küng's der islam, karen armstrong, rightly guided caliphs, umar