Ismail Kamdar – Legacy of Umar Ibn Abdul Aziz
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AI: Transcript ©
As we conclude our history
of the first 100 years of Islam,
I would like us to end with a
discussion
of who was perhaps the most
righteous
and the most extraordinary
of the second generation of Muslim leaders.
And that is
Omar Ibn Abdul Aziz
Rashim.
So over the past few weeks, we went
through about 50 years of our history starting
with Karbala, and we looked at the civil
war. We looked at the reign of Abdullah
ibn Zubair and Abdul Malik ibn Marwan.
But in this period,
one reign stands out
as leagues above everybody else.
And that is the reign of Omar ibn
Abdul Aziz.
Umar ibn Abdul Aziz
was the 8th Umayyad caliph. In the Umayyad
dynasty, he was the 8th in a row.
And
his reign is very unique for a number
of reasons.
Let's start with his lineage.
Omar ibn Abdul Aziz from his father's side
is an.
He is Umar,
the son of Abdul Aziz,
the son of Marwan ibn Hakam.
Right? So we mentioned a few weeks ago
that when Yazid died, Marwan ibn Hakam takes
the to his branch of the Umayyad family.
Right? Marwan has 2 sons, Abdul Malik and
Abdul Aziz.
Abdul Malik becomes the king and the father
of kings, and almost all the kings after
that are from the descendants of Abdul Malik.
Abdul Aziz becomes the governor of Medina and
then the governor of Egypt, and he passes
away during the reign of Abdul Malik, so
he never becomes the Khalifa.
But Abdul Malik's son, Omar, he becomes the
Khalifa at some point. So
he's an Umayyad on his father's side.
On his mother's side,
Umar is the great grandson
of Umar.
On his mother's side, Umar ibn Abdul Aziz
is the great grandson
of
So there's a famous story where
one night he was out and he heard
a righteous woman, you know, arguing with her
mother about something that her mother wanted her
to do that was haram. And he was
so amazed by this young woman's righteousness that
he wanted that woman to marry his son.
And so this righteous woman marries Asif, the
son of Omar.
And Omar
has a dream
that from their descendants will come a righteous
king. He has a dream that from the
descendants of Asif and this righteous lady will
come a righteous king. So Asif and his
wife have a daughter named Leila,
and Leila
marries the governor, the king's brother, Abdul Aziz.
And so Layla and Abdul Aziz have a
son who they named after his great grandfather.
They named him Omar.
So Omar Ibn Abdul Aziz is a man
with an amazing lineage.
On his father's side, he is a Umayyad.
On his mother's side, he is the great
grandson of Omar Ibn Khattab.
He's also linked to the Umayyad family in
another way.
Omar Ibn Abdul Aziz marries the princess,
Fatima bin Abdul Malik.
So Fatima
is
the daughter
of the king.
She's also the first cousin of Omar. It's
normally in royal families that they marry their
first cousins to keep the bloodline, you know,
secure.
So she's the cousin
and the,
she's the cousin of Umar Bilamblazid, and she
marries him. And he has 2 other wives
as well, but she's the one that's famous
because she's part of the royal family. Fatima
herself is an interesting figure in our history.
Her title in the history books is the
queen who had,
the queen who was righteous.
She's a woman who was born into royalty,
but
Umair
had a very different upbringing from the rest
of the Umayyads.
In general, the Umayyad kings and princes are
brought up in the palaces of Damascus,
and they are given a very royal upbringing,
a very royal education.
Umar ibn Abdul Aziz grows up in Madinah.
He grows up in Madinah
under the tutelage of the Sahaba.
So he grows up studying with the Sahaba.
You can imagine the difference. You have some
Umayyad princes growing up in a palace in
in Damascus, and you have one growing up
in Madinah being taught by the Sahaba. He's
obviously gonna grow up to be a very
different person from his cousins.
Umar ibn Abdul Aziz grows up and eventually,
his his cousin Walid
becomes the king after Abdul Malik dies, and
he appoints Omar ibn Abdul Aziz as the
governor of Madinah. So this is Omar bin
Abdul Aziz's first,
major political role. He becomes the governor of
Madinah.
Just a little brief about Walid King Walid.
One interesting point about King Walid.
The Ummah expanded the most during the reign
of King Walid.
So he mentioned 2 weeks ago that Abdul
Walid establishes the Umayyad Empire.
Right?
Walid expands that empire rapidly.
When Walid becomes king,
the Muslim world is the Middle East.
When Walid dies, the Muslim world is from
Spain to India.
All of those lands are conquered
during the reign of Walid.
The Muslim Ummah grows rapidly. You now have
Spain, North Africa.
You have the whole of the Middle East.
You have all what's today Afghanistan, Pakistan, all
the way to the borders of India. All
of these lands are now Muslim lands.
So massive expansion.
It's during this reign that Walid appoints Omar
ibn Abdul Aziz as the governor of Badin.
As the governor,
Omar ibn Abdul Aziz excels. He is a
righteous governor, people love him, he's a just
governor, people love him so much that there's
a mass migration
from other parts of the Muslim world to
Madinah.
And this makes the other governors jealous.
Right? Because people are leaving their lands to
go live under Omar. And they start to
argue with the king, like, you know, this
man's making us look bad.
And, oh, while he doesn't want any arguments
between his governors, and he also wants to
protect Omar because Omar is family, So he
tells Omar to step down as governor and
to move to Damascus and to work in
the palace. So Omar bin Abdul Aziz with
a very heavy heart, he leaves Madinah for
Damascus,
not realizing Allah has something greater in store
for him in Damascus than what he had
in Madinah.
Omar bin Abdul Aziz leaves Madinah. He moves
to Damascus. He starts to work in a
palace with his cousins.
Walid dies, and Walid's brother, Suleiman, becomes a
king. Now Suleiman's kingdom or his reign is
like a footnote in our history.
He doesn't really accomplish much, right, compared to
his brother and his father. Abdul Balik establishes
this empire, while he expands the empire,
Solomon waste his reign in food and women.
Right? He's this rich spoiled king who's just
enjoying life. And because he enjoys life a
bit too much,
within 3 years of being king, he gets
sick and he dies.
Right? It happens when you enjoy this world
a bit too much. You there's always too
much of a good thing. So, Suleiman, he's
known for overeating. He's known for being overweight.
And at a very young age, he gets
sick and he dies.
So as he's close to his death and
the doctors informing that, you know, it's your
times will be up soon, he starts to
regret his life choices.
And he does one good deed, one extraordinarily
good deed.
Soleiman begins to, to regret his life choices.
He feels like he wasted his life, he
wasted his reign. He didn't do anything really
good. What's he going to show to Allah
Subhanahu Wa Ta'ala the day of judgment?
So he says he's gonna do one good
thing before he dies. He says for all
of his brothers and his cousins and his
children,
whoever becomes the next king,
it must be someone that's going to be
a blessing to this Ummah. It must be
the best choice possible.
And so he consults the ulama, he consults
his, advisers,
and everybody tells him in your entire family,
Ummah is your best choice.
If you make Ummah the next king, that's
your good deal. Anything Ummah does, you're gonna
get the reward for it. And And so
Suleyman does adjust that. He writes in his
will. Even he dies,
his cousin slash brother-in-law, Umar, will be the
next king. And say Suleyman passes away in
the year 99 a h, and Omar bin
Abdul Aziz only finds out
after that that he had been appointed as
the next khalifa, as the next king.
And he doesn't want it, but when Allah
puts a responsibility on someone, they do the
best job that they can. It's interesting that
Omar ibn Abdul Aziz
was only Khalifa for two and a half
years. This is extraordinary.
Two and a half years. So what his
reign does is it gives us
a snapshot of what this could have been
like if we had righteous kings.
You see, it's the of Allah that the
majority of kings in Muslim history were average.
They had good. They had bad. There were
some who were tyrants, there were some who
were righteous, but most of them were average.
Right?
Was that rare light of righteous leadership.
A very rare glimpse of what it is
like for a righteous scholarly man to be
the king.
And in his reign of just two and
a half years, he accomplished
extraordinary things.
Omar Ibn Abul Aziz comes into power, and
the first thing he does is he makes
changes in the lifestyle of the Umayyads.
So one of the negatives of the of
the Umayyad Empire was that they were,
they lived a very extravagant lifestyle at the
expense of the Ummah. Right? They would, in
some ways, show unfair and unjust taxes,
usurp the money of people, and use it
to fund an extravagant lifestyle for themselves.
So they lived a very extravagant lifestyle. They
lived like kings. They they basically wanted to
emulate the the the seasons of Rome in
their lifestyle.
And
Umar ibn Abdul Aziz comes into power and
he gets rid of this.
He lives a very simple life. He will
he tries to live like Abu Bakr and
Umar. And this is a 100 years later,
but he wants to live like Abu Bakr
and Umar. Very simple life.
And
his wives and children also, very simple life.
And it's interesting because his wife Fatima
is born and raised in.
She is the daughter of the queen, the
granddaughter of the queen, the sister of 4
oh, sorry, the grand the the daughter of
the king, the granddaughter of the king, and
the sister of 4 kings. She has the
most luxurious lifestyle
probably anyone in history could think of having.
Yet when her husband said we are going
to live a simple life for the sake
of Allah, she goes all into living a
simple life for the sake of Allah to
such an extent that when Umar passes away
and her brother Yazid comes into power, so
obviously Yazids. Right? Her brother Yazid comes into
power. It's a different Yazid.
He tells her, you can have all that
money and extravagance back.
And she says, I obeyed my husband when
he was alive. I'm not gonna disobey him
after he's dead. And she continues to live
a simple life for the rest of her
life even though she has access to all
the treasures in the world. So they they
live a very, very simple life and he
forces this upon the omegas to simplify because
this money doesn't belong to them.
He also had an interesting policy
where he
reverses the unjust taxes
that the Umayyads were charging. So again, another
negative of the early Umayyads
is that they would double tax the convert.
What do we mean by double tax the
convert?
There are 2 taxes in Islam. Right? The
non Muslim pays jizya,
the Muslim pays zakah.
The early Umayyads
would double tax the convert. If somebody converted
to Islam, they make them pay jizya plus
zakah, so they get double taxed.
This was discouraging people from accepting Islam, and
it was unjust. It was it's haram.
Right? So Umar ibn Abdul Aziz becomes a
khalifa and he gets rid of this tax
policy. He says, non Muslims pay jizya, Muslims
pay zakah. If somebody converts, they stop collecting
jizya from them, only collect the zakah from
them. One of his governors writes to him
and says, if we do this, we're gonna
lose a lot of revenue.
I'm gonna lose a lot of money
because there are thousands of converts at that
time. And then Umar ibn Abdul Abdul Aziz
makes an extraordinary statement. He writes back to
the governor and he says, Allah did not
send his messenger as a tax collector.
He sent him
as He sent him as a mercy to
this universe.
Umar bin Abdul Aziz has a few other
extraordinary policies
that sets him apart
from those who came before and after him.
From amongst them was his focus on knowledge.
He increases the salaries of ulama. He gives
them more freedom,
and he ensures that every part of the
Muslim world has ulama.
Highly paid, well trained ulama to teach the
people and to do dawah. And so knowledge
spreads throughout the Muslim world in the reign
of Omar ibn Abdul Aziz. On top of
that, he notices
that Muslims have conquered a lot of land,
but they are neglecting these lands.
And so he does something
different from anyone before or after him. He
pauses the expansive jihad.
Right? So part of the empire building of
Muslims is that they would wage expansive
jihad on the nearby regions to conquer those
regions. In the reign of Omar ibn Abdul
Aziz, he put a pause on it. He
said, let's develop these regions first because people
are being neglected.
And one of the best examples of this
is Spain.
Spain is conquered in the reign of Walid
ibn Abdul Malik, and the Umayyads pay absolutely
no attention to it. It's just they basically
leave it to to self govern and to
self drive.
And they they forget about it. Spain's in
Europe, they're in Damascus.
Umair bin Abdul Aziz appoints a righteous man
as the governor of Spain, and he gives
him a very interesting project.
He tells him to record in writing for
him a full census of Spain. He needs
to record for him who are the people
of Spain, what are their demographics, what are
their religions, what's the geography, what are the
cities, what are the villages, what are their
needs. He wants to know about this land
in full details as possible so they can
figure out what they can do for the
people of these lands. Again, we're talking 1,300
years ago.
And, you know, when you study history
this is a what's the side note here?
When you study history, you realize the lies
that other people bring. Right? Because one of
the lies of history is that the world
was uncivilized until the Europeans brought civilization to
us. But here we have 1,300 years ago,
the Muslim world was very civilized. Extraordinary level
of civilization. And so Umar bin Abdul Aziz
begins the project
of developing Spain.
And within a 100 years,
Spain becomes a separate Umayyad superpower.
Right? A 100 years later, there are now
2 Muslim superpowers in the world. Spain run
by the Umayyads
and the rest of the Muslim world run
by the Abbasids.
But the development of Spain starts in the
reign of Umar ibn Abdul Aziz.
From the extraordinary projects that Umar bin Abdul
Aziz started was the compilation of Hadith.
So here he resembles his great grandfather.
Was the one who
came up with the idea that we should
compile the Quran into one book so that
it is preserved.
90 years later, his great grandson comes up
with a similar idea that we should compile
the authentic hadith into books so that they
are preserved.
And so he delegates this project to some
of the ulama and mohaddi seen of his
time, and he pays them for it. And
so the project of Hadith compilation begins in
the reign of Omar bin Abdul Aziz. It
goes on for 200 years reaching its peak
with over with Ibam Al Bukhari 200 years
later.
Sadly, the reign of Omar bin Abdul Aziz
is very short. His cousins can't stand his
radical changes. His cousins want their money back.
They want their luxuries back. They want that
lavish lifestyle back. So they plot against him,
and they bribe one of his slaves to
poison his food. And he dies at a
very young age. Some say 38, some say
40, very young age in the year 101
Ah, Umar bin Abdul Aziz dies. 1 of
his cousins goes back into power and some
of his policies are reversed and the Umayyads
go back to living their lavish lifestyle for
another 20 years before the Abbasids take over.
But Umar bin Abdul Aziz leaves behind a
legacy
of what is the model of a righteous
king. What does a righteous king look like,
and what can he accomplish?
Imagine Omar bin Abdul Aziz accomplishes all of
this in 2 years.
Imagine if you had 20 years. Imagine if
you had 50 years.
This is really a snapshot of what a
righteous leader looks like. And this is why
many of the historians
actually call Umar bin Abdul Aziz the 5th
of the rightly guided Khalifas.
When they talk about the Khulafa, Rashidin, they
talk about Abu Bakr, Umar, Usman, and Ali,
and then some say, Umar bin Abdul Aziz
at number 5. Because this man comes almost
a 100 years later,
yet his level of justice and righteousness
resembles that of Abu Bakr and Umar.
I want us to reflect in a very
interesting statement
that the wife of Umar ibn Abdul Aziz
made about him. Right? They say, you know
if a man is truly pious, if his
wife says he's pious.
Right? The prophet
said,
the best of you are those who are
best to their families.
And so what is the testimony
of the wife of Umar ibn Abdul Aziz?
There are actually many statements from Fatima
about the righteousness of her husband. But one
stands out for me because
when I first read it about 15 years
ago, when I first read the statement, it
redefined for me what piety is, what taqwa
is.
So Fatima Abdul Malik
commenced on the personality
of her husband, Omar bin Abdul Aziz,
and she says, he was not a man
who used to pray too much or pray
anything extraordinary,
nor was he a man who used to
fast often.
But by Allah, I have never met a
more pious man than him. I have never
seen a more pious man than him.
This statement,
it's extraordinary
because
when we think of piety,
we assume it's somebody who's playing tahundred every
day. We assume it's somebody who's fasting multiple
times a week.
But father Abid Abdul Malik says that that
wasn't the lifestyle of Omar ibn Abdul Aziz.
He wasn't known for his salah on his
fasting.
His piety came in other ways.
His piety came in his leadership,
that he feared Allah in every decision he
made as Khalifa.
That was his piety.
Just
leadership was his piety.
The lesson I want us to take from
this statement of Fatima Abdul Malik
is that,
piety
comes in different forms.
When it comes to the minimum, the basics,
we all have to do the minimum. Right?
We all have to pray 5 times a
day. We all have to eat halal and
earn halal and cover our overall. All of
this everybody has to do. But when you
build upon that with extra difficulties to try
and become righteous,
there are different parts to righteousness.
For some people, it's the.
For some, it's fasting.
For some, it's
sadaqa. It's giving lots of charity. For some,
it's being involved in community work. For some,
it is dawah. For some, it is Islamic
knowledge and learning and teaching the sciences of
Islam.
For Umar ibn Abdul Aziz, it was just
leadership.
His piety
was manifest in his just leadership.
In the fact that every decision he made
in office was made based on Taqwa.
Taqwa was his this was his deciding factor
in anything he did as the Khalifa.
And I want to end with the Hadith,
or to say reflection on the hadith. We
all know the hadith of the 7 people
will be under the shade of Allah's throne
on the last day. And we know that
these are 7 types of people. It's very
difficult to to get to those levels. That's
why they have such a good reward.
But what's the first of the 7?
When the prophet
said that 7 types of people will be
under the shade of Allah's throne on the
last day. What was the number one type
of person he said?
The just king.
The just ruler.
Number 1 will be the just ruler.
Why? Because a just ruler is so rare.
It is so difficult
at any point in history to find a
king or a ruler of any type who
is truly pious.
Pious kings are rare. Umur ibn Abdul Aziz
is the model of the pious king. He's
the model of what a righteous ruler looks
like.
Now we aren't rulers,
but we can learn from your taqwa. We
can learn from your justice. We can learn
from this that in whatever responsibilities
we have, whether it's in the workplace, whether
it's in our families, that we be just
and then we be righteous in the decisions
that we make in all of these levels.
And so
the main lesson I want us to take
from this is that piety comes in different
forms. Just because you find one act of
worship difficult, doesn't mean you can't excel in
different act of worship. Just because you find
it hard to wake up the 100, doesn't
mean you can't be a person of charity.
Just because you find it hard to fast,
doesn't mean you can't be a person of
dawah. There are different levels of piety, different
types of piety. Umr ibn Abdul Aziz represents
one of those types of piety, and that
is the piety of the just ruler. We
ask Allah
to have mercy upon Omar Ibn Abu Aziz
We
ask Allah to let us see in our
lifetime righteous rulers and the return of the
power and glory of Islam and the end
to the tyranny that plagues the Muslim lands
and the genocides that are going on in
Gaza and other lands.