Mufti Menk – The Achievements Of Umar bin al-Khattab
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The speaker discusses the history of the court system and the use of the hij scenes in the calendar. They also mention a former president who created a police department and employed men to service cities and towns. The speaker emphasizes the importance of recording and creating infrastructure for people in cities to ensure safety.
AI: Summary ©
I'm going to go through a list of
what he did because he is our hero,
really.
He is a champion of note. We know
of so many stories of his, I'm sure.
But I want to mention what he achieved
in the 10 years that he ruled.
Remember I told you he was 13 years
younger than Muhammad
approximately.
And he ruled for 10 years. So he
too was murdered when he was at the
age of 63 approximately.
62 to 63.
Here is what he did, he was the
person
who started the use of the hijri calendar.
Today we have the calendar hijrah, 1435
hijrah. That was Umar ibn Khattab radiAllahu anhu.
He is the one who started that calendar
off. And he said, from now on, the
Muslims, whenever we talk about the years, we
should relate them to the hijrah. And he
made it compulsory, and that is what we
are using to this day. He is the
one who gathered the people in tarawih
in Ramadan. So the tarawih we read today
in a gathering of this nature, Umar ibn
Khattab
was the one who started that off because
before him they used to read in small
groups,
and the smaller groups later on became larger
groups. He said, Let us read in 1
group in the masjid, and inshaAllah we will
follow 1 imam. Even though there were so
many reciters amongst them. But he put bayib
nukab in the front
and he said, We will all read behind
you.
May Allah grant us an understanding.
He was the first person who created a
proper army.
An army that had a job, and that
was only to defend the Muslims. And he
was the first person who had actually sent
his army to the borders in order to
protect them full time, the borders of the
Muslim nation.
And he was the first person who created
the police department amongst the Muslims, where he
had people who would walk around at night.
And he did too himself,
Finding out what happened, and maintaining law and
order, and seeing that everyone was okay. There
are so many incidents. In fact, I can
mention to you one very touching incident.
One day,
Umar ibn Kathtab
who decided to walk through.
He decided to walk through the gullies of
Madinah Munawar at night. And he was followed
by Talha
And
he walked into one home,
quietly when no one was watching.
And he came out after a little while,
and he went back. And he had a
home that no one would distinguish because when
he became the khalif, he did not change
his house. He remained where he was all
along.
So Talha
decided to go the following day to that
house to see who there was and what
happened. And he found there was a very
old blind woman there. So he asked her,
Who came to you last night, and why
did he come here? She said, I don't
know.
But it's a man who told me that
he will come every so often. He brings
me some food stuffs, and he cleans my
whole house in a little while, and then
he goes back.
Tal Har says, Subhanallah, this is amirul mumineen.
This is the leader of the mumineen. And
he goes himself at night to clean the
house of this blind woman, and to bring
her some food once in a while. This
was Umar ibn Khattab
The same man Muhammad
says, If Umar walks down the gully, shaitan
would never walk down the same gully. Shaitan
would walk down the other gully. Because even
shaitan feared Umar Bil Khattar
This was a man, the hero. He was
the first man who maintained
the roads, and built roads between cities and
towns.
He actually employed his men
to service the cities by creating drainage and
so many other facilities for the people of
the cities and the towns. He was the
man. He was the first man who
developed
what we know today as the registrar
general. You know, everything is recorded. The births,
the deaths, everything.
Who is a civil servant? What do they
get? And so on. Everything recorded. That was
Umar ibn al Sattab