When Abu Bakr died, he was careful not to leave the same type of succession crisis as they had faced at the Prophet’s death. He knew exactly what he wanted to do. He named Umar as his successor, therefore Caliph. Umar ruled as Caliph (successor) and added a new title: Commander of the Faithful. He lived for another ten years, sometimes leading the armies himself, and always living simply and according to strict Muslim law. He had his own son publicly whipped for drunken behavior, although the whipping wounded him to death. Ali ibn Abi Talib worked closely with Umar as his second-in-command, filling the power vacuum if Umar left Medina. Most of the news from Umar’s reign is about the intense decade of conquest that began under Abu Bakr but really took off now.
Let’s review Umar’s biography. He had been an early Meccan convert to Islam, but with a twist. When his sister began following the brand-new strange cult, he grew very angry. He assaulted her, then when she shamed him, he set out to kill the Prophet. When he heard the beautiful verses of the early Quran being recited, he was overwhelmed and immediately converted. So he was a very early convert and friend to the Prophet, and clearly was Abu Bakr’s closest companion as well. But Umar was a violent man. Stories about him always include his calling for someone’s head to roll. He was in charge of forcing Ali to submit to Abu Bakr, so either he personally put his shoulder to Ali’s door, injuring Fatimah, or he ordered one of his bodyguards to do it.
Umar had two wives in Mecca, but in Medina he married a local woman to create alliances. He may have married or at least fathered children by several more, the total coming to as many as nine. But the most interesting story is about the wife he married around the time he succeeded Abu Bakr as Caliph.
Atiqah was a child in Mecca when Muhammad’s revelations began, and her guardian was an early convert. She married a much older man who took her to Medina with the other Muslims, but they must have divorced, for next she married Abu Bakr’s son Abdullah. Atiqah was a poet! She was renowned in the community for the poetry she recited; note, she did not need to be literate, since all poetry was memorized like the Quran. Abdullah ibn Abi Bakr doted on his wife, although she bore no children. They say Abu Bakr was angry because Abdullah listened to his wife too much, both in obeying her and in literally hanging around talking to her, when he should have been out leading armies or collecting taxes. He tried to make Abdullah divorce her. But in the end, she remained Abdullah’s wife. Abdullah doted on her so much that he made her promise not to remarry. He willed her a large property, since she had no son to inherit.
When Muhammad died, Atiqah recited an elegy for him. Her Wikipedia entry gives sixteen lines of it, perhaps the whole elegy. Here is how it begins:
His camels have been lonely since evening;
he used to ride them and he was their adornment.
I have been weeping for the Chief since evening,
and tears are flowing in succession…
When her husband died a year after Muhammad, she turned down several marriage offers. But Umar was a suitor not to be denied. He ordered her guardian to marry her to him, then he argued with her personally until she finally gave in. A’isha sent her a bitter message asking for their family property back, since Atiqah broke her vow. But Atiqah finally bore a child to Umar.
The remarrying cross-overs get dizzying. Umar also married a widow of the Battle of Ajnadayn: Umm Hakim, first wife of Ikrimah, a leading Meccan. But Ikrimah himself had married two women who were almost wives of Muhammad. They probably had been intended brides during his last year of life. One arrived just after his death, and they decided not to return her to her father—but the failure of the marriage alliance to the Prophet may have contributed to her clan’s part in the Ridda Wars rebellion. Ikrimah may have been a big shot in Mecca, but the Prophet he wasn’t.
The other girl might have been the bride that A’isha boasted she got rid of, because it’s not clear how this Asma was (or wasn’t) a wife of Muhammad. In that story, A’isha said she told this new bride that it would really turn Muhammad on if she pretended to be afraid and said to her new husband, “I take refuge from Thee in Allah!” The girl (Asma?) didn’t realize this was a formula for divorce until Muhammad left the room. Whatever happened, now married and divorced without consummation, Asma was a logistical problem for the Muslims. She was married to another man first, but ended up with Ikrimah. We don’t know why Umar didn’t choose one of these Ikrimah-widows to marry, and I don’t think we know what happened to them next.
Abu Bakr left a widow, another Asma. She had been married to Ja’far, Ali’s brother. After he died in the first doomed invasion of Syria, Abu Bakr married her. She bore him a son along the road to Mecca, the infant Muhammad. But now, in 634, she was a widow again. This time, Ali married her, so he became stepfather to his brother’s children and also to Abu Bakr’s toddler. As if Muslim names were not confusing enough, eventually the story will feature this Muhammad, son of Abu Bakr and technically A’isha’s half-brother, but emotionally the son of Ali. He didn’t have an easy life; he was a walking divided-allegiance.
There’s one more tangled marriage story, this time for Umar again. After he became the Caliph, he asked to marry Ali’s daughter, who was known as Umm Kulthum. Shi’ites do not believe this marriage happened, and everyone agrees that Ali intended to marry his daughters to their cousins, Ja’far’s sons. Sunni sources say Umar insisted, but one twist was the girl’s age. It hadn’t been many years since her mother Fatimah died and the child was not yet the age of puberty. Sunni sources say Ali agreed to the match on Umar’s promise that he would be the best husband ever, and that Umm Kulthum lived as a queen in Medina, sending a gift of perfume at one time to the Empress in Constantinople. If this marriage did happen, it’s another example of what ridiculous age gaps they were willing to accept, basing a marriage’s value on rank and wealth, not on age suitability. It’s likely that Umar wanted a public sign of Ali’s support to quell possible rebellions.
- After the Prophet, by Lesley Hazelton.