Abdullah ibn Umar

ProfileAbdullah ibn Umar

Abdullah (may Allah be pleased with him) was the son of Umar ibn al-Khattab and Zaynab bint Madh'un, and the full brother of Hafsah, the Prophet's ﷺ wife. According to the early biographies, he was born about a year after revelation began, and he looked so much like his father that people who missed Umar would look at him to remember him. According to the early biographies, some say that he accepted Islam before his father, but this arose from the day at Hudaybiyyah when Umar sent him to fetch a horse, and he gave the pledge under the tree before Umar knew it was being taken. He was too young to fight at Badr. He was presented to the Prophet ﷺ before Uhud at fourteen and not allowed to fight, and at fifteen he was allowed to fight at the Trench (Sahih al-Bukhari). According to the early biographies, the Prophet ﷺ would ask Umar where his young man was.

He was close to the Prophet ﷺ at home through his sister Hafsah, and outside it, and he became the narrator of what he did. He narrated how the Prophet ﷺ took hold of his shoulder and told him to be in this world as if he were a stranger or a traveller, and Ibn Umar used to say that when he reached the evening he should not expect the morning, and when he reached the morning he should not expect the evening, and should take from his health for his illness and from his life for his death (Sahih al-Bukhari). He told how the Prophet ﷺ once asked which tree was like a Muslim, and he thought it was the date palm but was too shy to say so in front of the elders, until the Prophet ﷺ answered. When he told his father, Umar said that he would have been happier if he had said it (Sahih al-Bukhari). He told of a dream he had while sleeping in the mosque as a young unmarried man, in which two angels took him to the Fire, and a third told him not to be afraid. He told his sister Hafsah, who told the Prophet ﷺ, who said that Abdullah was a good man, and that he wished that he would pray at night. After that Abdullah slept little at night (Sahih al-Bukhari). He once rode a hard camel of Umar's that kept going in front of the Prophet ﷺ. The Prophet ﷺ asked Umar to sell it, bought it, and gave it to Abdullah (Sahih al-Bukhari).

He is known above all for following the Prophet's ﷺ practice. According to the early biographies, he made a point of praying in every place where he had seen the Prophet ﷺ pray (Sahih al-Bukhari reports that he did this and Salim, his son, after him), of dyeing his hair and wearing the sandals he had seen the Prophet ﷺ wear, and of going to the same trees and watering them. When he was asked why he did certain things, he answered that he had seen the Prophet ﷺ do them (Sahih al-Bukhari). According to the early biographies, he is said to have taken care not to step wrongly where the Prophet's ﷺ feet had fallen, and Malik said that he followed the traces of the Prophet ﷺ so closely that one might have called it madness. People used to pray that Allah keep Abdullah ibn Umar alive so that the practice of the Prophet ﷺ would not be lost. According to the early biographies, he was careful with narrating, adding or removing nothing, and he narrated more than two thousand hadith, often with tears in his eyes. The Prophet ﷺ said that if only the door of the mosque were left for the women, and Nafi' said that Ibn Umar never entered by it until his death (Sunan Abi Dawud, graded sahih; another narrator says that the words were Umar's).

He held to the sunnah even against those he loved. When a man told him that his father Umar had said something different about a ruling, he answered that he had heard it from the Prophet ﷺ. When his son Bilal said that he would forbid his wife from going to the mosque, since the Prophet ﷺ had said not to prevent women who ask leave to go (Sahih Muslim), Abdullah told him that he was saying the opposite of what the Prophet ﷺ said, and did not speak to him until he went back on it. When a man sneezed beside him and said "praise be to Allah and peace upon the Messenger of Allah", Ibn Umar told him that the Prophet ﷺ had taught them to say only praise to Allah in every state (Jami at-Tirmidhi, graded hasan). According to the early biographies, he also corrected a man who sang the call to prayer, and he disliked people who exaggerated in reciting the Quran until they fainted. When he was told that Abu Hurayrah reported a great reward for following a funeral to the grave, he thought it was a lot, and when Aisha confirmed that she had heard the Prophet ﷺ say it, he said that they had lost many rewards (Sahih al-Bukhari; Sahih Muslim). When he met a Bedouin on the road, he gave him his donkey and his turban, and when he was told that the man would be satisfied with something small, he answered that the man's father had been a friend of Umar and that the Prophet ﷺ said the finest goodness of a son is to treat kindly the friends of his father (Sahih Muslim). He saw young men using a hen as a target and said that the Prophet ﷺ cursed whoever did that to an animal (Sahih al-Bukhari).

He was brought up strictly. Umar fixed four thousand for each of the early Muhajirun and only three thousand five hundred for his own son, because his parents had taken him with them on the migration (Sahih al-Bukhari). Abdullah told how Umar once told him to divorce his wife whom he loved, and when he refused, Umar went to the Prophet ﷺ, who told him to divorce her (Sunan Abi Dawud, graded sahih); scholars, among them Imam Ahmad, have said that this was a particular case, and not a rule for any father. According to the early biographies, Umar would take his sons out on his night rounds, one each night, and when Abdullah bought a fat camel that grazed with the state animals, Umar made him sell it and give the profit to the treasury. When Umar was stabbed, Abdullah was with him, and Umar told him to check how much he owed, which came to about eighty-six thousand, and said that it should be paid from his family's property, and, if that fell short, from the Banu Adi and then from Quraysh. He sent him to Aisha to ask to be buried with the Prophet ﷺ and Abu Bakr, and she said that she had meant it for herself but today preferred Umar. Umar then told him to ask again after his death, in case she had agreed out of the moment, and if she refused, to take him to the graveyard of the Muslims (Sahih al-Bukhari). Umar named the six, and said that Abdullah ibn Umar would be a witness but would have no share in the rule (Sahih al-Bukhari), and, according to the early biographies, when it was suggested that Umar appoint his son, he said that it was enough for one man of the family of al-Khattab to have borne it.

After his father's death, he did not take office. According to the early biographies, he fought in the conquests in Syria, Iraq, Persia and Egypt, but would not take a post. According to the early biographies, when Uthman asked him to be a judge, he refused, and said that a judge either rules in ignorance, or follows his desire, or strives and gets it right, and that he would rather not put himself in that position. During the troubles, he kept out of the fighting. When two men asked him why he did not come out during the trouble of Ibn az-Zubayr, he said that Allah had forbidden him to shed the blood of his brother, and that they had fought until there was no more persecution, while they wanted to fight until there was (Sahih al-Bukhari). According to the early biographies, he said that if he was called to the prayer and to success he would go, but not to fight the Muslims. Everyone knew where he stood. When a man from Iraq asked him about the blood of a fly on the pilgrim's clothes, he said that they asked about flies while they had killed the Prophet's ﷺ grandson, whom the Prophet ﷺ had called a sweet flower in this world (Sahih al-Bukhari). According to the early biographies, he told al-Hajjaj publicly that he was an enemy of Allah who had attacked the House, and the governor had him poisoned, and when al-Hajjaj came to visit him, he said that the one who had struck him was the one who had brought weapons into the sanctuary.

He feared Allah. According to the early biographies, he worshipped by night, fasted by day, performed Hajj every year, and wept at the verse about the hearts of those who believe being softened, so that he could not go on, and when he drank water he wept at the thought of the people of the Fire wanting a sip of water. When he missed a prayer in congregation, he prayed longer in the night, and if he missed a fast, he fasted more. According to the early biographies, he would not take his fill of food, and would not sit for a meal unless there was an orphan with him, and he freed more than a thousand slaves. According to the early biographies, he gave away what was given to him, up to thirty thousand in one sitting, and some of the freed slaves came to pray in the front rows hoping he would free them, and he said that he would let them deceive him for Allah's sake. When a shepherd told him he would not sell a sheep without his master's leave, and Ibn Umar suggested that he could say a wolf had eaten it, the boy answered that he would then have to answer to Allah, and Ibn Umar bought him and freed him. He did not like to speak without knowledge, and would often answer that he did not know. According to the early biographies, he said that if he could meet Allah with his back free of people's blood, his stomach of their wealth and his tongue of their honour, that was the knowledge he needed. He said he never spent a night since hearing the Prophet ﷺ without having his will beside him (Sahih al-Bukhari; Sahih Muslim). According to the early biographies, in his last illness he told them that he regretted nothing except the long days of fasting and the long nights, and that he had not fought the oppressive party. He asked that his daughter, who had been promised in marriage, be married before he died, so as not to meet Allah with an unfulfilled promise. He died in Makkah in 73 AH, about the age of eighty-four or eighty-six. According to the early biographies, he was the last of the great Companions to die there. Imam Malik's chain through Nafi', his freed slave, from Ibn Umar, from the Prophet ﷺ, is called the golden chain by hadith scholars. According to the early biographies, Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz, a descendant of Umar, learned his love of the sunnah from him.

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