Free Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes by Tamim Ansary Page A

known to do a certain amount of brawling and drinking. Back then, he had hated Islam and Mohammed. Then came his oft-recounted conversion: one day, tradition reports, he announced that he was going to kill the Messenger of God and be done with it. He grabbed a sword and went striding across town to commit the deed, but on the way he spotted his beloved sister sitting under a tree, studying a leaf with some sort of text on it. “What are you doing?”
    “Reading,” she said.
    “Reading what?”
    She looked up timorously. “The Qur’an. I’ve become a Muslim.”
    “What? Give me that!” He snatched away what she was reading. It was a verse called Ta Ha, and to Omar’s astonishment the words seemed addressed directly to him. At that moment Omar went through a transformation. He dropped his sword, ran through the streets of Mecca, and banged on the Prophet’s door, shouting, “I believe you! You are the Messenger of God! I believe!”
    After that, he became one of Mohammed’s closest companions, but he always remained a tough guy’s tough guy, subject to outbursts of frightening rage, and though he had a good heart beneath it all, many wondered if the khalifate could be entrusted to a man whose very demeanor frightened children. At that critical moment, however, Ali stepped forward to endorse Omar, and his word tipped the scales: the Umma accepted their second post-Mohammed leader.
    Upon taking office, Omar told the community that he knew he was more feared than loved, but he assured people, they had seen only one side of him so far. Both the Prophet and Abu Bakr had been tenderhearted men, he explained, yet leaders sometimes must take tough action, and when such a need had arisen, Omar had been their instrument. He had needed to be a sword all the time so that the Prophet, and later Abu Bakr, would have a sword available to them any time. Now that Omar was khalifa, however, he would not be a living sword all the time, because he knew that a leader must sometimes be gentle. From now on, therefore, the community would see both sides of him. Wrongdoers and tyrants who trampled on the weak would see the old Omar. The poor, the weak, the widows, the orphans, all who sought the good and needed protection, would see the tender Omar.
    The Umma soon realized their second khalifa was a towering personality, even more imposing than Abu Bakr, perhaps. Omar directed the Umma for ten years, and during that time he set the course of Islamic theology, he shaped Islam as a political ideology, he gave Islamic civilization its characteristic stamp, and he built an empire that ended up bigger than Rome. Any one of these achievements could have earned him a place in a who’s who of history’s most influential figures; the sum of them make him something like a combination of Saint Paul, Karl Marx, Lorenzo di Medici, and Napoleon. Yet most people outside Islam know him only as a name and perhaps a one- or two-sentence descriptor: he’s the second khalifa, a successor of Mohammed—that’s about it.

    Perhaps this is because Omar made lack of pretension his core principle. This is so much a part of his legend that Omar becomes in Islamic tradition the embodiment of a principle. His word was not law; his will did not rule; he ceded all authority to God—such was his storied claim. He envisioned Islam as an absolutely just and egalitarian community and he intended to make that vision a reality. In the Muslim community, he said, no one ever needed to fear the whims or will of any human power because this community had the Qur’an as its law, and the example of the Prophet’s life as itsguide, and nothing else was needed. Omar declared that his role was merely to keep the Umma united and moving forward along the track indicated by the revelations.
    Omar had never been a rich man, but Ali and others urged him to take a suitable salary from the public treasury, arguing that since Islam now included all of Arabia, the Umma could no longer