The Khilafa of Sayyidina Uthman - The Wisdom and the Agony
By Abdal Hakim Murad | 2026-01-13T22:59:02.377842+00:00 | Topic: Sahaba
The Khilafa of Sayyidina Uthman - The Wisdom and the Agony
Shaykh Abdal Hakim Murad
Opening
In the name of Allah, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful. All praise is due to Allah, Lord of the worlds. Peace and blessings be upon all the prophets and messengers.
Introduction
Welcome to the third in this series of lectures at the Cambridge Muslim College to the members of the Cambridge New Muslim Group, broadcast also live via the internet.
This time we'll be talking about the third of the four Khulafa Rashidun, the third of the four rightly guided Khalifas or Caliphs of Islam, which is Sayyidina Uthman bin Affan, (رضي الله عنه).
We've already looked at some of the lessons that are beginning to emerge from our survey of these four giants, basing ourselves on the principle of the Jahariyar enunciated by Imam Shamsuddin Sivassi in his book on the four Khulafa. And we've noted that each of them represents, as it were, a particular dimension or shaft of light from the prophetic diamond.
Each of them is very characteristic, very different to an individual, and we know that Allah (سبحانه وتعالى) values ikhtilaf, human difference, that he has created us as different forms.
The Beauty of Diversity Among the Sahaba
One of the most beautiful things that you can learn from studying the lives of the Sahaba is the extraordinary diversity of the rainbow family of Islam and how Islam brings out rather than suppresses the distinctiveness of the personalities of these extraordinary men and women.
Sayyidina Abu Bakr, as we saw, the truthful, the believer, the only one to have entered Islam without any hesitation at all, and the one who accepted as Siddiq the story of the Mi'raj as soon as he heard of it. Sayyidina Umar, al-Farooq, the one who differentiated absolutely rigorously between truth and falsehood.
And Sayyidina Uthman, who is the subject of the lecture this evening, who we will see represents a different type of human perfection, quite different from his predecessors, but a form of perfection nonetheless. And as we'll see as the dramatic story unfolds, that certain things that continue to afflict and divide the Ummah today start to germinate in the second half of his distinguished Khilafah, (رضي الله عنه)
Lineage and Early Life
Sayyidina Uthman's name: Sayyidina Uthman ibn Affan ibn Abil As ibn Umayyah ibn Abshams ibn Abdi Manaf. He's born five years after the birth of the Prophet, which was the year of the elephant.
He's from one of the leading families of Makkah, one of the noble lines of the tribe of Quraysh. His mother was Arwah bint Quraysh, who was a relative of the Holy Prophet (صلى الله عليه وسلم) also an aristocrat of Quraysh. Her mother was a woman called Umm Hakim bint Abdul Muttalib ibn Hashim.
So his grandmother was the twin sister of the Holy Prophet's father. So there was a relationship through Sayyidina Uthman's mother.
Conversion to Islam
He converts early in Islam and is converted by Sayyidina Abu Bakr (رضي الله عنه) during the time of the secret Dawah.
For the rest of Abu Bakr's life, there's a particular closeness between the two, because it was Abu Bakr who introduced him to Islam. In fact, the historians record that Sayyidina Uthman was the fourth male adult convert to Islam.
When he converts, of course, because he's a big shot, a significant individual in the city of Makkah, this generates a good deal of rage and opposition.
His uncle, al-Hakam ibn Abi al-'As, physically grabs hold of him, shakes him, and he ties him up. He grabs a piece of rope and just trusses him up, throws him down and says, "Do you want to leave the religion of your ancestors for this new thing that hardly anybody is following, that's just been invented? By Allah, I will not leave you alone until you give this up."
But Uthman says, "By Allah, I will not abandon this ever," and is absolute.
When he sees his determination, al-Hakam sees that this is futile to try and bully him out of Islam, and he lets him go. But this is quite characteristic of Uthman. He doesn't fight back, he doesn't raise his hands in violence, but he is absolutely determined.
We'll see that this becomes a characteristic of his way right up to his last days.
Companionship with the Prophet
It's a sohbah, a companionship with the Holy Prophet, that is full of distinction in every way. So he has a number of titles, one of them is Dhul Hijratain, the one who migrated twice, because he was the first to migrate to Ethiopia.
Indeed the Holy Prophet, when he saw him off with Ruqayya, who was the Prophet's daughter, who was Uthman's wife, the Holy Prophet prayed for him and said:
"May Allah be with the two of them. Uthman is the first to have migrated with his wife since the time of Lut, (عليه السلام)."
And this ma'iyya, this withness, the Holy Prophet (عليه السلام) prays for, becomes characteristic of Uthman in his ibadah. He is a man of ma'iyya, a man of withness, closeness to Allah, (سبحانه وتعالى).
Physical Description
We know quite a bit about what he looked like. He was a patrician figure, very good looking. He was reasonably tall. He had a full beard, a pale complexion, and was famous for being physically very impressive. One of the sahaba said, "I saw Uthman bin Affan and never in my life have I seen a man or a woman who was more beautiful than him in his face."
This is a little story from Usama bin Zaid. The Rasul of Allah, (صلى الله عليه وسلم), sent him once to Uthman's house with a plate of food. He says:
"I went in, and there was Ruqayya, may Allah be pleased with her, sitting."
Usama is little at this time:
"And then I started to look first at Ruqayya, at her face, and then at the face of Uthman."
When I returned, the messenger asked, "Have you ever seen a couple more beautiful than they?" And I said:
"No, O Messenger of Allah."
Resemblance to Ibrahim
A number of interesting comparisons were made by the Holy Prophet himself between Hazrat Uthman and Sayyidina Ibrahim (عليه السلام) which is something that we're going to need to think about.
There's a narration from Aisha (رضي الله عنها) when the Holy Prophet (صلى الله عليه وسلم) gave his daughter, Umm Kulthum, in marriage, he said to her, "Your husband is, of all men, the one who most resembles your grandfather, Ibrahim, and your father, Muhammad." That's a major thing for him to be saying.
Of all men, he is the one who most resembles Ibrahim and your father, Muhammad. And there's actually a raft of other hadiths in which the Holy Prophet (صلى الله عليه وسلم) says that he found resemblance between Uthman and Ibrahim.
There's a lot of hadiths about the manaqib, the virtues of Sayyidina Uthman. The Holy Prophet loved him very much and was very taken with the depth and the stature of his spirituality. So he said that of all of my sahaba, the one who most resembles me in khuluq, in traits of character, is Uthman ibn Affan.
The Quality of Haya
What was the specific content of this? What kind of person was he, in fact? Well, we know that he was famous for his haya'a, famous for his humility, his modesty, his shyness, which is a fundamental quality, and this is also a prophetic quality.
The Holy Prophet (صلى الله عليه وسلم) was more shy than a virgin in her tent. This is the opposite of the kind of pharaonic glare. This is the prophetic shyness and humility that is actually the fulfillment of human dignity and not a sign of weakness. It's the sign of a complete overwhelming of the nafs, by the ruh, of the ego, by the spirit.
Sidna Uthman was famous for being haya'i, for having this quality of haya'a, and this seems to be the particular form of correspondence between him and his relative, the Holy Prophet that is being referred to.
So, for instance, Anil Hasan said, "I saw Uthman sleeping in the mosque, surrounded by no one, and he was the leader of the believers." Just to show you the level of his humility, how he really didn't care about dunya, despite being from a wealthy family of grandees.
He said, "I once saw Uthman just sleeping in the mosque with a blanket over him, nobody around him, and at that time he was already amir al mu'minin, he was commander of the faithful." His third khalifa said, by this time his empire stretches from Tunis to the gates of China. He's one of the most powerful men in the world, but he's just taking his siesta in the mosque, which was actually a frequent custom of his.
After the zuhr prayer, he would often just lie down in the masjid and go to sleep, taking his qailullah. He didn't care exactly where he slept in the mosque, and often he would sleep on the stones, because most of the ground of the mosque of the Holy Prophet was actually made up of pebbles, and he would just lie on those, which would leave a mark on him, but he paid no attention.
Balance Between Wealth and Asceticism
He also managed to keep up this extraordinary balance that is a feature of many of the great sahaba, particularly the wealthy amongst them, that even though they were rich, independent, noblemen, they paid no attention to any of that.
So, for instance, a narrative from Shurahbil bin Muslim, that Uthman used to feed people with the amir's food, the stuff that was officially his, and then he would go to his own house and eat vinegar and oil, something cheap, that was all he cared about. He wasn't interested in banquets. And he used to ride around Medina on a mule.
Mules are not very prestigious, but they're tough, and he also used to ride his servant behind him, riding about the city on this mule. Known for being soft-hearted, and in this respect, I guess, quite similar to Abu Bakr, he was known to weep frequently at the graves until his beard was wet, and not really caring about his clothes.
So one of the sahaba said, during his khilafah, "I saw him on the minbar on the Friday, and he was wearing a waist wrapper, which was made of thick, rough linen from Adan, worth about four or five silver coins," in other words, a really rough, cheap, pauper's garment, and his upper garment was patched.
Generosity
Another part of this was his generosity, and he's remembered for this as well, and this again is one of the ways in which we can say that he has this particular mushabaha or resemblance to the Holy Prophet, for whom generosity was really a way of life, an ancient aristocratic virtue, to give and to give and to give.
One of the sahaba said, the Holy Prophet was quicker and more generous in giving than the wind let loose, the wind which has no boundaries and just goes where it will, and this was the Prophet's nature, that no gold or silver coin was spent the night in his house. Sayyidina Uthman was similar, and was absolutely celebrated for his generosity.
The Well of Rumah and Jaysh al-Usra
There are two particular moments in which this generosity makes a critical difference during the seerah, and these are the moments where Uthman buys the well of Rumah shortly after the hijrah, so that the Muslims can have their own well, and also when he prepares, and through spending vast sums, the Jaysh al-Usra, which is for the Tabuk expedition, which was a necessary expedition to ward off Byzantine incursions, and was extraordinarily expensive.
So we have a hadith in which, for instance, Uthman bought paradise twice from the Holy Prophet, when he had the well of Rumah dug, and when he prepared the army of difficulty, and the Tabuk expedition was announced by the Prophet on the minbar.
Uthman ibn Affan (Part 2)
So the Holy Prophet is urging the Sahaba to give and to contribute to this army of difficulty, and Uthman gets up and offers 100 camels with their saddles and with the equipment necessary for a cavalryman to accompany the army. Uthman gets up again and says another 100 with their equipment.
Then he did it again, and again Uthman gets up, he can't restrain himself. Another 100 with their saddles and with their equipment. And then the narrator said, I saw the Holy Prophet, moving his hand and saying, "This is enough for Uthman, he has whatever work he does after this will be as it were supererogatory, additional, because this is what will purchase paradise for him."
Indeed he equips 1000 camels, and he gives the Holy Prophet a bag of 1000 gold coins from his wealth, and as a result the army is successfully equipped. The Holy Prophet saw Uthman ibn Affan on the day of the army of difficulty coming and going. And he makes this mighty prayer for Uthman, and he says:
"O Allah, forgive Uthman as he comes and as he goes, and as he conceals things and as he announces things, and as he keeps things in his heart, and as he speaks of things."
The Virtue of Modesty
He participates in many of the expeditions, and he participates in the two final hajjis of Islam, including the hajjat al-widah. And he's also known for having a tremendous personal presence. He's one of those people who a woman will kind of be hushed when he entered it.
He was a man of tremendous stature. So there's a famous hadith in Bukhari and Muslim narrated by Aisha, that when Uthman entered, the Holy Prophet would gather his robes around him. You know how sometimes when somebody significant comes in, you make sure that you're together.
And he would say:
"Should I not feel modest in the presence of the one in whose presence the angels feel modest?"
(Reference: Sahih Muslim 2401)
And this is part of his haya, perhaps his most famous of all of his virtues. And this is really the virtue of Islam itself. In the famous hadith, "Every religion has a particular trait, a particular characteristic. The characteristic of Islam is modesty, humility, shyness."
So we find this hadith. The Prophet is describing Uthman. He could be in his house, and the doors could be locked. And when he took off his clothes in order to pour the water over himself, so shy was he, even though there's nobody around that he would be bending over rather than standing up straight. This is his way of praising the modesty, the haya of Hazrat Uthman.
And he said:
"Uthman is of all the people of my ummah, the one with most haya and most karam."
That is to say, the one with most modesty and shyness, and the one with the greatest generosity. And these are really beautiful, aristocratic Islamic qualities.
His Relationship with the Quran
Another of his virtues is that he had a particular relationship to the Qur'an. And when we look at the history of sanctity in Islam, we very typically find that there's a particular relationship to Allah's book.
That's not surprising. Allah's book is kalamullah al-qadeem. It is the uncreated speech of the divine. When it is within us, when we recite it, we are not partaking of just another thing in dunya. We are, as it were, resonating with the words of the infinite. That is at the heart of our worship and the heart of the religion.
So the great awliya of this ummah have always had a particular, close, intimate relationship with Allah's book. And Hazrat Uthman was certainly one of them. And he has, of course, the famous story which we'll deal with in a few minutes, when he is the one who ensures the protection and the preservation of the Qur'anic text.
But he's also one of the only two khalifas in the whole history of Islam to have memorized the entire text. One of the two hafiz. Uthman bin Adhan is the first, and al-Ma'mun, one of the Abbasid caliphs, was the other.
His Titles
So we mentioned one of his titles, Dhul-Hijratain, the man of the two migrations. But he has others as well. Al-Musalli ila al-Qiblatayn is one of them. He was one of the companions who prayed to the two Qiblas, Jerusalem, and then the verse in Surah al-Baqarah was revealed, and he prayed towards Baytullah al-Haram in Makkah.
But he has another name as well, which is perhaps better known, which is Dhul-Nurayn, the man of the two lights. There's different opinions on exactly what this means. The most common one is that it's referring to the fact that he married two of the daughters of the Holy Prophet, so he's called the man of the two lights.
First, Ruqayyah, whom he married before Islam, and she died. It seems that she had malaria and died during the Battle of Badr, and the Holy Prophet excused him from attending with the army because he was nursing his dying wife, and indeed when he was burying her during the burial, the news came of the victory at Badr.
He was strongly attached to her, and the Holy Prophet صلى الله عليه وسلم partly because of his strong personal affinity with Uthman, gave him another of his daughters to marry.
Ruqayyah is the mother of Abdullah, and this becomes his kunya, his patronymic name, so it's Abu Abdullah, his informal name.
Some people looking at this name, Dhul-Nurayn, the man of the two lights, say that this was actually a title given to him not by the Holy Prophet صلى الله عليه وسلم, but by Hazrat Ali, who again had a close personal relationship to him. But there's another tradition that says it's not because of the two wives, it's because in Paradise, the Holy Prophet predicted that he would always have two lights with him, which he compared to bolts of lightning, which would be a particular way of indicating his high standing in the eyes of Allah سبحانه وتعالى
Allahu alam, but in any case, this is his great title in Islam, Dhul-Nurayn, the man of two lights.
So much was the love that the Prophet صلى الله عليه وسلم felt for Uthman, that not only did he marry him to two of his daughters, Ruqayya and Umm Kulthum. Umm Kulthum also pre-deceases, dies before her father, as part of the tragic dimension of the Holy Prophet's life, that he suffers a lot of bereavement.
Only one of his children, Fatima, outlives him. Not an easy thing for a parent to bury his own children. Ruqayya dies, Umm Kulthum dies a year before her father.
But we even find the hadith:
"If I had a third unmarried daughter, I would marry her to Uthman."
And another hadith:
"If I had 40 daughters, and they died one after the other, I would still continue to marry them to Uthman."
And again, all of these, and it's a huge amount of material that we have, confirms that there's a special relationship between the two men.
Devotion and Night Prayers
Another important facet of his diamond-like personality is his strong attachment to devotion. He's one of the nusak, the obaid, amongst the sahaba. And here again we find his particular relationship with Allah's book.
In the books of tafsir, where you see the worshippers, the obaid, mentioned, very often you'll find that the sahaba commenting on these verses will say, "Uthman is one of the people, or the person, that this particular verse refers to."
So, to take one example:
"Is he who is submissive in the watches of the night, prostrate and standing, fearful of the afterlife, and hoping for his lord's mercy"
Ibn Umar says, "Who are Uthman ibn Affan?" This is Uthman ibn Affan, famous for his night prayers.
And again, another verse:
"Those who have iman, and do good works, and then fear Allah, and then believe, and fear Allah, and act with ihsan, excellence, the highest spiritual degree. And Allah loves the people of ihsan."
Ihsan is the highest degree, famously in the hadith al-nawafil, that Allah loves the one who is this highest degree of, and he sees, and he hears, and he walks, and he smites by me. This is a famous hadith of the nawafil.
Uthman is clearly being identified with this high degree of ihsan. Because in the books of tafsir, you find Hazrat Ali saying, "Uthman is one of these people. And Allah loves the people of ihsan."
Uthman is one of them. They said that Uthman used to fast day after day after day. And he would stand all night in prayer, except for a light sleep which he would take at the beginning of each night.
Once, he was watched in the mosque in Medina, after the Isha prayer, one of the Sahaba noticed him in a corner of the mosque, and kept watching him, and noted that in the one prayer, he completed the entire Qur'an. And there are very few of the Sahaba of whom this is reported. Because it takes about eight hours, even if you recite it pretty fast, to recite the whole Qur'an.
He would do this in two rakahs. And indeed, at the tragic end of his life, when his house is surrounded by the rebels, his wife, Layla, leans out. And she says:
"Whether you kill my husband or not, he is still the man who used to give life to the whole night, by reciting the whole Qur'an in one rakah."
She was saying, no kind of rabble, here is the man who would spend the entire night with the Qur'an.
His Knowledge and Scholarship
He's known for transmitting hadith, there's 146 hadith narrated on his authority. Also well known for his fiqh and for his fatwa, Sir Ibn Sirin would say:
"Concerning the rituals and the rules, Uthman was, of all of the people, the most learned. The one who was the most fiqh, followed by Ibn Umar."
Election as Khalifa
So we have this extraordinary closeness and distinction between the Prophet, صلى الله عليه وسلم and Sayyidina Uthman. And this kind of continues in a new way after Abu Bakr becomes khalifa.
Because as we mentioned, there's already a close friendship and a relationship between the two men, because there's always a certain softness that links somebody to the person who he took shahada with. In some mysterious way there's a spiritual bond and this is certainly something that unites Sayyidina Abu Bakr and Hazrat Uthman.
In fact, as we saw in the first of these lectures, the second person to pledge allegiance to Abu Bakr is actually Uthman. He would, as it were, mine the fort in Medina during the Ridda Wars and played a very significant consultative role. During the rule of Umar, he was the first person to pledge allegiance to the new amir al-mu'minin. And again, he plays a vital role as his close counsellor.
A number of the important early fatwas in Islam that has huge knock-on effects for the populations were attributed to Uthman. So for instance, what to do with all of these conquered lands? Do we just dish them out to the conquerors? Can the sahaba take large chunks of Egypt and Tunis and Syria or wherever?
Uthman's view was that they should be left in the hands of their existing owners. Doesn't matter if they're Christians, Jews, whatever, you leave them in possession of their lands. And that was the ruling that was practised. The only exception being absentee landlords, so Greek expatriate barons who were running big estates in Egypt, who'd gone back to Constantinople. Those lands could be expropriated by the treasury and dished out to pensioners of the army, but not otherwise.
That was the kind of ruling that made Hazrat Uthman's counsels vitally important during the khilafah of Hazrat Umar.
The Election Process
Now, the story so far that we were recounting last time was up to the death, the assassination, the tragic martyrdom of Hazrat Umar after an extraordinary meteoric career in which the Ummah has expanded
over the horizons, and the Byzantines and the Persians have been crushed, and the local populations, particularly the oppressed religious minorities, have risen up in favour of the Muslim conquests, and a completely new civilisation is being born overnight. Extraordinary ages, an extraordinary age of glory.
Umar is stabbed in the mosque, but it takes him a few days before he dies, and in that time, he wants to make sure that there is a smooth transition of power. He's against a kind of monarchical principle. He doesn't think it should be his son, or somebody else's son, or it shouldn't be done on the basis of genealogy.
That's the old way, the Meccan pagan way. The idea that it should be a close relative is an older understanding, and now it's whoever is most appropriate and the most equipped and generally popular figure should take over. But he doesn't designate one himself.
Instead, what he does is to appoint a kind of electoral committee. He names six men and says, "You've got three days, and on the fourth day, you have to announce the new khalifa." And he puts this in place before he dies.
The six men are Ali, Uthman, Talha ibn Ubaidullah, Abdurrahman ibn Auf, Sa'ad ibn Abi Waqas, and Az- Zubair ibn Awwam, who are all major Sahaba. And selected very carefully so that the different shades of opinion, Ansar, Muhajireen, all have people that they can identify with. So they're given these three days.
In order to move things along, these are six friends basically. They all have the same purpose, which is to ensure that the extraordinary ascendancy of Islam shall continue, and that the unity of the Muslims is maintained. And to demonstrate the quality of these people, if you compare it, say, to modern presidential elections where everybody is backstabbing and gossiping and there's hostile advertising against the other candidates, it's pretty miserable.
These six men are different. So Abdurrahman ibn Auf says, "I'm going to withdraw my own candidacy. I'm not in the running. But what I want to do is preside over the proceedings and be a kind of chair of the committee."
"I'm not worthy enough to compete with you in this business."
So he presides and he asks each of them in turn, starting with the five, who do you think should be the ruler? Ali, out of his own humility and his haybah, his awe of the immensity of this task, will not commit himself.
Zubayr says, "Either Ali or Uthman, I think." And Uthman says, "Ali." And Sa'ad says, "Uthman."
So there's kind of a majority in favor of Uthman, but then Abdurrahman goes out and consults the generality of Muslims in the mosque, and generally he finds that they tend to incline to Uthman, who had
this particular spiritual closeness to the Holy Prophet صلى الله عليه وسلم.
So in the morning of the fourth day, Abdurrahman goes out to the mosque and he prays Fajr:
"So after they prayed Fajr, a crowd started to collect and he sent messengers to the key people of the Muhajireen and the Ansar."
"And also to the leaders of the army."
"And then he gave the khutbah, then he spoke to them."
"And he praised Allah, and glorified him, and then he said:"
"I have looked into the affair of the people, and I have consulted them."
"And I've not found anybody who really disagrees with Uthman."
That's the preponderant view. Then he said:
"O Uthman, we pledge allegiance to you according to the sunnah of Allah's Messenger and the two khalifas after him."
So he's the first to pledge allegiance, and Uthman says:
"Yes."
"And then the Muhajirun make their pledge of allegiance to him. And the Ansar pledge their allegiance to him, and the leaders of the army and the generality of the Muslims."
"And that was at the beginning of the month of Muharram, the year 24, three days after the burial of Umar."
His Leadership Style
It soon becomes clear to everybody that this is going to be a different experience, a different kind of ruler. Umar is always walking around with his stick. He's absolutely determined, not only that there will be moral excellence and probity in his city and in his nation that he's just created, but he's determined that the inward flourishing of the Ummah will continue.
Sayyidina Uthman is the same Ummah, but his is more not the puritanical but more the aristocratic, noble approach. And he's also quite a bit older. He's in his 60s already by the time he takes over. And he's this noble, physically beautiful, beautifully eloquent and well spoken individual who now finds himself in the hot seat presiding over the most significant political enterprise that the world has seen probably since the founding of the Roman Empire or even Alexander the Great.
These are days of destiny. But he accepts the responsibility despite the fact that he himself is still sleeping in the mosque and getting dusty and he's not interested in the dunya side of the pomp and circumstance. He just wants to secure the unity and the greatness of Allah's people.
Major Conquests and Policies
So his policies are significant and generally his reign is one of expansion and consolidation. The conquests continue unabated. They're more difficult now because the frontiers are so far away.
It takes a long time to get a message from the frontiers of China to Medina. A long time, but still he's managing these very different, distant campaigns. So the army is going to Central Asia and it's in his time that Yazdegerd III, the last of the emperors of Persia, is killed by one of his own people as he's fleeing from the liberating armies.
He sends an army also further to the west, beyond Egypt, through what's now Libya to Tunisia, to the neighborhood of what becomes the great Muslim city of Qayrawan. And if you look at the emergence of the fiqh in early Islam, you find that Qayrawan is one of the centers that very quickly develops, one of the most humane and intelligent of the schools of early fiqh. It's not ideologically committed to some kind of philosophical architecture for its fiqh.
It's closely rooted in the practice of the people of Medina. But for the founding of this great city of Qayrawan, the subsequent history of the Sharia would have been very different. So this army is cutting like a knife through butter to the territories to the west under Uthman's foster brother Abdullah bin Sa'd.
The Creation of a Navy
Another amazing thing that he does without hesitation is that his relative Muawiyah ibn Abi Sufyan, who's been appointed to be the governor of Syria, says the Byzantines are constantly attacking us from the sea. And indeed, they invade Egypt. They try and recapture Alexandria, and they're rebuffed.
So Muawiyah says, "We need a navy. We've been great on land. Let's try our fortunes on the waves."
And so with the characteristic foresight and innovativeness of these people, Uthman says, "Fine," and they create shipyards in Syria and in Egypt. And they create a navy that even though the Muslims have hardly been to sea before, Arabia is a few boats going around the coast, but the Red Sea and the Gulf are not the same as the Mediterranean at all. They start to win battles by sea.
In part, it's because most of the sailors are actually willing local volunteers who are sick of the Byzantines. Most of the sailors in the early Muslim naval conquests are actually Christians. They're Copts or they're Jacobites, Christian minorities who have been very happy to see the back of the Byzantines and to accept Muslim rule.
Naval Conquests
So now Muslims are safe from Byzantine incursions by sea, and they're able to invade Cyprus. It's in the time of Sayyidina Uthman that the Muslims invade Cyprus. So Muawiyah invades the sea, as the historians say, and with him was Ubadah ibn al-Samit, one of the great hadith narrators amongst the Sahaba, a very saintly man who's, of course, buried next to the haram in Jerusalem, and with him was his wife Um Haram.
Um Haram important. She's old at this time. She had been one of the wet nurses of the Holy Prophet (صلى الله عليه وسلم - but these are feisty women. She's not going to hold back. She's really old, but she gets on a ship. Muslims haven't really been on ships in the Mediterranean before.
She wants to see this conquest of Cyprus, and she actually dies during the siege of Larnaca, and she's buried there, and you can visit her tomb and her mosque to this day. It's the great Muslim site in the island of Cyprus. They call it Hala Sultan Tekesi.
It's a beautiful place, and everybody should visit. So the wet nurse of the Holy Prophet (صلى الله عليه وسلم - lives into this era of conquest, and she's buried in Cyprus, in the European Union now, isn't it? So the European Union is honoured by having the Sahaba within it.
Until the 20th century, when Ottoman ships, or any ship flying a Muslim flag, went past that part of the Cypriot coastline, because the grave and the mosque are on the coast, they would lower their flags to half-mast out of respect for her, and if they had a cannon, in the days of naval cannon, they would fire a salute out of respect for the wet nurse of the Holy Prophet صلى الله عليه وسلم.
Unfortunately, because of the rise of anti-Muslim sentiment in Greece just two years ago, the tomb and the mosque were quite badly damaged by vandals blocked up, graffiti and so forth. So something the Muslims ought to be doing to look after these places.
In any case, so the Muslims are now a naval power, and they capture not only Cyprus, but the island of Rhodes.
The Battle of the Masts
The Byzantines, trying to get their balance in the face of this new threat, counter-attack, and they're defeated by Muawiyah at one of the great naval battles of world history. That's a battle called the Battle of the Masts, because there were so many masts in the ships that were close to each other before gunpowder, so to fight at sea, you had to close with the enemy and board them. And the masts would lock and you could have people up in the rigging, attacking and climbing.
It was an extraordinary kind of three-dimensional form of warfare. And the Muslims win hands down in this battle, which is off the coast of what's today Turkey. And that's probably the largest sea battle the Mediterranean has seen for centuries.
There won't be another one on the same scale for at least 500 years. And again, the Muslims are victorious. So Muawiyah, great conqueror, not only is victorious by sea, but he also conquers Armenia, again with a good deal of support from the local Christians who don't like Byzantine rule.
The Siege of Constantinople
He also had something that could have been one of history's great turning points. In the year 32, he besieges Constantinople, Istanbul. He takes his army through Malatya, right through what's now Turkey, and he crosses the Bosphorus and he camps on the European side with many of the Sahaba, including Abu Ayyub al-Ansari, who of course is buried there.
But there's other Sahaba also buried outside the city walls of Constantinople and spends a year besieging the city. Now, of course, history is in Allah's hands. We know that what happened was what was going to happen.
But it's permissible to think, because they had the expectation that there was the possibility of victory. What would have happened if Constantinople had fallen then rather than in 1453? That's 700 years of Byzantine history that happened subsequently. Beyond Constantinople there was nothing in Europe, and again the Sahaba would just have continued until they'd come here, presumably, to Cambridge and beyond.
Constantinople was the only fortress that stood in their way. But they couldn't deal with the city walls. They didn't have gunpowder, it wasn't around at the time, and they didn't know how to penetrate the city
Administrative Innovations
Many other things Sayyidina Uthman does. He changes the seaport of Mecca. Now we assume it's always been Jeddah. That's where you get off your ship if you're coming to do the hajj by sea. But it was Uthman, actually, who founded the city of Jeddah, and he kind of went there to survey the site. And it seems that he swam in the sea there, and so these are blessed waters.
He made sure the Sahaba were properly dressed as they went into the sea. But the old seaport for Mecca, Shu'ayba, was subsequently abandoned, and Jeddah turned out to be a very good site for a port. So all kinds of new innovative things.
Even though by this time he's into his seventies, he's still thinking outside the box.
Diplomatic Missions
Another amazing thing he does is that he looks outside the frontiers of his empire to the people who are beyond, and he wants them to engage with Islam. So he sends an embassy to Sri Lanka, a kind of semi-legendary distant place, but he sends the Sahaba to Sri Lanka to call the people there to Islam.
He also sends an embassy under Sa'd ibn Abi Waqas, remember, one of the great conquerors at the time of Umar, to China. Now that was really a distance. And it seems that they went by sea around India, and then presumably Indochina, Vietnam, Thailand.
The Sahaba went all the way around to the ports of coastal China, and then inland to see the Tang Emperor. And they appeared before him, and they told him of the emergence of the Sage of the West, the great prophet of Arabia, and summoned him to Islam.
Now the Chinese normally, historically, they've not been terribly interested in or impressed by neighboring countries. They're not really influenced by anybody. They're convinced that they have everything that they need. This continued to be the case when the British were forcing them to buy Bengali opium in the 19th century.
The Emperor said, "We don't need it. Our country has everything that we need. We don't need anything from you Europeans."
But the Sahaba are bringing Islam. And although the Emperor doesn't accept Islam, and again, that could have been one of history's great turning points, had he taken Islam. And some Chinese Muslims say actually he was a secret Muslim.
Wallahu alam. But still, he has respect for them, and he says, "You may spread your religion here freely, and you may worship here freely," and he helps them to create China's first mosque. So Chinese Islam is really old.
It goes back to the time of the Sahaba, the time of Sayyidina Uthman, and the mosque of Sayyidina Uthman, and the tomb of the son of Sa'd ibn Abi Waqas is one of the tombs of the Sahaba that are verified, that are in China.
So again, you can see the amazing mindset of these people. We tend to think Marco Polo was this amazing guy who went from Venice all the way to China, and that was the beginning of a new age of looking beyond Europe.
But for the Sahaba, that was just normal. You sent people anywhere, and they trusted in Allah, and they called people to Islam, and new horizons were opened.
Economic Policies
He does another thing. He strikes the first Muslim coinage. His reign is a time of economic consolidation and prosperity. One of the things that happens in these countries, following the Muslim conquests, and historians can map this fairly accurately, is that trade routes start to be revived very strongly until you have the extraordinary network, the golden web of medieval Islamic commerce that characterized medieval Islam and made merchants so much a part of the Ummah.
One of the reasons why that was possible is that the old Iron Curtain between the Byzantine world and the Mediterranean world on the one hand, and the Persian world, and the Indian world, and Central Asia, and China on the other hand, which had been there really since shortly after the collapse of the empire of Alexander the Great. The Romans had tried to invade Persia, but they never succeeded. Persians had tried to invade Greece at the time of Darius Xerxes, but they never successfully done it.
That was an Iron Curtain roughly along the valley of the Euphrates, but the Muslims kicked open that door and all of these were now united in a single country, which really was a kind of kiss of life for trade. And so people were starting to move east and west, and the Great Silk Road is one of the consequences of these early conquests, because now you could go from one country, you'd be in one country if you went from Tunis all the way to the gates of China. That never happened before in human history.
Alexander's conquests had been a kind of one-off meteoric phenomenon that hardly outlived his death, but the conquest of the Sahaba, those countries are Muslim to this day. So commerce is reviving very fast. A lot of mosques are being built, thousands and thousands of mosques commissioned during the time of Uthman.
The Haram in Mecca and Medina expanded. Similarly we find that there are economic transformations taking place in terms of things like the use of irrigation systems. We already saw how Sayyidina Uthman dug a kind of predecessor of the Suez Canal all the way from the area of Fustat to the Red Sea.
These are people interested in developing the world's infrastructure. They're not just into prayer and akhira, they're developing the prosperity of the world as well.
So one of the things Hazrat Uthman does is to create a Muslim coinage. In the Persian provinces first of all, and they look like Persian coins just so the people will be able to recognize them. They even have the picture of the emperor Yazdegerd on them. Uthman doesn't mind particularly.
And it's only later in the time of the Umayyad Caliph Abd al-Malik that the Muslims have their first fully, as it were, Quranic non-pictorial dirhams and dinars.
The Preservation of the Quran
One of his most characteristic policies is his policy over Allah's book. And I mentioned earlier how important Allah's book is to this soft-hearted Khalifa.
He receives a delegation led by Hudhaifa ibn al-Yaman, one of the great Sahaba, who is saying to him, "Some of these Arabian tribes who've gone out to these far different provinces are making mistakes in their recitation of the Quran. Sometimes their memories are jumbled. Sometimes they get the vowels wrong.
These are dialects. They have bad memories. There's a danger that the text's unity will be lost."
And so one of the greatest things that he does in his caliphate is to save Allah's book. Abu Bakr, in close consultation with Zayd bin Thabit, who had been the scribe of the revelation in the time of the Prophet, had created the first Mus'haf, a basic text which ended up being conserved in the house of Hafsa.
This copy is brought to Uthman and again the great Sahaba are assembled. Zayd bin Thabit is kind of the head of this redaction committee. They make sure that the text that they have physically is absolutely the text that everybody in Medina remembers from the time that the Prophet himself is leading the community, particularly in the Tarawih prayers.
And then the caliph has four or five copies of this made, checked and checked and checked again, and sent out to the great provinces, and he orders that anything that differs from these texts should be destroyed.
Interestingly, you can still see fragments of the distorted text in some places today. In a little cupboard attached to the great mosque in Sana'a in Yemen, for instance, they found a few years ago some ancient parchments that preserve some of the distorted readings. It seems that instead of being thrown away, these were just put in a cupboard.
They thought it would be disrespectful to throw them out. And you can still see that there were indeed pretty minor differences. In the early period, there was a certain instability creeping in.
When Uthman launches this blessed enterprise of unifying the memory of the community on the basis of the memory of the Qur'an of the first Sahaba, those variants stop and no longer are a problem. And so all of the sects of the Muslims today, (الْحَمْدُ لِلَّهِ - alhamdulillah) are united in a single Mus'haf, a single text.
And that really is his work.
You can see if you go today to a great place, which is the Mubarak Madrasa in Tashkent in Uzbekistan, you can see one of these copies of the Qur'an which is preserved in a great perspex case. It's a tremendous place. Everybody should go there.
It's near the Mufti's office in Tashkent. And there's the tomb of Abu Bakr Al-Qafal which is there, and a Madrasa. And they've kept one of these Mus'hafs there which is certainly worth checking out.
The Beginning of the Fitna
So it's a time of glory, but it's also a time of pain. And Muslims are always disconsolate and confused when they consider the events leading up to what we call the first civil war, although it wasn't really a civil war, but rather a kind of civil disobedience that got out of hand. It wasn't huge armies clashing and thousands and thousands of people being killed.
It was a few hot-headed rebels and a caliph who couldn't bring himself to punish them or to fight back. That I think is one helpful way of looking at it. Imagine the scenario.
You have this huge empire with these vast distances. The choice of governors in the provinces is going to be really important because they have to take decisions on their own. Part of Uthman's greatness is that he believes radically in Muslim equality.
He thinks that whoever is the best man for the job and will get the work done is the person who should be appointed. It doesn't matter who he's related to. Very often the people who are from the old Meccan elite are good at administering.
It's in their blood. They've been doing it for a long time. He's not going to discriminate against them.
We've already seen how he appoints Muawiyah bin Abi Sufyan to be the governor of Syria. Muawiyah is this guy who conquers Armenia and conquers Cyprus and conquers Rhodes and wins the battle of the Masts. He turns out to be a brilliant provincial governor.
In some cases he dismisses people who are from the old Meccan elite. This generates resentment as well. Amr bin al-As, the conqueror of Egypt, he withdraws him as governor of Egypt.
Amr becomes a critic of Uthman, but what's not going on here is a kind of clear power play between possible contenders to the Khalifa. It's not really clear to anybody who the obvious alternative to Uthman would be. There are people grumbling as there always are.
Politics is politics. Human nature is human nature. There are people who are discontented. People who think things could be done differently. People who think the conquest could be even faster. The prosperity could be greater.
Different sorts of people, their own relatives might be appointed. This is human nature. None of these people are invaluable after the death of the Prophet.
We find people's loyalties are often quite flexible. So although Amr in Egypt is kind of critical of Uthman, Amr is not necessarily siding with Ali instead because at the arbitration of Siffin, when Ali and Muawiyah ten years later are contending, Amr is actually representing Muawiyah and not representing Ali. So it's not a kind of Uthman versus Ali trade-off.
It's much more fluid and complex than that. Of course, Ali and Uthman are personally very close to each other. Uthman's problem really is that unlike Umar, he was mild and he didn't sack people unless he had to.
He really was reluctant to punish people, even people who were really rioting or people who were rebels. He was very mild. So there were these grumblings that he heard that were unclear from different provinces.
The Growing Opposition
So he called a council of all 12 governors. He brought in all of these people who were ruling on his behalf in these far-flung corners of his empire and he brought them, sat them in front of him in Medina to identify what is the problem. And he also sends some of the great Sahaba, people everybody respected to the great provincial capitals to try and hear what the word was.
What was the buzz on the streets? What are people saying about the way things are? So he sends Usama bin Zaid, a great Sahabi to Basra. Abdullah bin Umar, a great Sahabi to Syria and so forth. And they come back and they say basically things are fine.
Of course human nature is human nature. Some people are chattering, complaining, would like things to be otherwise, but basically things are well.
So Uthman then, because he's a soft-hearted person, wants to get to the bottom of this. He invites everybody who might have a complaint to come to the Hajj. So they can do the obligation of the Hajj, but they can also meet the Khalifa and discuss their issues.
But when the people come, they seem to be reluctant to mention their issues, partly because it's the Hajj, partly because the great Sahaba are there and they realise that their complaints are kind of silly, inappropriate, personal, not relevant.
And so he doesn't really get to hear what the people are saying because they've realised that the Sahaba are against them. But some of these grumblers in this huge new empire start to acquire power, and the rebels effectively are taking over in Egypt and in Basra and in Kufa, in those three significant places. For start, in the two garrison cities of Iraq, Basra and Kufa.
The Siege of Medina
And a thousand rebels come to Medina. Uthman is very reluctant to be the one who starts some kind of fighting between Muslims themselves. This has not happened, and he cannot bear to do it.
And so when a ragtag bunch of a thousand or so people come from Egypt to Medina to sort him out, to try and express whatever it is that's upsetting them, he doesn't send an army out to thrash them, which may well be what Sayyidina Umar would have done.
Instead, he lets them into the city of Medina and he watches to see what they're going to do. And they go to Ali and they say, "We'd rather you were the caliph," but he says, "No," Ali remains loyal to the man whom the Muslims have made bay'ah to.
So they think, "Alright, we'll try Zubayr, we'll try Talha," and they all say, "No, we are loyal to the khalifa." And so then they go to Uthman's house. And by this time, people are saying, "You have to stop these people who are in the city and rioting."
But Uthman has a tremendous sense of the hurma, the sanctity of the prophet's city. He will not shed blood in the city of the holy prophet. He knows this is the city that will be safe from dajjal even.
This is the city in which Imam Malik is going to be walking barefoot in the city out of respect for the prophet who is buried there. This is a city of so many blessings, the city that as the hadith says, rejects ugliness, the way that iron when it's heated, rejects impurities.
So it's his piety and his respect for firstly the right of Muslims to express their opinions, and also for the sanctity of the city of Medina that in a sense is the reason for his downfall.
The population also out of respect for the city feel likewise. They really don't want to see fighting in the streets. His own servants in his house and a certain number of local people ask for permission to fight against the rebels but he refuses.
And then the hajj happens and the great sahaba from the city of Medina leave on the hajj. And then things start getting more unpleasant because the rebels are stopping him from going to the mosque. It's not quite clear what they want and they're not united amongst themselves.
But he can't go to the mosque and then they surround his house and forbid any supplies of food or water into his house. But they can't get in because the house is guarded by some of the great ones, particularly
from the Ahl al-Bayt. Al-Hassan and Al-Husayn, no less, are there on either side of his door to stop these people from getting in.
A number of small skirmishes and Al-Hassan is actually wounded at one point.
The Final Speech
Uthman goes up onto the roof to try and talk to them. Again, diffident. By this time he's old. He's in his 60s when he becomes khalifa and this is 12 years later and he speaks to them:
"Uthman went up onto his roof."
"And he heard somebody in the crowd saying 'Find some way of killing him. Allah has made killing him lawful.'"
"And he said 'By Allah, neither Allah nor his messenger have made it lawful to kill me.'"
So he's not doing it as a personal self-defense. "Why should you kill me?" He's saying this is not lawful. Neither Allah nor his messenger have made it permissible:
(Sahih al-Bukhari 6878)
"I heard Allah's messenger saying: 'The blood of a Muslim is only lawful on three occasions: kufr after Islam or zina after being in the state of Ihsan, somebody's been married, or murder.'"
That's the Bukhari Hadith, it's him presenting the law Allah's religion. This is the Fiqh. This is the sound Hadith. In Sahih Bukhari "Why should you kill me? I haven't committed any of these three offenses:"
"I haven't done any of those things."
"I shall never be the successor of Allah's messenger over his Ummah as somebody who sheds a single drop of blood."
He's never going to meet the Holy Prophet. "I simply will not do it, not one drop." And he says, "What do you want?" and they said, "Resign, we're going to choose somebody else, we will choose whoever we want."
They don't say who. He says:
"I will not take off a garment which Allah has caused me to wear."
"If you kill me, then afterwards never again will the Muslims love each other and if you kill me then afterwards never again will the Muslims fight an enemy together."
Those are his two predictions and he's looking not for himself, he's not saying "don't kill me," he's looking for the interests of the Muslims. "If you do it, never again will the Muslims be united in love. If you do it, never again will they be united against an enemy, so think about it. There's a lot at stake."
The rebels are not listening and they start shooting arrows and this is when Al-Hassan is wounded.
The Martyrdom
And then while Hassan and Hussein are at the front, some of the Egyptian rebels find a way to climb over the wall at the back of the house and they break into his private rooms:
"So they go in, they burst in and Uthman is there and he's reading the Quran and his wife is with him."
An obscure individual Sudan ibn Jamad attacks him, he takes his sword and attacks him even though he's sitting there, attacks him with his sword and his wife Na'ilah throws herself between the attacker and the khalifa, he pays no attention and she loses her fingers as a result of the hacking that's going on. Uthman is killed:
"And then when they've done it, they just run away," and this is the end of the siege of his house after 49 days.
Na'ilah, wounded, goes out to tell people, to give the news:
"And when the people went in, the sahabah went in, they saw Uthman was killed and they kind of burst into tears."
And the news reaches those who are away, which is Ali and Talha and Zubayr:
"And they almost lost their minds at the tragedy, the terrible news that they had heard."
He says to Hassan and Hussain:
"How can the Ameer of Mu'mineen be killed when you are at the gate?"
"They said, 'We didn't know, they were at the front, the assassins came in through the back."
And then the sahabah pursue the rebels and most of them are killed.
Three days later Hazrat Uthman رَضِيَ اللهُ عَنْهُ is buried after his خلافة of twelve years. And because he dies as a martyr, as a shaheed, there's no ghusl, he's just buried in his bloody garments.
The Prophetic Prediction
So that's the climactic end and it's difficult to imagine at such a huge distance, historically, culturally, what exactly was in the minds of those people on that terrible day. But what we know is that Uthman رَضِيَ اللهُ عَنْهُ, was expecting shahada, he was expecting martyrdom because he'd heard this from the Prophet, himself, on a number of occasions.
For instance, the famous hadith: he's standing on the mountain of Thabir - he used to like walking in the hills with his companions. Mount Thabir is just outside Makkah. One of his miracles was that he was on Thabir and making a dua and because of the power of the spiritual tajalli, the mazhar, the spiritual magnetism of the moment, the mountain starts to move slightly, there's a minor earthquake and the pebbles start rattling down and the Holy Prophet stamps his foot and says:
"Be still Thabir, there's nobody standing on you except the Prophet and the Siddiq and two martyrs."
And from that, of course, Sayyidina Uthman anticipates what's going to happen. It's happened to Umar, he would have been expecting something similar. This is a particularly tragic way for him to go, but الحمد لله, none of the big sahaba are implicated. These are relatively unknown people from recent convert backgrounds, in many cases from Egypt, from Iraq, from elsewhere.
So that is the case, but to the end, his policy was not to shed blood in the city of the Holy Prophet, not to be the one who starts the bloodshed amongst the Muslims. They should be the ones who take the initiative, even if he's the first one who has to die in this strife. He prefers to be the one who is killed rather than the one who is starting the process of killing amongst the Muslims.
That seems to have been the decision that he took, the old man sitting there in a dignified way with his mushaf being hacked to death by these rebels. That's the way he wanted to go, and there's a nobility in that.
Conclusion and Prayers
May Allah have mercy upon the great khalifa, one of the greatest of the rulers of human history, Uthman ibn Affan رَضِيَ اللهُ عَنْهُ وَأَرْضَاهُ and accept him and his actions and his intentions and increase us in love for him.
There is so much to be learnt from his seerah, from his life and one of the things that in our democratical age, in which we're cynical about everything and don't speak much about nobility, one of the things that we don't see is this idea of human dignity and nobility, the aristocratic type, who doesn't care about his wealth, about his palace, about status and prestige, one who really follows the principle of noblesse oblige who does what he thinks is right for the people around him and forgets himself.
This is the principle that carried him through these twelve amazing years in which economically the Muslim world is thriving and the frontiers are being pushed out, Islam is reaching China, Sri Lanka, the Muslims are in Europe in Cyprus, in Istanbul and elsewhere, سُبْحَانَ اللهِ so much is happening, a tremendous ruler, tremendously successful right to the end.
The way in which he goes or almost chooses to go is again to this principle of being noble and dignified to the last breath that he took.
Closing Duas
So may Allah be pleased with him and increase us in love for him and inshallah grant us all love for all of the Sahaba, without exception.
"Our Lord, forgive us and our brothers who preceded us in iman and put not in our hearts any resentment toward those who have believed. Our Lord, indeed You are Kind and Merciful."
(Quran 59:10)
"May Allah bless you, and may you forgive us. Peace, mercy, and blessings of Allah be upon you."