Section on the Remaining Leading Companions

61 – ʿUthmān ibn Ḥunayf ibn Wāhib al-Anṣārī * (T, S, Q)
He was ʿUthmān, son of ʿUkaym ibn Thaʿlabah ibn al-Ḥārith ibn Majdaʿah ibn ʿAmr ibn Ḥanash ibn ʿAwf ibn ʿAmr ibn ʿAwf, an Anṣārī of the Aws clan, resident of Qubāʾ.

He was the brother of Sahl ibn Ḥunayf and the father of ʿAbd Allāh, Ḥārithah, al-Barāʾ, Muḥammad, and another son named ʿAbd Allāh. Their mother, Umm Sahl, was counted among the eminent women of the Anṣār.

Ibn Abī ʿArūbah reports—from Qatādah, from Abū Mijlaz—that ʿUmar appointed ʿUthmān ibn Ḥunayf over the kharāj of the Sawād, granting him a daily stipend of one-quarter of a sheep and five dirhams. He instructed him to measure the Sawād, both its cultivated and its fallow tracts (1), but not to measure salt flats, sand hills, thickets, or marshland.

Accordingly, ʿUthmān surveyed everything short of Mount Ḥulwān (2), reaching as far as the Arab lands on the lower Euphrates, and he wrote to ʿUmar:

“I have found every area reached by the water to contain both unworked and cultivated land.”