—until he had emptied it completely, and he bound himself not to eat clarified butter or any rich meat until the people’s hardship had been removed. In days of plenty they would crumble bread for him in milk and ghee, (1) but in the Year of the Ashes they crumbled it only in oil and vinegar, and he found oil hard to digest. Even so he never ate his fill, so ʿUmar (may Allah be pleased with him) grew dark of complexion and his body wasted away to the point that one feared for his very strength. This condition among the people lasted for nine months, after which the situation turned to abundance and ease, and the tribes dispersed from Madinah back to their own lands.

Al-Shāfiʿī said: It has reached me that when the clans finally struck camp and left Madinah, (2) an Arab said to ʿUmar, “The affliction has lifted from you, and, by Allah, you are truly the son of a noblewoman!”—that is, you shared with the people, treated them justly, and did good to them.

We have likewise narrated that ʿUmar patrolled (3) Madinah one night during the Year of the Ashes and found no one laughing, no one conversing in their homes as usual, and not a single beggar asking for alms. (4) He asked about the reason, and it was said to him, “Commander of the Believers, the beggars asked but were not given, so they have stopped asking; the people are weighed down with anxiety and hardship, so they neither talk nor laugh.” ʿUmar thereupon wrote to Abū Mūsā in Basra, “Help, help, for the community of Muhammad!” and he wrote to ʿAmr ibn al-ʿĀs in Egypt with the same words. Each of them sent a tremendous caravan laden with wheat and every kind of food. The provisions dispatched by ʿAmr came by sea to Jeddah and from Jeddah to Mecca. This report has a sound chain of transmission, yet the mention of ʿAmr ibn al-ʿĀs in the Year of the Ashes is problematic, for Egypt had not been conquered in year eighteen. (Either the Year of the Ashes was after year eighteen, or the reference to ʿAmr ibn al-ʿĀs in connection with it is an error; Allah knows best.)

Sayf related from his shaykhs that Abū ʿUbaydah arrived in Madinah with four thousand pack-animals carrying food, and ʿUmar ordered him to distribute it (5) among the tribes encamped around the city. When he had finished, ʿUmar ordered that he be given four thousand dirhams, but he refused to accept them; ʿUmar persisted until he took them.

(6) Sayf ibn ʿUmar (7) also reported—through Sahl ibn Yūsuf al-Sulamī, from ʿAbd al-Raḥmān ibn Kaʿb ibn Mālik—that the Year of the Ashes fell at the end of the seventeenth year and the beginning of the eighteenth. A severe famine struck the people of Madinah and its environs, many perished, and even the wild beasts began to seek shelter with humans. Such, then, was the state of the people—and of ʿUmar— (8)