upon, and stand firm upon it!’

He (ʿUmar) continued: ‘It was then as though I were given permission to leave, so I came out. I looked back and there was ʿUthmān ibn ʿAffān emerging from the palace, saying, “Praise be to Allah, for my Lord has granted me victory.” Behind him was ʿAlī, saying, “Praise be to Allah, for my Lord has forgiven me.” (1)

Section (2)

We have already cited in Dalāʾil al-Nubuwwah the hadith recorded by Abū Dāwūd in his Sunan in which the Messenger of Allah ﷺ said,

‘Indeed, Allah will raise up for this community, at the head of every century, someone who will renew for it the affairs of its religion.’ (3)

A group of scholars—including Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal, as Ibn al-Jawzī and others relate—said that ʿUmar ibn ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz was the one at the head of the first hundred years. Others held that he was among those by whom Allah renewed the religion at the turn of that century—though he is, beyond dispute, the most deserving of inclusion because of his imamate, his universal authority, and his tireless effort to uphold the truth. His conduct so resembled that of ʿUmar ibn al-Khaṭṭāb that he frequently emulated him.

Shaykh Abū ʾl-Faraj Ibn al-Jawzī compiled a combined biography of the two ʿUmars—ʿUmar ibn al-Khaṭṭāb and ʿUmar ibn ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz. I have produced a separate volume on the life of ʿUmar ibn al-Khaṭṭāb, together with a large volume of his musnad. As for the life of ʿUmar ibn ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz, I have set down here a substantial portion, sufficient to indicate what I have left unrecorded.

ʿUmar—may Allah have mercy on him—would grant each person who devoted himself to the congregational mosque, whether from his own city or elsewhere, for the sake of jurisprudence, the dissemination of knowledge, and the recitation of the Quran, one hundred dinars every year from the public treasury. He would write to his governors, telling them to hold the people to the sunnah, and he would say, ‘If the sunnah does not reform them, may Allah never reform them.’ He wrote to all the provinces instructing that no dhimmī—whether Jew, Christian, or otherwise—was to ride on a saddle, wear a qabāʾ, a ṭaylasān, or trousers with ornamental hems, nor was any one of them to walk except with a leather zunnār, with the forelock of his hair bound. If any of them were found with weapons in their homes, those weapons were to be confiscated.

He also ordered that no one be appointed to public office except those who are people of the Quran; if no good is to be found in them, then others are even less likely to possess any good.