The Caliph Who Defended The Early Muslim State

Umar ibn al-Khattab and the Expansion of the Caliphate

von Adrian Hall

146 Seiten, Taschenbuch

Kurzbeschreibung des Verlags

He once set out from Mecca with a sword, determined to kill the Prophet himself. By sunset that same day, he was a Muslim.Umar ibn al-Khattab would go on to become the second caliph of Islam, and under his ten-year rule, a fragile religious community barely holding together in Arabia transformed into an empire stretching from Egypt to Persia. His armies broke Byzantine power at Yarmouk and shattered the ancient Sassanid Empire at Qadisiyyah and Nahavand. Yet the moment that defined him wasn't a battlefield triumph - it was Jerusalem, where he arrived to accept the city's surrender sharing a single camel with his own servant, dressed in patched robes indistinguishable from any ordinary traveler, and refused to pray inside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre so that no future ruler could ever use his example to claim it as a mosque.This is the story of a man once feared across Mecca for his temper and his fists, who became the architect of an empire built on something conquerors rarely bothered with: restraint. Umar established the first welfare register in Islamic history, founded cities that would grow into some of the great capitals of the medieval world, set the calendar that Muslims still use today, and walked the streets of Medina alone at night, unrecognized, to see with his own eyes whether any of his people went hungry.He held his own sons to the same standard as any subject. He removed his most celebrated general from command rather than let one man's glory outgrow the state itself. And when an assassin's blade finally found him at dawn prayer, his last act as ruler was building a council designed to keep the empire he'd built from tearing itself apart.The Caliph Who Defended the Early Muslim State tells the full story - the conquests, the institutions, and the man history remembers as al-Farooq: the one who distinguishes right from wrong.

• Reihe: Independently published
• ISBN: 9798176500486
• Sprache: Englisch
• Erscheinungsdatum: 23.09.2026
• Größe: 229 x 152 mm
• Verlag: Independently published