English Translation of al-Jahshiyari’s Kitab al-Wuzaraʾ wa al-Kuttab: 4: Scribes of the Rightly Guided Caliphs

 

During the time of Abū Bakr [rta]

ʿUthmān b. ʿAffān  and Zayd b. Thābit  used to write for Abū Bakr .

It has also been narrated that ʿAbd Allāh b. al-Arqam  wrote for him, and that Ḥanẓalah b. al-Rabīʿ  also served as his scribe. 

During the time of ʿUmar b. al-Khaṭṭāb [rta]

Zayd b. Thābit  used to write for ʿUmar , as did ʿAbd Allāh b. al-Arqam . He also appointed Abū Jubayrah b. al-Ḍaḥḥāk al-Anṣārī as scribe over the records of Kūfah (i.e., the dīwān of Kūfah).

ᶜUmar’s Advice to His Scribes

ʿUmar  used to say to his scribe, and he wrote to his governors:

Power over work means not postponing the task of today until tomorrow. For if you do that, your duties will accumulate (tadākkat), and you will no longer know which to begin with or which to attend to first.

Reason for Devising the Registers

ʿUmar  was the first to organize the administrative registers (dawāwīn) among the Arabs in Islam. This [decision] was occasioned by that Abū Hurayrah  returned from al-Baḥrayn carrying a large sum of wealth. When ʿUmar met him, he asked: “What have you brought?” Abū Hurayrah replied: “Five hundred thousand dirhams.” ʿUmar said: “Do you know what you are saying?” He said: “Yes: one hundred thousand, and another hundred thousand, and another hundred thousand, and another hundred thousand, and another hundred thousand.” ʿUmar asked: “Is it all pure [ṭayyib, i.e., lawful]?” He replied: “I do not know.” So ʿUmar ascended the minbar, praised and glorified God, and said:

O people, a large sum of wealth has come to us. If you wish, we shall measure it by volume, and if you wish, we shall count it piece by piece.

A man stood up and said: “O Commander of the Faithful, I have seen that the non-Arabs [al-ʿajam] keep registers (dīwān) for themselves.” ʿUmar responded: “Then establish the registers” (dawwinu al-dawāwīn).

When ᶜUmar put al-Fayruzān (a Persian administrator) in charge of a military dispatch, the latter appeared before [the Caliph] who said to him: “I have paid the families of this group—but if one man were to stay behind and fail to take his position, how would the commander know (ṣāhibu [ka wa ashāra])?” [Al-Fayruzān] advised him to create a register, explained its function to him, and detailed its usefulness. This prompted ʿUmar to establish the dīwān.

ᶜUmar and Ziyād b. Abīhi

When Abū Mūsā al-Ashʿarī  appointed Ziyād b. Abīhi as his scribe, ʿUmar wrote to summon him [that is, Abū Mūsā. Abū Mūsā appointed Ziyād as acting administrator in his absence. When Abū Mūsā arrived before ʿUmar, he informed him that he had made Ziyād his deputy. ʿUmar said to him: “You handed over the administration to a young man?” He replied: “O Commander of the Faithful, he protects what he has been made in charge of and possesses all good [qualities].”

ʿUmar wrote to [Ziyād], commanding him to come to him in person and to appoint someone in his place to oversee the administration. So Ziyād b. Abīhi appointed ᶜImrān b. Ḥusayn as his deputy and came to meet ʿUmar (rta). ʿUmar remarked: “If Abū Mūsā had appointed a youth, the youth has appointed an elder as his deputy.” He then summoned Ziyād and said to him: “You should write to your deputy with what is required of him in terms of duties.” So Ziyād wrote a letter and handed it to ʿUmar . ʿUmar looked at it and said: “Rewrite it.” He wrote a second version. ʿUmar said: “Rewrite it again.” He wrote a third version. ʿUmar [later on] said: “He reached what I desired in the first version—but I suspected that he had written after too much deliberation and consulting (rawwā fīhi). In the second, he reached the level I hoped ; however,ver I disliked revealing that to him. I intended to make hmodest so so that vanity would not creep into his heart and destroy him.”

Ḍabbah’s Complaint Against Abū Mūsā

When Ḍabbah b. Miḥṣan al-ʿAnazī and other petitioners brought their complaints about Abū Mūsā to ʿUmar, they accused him and said: “He has a servant as his adviser who is treacherous (khattār), [he keeps] a spread table, and a fine riding mule (birdhawn).”

Ziyād’s Encounter with ᶜUmar Revealing his Zuhd

ʿUmar  summoned Ziyād to his presence, about which Ziyād said: “I came to him wearing linen garments and plain leather shoes. In his hand was a staff (mikhṣarah) with an iron tip. He pressed the tip into my shoe until it tore through and bloodied my foot. The next day, I returned to him wearing thick shoes and two garments of cotton. When he saw me, he said: “That’s how you should dress, O Ziyād! That’s how, O Ziyād!” Then he asked me: “How much did you pay for those shoes?” I said: “a wāfī”—he meant a wāfī dirham—“so he gave me a dirham and said: ‘Buy me a pair like them.’”

Intelligence of Ziyād

ʿUmar  was dictating to his scribe, who was sitting in front of [the caliph], and the scribe wrote something different from what he had said. Ziyād remarked: “O Commander of the Faithful, he has written something other than what you said.” ʿUmar looked at the written text and found it was as Ziyād had said. He asked: “How did you notice this?” Ziyād replied: “I observed the motion of your mouth and the movement of his hand, and I realized that the movement of his hand did not match [mā aḥārat] what your lips’ movement indicated.”

Excavation of Nahr al-Ubullah

ʿUmar also wrote to Abū Mūsā, commanding him to dig a canal for the people of Baṣrah, and thus was excavated the well-known Nahr al-Ubullah.

ᶜUmar’s Grant to Ziyād

It is also narrated that when Ziyād first arrived, ʿUmar gifted him one thousand dirhams. Later, ʿUmar remembered it and said: “That thousand I gave to Ziyād—it’s gone to waste.” When Ziyād entered upon him, ʿUmar asked: “What became of the thousand I gave you?” Ziyād replied: “I bought ᶜUbayd with it and emancipated them.” ʿUmar said: “Then your thousand was not wasted.”

He then said: “O Ziyād, will you carry my letter to Abū Mūsā concerning your dismissal from his secretarial post?” Ziyād replied: “Yes, O Commander of the Faithful, so long as it is not out of anger.” ʿUmar said: “It is not out of anger—but I am reluctant to burden the people with the weight of your sharp intellect.”

Establishment of Hijri Calendar

ʿUmar was the first to establish dating the calendar from the Hijrah. This was prompted when Abū Mūsā wrote to him, saying: “Letters come to us from you with no date.” At that time, the Arabs used to date events by the Year of the Elephant. So ʿUmar gathered the people for consultation. Some suggested that the calendar begin with the Prophet’s [sws] prophethood, while others proposed it start from his Hijrah. ʿUmar said: “No, but rather from the Hijrah of the Messenger of God [sws], for his migration marked the separation between truth and falsehood.” This was established in either the seventeenth or eighteenth year after the Hijrah.

Once they had agreed upon that, they discussed which month should begin the year. Some said: “From Ramaḍān.” But ʿUmar said: “Rather, from Muḥarram—for it is the month in which the people return from their ḥajj, and it is a sacred month.” So they agreed upon Muḥarram as the beginning of the Islamic year.

It is also reported in an anomalous narration (shādhdh) that the Messenger of God [sws], when he arrived in Madinah as an emigrant from Makkah on a Monday—the twelfth night of Rabīʿ al-Awwal, fourteen years after he was commissioned as a prophet—ordered that dates be recorded from then. However, the first account [that of ʿUmar’s initiative] is better established and more authentic.

Abū al-Zinād, ʿAbd Allāh b. Dhakwān, used to serve as scribe for Yaḥyā b. al-Ḥakam b. Abī al-ʿĀṣ, who was governor of Madīnah. When prices rose steeply in Madīnah, one of its witty residents composed:

Did it not sadden you that prices soared—

Because Abū al-Zinād said, “O boy!”

If people could live without speech,

We would have declared speech forbidden. 

During the time of ʿUthmān [RTA]

Marwān b. al-Ḥakam was the primary scribe for ʿUthmān b. ʿAffān. ʿAbd al-Malik b. Marwān would write for him the dīwān of Madīnah, and Abū Jubīrah al-Anṣārī was responsible for the dīwān of Kūfah. ʿAbd Allāh b. al-Arqam b. ʿAbd Yaghūth, one of the scribes of the Prophet [sws], was entrusted by ʿUthmān  with managing the public treasury (bayt al-māl). Abū Ghaṭafān b. ʿAwf b. Saʿd b. Dīnār, of Banū Dahmān from the tribe of Qays ʿAylān, also served as a scribe for ʿUthmān, as did hid mawlā Uhayb and Ḥumrān [b. Abān], his mawlā.

When the Egyptians approached ʿUthmān b. ʿAffān during the first incident of unrest, he sent Jābir b. ʿAbd Allāh to meet them—and he succeeded in turning them back.

It is narrated from Jābir that when the Egyptians were returning from their first encounter with ʿUthmān and had reached the region of Aylah, they encountered a rider whose presence seemed suspicious. They apprehended him and discovered that he was a servant of ʿUthmān, riding a camel known to belong to him—one ʿUthmān used for pilgrimage. Upon searching him, they found a lead cylinder containing a parchment sealed with ʿUthmān’s seal. When they opened it, they discovered a letter addressed from ʿUthmān to ʿAbd Allāh b. Saʿd, his governor over Egypt. It read:

When so-and-so, so-and-so, and so-and-so arrive to you, strike their necks. As for so-and-so, so-and-so, and so-and-so, cut off their hands and feet.

The names listed were those of the very people who had gone to ʿUthmān and then returned to Egypt. Realizing what they had uncovered, they turned back immediately. [Upon reaching Madīnah], they had the companions of the Messenger of God [sws] read the letter. Some among the people rebuked ʿUthmān for this. He responded: “The handwriting is that of my scribe, and the seal is my own—but by God, I did not command this.” The letter, in fact, bore the handwriting of Marwān b. al-Ḥakam. So the people said: “If you are lying, then you are unfit for leadership. And if you are telling the truth, then one who is so heedless as to have his scribe send such a grave command in his name cannot be suitable for the imamate.”

During the time of ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib [RTA]

Saʿīd b. Nimrān al-Hamdānī served as scribe for ʿAlī, as did ʿAbd Allāh b. Jaʿfar. It is also reported that ʿAbd Allāh b. Jubayr wrote for him. ʿUbayd Allāh b. Abī Rāfiʿ was another of his scribes.

It is related from this same ʿUbayd Allāh that he said:

I was seated before ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib, and he said: ‘ʿAbd Allāh, prepare (alqi) your inkwell, sharpen the tip (shabāt) of your pen finely, leave space between the lines, and condense (qarmiṭ) between the letters.’”

When ʿAlī  arrived in Baṣrah, Ziyād avoided presenting himself before him. But when ʿAbd al-Raḥmān b. Abī Bakrah met him [ᶜAlī], the latter said: “O bald one, where is your uncle?” He replied: “I will take you to him, on the condition that you guarantee his safety.” So he brought ʿAlī  to his mother’s house. ʿAlī said to Ziyād: “Where is the wealth you were responsible for?” Ziyād replied: “It is as it was, still with me.” ʿAlī  said: “One like you deserves to be entrusted.” Ziyād went along with ᶜAlī who said to his companions: “Here comes the man who knows the depths of his field (ibn bajdatihā).” When ʿAlī  departed from Baṣrah, he appointed Ziyād over the tax administration (kharāj) and the state registers (dīwān), and said to him: “Safeguard well what I have entrusted you with (istakfaytuka).”