Umar ibn al-Khattab

Audiobook in English — narrated from the original Arabic · free to listen

Umar ibn al-Khattab by Imam Ibn Kathīr is available as a complete English audiobook on Joyful Muslims — about ten and a half hours on the first Commander of the Faithful, from Damascus to al-Madāʾin, the Year of Ashes, and the dagger at dawn prayer — translated in-house from the Arabic, with a word-synced transcript, free to start listening.

By Abū al-Fidāʾ Ismāʿīl ibn ʿUmar ibn Kathīr al-Dimashqī

أبو الفداء إسماعيل بن عمر بن كثير الدمشقي

Duration

10h 27m

Access

Open to all

Language

English · Arabic

He was the first to be called Commander of the Faithful, and Ibn Kathīr gives him ten years, six months and four days. In that span the book moves from Damascus to al-Qadisiyya, from the Bridge where the Muslims drowned to al-Mada'in, where the carpet of Chosroes is cut up and shared among the Muslims, and to Jerusalem, which ʿUmar enters in person. Then the two years in which the people perished: the plague of Amwas, twenty-five thousand dead in Syria, and the Year of Ashes, when ʿUmar ate nothing but bread and oil until his skin turned black and said, "What a wretched ruler I am if I eat my fill while the people go hungry." Egypt falls, the Nile is told to flow by a letter, Nihawand becomes the mighty conquest that breaks Persia, and the armies reach the Turks and the Barrier. Then a Wednesday at the dawn prayer, four nights left in Dhu al-Hijja, and a slave from Nihawand with a dagger. A hundred and two chapters, with the obituaries the years cost — Khālid, Bilāl, Muʿādh, Zaynab bint Jahsh — and ending on his description, his wives and children, the women's elegies, and some ten opinions on how old he was when he died.

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