The Renewal under Umar II

Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz (rahimahu Allah), the Umayyad caliph who reigned only from 99 to 101 AH (717-720 CE), is remembered in the Sunni tradition with a reverence reserved for almost no other ruler of his house, a great-grandson of Umar ibn al-Khattab (RA) through his mother, and so esteemed for his justice that later scholars often counted him a renewer (mujaddid) of the religion and even, in affection, a fifth among the rightly-guided. His short caliphate was a deliberate reform of the Umayyad state from within. He opened the registers of grievances (mazalim) and returned estates and revenues that the ruling family and its governors had taken unjustly, beginning with his own kin and his own property. He reformed the taxes: he ended the abuse by which non-Arab converts to Islam (the mawali) were still made to pay the tribute of non-Muslims, holding that Islam, not lineage, fixed a believer's obligations, a measure of fiscal justice with deep social consequences. He ordered an end to the cursing of Ali ibn Abi Talib (RA) that had been pronounced from Umayyad pulpits, replacing it with the recitation of the Qur'anic verse enjoining justice and excellence (al-Nahl 16:90). And, fearing that the death of the Companions' students would carry away the Prophet's reports with them, he gave the order that would shape the whole later science of hadith: he instructed his governor of Madinah, Abu Bakr ibn Hazm, and the great scholar Ibn Shihab al-Zuhri (rahimahu Allah) to gather and write down the hadith, the first state-sponsored codification of the Sunna, noted in the introduction to Sahih al-Bukhari. He lived austerely, restraining the treasury and his own household. The reforms outlasted him only in part, his successors reversed much of the fiscal program, but his reputation as the just caliph endured across the Sunni centuries. He governed often from his estates in the Syrian countryside rather than from the palaces of Damascus. A clerk receives a visitor beside papers, coins and a balance in a plain stone courtyard. These objects suggest administration; the documents cannot establish a particular tax decision. Tradition credits Umar II with ordering the collection of hadith. This is background to his reign, not an identifiable manuscript being copied in the Syrian courtyard.