The Saqifah of Banu Sa'idah

Shaykh Yasir Qadhi explains:

The Prophet ﷺ died Monday morning, the 12th of Rabīʿ al-Awwal, after Fajr. Within hours the Anṣār began to gather, not by any summons to "discuss the khilāfah," but by the human instinct that draws men together at a shared calamity, at their old meeting-place, the saqīfah, a roofed shed in the garden of Banū Sāʿidah, the clan of Saʿd ibn ʿUbādah; it still stands behind the Prophet's ﷺ masjid to this day. And as men gathered, talk turned to what all understood must be settled: who would now take charge.

❧Sa'd ibn Ubadah

The name they looked to was Saʿd ibn ʿUbādah, seniormost of the Khazraj, the larger of the two Anṣārī tribes, and the first to accept Islam at the pledges of ʿAqabah. (He is the second of the two famous Saʿds of the Anṣār; Saʿd ibn Muʿādh, of far higher rank, who spoke at Badr and at whose death the Throne shook, had died after the Trench.) Saʿd ibn ʿUbādah was a Badrī and one of the twelve nuqabāʾ of the second ʿAqabah, immensely generous, feeding eighty of the people of the Ṣuffah at once, and the Prophet ﷺ gave him the banner of the Anṣār in every campaign and made duʿāʾ for him by name. This was no lightweight the Anṣār raised up.

❧The meeting

Abū Bakr and ʿUmar were in the masjid when word came, and ʿUmar said: let us go to our brethren the Anṣār. We have only one eyewitness to what followed, ʿUmar himself, who narrated it years later in his own caliphate, when a rumour spread that Abū Bakr's election had been a mere accident; enraged, he gathered the Companions and told the whole story. Abū Bakr brought a chosen few of the Muhājirūn; two Anṣārīs met them on the way and warned them off, fearing a shouting-match, no fear of violence, that never happened among the Companions, but ʿUmar said there would be benefit in going.

They found the Anṣār gathered, Saʿd among them wrapped in a shawl, ill with fever. An Anṣārī rose and spoke, courteously, no insult, saying: we are the Anṣār of Allah, the vanguard of Islam, and you Muhājirūn are a group who came to us one by one; by our sheer numbers the leadership is ours, and you are one clan among us. There was truth from their vantage, they were some thousands, the Muhājirūn perhaps a tenth of that.

❧Abu Bakr's wisdom

ʿUmar says he prepared a speech in his mind, and some of it harsh, and rose to give it, but Abū Bakr pulled him down: عَلَى رِسْلِكَ, gently now, ʿUmar. And ʿUmar, the one man he would not anger, held back; and Abū Bakr rose and said everything ʿUmar had meant, and better and gentler, so that ʿUmar swears there was not a point in his own mind but that Abū Bakr said it or better.

He began not by putting the Anṣār down but by praising them, every ḥadīth in their honour he could recall, that had all mankind gone one way and the Anṣār another he ﷺ would follow the Anṣār. Then he turned to Saʿd directly and reminded him of a ḥadīth they had both heard, how then can any of you go against it?, and then to logic: the Arabs will follow none but Quraysh, the noblest of them in lineage and in house, so the leaders must be Qurashī. At this Saʿd said: صَدَقْتَ, you have spoken the truth; you are the leaders and we the helpers, أَنْتُمُ الْأُمَرَاءُ وَنَحْنُ الْوُزَرَاءُ, the mark of his faith, that once the evidence was plain he yielded.

Then Abū Bakr took the hands of ʿUmar and Abū ʿUbaydah ʿĀmir ibn al-Jarrāḥ, plainly he had brought these two deliberately, and, too modest to nominate himself, said: I have nominated these two; choose whichever you wish. Wisdom again: offer men a choice and they choose more easily, even between two they had not first considered. An Anṣārī offered a compromise, مِنَّا أَمِيرٌ وَمِنْكُمْ أَمِيرٌ, an amīr from each side, but a ship cannot have two captains, and the voices rose in confusion. Then ʿUmar, with the loudest voice, called: stretch out your hand, Abū Bakr, and gave him the bayʿah, the first to do so, and the Muhājirūn and Anṣār followed.

❧Sa'd's dissatisfaction

Part of the task is to tell the unrosy side too. Several narrations say Saʿd ibn ʿUbādah was not content, that he said, you have forced me, and was answered that it is better you be kept within the Jamāʿah than let go to cause firqah. If authentic, there is nothing wrong in it: it is no sin to have wanted the leadership for good ends. Others hold these reports baseless. The outright fabrications, that Saʿd refused ever to pray behind Abū Bakr, to make Ḥajj, to take part in anything, come from pro-Shīʿī sources such as al-Balādhurī and the narrator Abū Mikhnaf Lūṭ ibn Yaḥyā (the same who authored the Shīʿī Maqtal al-Ḥusayn), a man we hold a kadhdhāb and reject. Saʿd withdrew from Madinah and died in Shām around 14–15 AH, little mentioned afterwards; there is even a legend, no authentic ḥadīth, that the jinn killed him, the famous quiz-answer for "which Companion was slain by the jinn", which we neither need nor build our religion upon.

❧Al-a'immah min Quraysh

The ḥadīth Abū Bakr cited, that the leaders are from Quraysh, is mutawātir: Ibn Ḥajar counted over forty narrations, الْأَئِمَّةُ مِنْ قُرَيْشٍ, النَّاسُ تَبَعٌ لِقُرَيْشٍ فِي هَٰذَا الْأَمْرِ, across every book of ḥadīth. It raises eyebrows, and the honest answer is that the Prophet ﷺ said it and that suffices. Sunnī and Shīʿah actually agree the leader must be Qurashī, the Shīʿah restrict it further to Āl al-Bayt, the Sunnīs to any Qurashī; only the Khawārij and Muʿtazilah rejected it. The Umayyads and ʿAbbāsids were Qurashī; only with the Ottomans did this lapse, and the majority hold a non-Qurashī caliphate valid, if lacking something, so the Ottoman caliphate stands.