42 DESTINY DISRUPTED
The Umma soon realized their second khalifa was a towering personal-
ity, even more imposing than Abu Bakr, perhaps. Omar directed the
Umma for ten years, and during that time he set the course oflslamic the-
ology, he shaped Islam as a political ideology, he gave Islamic civilization
its characteristic stamp, and he built an empire that ended up bigger than
Rome. Any one of these achievements could have earned him a place in a
who's who of history's most influential figures; the sum of them make him
something like a combination of Saint Paul, Karl Marx, Lorenzo di
Medici, and Napoleon. Yet most people outside Islam know him only as a
name and perhaps a one-or two-sentence descriptor: he's the second khal-
ifa, a successor of Mohammed-that's about it.
Perhaps this is because Omar made lack of pretension his core princi-
ple. This is so much a part of his legend that Omar becomes in Islamic tra-
dition the embodiment of a principle. His word was not law; his will did
not rule; he ceded all authority to God-such was his storied claim. He
envisioned Islam as an absolutely just and egalitarian community and he
intended to make that vision a reality. In the Muslim community, he said,
no one ever needed to fear the whims or will of any human power because
this community had the Qur'an as its law, and the example of the
Prophet's life as its guide, and nothing else was needed. Omar declared
that his role was merely to keep the Umma united and moving forward
along the track indicated by the revelations.
Omar had never been a rich man, but Ali and others urged him to take
a suitable salary from the public treasury, arguing that since Islam now in-
cluded all of Arabia, the Umma could no longer afford a part-time khalifa
who milked a cow for extra cash. Omar agreed but appointed a commis-
sion to calculate how much he needed to live like the average Arab, no bet-
ter and no worse, and supposedly set this amount as his salary. (Imagine
the CEO of a modern multinational corporation doing that.)
In imitation of the Prophet, Omar habitually patched his own clothes,
sometimes while conducting important state business. At night, after his
official duties were done, the stories portray him shouldering a bag of grain
and roaming through the city, personally delivering food to families in
need. Once, somebody who saw him at this labor offered to carry the bag
for him, but Omar said, "You can carry my burden for me here on Earth,
but who will carry it for me on the Day ofJudgment?"