Umar and the Hungry Children

Umar ibn al-Khattab رضي الله عنه ruled an empire stretching from Egypt to Persia — and slept under a tree, patched his own garment, and walked the streets of Madinah at night to see for himself how his people lived. "If a mule stumbles on the road in Iraq," he once said, "I fear Allah will ask me: Why did you not pave the road for it, O Umar?"

During the year of famine, on one of those night patrols with his servant Aslam, he heard children crying in the distance. He followed the sound to a campfire where a woman had a pot boiling. The children cried; she stirred the pot; they quieted a little, then cried again.

"Assalamu alaikum," Umar said. "What is wrong with the children?"

"Hunger," she said. "They have had nothing since morning."

"And what is in the pot?"

"Water and stones," she said, "to keep them hoping until they fall asleep. And Allah will judge between me and Umar — he leads us and does not know our state."

She did not know whom she was speaking to. Umar's companion moved to speak; Umar silenced him. He turned and walked — nearly ran — back to the treasury storehouse, and took a sack of flour, a container of fat, and said to Aslam: "Load it on my back."

Aslam protested: "Let me carry it for you, Amir al-Mu'minin!"

Umar's answer has been repeated for fourteen centuries: "Will you carry my burden for me on the Day of Resurrection?"

He carried the sack himself, cooked the meal himself, blew on the fire himself until smoke ran through his beard, and served the children with his own hands — then sat at a distance and would not leave until he heard them laughing. In the morning, the woman went to the khalifah's court to thank the kind stranger, and found him seated as the ruler of the believers.

This is 'adl as the Quran commands it: "Be persistently standing firm in justice, witnesses for Allah, even if it be against yourselves" (4:135) — the ruler who prosecutes his own conscience first.