The election of Abu Bakr

Where the divide begins

Sheikh Yasir does not rush past what is at stake. Every Muslim knows that this moment, the choosing of the first leader after the Prophet ﷺ, is where Sunnism and Shiism part. The Sunni position is that Abu Bakr was the most suitable man for the role, and that this is a religious matter and not merely a political one. The other group holds otherwise. He is not here to litigate the Shia evidences; that is a different class. But you cannot tell the story of Abu Bakr's election honestly while pretending the theology is not in the room.

Within Sunni Islam itself, he lays out three views on how Abu Bakr came to lead. The first: the companions, seeing he was the best among them, simply chose him, with no explicit instruction from the Prophet ﷺ. The second, narrated from al-Hasan al-Basri and others: the Prophet ﷺ indicated it indirectly, never naming him outright but leaving clear hints. The third, a small minority view he could trace to almost no one beyond Ibn Hazm: that the Prophet ﷺ explicitly commanded it.

Then he does something a careful teacher does. He collapses the first two. They are not really opposed, he says. The hadith praising Abu Bakr as the greatest of the companions is itself an indication of who should lead. So the honest Sunni position is this: the Prophet ﷺ did not stand up and name a successor, but he left enough light that the companions understood. Faithful to that light, the rest of the story unfolds.

The second of the two

إِلَّا تَنصُرُوهُ فَقَدْ نَصَرَهُ اللَّهُ إِذْ أَخْرَجَهُ الَّذِينَ كَفَرُوا ثَانِيَ اثْنَيْنِ إِذْ هُمَا فِي الْغَارِ إِذْ يَقُولُ لِصَاحِبِهِ لَا تَحْزَنْ إِنَّ اللَّهَ مَعَنَا ۖ فَأَنزَلَ اللَّهُ سَكِينَتَهُ عَلَيْهِ وَأَيَّدَهُ بِجُنُودٍ لَّمْ تَرَوْهَا وَجَعَلَ كَلِمَةَ الَّذِينَ كَفَرُوا السُّفْلَىٰ ۗ وَكَلِمَةُ اللَّهِ هِيَ الْعُلْيَا ۗ وَاللَّهُ عَزِيزٌ حَكِيمٌ

“If you do not aid him, Allah has already aided him when those who disbelieved had driven him out as one of two, when they were in the cave and he said to his companion, "Do not grieve; indeed Allah is with us." And Allah sent down His tranquility upon him and supported him with soldiers you did not see and made the word of those who disbelieved the lowest, while the word of Allah, that is the highest. And Allah is Exalted in Might and Wise.”

Surah at-Tawbah 9:40Listen Read 9:40 with tafsir

Over the centuries, scholars searched the Qur'an for indications of Abu Bakr's standing, and Sheikh Yasir is honest that many of those readings are a reach. But two, he says, carry real weight. The first is the ayah of the cave. As the Prophet ﷺ and Abu Bakr hid from the men of Makkah, Allah calls Abu Bakr the second of the two, his companion in that hiding place, the one told do not grieve, Allah is with us.

Here is the argument the scholars drew, and the Sheikh finds it sound. If Allah Himself names Abu Bakr as the second of the two, then when the first of the two is gone, who stands in his place? The second. And the word khalifah means precisely that: the one who steps into the place of someone who has departed. The very word of the office is built into the verse. When number one is no longer here, number two takes the stand.

The second ayah names the foremost believers in their order, and Abu Bakr stands at the front of that order. We will come to it. For now, hold the cave: two men, one threshold, and the quiet logic that when the first crosses over, the second remains.

The dream of the well

Beyond the Qur'an there are many ahadith on the rank of Abu Bakr, enough for whole lectures of their own. Sheikh Yasir chooses a few that touch leadership directly, and the most beautiful is a dream the Prophet ﷺ saw and reported in Bukhari.

I was at a well, he said ﷺ, drawing water as long as Allah willed. Then Abu Bakr came and drew a bucket or two, and in his drawing there was some weakness. Then Umar came, and the bucket became enormous, the great vessel for watering whole herds, and the Sheikh notes the Prophet ﷺ said he had never seen a leader draw water the way Umar did, until the people brought their camels back to rest, watered to their fill.

The symbolism, the Sheikh says, is plain and profound. After the Prophet ﷺ departed, Abu Bakr took the rope and kept the water flowing for a year or two. The weakness was not his fault: the whole ummah trembled and nearly fractured in his time, and by Allah's grace he held it together and healed the wound. He drew exactly long enough for Umar to come and turn the well into a flood, the great conquests no Khalifah has equalled in fourteen centuries. One man steadied it; the next let it overflow.

The door that stayed open

For Sunni Islam the strongest indication of all, Sheikh Yasir says, came in the Prophet's ﷺ final illness, when he commanded that Abu Bakr lead the prayer. For three days and nights, the dying Prophet ﷺ, feverish and barely conscious, sent for Abu Bakr to stand where he had always stood. Once, when others tried to substitute someone else, he stirred and insisted: Allah and His Messenger refuse anyone but Abu Bakr. This was no ordinary question of who would lead a single salah. It was a demonstration of who would stand in his place.

And in his last sermon from the minbar, unable now to stand, he gave another sign: close every door that opens into the masjid, he said, except the door of Abu Bakr. Every household with private access was sealed off. One man kept his.

So why, with all these signs, did the Prophet ﷺ never simply say the words, when I die, let Abu Bakr lead? Here the Sheikh offers the answer he finds strongest. Had the Prophet ﷺ named a successor outright, it would have become binding law that every leader must name the next, and that door is better left open, not commanded shut. Look at how the four rightly guided Khalifahs each did it differently: Abu Bakr named Umar; Umar named a council of six; Uthman named no one; and later, Muawiyah, the last companion to hold the office, named his son and opened the door of dynasty. The Sharia permits all of these, the Sheikh notes, though naming a son is the least ideal. The Prophet ﷺ left the matter open on purpose, and indicated without commanding.

The shade of Banu Sa'idah

Now to the morning itself. The Prophet ﷺ passed away after Fajr on Monday, the twelfth of Rabi al-Awwal. Within a few hours, the Ansar began to gather at their old meeting place, a covered shelter, a saqifah, in the garden of Banu Sa'idah. Sheikh Yasir is careful here, and asks us to be careful too: there was no announcement, no scheme. It is simply human nature, he says, that at a shared calamity people come together to ask what happens now. The conversation turned, as it had to, to who would take charge.

The name that rose among them was Sa'd ibn Ubadah, radiyallahu anhu, the senior figure of the Khazraj, a man of Badr, of the second pledge at Aqaba, famous for a generosity inherited from his fathers, who would feed scores of the poor at a time. He lay ill with fever, wrapped in a cloak, as his people spoke. There was nothing dishonourable in any of it. Each side, the Sheikh says, genuinely felt itself the more deserving, and there is an element of truth on every side of that feeling.

Word reached the masjid, where Abu Bakr and Umar still were. Let us go to our brothers among the Ansar, Umar said, and Abu Bakr agreed. The Sheikh believes, and says he is theorizing, that Abu Bakr deliberately chose his companions for the walk, because it is no accident that the two men beside him were Umar and Abu Ubaydah ibn al-Jarrah, two of the ten promised Paradise. Meanwhile Ali, Abbas, and the family, radiyallahu anhum, were occupied with the most natural duty of all: the inner affairs of the household and the washing of the Prophet ﷺ. The Sheikh pauses to say plainly that there is nothing here to be awkward about, and no conspiracy to imagine. Ali was barely in his early thirties; Abu Bakr, Umar, and Uthman were nearly twice his age. His time would come, when he had reached it, and we honour every blessing in him.

The leaders and the helpers

وَالسَّابِقُونَ الْأَوَّلُونَ مِنَ الْمُهَاجِرِينَ وَالْأَنصَارِ وَالَّذِينَ اتَّبَعُوهُم بِإِحْسَانٍ رَّضِيَ اللَّهُ عَنْهُمْ وَرَضُوا عَنْهُ وَأَعَدَّ لَهُمْ جَنَّاتٍ تَجْرِي تَحْتَهَا الْأَنْهَارُ خَالِدِينَ فِيهَا أَبَدًا ۚ ذَٰلِكَ الْفَوْزُ الْعَظِيمُ

“And the first forerunners among the Muhajireen and the Ansar and those who followed them with good conduct, Allah is pleased with them and they are pleased with Him, and He has prepared for them gardens beneath which rivers flow, wherein they will abide forever. That is the great attainment.”

Surah at-Tawbah 9:100Listen Read 9:100 with tafsir

Only one eyewitness ever told us what happened inside that shelter, and that is Umar himself, who narrated it years later in his own Khilafah to silence a rumour that Abu Bakr's election had been a thoughtless accident. So the scene we have is the scene Umar gave.

A speaker from the Ansar rose and made their case with grace, no insults, only pride: we are the helpers of Allah, the ones who defended this religion, and you Muhajireen are dear to us, but few. Umar said he had readied a sharp reply in his mind, and was about to stand, when Abu Bakr pressed him down and rose himself. By Allah, Umar admitted, he was wiser and gentler than I would have been, and every point I had prepared, he made, or made better. This is the ayah of the foremost, the Sabiqun, the first forerunners among the Muhajireen and the Ansar: Abu Bakr began not by diminishing the Ansar but by honouring them, recalling every virtue the Qur'an and the Prophet ﷺ had granted them.

Then, turning to Sa'd directly, he recalled a hadith they had both heard the Prophet ﷺ say: that the leaders of this matter would be from the Quraysh, the righteous leading the righteous. The Arabs, he reasoned, would accept leadership from Quraysh as from no one else. And Sa'd, in a moment the Sheikh holds up as a mark of his iman, answered: you have spoken the truth. You are the leaders and we are the helpers. When a hadith is set before a believer, how does he argue with it?

Stretch forth your hand

Then came the moment the Sheikh calls pure wisdom of leadership. Abu Bakr did not nominate himself; that was not his way. Instead he took the hands of the two men he had brought, Umar and Abu Ubaydah, and said: I have nominated these two, choose whichever you wish. By opening a door the Ansar had not even been looking through, he made it easy to walk through it.

This was the one line of the speech Umar said he hated, that his own name had been put forward. By Allah, Umar said, I would sooner have my neck struck, where there is no sin in it, than lead a people while Abu Bakr is among them. There was a flurry of raised voices, a suggestion of two leaders, one from each side, which cannot work, the Sheikh notes, any more than a ship can have two captains. And then Umar, with the loudest and deepest voice in the gathering, cut through it: stretch forth your hand, O Abu Bakr. Abu Bakr put his hand out. Umar gave him the pledge of allegiance, the first to do so, and the Muhajireen and the Ansar followed.

Sheikh Yasir, faithful to his task, does not hide the harder edge. There are narrations that Sa'd ibn Ubadah was not content, that he felt pressed into it; if authentic, the Sheikh says, there is nothing wrong with that, for it is no sin to have wished, for good reasons, to serve. The wild fabrications, that Sa'd refused ever to pray behind Abu Bakr, that the jinn later killed him, he sets aside as the stuff of partisan sources and legend, our religion resting on none of it. Sa'd quietly left for Sham in the end and passed away there, a man of Badr and of Aqaba, honoured to the last.

The first khutbah of a Khalifah

By Tuesday, barely a day after the Prophet ﷺ had passed, and with his blessed body ﷺ still in the house of Aisha, awaiting burial, the people gathered in the masjid to give their public pledge. Umar stood first and undid the rumour at its root: what I said yesterday, he told them, I did not find in the Book of Allah, nor did the Prophet ﷺ tell it to me; it was only my own thought, and I had imagined we would all pass before him. But Allah has left you His Book, and chosen the best of you, the companion of the Messenger ﷺ, the second of the two in the cave. So stand and give your pledge.

And they did, one after another, until Abu Bakr rose to give a sermon Sheikh Yasir calls the most powerful ever delivered by any political leader after the prophets. Three short lines, and the Sheikh lets them stand almost bare, because nothing improves them.

O people, Abu Bakr said, I have been put in charge of you, though I am not the best of you. So if I do well, help me; and if I do wrong, correct me. Truthfulness is a trust, and lying a betrayal. The weak among you is strong in my sight until I secure his right, and the strong among you is weak in my sight until I take from him what is owed. Obey me as long as I obey Allah and His Messenger ﷺ; but if I disobey them, then you owe me no obedience. The seerah we have walked for a hundred and four days had taught this man exactly how to carry power: as a trust, with his own smallness named out loud.

The age of the companions begins

Within a single day, every question had been settled and the ummah had a leader. Only then was the Prophet ﷺ washed and prepared, and so many came to pray over him ﷺ that the burial was pushed deep into the night. He was laid to rest where he had lived, in the house of Aisha, in the small hours that the Muslim calendar counts as Wednesday. And with that, the Sheikh says, the story of the election of Abu Bakr is complete.

He closes the way a teacher of mercy closes a hard subject. We respect every one of the companions, he reminds us, even where we may not agree with a judgment one of them made; we do not impugn their integrity, and we trust they sought the good of this ummah. When the later disputes among them come up, his counsel is the counsel of Imam Ahmad and Imam Malik before him: Allah kept our swords out of that blood, so let us keep our tongues out of it too. Not every knowledge softens the heart, and these companions are dearer to us than that we should pick over their wounds.

And so the seerah ends here, not with the Prophet ﷺ alone, but with the people he left behind, taking their first steps into a world he had prepared them for. From here the road runs on into the age of the companions: the conquests, the preservation of the Qur'an, the lives of the men and women who carried his light to the ends of the earth. If your heart is not ready to leave him ﷺ, then do not. Walk straight on into their stories, where you will meet the firsts of this ummah, the first to believe, the first to give, the first to fall, each one a door the Prophet ﷺ opened and they walked through. One hundred and four days with him ﷺ is over. Loving him, and following those who loved him, never has to be.