The Year of the Ashes

A law exists for a purpose, and whoever applies it against its purpose has broken it while seeming to obey. The men closest to the founder of any tradition understood this better than the scholars who came later, for they had seen what the rules were for. When the letter of a command begins to destroy the thing it was given to protect, fidelity lies with the purpose.

The Caliph and the Thief

In the eighteenth year of the Muslim calendar, about the year 639, the rains failed in Arabia. The wind lifted the dry topsoil and blew it across the Hijaz in black clouds, so that the people remembered it afterward as the Year of the Ashes. Livestock died standing. Bedouin by the tens of thousands abandoned the desert and camped around Medina, begging for food.

The ruler of the Muslims was Umar ibn al-Khattab, the second caliph. He had been one of the Prophet's closest companions for twenty years, and he was famous for a severity that frightened even his friends. He is said to have sworn to eat no butter or meat until the famine ended, and his skin darkened from a diet of oil and coarse bread. He sent to Egypt and Syria for grain and stood in the street supervising its distribution.

During that year, the tradition reports, Umar gave an instruction about the law. The Quran prescribes that the hand of the thief be cut off. It is one of the fixed penalties, stated in the scripture in plain words, and Umar had enforced it without hesitation in ordinary times. Now he ordered that it not be applied. There would be no cutting, he said, in a year of famine.

A man who steals bread because his children are starving is no thief in the sense the law intended, and to mutilate him would be an injustice committed in God's name.