Abu Bakkar Siddique R.A

Short History of Abu Bakkar

Abu Bakkar, also called al-Ṣiddīq (Arabic: “the Upright”), (born 573—died August 23, 634), Muhammeed’s closest companion and adviser, who succeeded to the Prophet’s political and administrative functions, thereby initiating the office of the caliph. Of a minor clan of the ruling merchant tribe of Quresh at Makka, Abu Bakkar purportedly was the first male convert to but this view is doubted by a majority Islam of Muslim historians. Abu Bakkar prominence in the early Muslim community was clearly marked by Muhammad’s marriage to Abū Bakr’s young daughter Aisha and again by Muhammad’s choosing Abu Bakkar as his companion on the journey tom Madina (the Hijrah 622). In Medina he was Muhammad’s chief adviser (622–632) but functioned mainly in conducting the pilgrimage to Mecca in 631 and leading the public prayers in Medina during Muhammad’s last illness. On Muhammad’s death (June 8, 632), the Muslims of Medina resolved the crisis of succession by accepting Abu Bakkar as the first khalīfat rasūl Allāh (“deputy [or successor] of the Prophet of God,” or caliph). During his rule (632–634), he suppressed the tribal political and religious uprisings known as the Ridda “political rebellion,” sometimes translated as “apostasy”), thereby bringing central Arabia under Muslim control. Under his rule the Muslim conquests of Iraq and Syria began, although it is not clear whether he himself was aware of these military forays from the beginning. The first written compilation of the Qur’an is said to have taken place during Abu Bakkar’s caliphate, after the deaths of several Quʾrān reciters in the Battle of Yamama raised the possibility that parts of the text could be lost and Umer Ibn-e- Khitab (Abu Bakkar’s eventual successor as caliph) urged Abu Bakkar to have the Quʾrān written below During his last illness, Abu Bakkar was nursed by Aisha . As he requested, he was buried in Aisha’s apartment, close to where her husband, the Prophet Muhammad, had been buried in accordance with Muhammad’s reported utterance that a prophet should be buried where he dies.