Abu Ubayda ibn al-Jarrah

Abu Ubayda ibn al-Jarrah (may God be pleased with him) was an early Meccan emigrant among the first converts. The Prophet named him "the trustworthy one of this community," and he was the commander who held together the conquest of Syria until plague took him.

A Qurayshi of a modest clan, he embraced Islam at the hand of Abu Bakr among the earliest Muslims ¹. He took part in Badr. At Uhud tradition remembers him pulling the chain-mail rings out of the Prophet's wounded face with his teeth ¹.

After the Prophet's death he was sent to Syria with the armies. In the time of Umar he took over the supreme command: he took Damascus, then directed the victory at Yarmuk and the surrender of Jerusalem ². In 639 CE the plague of Amwas struck his army in Palestine. The sources describe him preferring to stay among his men rather than seek his own survival, and he died of the plague in his fifties ¹.

Of the ten whom the sunna gives glad tidings of paradise, his reputation belongs to the quiet kind. It is not a brilliance recounted, but trust: he was the commander whom the caliphs trusted with any army.

Ibn Ishaq relates that the Prophet sent him as reinforcement to Amr ibn al-As (may God be pleased with him) on the Dhat al-Salasil expedition, among the early emigrants, including Abu Bakr and Umar, and said to them: "Do not disagree." When Amr disputed the command with him, Abu Ubayda said: "If you disobey me, you will obey me." Then he submitted: "Then take it, it is yours." Ibn Ishaq describes him as a gentle, easy-going man, for whom the affairs of this world were of little weight ³.

The book counts him among those who followed the first vanguard of the earliest Muslims in the secret call. Ibn Hisham counted more than forty such people from all the clans of Quraysh ^{4 5}. The book names the "trustworthy one of this community" as Abu Ubayda Amir ibn al-Jarrah of Banu al-Harith ibn Fihr, and refers the title to al-Bukhari's chapter on virtues ^{4 6}.

The Prophet appointed him commander of a detachment to Sayf al-Bahr and gave them a bag of dates. He rationed it to them until each man was given a single date a day. Then God brought out for them a creature from the sea, on which they lived for twenty nights. See the detachment ⁷.

The Encyclopaedia of Islam (2nd ed.), signed by H. A. R. Gibb, gives his name as Abu 'Ubayda 'Amir b. 'Abd Allah b. al-Jarrah, of the family of Balharith of the Quraysh tribe of Fihr. He was one of the early Meccan converts and one of the ten promised Paradise. He took part in the emigration to Abyssinia, and was called "amin" (trustworthy) by Muhammad for his courage and unselfishness. He was 41 at Badr, fought at Uhud, and commanded several expeditions. He was sent to Najran to instruct the Yemeni converts, but returned to Medina before the Prophet's death, and with Umar b. al-Khattab helped secure the election of Abu Bakr as khalifa. ⁸

After Umar's accession in 13/634 Abu 'Ubayda was sent to Syria to join the campaigns against the Byzantines. Probably in 15/636 he was given the supreme command there. After the victory on the Yarmuk that year he completed the conquest of northern Syria: Hims, Aleppo and Antioch. In 17/638 Umar visited the Syrian army at Dabiya to regulate its administration and to support Abu 'Ubayda's authority; tradition says Umar meant to name him his successor. When plague broke out in Syria in 18/639, Umar summoned him to Medina, but he refused to leave and died of the plague at the age of 58, leaving no descendants. The article says his personality impressed his contemporaries, but later tradition presents him in a rather colourless way. ⁸