There is a way that the four rightly guided caliphs are spoken of, and in that telling one of them is quietly underserved. Abu Bakr, Umar, Ali: the names roll forward, and somewhere in the middle Uthman ibn Affan (may Allah be pleased with him) slips by, not given his full due, not loved with the love he earned. Yet here is a man who resembled the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ in his face and in his character, who married not one but two daughters of the Messenger of God, who poured a fortune into the cause of Allah until the Prophet ﷺ said that nothing could harm him after what he had done. To understand the weight of him, you have to meet him before Islam, and then watch how a man with everything to lose ran toward the truth without hesitating.
A man who had it all
His name was Uthman ibn Affan ibn Abi al-As, of the powerful tribe of Banu Umayyah, and his lineage met the Prophet's own at their shared ancestor Abd Manaf. The connection ran closer still through his mother. Her name was Arwa, and her mother was Umm Hakim al-Bayda bint Abd al-Muttalib, the full sister, and by some narrations the twin, of Abdullah, the father of the Prophet ﷺ. That made Uthman a second cousin of the Messenger of God, a kinship not widely known.
His father died in the days of ignorance and left him a vast fortune, by some reports more than thirty million dirhams. His mother accepted Islam and lived all the way into his caliphate, and he prayed over her at her death. Before Islam the people called him Abu Amr, the name of a son not yet born, for he had no children in those years. He was about six years younger than the Prophet ﷺ, and when the histories describe his appearance it is as if they are describing the Messenger of God himself: neither short nor tall, broad shouldered, skin softer than silk, a thick beard, hair falling just below his ears, a handsome face with a small gap between his teeth. It was said that if your gaze landed on Uthman you would not want to look away, for the amount of beauty Allah had placed in him. He spoke with eloquence. He was rich, he was powerful, and he carried none of the arrogance that usually travels with those things.
What was most striking about him was a quality you would not expect from a man so wealthy, so handsome, so high born: hayaa, modesty. He came from a proud clan. His half brother through his mother was al-Walid ibn Uqba, son of one of the cruelest tormentors of the Prophet ﷺ. He was richer and more beautiful than the men around him, and yet he was known not for any of that but for his shyness, his bashfulness, his gentleness. The Prophet ﷺ taught that every religion has a defining character, and the character of Islam is modesty, and that modesty is a branch of faith. The more modesty a person carries, the more faith. In Uthman that modesty was so complete that the poor respected him and the rich respected him, the man of a great tribe and the man of no tribe at all, every one of them, for the character he carried.
And his restraint was not a pose. He never prostrated to an idol in the age of ignorance. He never committed any indecency. He refused alcohol before it was ever forbidden, saying that wine destroys the mind, and the mind is a gift from God. He said he never once looked at the nakedness of another, before Islam or after, in a time when men bathed in the open. He stayed away from the parties and the songs and the entertainments of Quraysh, finding nothing in them he wanted. Strip away his name and most of what has just been described is a description of the Prophet ﷺ.
He was well traveled and well read, knowing the lineages of the Arabs, their histories, the lands and customs of Syria and Yemen and Abyssinia, all of it gathered on his trade routes before Islam. And he never came back from a journey without the people of Makkah feeling his generosity. He gave so freely, and his character was so loved, that a mother in Makkah would say to her child the highest words of affection she could find: I love you by the Most Merciful the way Quraysh loves Uthman. This is the man the Prophet ﷺ pointed to when he taught that the best of people in the days of ignorance are the best of them in Islam, once they are given understanding. Uthman already carried the manners of Islam before he ever heard its call.
The one who did not hesitate
Usually it is the one with the most to lose who hesitates. A man holding a fortune, a name, the love of an entire city, weighs the cost before he answers. Uthman did not weigh it. He was returning from a trade journey to Syria, and on the way back, by one narration, he slept and saw a dream in which a voice called to the sleepers to rise, for Ahmad had appeared in Makkah. When he reached the city, he heard that the Prophet ﷺ had begun to call people to Islam, and at once he was ready.
It was Abu Bakr (may Allah be pleased with him) who came to him. Abu Bakr did not merely believe; he became the great ambassador of the message, going to the luminaries of his people and bringing them in. So much of the good that would later flow from Uthman, and from Abdul Rahman ibn Awf, and from Talha and Zubayr, traces back to Abu Bakr who first called them. Abu Bakr knew how to approach a man like Uthman because he was of that same noble class, a man who also shunned the idols and the wine and the cruelty of his people. He came to Uthman as he returned from Syria and invited him to Islam, and Uthman went straight to the Prophet ﷺ and accepted it. By the account of Ibn Ishaq he was the fourth male to enter Islam, after Abu Bakr, Ali, and Zayd ibn Haritha, and he believed even before the Prophet ﷺ took the believers to the house of al-Arqam to teach them.
He knew exactly what it would cost. A man as beloved and as wealthy as Uthman understood that he could go from the most loved of people to the most hated in a single turn. It did not stop him. And when he believed, the persecution came. The powerful of Makkah were tortured privately by their own tribes, who wanted to save face while still crushing the faith out of their own. Uthman was seized by his relative al-Hakam ibn Abi al-As, who tortured him and ordered him to abandon Islam and leave the company of Muhammad ﷺ. Uthman answered the same way every time: I will never give up Islam, and I will never part from him. In the end al-Hakam gave up, because Uthman would not. He had never been a man of tribal politics or public confrontation; his danger to Quraysh was simpler and deeper. He was so loved that his faith alone would draw others in. The child who grew up hearing "I love you the way Quraysh loves Uthman" would now learn that Uthman had become a Muslim.
The first family to leave for the sake of God
When Abu Lahab set himself to wound the Prophet ﷺ in every way he could, he ordered his two sons to divorce the Prophet's two daughters, Ruqayyah and Umm Kulthum, whose marriages had not yet been consummated. Ruqayyah was hurt by it, as anyone would be. And then look at the replacement Allah sent her. Uthman, who by every indication had never married, came to ask for her hand. She went from the son of Abu Lahab to the most beloved, most beautiful, most noble man Quraysh knew. The Prophet ﷺ and Khadijah were overjoyed; there is no better suitor for a daughter than Uthman. And on the marriage the Prophet ﷺ said to Ruqayyah, my daughter, take good care of Abu Abdullah, for he is the closest of my companions to me in character. His kunya itself was changing, from Abu Amr to Abu Abdullah. They became the most blessed couple the people knew, the most beautiful and the most loved, and in love with one another. Every gentle quality the people admired in Uthman from a distance, he brought home to the daughter of the Messenger of God.
His torture continued privately, and the scholars note that there was wisdom in sending Uthman among those who would migrate to Abyssinia. He had been there on trade. He knew its land, its people, its customs. There was also trust in the Prophet ﷺ sending his own daughter among the migrants in his care. So Uthman and Ruqayyah were not only among those who made that first hijra; by a beautiful narration, weak in its chain yet powerful in its meaning, Uthman was the first man to migrate with his family for the sake of Allah after the Prophet Lut, peace be upon him. He gave up the comfort of Makkah and carried his household across the sea for God.
He who runs when the Prophet calls
The story of Uthman in Islam truly unfolds in Madinah. He came there with Ruqayyah and their son Abdullah, and the Prophet ﷺ paired him with Abu Talha. Uthman needed little help; he had kept and grown his trade even in Abyssinia, and within a short time he had bought his own home and returned to the marketplace, building his fortune as he always had, now to spend it on noble things. He was honest in his dealings when others took the short and crooked route, and his honesty drew people to do business with him.
And then a pattern begins, repeated so often the narrations are hard to count. Whenever the Prophet ﷺ made a call and attached to it the reward of Paradise, Uthman ran forward. When the migrants struggled for water in Madinah, there was a well called Rumah whose owner held a monopoly and charged the people dearly. The Prophet ﷺ said that whoever buys the well of Rumah will have Paradise. The owner would not sell it outright, so Uthman, the shrewd merchant, negotiated: he bought half the well, one day his and the next day the owner's, for twenty thousand dirhams. Then he told the people that on his day the water was a free endowment, take as much as you need. No one came on the owner's day. The high price collapsed on the man who set it, and he came to Uthman to sell the other half, and Uthman, who no longer needed it, negotiated him down and took the whole well for charity. That well has watered gardens in Madinah from that day until this. Its endowment still runs, the reward still flowing to a man who has been in his grave for fourteen centuries because he jumped, once, at the call of the Prophet ﷺ.
The Prophet ﷺ called again: who will buy the land beside the mosque so it can be expanded, in exchange for something better in Paradise? Uthman answered, I have it, and bought it for twenty thousand dirhams, and the mosque was widened by his hand. The Prophet ﷺ taught that whoever frees a slave, Allah frees their whole body from the Fire, and from the day Uthman heard it until the day he could no longer do it, every Friday he bought the freedom of people in bondage, so many that no one could count them.
Then came Tabuk, the expedition the histories call the army of hardship. The Prophet ﷺ asked who would equip it, and Uthman stood and gave a hundred camels, fully outfitted. The Prophet ﷺ asked again, and Uthman gave another hundred. Again, and another hundred, until he had given nine hundred and forty camels and sixty horses, all equipped for the sake of Allah. While the Qur'an was naming the hypocrites who held back from that very march, Uthman was emptying his wealth into it. He went home and gathered all the gold and silver he could carry and poured it into the lap of the Prophet ﷺ, who turned it over in his hands and said, nothing can harm Uthman after what he has done today. He said it twice. The window in which Allah offers a person the chance to give is sometimes small, and Uthman had stepped through it again and again.
He was not a man of the battlefield, and yet look at what he gave. He would witness the campaigns of the Prophet ﷺ save one, and the story of that one absence is its own.
The day of joy and the day of grief
That campaign was Badr. How could Uthman, fourth to believe, migrant to Abyssinia and to Madinah, miss it? Because Ruqayyah fell gravely ill, and the Prophet ﷺ gave Uthman, who loved her dearly, permission to stay and care for her. So while the others marched, Uthman sat at the side of his sick wife, the daughter of the Messenger of God, and watched her die before his eyes, the young mother of his child gone. It crushed him. The victory of Badr is remembered as a day of great joy and great sorrow at once, for on the very day Allah gave the believers their unexpected triumph, He took the Prophet's daughter back to Himself.
The Prophet ﷺ knew how badly Uthman had wished to be with him, and so it was a mercy that the veterans of Badr hold a special rank in Islam, and Uthman was given the full reward of being among them though his body was not there. Actions are by intentions, and his intention had been to march. He was counted a man of Badr.
But the grief did not stop. Not long after, the small son, Abdullah, was struck in the face by a bird and an infection spread until it covered his whole face and swelled until the child stopped breathing, dead at six years old. Uthman had now lost his wife, the daughter of the Prophet ﷺ, and his son, the grandson of the Messenger of God. He changed visibly. The sorrow sat on him and would not lift, and the Prophet ﷺ, who loved him, came to ask what weighed on him so. Uthman said it was the death of Ruqayyah, and something else. What is the something else, the Prophet ﷺ asked. Uthman answered: my closeness to you has been severed by her death. He was not only grieving a wife; he was grieving the loss of being joined to the Prophet ﷺ.
Then came something decreed for no other man. The angel Jibril came to the Prophet ﷺ with the command to marry his next daughter, Umm Kulthum, to Uthman, with a dowry like the first and upon the same kindness and love with which he had treated Ruqayyah, because that treatment had been exemplary. This is the meaning of the title Dhu al-Nurayn, the possessor of two lights. No one else was ever given the honor of marrying two daughters of the Prophet ﷺ.
There is a tender account beside this. Umar (may Allah be pleased with him), wanting a noble husband for his daughter Hafsa, offered her first to Abu Bakr, who said he would think about it and then simply avoided him, and then to Uthman, who put him off and prolonged a prayer until Umar gave up and left. Hurt that both his friends had turned from him, Umar complained to the Prophet ﷺ, who told him that Hafsa would marry someone better than Uthman, and Uthman someone better than Hafsa. The Prophet ﷺ himself would marry Hafsa; Uthman would marry Umm Kulthum. Later the two explained that they had stayed silent only because the Prophet ﷺ had already spoken of Hafsa, and they would not disclose his secret.
In time Umm Kulthum also died, in the lifetime of both the Prophet ﷺ and Uthman. There are narrations of the Prophet ﷺ sitting at the graveside of his daughter and weeping, the sixth of seven children he would bury in his own life. He saw the grief of Uthman, who had now married and lost two of his daughters, and he said to him: by Allah, Uthman, if we had a third, we would marry her to you. Such was his place with the Messenger of God. They would have kept giving him their daughters, one after another, because of who he was.
What Uthman's life asks of our faith
It is tempting to read a life like this and feel only admiration, to place Uthman so high that he asks nothing of us. That would be a loss. His life is not a monument. It is a question put to our own iman.
He did not hesitate when faith would cost him everything. He was the most loved man in his city and one of its richest, and he understood precisely that believing could turn all of that to ash overnight, and he believed anyway, the same day. Most of us hold back when the truth is inconvenient, when it might cost us standing or comfort or the approval of people we want to keep. Uthman's life asks whether you trust Allah's promise enough to answer Him before you have counted what it might take from you. The thing he was sure of was not safe. It was simply true, and he chose it.
He ran toward every good the Prophet ﷺ named. The well, the land for the mosque, the freeing of slaves every Friday, the army at Tabuk: again and again he heard "and they will have Paradise" and he moved before the moment closed. The opportunity to give for Allah is often a small window. Someone needs help today; a good deed is in front of you now; a chance to give quietly will not come again tomorrow. His life asks whether you step through those windows or let them close while you deliberate. You do not need his fortune to learn his speed. You need only to treat the next good thing in front of you as the chance it is, and take it for Allah before it passes.
And he gave for the sake of Allah, not the eyes of people. Notice what he did with the well: he turned a monopoly into a free gift and asked nothing back, and the reward of it still runs in the earth he is buried under. This is the secret the world cannot see. What you give to Allah, He keeps. What looks like loss from the street, the wealth poured out, the comfort surrendered, He may be recording as the very thing that secures you. Uthman freed people he would never be thanked by, watered a city he would not live to see flower, and the Prophet ﷺ said nothing could harm him after it. That is sincerity, ikhlas: to do the deed for Allah alone and be content that He has seen it.
His life asks one thing more, the hardest. He loved deeply and lost much, his wife, his son, his closeness to the Prophet ﷺ, and the histories do not record him railing against the decree of his Lord. He grieved, openly and humanly, and then he received from Allah a gift no other man received. When loss comes to you, and it will, his life asks whether your trust in Allah can survive the taking of the very things you thought you could not live without, and whether you can keep your heart soft and patient while it heals.
So carry one thing from him into your own ordinary day. Answer a good that is in front of you now, before you talk yourself out of it. Give one thing for Allah that no one will ever thank you for. And when something is taken from you, hold steady, without a word of complaint against your Lord. That is how this beloved man lived, in modesty, in speed toward the good, in quiet sincerity, and that way is still open to anyone who wants it. May Allah be pleased with Uthman, the possessor of two lights, and raise us upon a measure of his haste toward Him.
This chapter follows the account of Uthman ibn Affan (RA) in Dr. Omar Suleiman's series The Firsts (Yaqeen Institute). Where the histories carry more than one narration, the most widely reported has been followed.