The judgment of the Egyptian boy

A Coptic Egyptian boy came to Umar in Medina with a complaint: the son of the governor of Egypt, Amr ibn al-As, had beaten him unjustly in a horse race. Umar summoned Amr and his son from Egypt and handed the whip to the Coptic boy.

In one of the years of Umar's caliphate, a young Coptic Christian arrived in Medina after weeks of travel from Egypt. He asked to see the caliph. He was received. He said to Umar: I am a Copt from Egypt. I ran a horse race against Muhammad, the son of Amr ibn al-As, your governor of Egypt. My horse was faster. When Muhammad saw that a Copt was going to beat him, he flew into a rage. He struck me with a whip and shouted at me: "Take that, son of the noble ones!", a mockery of my father's status. His father the governor did nothing.

Umar sent word to Amr ibn al-As: come to Medina immediately and bring your son with you. Amr, the conqueror of Egypt, one of the great generals of Islam, understood at once. He and his son travelled to Medina.

When they arrived at the majlis, Umar had the Coptic boy stand beside him. He held out a whip. He said to the Coptic boy: strike Muhammad son of Amr with this whip as he struck you. Strike the son of a governor of an Islamic province as he struck you.

The Coptic boy took the whip and struck Muhammad son of Amr as he had been struck. When he was finished, Umar said: strike the head of Amr also, for the son struck you thinking his father would protect him. The Coptic boy said: O commander of the faithful, I have already struck the man who struck me. Enough. He handed the whip back.

The line is one of the most-quoted single sentences in the Islamic ethical tradition, especially among the classical jurists and, in modern times, among Muslim rights reformers. It carries weight because of who said it and where. The caliph of an empire, in Medina, in the presence of his own governor of Egypt, sided with a Coptic Christian boy against the son of his own general. He humiliated the governor, personally, in public, for having allowed a man in his household to think that governor's blood exempted him from the law that applies to every human being. He did not give the Coptic boy compensation. He gave him equal justice.

Amr returned to Egypt. His son returned with him, and if the classical sources are to be trusted, he was never known to raise his hand again in that manner. The Coptic Christian community of Egypt remembered the story for centuries.

What the story teaches

Umar's judgment is remembered by Muslims because it is one of the clearest historical anchors for the classical Islamic principle that justice is universal, not restricted to Muslims. The Coptic boy was a Christian. He was a colonial subject, in the modern sense. The governor's son was Muslim, of noble Arab tribal lineage, the child of a Companion of the Prophet, son of the man who had opened Egypt for Islam. Umar sided with the Copt, not because the Copt was right in some tribal sense, but because he had been wronged. The classical scholars of Islamic law took Umar's judgment as one of the founding cases for the principle that no rank of person is exempt from the same law that applies to any human being. The Egyptian Copts who accepted Islam under Amr's governance did so, in significant number, because they had watched what kind of state came in when Umar sent his messengers.