The well of Rumah

The Muslims of early Medina had no reliable well of their own. A Jewish merchant owned the sweetest well in the city and sold its water by the skin. The Prophet ﷺ said whoever purchased Rumah for the Muslims would enter paradise. Uthman heard him and bought half the well the same afternoon.

The first Muslims of Medina arrived at the oasis with almost nothing. They had left their homes, their property, and much of their extended family in Mecca. The Ansar of Medina, the Muslims of the city, shared what they had. But water was one thing an early city could not simply share.

Medina's water table was uneven. The city drew from a scatter of wells, some sweet, some brackish, some seasonal. Among all of them the sweetest and most abundant was called Bir Rumah, the Well of Rumah, in the north of the city. It was owned by a Jewish merchant of the Banu Ghifar. He sold its water by the skin at prices that rose in dry seasons. The Muslims either paid what he asked or drank from the brackish alternatives.

One day early in the Medinan period the Prophet ﷺ said openly in the mosque: "Whoever buys the well of Rumah and gives its water freely to the Muslims, for him is paradise." The men in the mosque heard him. Some of them looked at each other. Nobody moved.

Uthman ibn Affan heard the words and left the mosque quietly. He went straight to the owner of the well. The classical Muslim historians preserve the negotiation because it turned on a specific piece of Uthman's cleverness.

The owner would not sell the whole well; the well was his family's future. Uthman asked whether he would sell a half share. The owner, thinking he had found a foolish buyer, agreed and named a price: twelve thousand dirhams. It was a fortune. Uthman paid it in full.

The market for the well collapsed within a week. On Uthman's day the Muslims came with every water-skin they owned and filled them. They took enough on that day to last them to the next Uthman's day. On the merchant's day nobody came. He had nobody to sell to. The Muslims already had all the water they needed.

The merchant returned to Uthman within days and offered him the other half at the same price. Uthman paid another twelve thousand dirhams and the well was fully his. He then endowed the whole well as a waqf, a perpetual charitable trust, for the free use of the Muslims of Medina forever.

The Well of Rumah is still there. The city has grown around it. The Saudi Ministry of Endowments still administers the waqf that Uthman established fourteen hundred years ago. Water still flows from it. It is one of the oldest continuously-operating charitable endowments in human history.

What the story teaches

The story of the well of Rumah is remembered because it demonstrates a specific quality of Uthman that the Muslim tradition names himmah: the immediate movement of a large sum of money toward a public good when the Prophet ﷺ named the good and invited the ummah to act. Uthman did not wait for a committee. He did not budget. He did not haggle himself into a smaller commitment. He walked out of the mosque and bought the well the same day. The classical Muslim historians count this as one of three great acts of himmah by which Uthman earned his high station in the Companions, the well of Rumah, the expansion of the Prophet's mosque (which he purchased the land for), and the equipping of a third of the army at Tabuk out of his own pocket. Each was a case where the ummah's largest immediate need was met by one man reaching into his own wealth without being asked twice.