The Two Lights
ʿUthmān was of Banū Umayyah, a cloth and grain merchant of considerable wealth, and among the earliest converts — brought by Abū Bakr. He married the Prophet's ﷺ daughter Ruqayyah, emigrated with her to Abyssinia and later to Madīnah, and when she died during the campaign of Badr, the Prophet ﷺ married him to her sister Umm Kulthūm. It is from this that the community called him Dhū al-Nūrayn, the possessor of two lights.1
The reports about him agree on two traits: extreme modesty and unusual generosity. ʿĀʾishah recorded that the Prophet ﷺ was reclining with his garment loosened when Abū Bakr and then ʿUmar came in, and did not change his position — but when ʿUthmān asked permission, he sat up and adjusted his clothing. Asked about it afterwards, he said, “Should I not feel shy before a man before whom the angels feel shy?”2
When the Muslims arrived in Madīnah, the only sweet water was a well owned by a man who sold it. ʿUthmān bought it and made it a public endowment.3 For the expedition to Tabūk, which the sources call jaysh al-ʿusrah — the army of hardship — he equipped a large part of the force at his own expense, and the Prophet ﷺ said, “Nothing will harm ʿUthmān after today, whatever he does.”4
The Pledge Beneath the Tree
At Ḥudaybiyyah, ʿUthmān was sent into Makkah as the Prophet's ﷺ envoy — chosen because his clan connections made him the safest man to send. Word came back that he had been killed. The Prophet ﷺ called the Muslims to pledge themselves beneath a tree to stand and not flee, and the Qur'an records God's satisfaction with that pledge: “Certainly was God pleased with the believers when they pledged allegiance to you under the tree.”5
Taking his own left hand as ʿUthmān's, the Prophet ﷺ struck it against his right and said, “This is for ʿUthmān.” The report of his death proved false; but the pledge stood, and it is remembered as bayʿat al-riḍwān, the pledge of God's good pleasure.5
The Book
The act for which the Muslim tradition remembers ʿUthmān above all was administrative. As the conquests spread, Muslims in Syria, Iraq, and Yemen were reciting the Qur'an in the different dialectal readings permitted in the Prophet's ﷺ lifetime, and Ḥudhayfah ibn al-Yamān returned from the frontier alarmed at hearing them dispute over it. He came to ʿUthmān and said, “Save this community before they differ about the Book as the Jews and Christians differed.”6
ʿUthmān sent for the sheets Abū Bakr had had collected, which were then in the keeping of Ḥafṣah, appointed a committee under Zayd ibn Thābit to copy them into a standard text, ordered that where the copyists disagreed the dialect of Quraysh should prevail, and sent a master copy to each of the great cities. The variant personal copies were then burned. The text every Muslim recites today descends from that recension.6
His caliphate lasted twelve years and ended badly. Rebels from Egypt and Iraq besieged his house in Madīnah over grievances about his governors and his relatives. He refused to allow the Companions who offered to defend him to shed blood on his behalf, and he was killed while reading the Qur'an — the blood, the sources say, falling on the verse “God will suffice you against them, and He is the Hearing, the Knowing.” He was eighty-two.7