When 'Umar ibn 'Abdul-'Aziz died, the learned men came to his wife to express sympathy and say how great a calamity had struck the people of Islam by his death. And they said to her, "Tell us about him - for the one who knows best about a man is his wife."
And she said: "Indeed he never used to pray or
fast more than the rest of you, but I never saw a servant of God who feared Him
more than 'Umar. He devoted his body and his soul to the people. All day he
would sit tending to their affairs, and when night came he would sit up while
business remained. One evening when he had finished everything, he called for
his lamp - from which he used to buy the oil from his own money - and prayed
two prostrations. Then he sat back on his folded legs, with his chin in his hands,
and the tears ran down from his cheeks, and this didn't stop until dawn, when
he rose for a day of fasting.
"I said to him, 'Commander of the Believers, was
there some matter that troubled you this night?' And he said, 'Yes, I saw how I was occupied while governing the affairs of the
community, all its black sheep and its white sheep, and I remembered the
stranger, beggared and straying, and the poor and the needy, and the prisoners
in captivity, and all like them in the far places of the earth, and I realised
that God most high would ask me about all of them, and Muhammad would testify
about them, and I feared that I should find no excuse when I was with God, and
no defence with Muhammad.'
"And even when 'Umar was with me in bed, where a
man usually find some pleasure with his wife, if he remembered some affair of
God's (people), he would be upset as a bird that had fallen into the water.
Then his weeping would rise until I would throw off the blankets in kindness to
him. 'By God,' he would say, 'How I wish that there was
between me and this office the distance of the East from the West!' "
http://sunnahonline.com/library/purification-of-the-soul/375-memory-of-caliph-umar-bin-abdul-aziz-by-his-wife-the
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