Who was ʿUmar ibn ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz and why is he called the fifth rightly-guided caliph?

ʿUmar ibn ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz was an Umayyad caliph (99–101 AH) and a descendant of ʿUmar ibn al-Khaṭṭāb through his mother's line, who ruled for only about two and a half years yet reversed much of the injustice of his predecessors: he returned wrongfully taken wealth including his own family's estates, restrained the governors, restored the ṣadaqah to its rightful recipients, and abolished the cursing of ʿAlī from the pulpits, replacing it with the recitation of "Indeed, Allah orders justice and good conduct..." (Qurʾān 16:90) — a practice that continues in Jumuʿah khuṭbahs to this day. He also wrote to Abū Bakr ibn Ḥazm ordering that the ḥadīth of the Messenger ﷺ be written down and collected, fearing the loss of knowledge with the death of the scholars; al-Bukhārī cites this letter in his Ṣaḥīḥ in the Book of Knowledge, in the chapter on how knowledge is taken away, and it marks the beginning of the official codification of the Sunnah. Later scholars honoured him with the title "the fifth of the rightly-guided," but this is a term of praise, not a claim that he equals the four Khulafāʾ al-Rāshidūn, whose rank is established by the Sunnah and the consensus of the Companions.

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