Omar had never been a rich man, but Ali and others urged him to take a suitable salary from the public treasury, arguing that since Islam now included all of Arabia, the Umma could no longer afford a part-time khalifa who milked a cow for extra cash. Omar agreed but appointed a commission to calculate how much he needed to live like the average Arab, no better and no worse, and supposedly set this amount as his salary. (Imagine the CEO of a modern multinational corporation doing that.)
