The Final Illness
Late in Ṣafar of the eleventh year, after rising at night to pray for the dead of the graveyard of Baqīʿ, the Prophet ﷺ was seized by headache and fever. The illness gathered for some ten days; he continued to lead the prayers while strength lasted, and asked his wives' leave to be nursed in the chamber of ʿĀ'ishah, walking there supported between al-ʿAbbās and ʿAlī, his feet dragging the ground. From his last public words in those days: warnings against taking graves as places of worship, as those before had done with the tombs of their prophets; tenderness for the Anṣār — “accept from their doers of good, and pass over their wrongdoers”; and freedom for his slaves, and the last coins in his house given away in charity. When the fever mounted he said: “No prophet's soul is taken until he is shown his place in Paradise, and given the choice.”12
Too weak at last to come out, he commanded: “Order Abū Bakr to lead the people in prayer” — insisting through ʿĀ'ishah's tearful objections, three times, until it was done: seventeen congregations behind the man who would carry the community when he was gone. On the last morning, the Monday, he lifted the curtain of his chamber as the believers stood in rows at the dawn prayer behind Abū Bakr — and smiled, the ḥadīth says, a smile like a page of the Qur'an — and the congregation nearly broke with joy, thinking him recovered. He let the curtain fall.23
The Highest Companion
He died before noon of that day — the twelfth of Rabīʿ al-Awwal, the eighth of June, 632 — his head against ʿĀ'ishah's breast, after she had softened for him, at his glance, the tooth-stick her brother carried; so that she would say, with wonder, that her saliva and his met in his last hour. She heard him murmur: “With those upon whom You have bestowed favour — the prophets, the true ones, the martyrs, the righteous…” and then, three times: “Rather, the Highest Companion” — al-Rafīq al-Aʿlā — until his hand fell. He was sixty-three years old.32
Madīnah went dark with grief. ʿUmar, sword-strong and breaking, stood in the mosque denying the death and threatening any who said it. Then Abū Bakr came in from the city's edge, kissed the still face — “Sweet you are in life and sweet in death, by Him in whose hand is my soul” — and went out and spoke the words on which the community steadied itself, and by which it still steadies: “Whoever worshipped Muḥammad — Muḥammad has died. And whoever worships God — God is Living and does not die.” Then he recited: “Muḥammad is only a messenger; messengers have passed away before him…” — and it was, said ʿUmar, as if the verse had never been revealed until that day, and my legs would not carry me.4
He was buried where he died, in the earth of ʿĀ'ishah's chamber — for “no prophet is buried,” Abū Bakr related from him, “save where he dies.” He left, the ḥadīth records, no dinar and no dirham, no slave and no estate — his coat of mail stood pawned to a Jewish merchant for thirty measures of barley — nothing but a white mule, his weapons, and a piece of land already given for the wayfarer.5
What Remained
What remained was everything else. A century after that Monday, the community he left — perhaps one hundred thousand souls — stretched from the Atlantic to the Indus. The Book he delivered is recited today, letter-perfect, by more Muslims than the Roman Empire had subjects, and his practice — how he prayed, judged, forgave, greeted children, kept faith with enemies — is preserved at a density of documentation no other ancient life approaches: the sciences of ḥadīth arose for no purpose but to sift the record of this one man.67
Asked to describe him, those who knew him reached always past the particulars — the deep-set eyes, the hair to the earlobes, the walk of a man descending a slope, the face that made Umm Maʿbad's husband say “this is the most beautiful of people” — to the same summary. His servant Anas, ten years at his side: “He never once said to me: Why did you do that? or, Why did you not?” His wife ʿĀ'ishah, asked what he was like at home: “His character was the Qur'an.”86
And the Qur'an had already written the epitaph that this sīrah, chapter by chapter, has only unfolded: “And We have not sent you except as a mercy to all the worlds.”9