What He Did at Home
Al-Aswad asked ʿĀʾishah what the Prophet ﷺ used to do in his house. She answered: “He used to be in the service of his family — and when the time for prayer came, he would go out to the prayer.”1 Asked the same question elsewhere, she described him sewing his own garment, mending his own sandal, and working as any man works in his house.2
The Prophet ﷺ was asked who was most beloved to him, and he named ʿĀʾishah; asked which man, he said, “Her father.”3 He said, “The best of you is the best to his family, and I am the best of you to my family.”4 He raced ʿĀʾishah on a journey and lost, and years later raced her again and won, and said, “This for that.”5
His Food
The reports about his eating are almost uniformly about scarcity. ʿĀʾishah said that the family of Muḥammad ﷺ never ate their fill of wheat bread three nights in succession from the time he came to Madīnah until he died.6 Asked how they lived, she said: “By the two black things — dates and water” — and that two months would pass with no fire lit in their houses.7 Abū Hurayrah once fainted from hunger between the pulpit and ʿĀʾishah's chamber, and people thought he was mad; “it was nothing but hunger.”8
He never criticised food: “If he desired it he ate it, and if he disliked it he left it.”9 He ate with three fingers and licked them before wiping them.10 He said he did not eat reclining.11 He loved dates, and honey, and sweet things; he liked the gourd from a dish and would follow it around the plate.12 And he taught that a meal for one suffices two, and a meal for two suffices four.13
His Dress and Possessions
Umm Salamah said the garment most beloved to him was the qamīṣ, the long shirt.14 He wore a striped Yemeni mantle, and a silver ring engraved Muḥammad rasūl Allāh in three lines, which he used as a seal on letters to kings.15 He forbade men silk and gold, and wore wool and cotton.
ʿUmar entered upon him one day and found him lying on a plaited mat that had left its marks on his side. Looking around the room, ʿUmar saw nothing but a handful of barley, a hide, and a waterskin hanging on the wall — and he wept. The Prophet ﷺ asked why, and ʿUmar said that Chosroes and Caesar were in the midst of what they were in, and he was the Messenger of God with only this. He answered: “Are you not pleased that for them is this world, and for us the Hereafter?”16
His household kept no hoard. He said, “What have I to do with this world? My likeness and the likeness of this world is that of a rider who shades himself under a tree, then goes and leaves it.”17 At his death his armour was pledged with a Jewish man of Madīnah for thirty measures of barley taken for his family.18
His Sleep
He would lie on his right side and place his right hand under his cheek, and say, “O God, in Your name I die and I live.” On waking he said, “All praise is for God, who gave us life after causing us to die, and to Him is the resurrection.”19
Before sleeping he would cup his hands, recite al-Ikhlāṣ, al-Falaq, and al-Nās into them, blow into them, and wipe over as much of his body as he could reach, beginning with his head and face; he did this three times.20 He disliked sleeping before the night prayer and disliked talk after it.21 And ʿĀʾishah reported that his eyes would sleep but his heart would not.22