The First Muslim: The Story of Muhammad (34 page)

With abu-Bakr and Omar present, Muhammad appeared to recover somewhat—the kind of illusory improvement that often precedes the end. He seemed quite lucid as he sat up, sipped some water, and made what many believe was a final attempt to make his wishes known. But even this would come laden with ambiguity. “Bring writing materials that I may dictate something for you, after which you will not be led into error,” he said.

It seems a simple enough request, and a perfectly reasonable one under the circumstances, but it produced near panic among those in the room. What did Muhammad want written? Would it be general guidelines for how they should proceed? Religious advice for the community he was about to leave behind? Or was it the one possibility that seemed most called for and yet was most feared: a will. Was the dying prophet about to definitively name his successor?

The only way to know was to call for a scribe to be brought in, but that is not what happened. Instead, they argued about whether to do it. They voiced concern about the strain on Muhammad, insisting that he rest and that the sickroom be kept quiet. And even as they stressed the need for silence, their voices rose.

It is the strangest scene. There was every sign that the man they were all so deeply devoted to was ready to make his dying wishes known, perhaps even to designate his successor once and for all. It was the one thing everyone in the room wanted to know, but at the same time the one thing nobody wanted to know. Yet it is an altogether human scene. Everyone was concerned, everyone trying to protect Muhammad, to stop the importuning of others and to ease his life even as it seeped out of him. They were all doing their best, and doing it heatedly, their voices rising so that every angry note and high-pitched syllable seemed to pierce the sick man’s ears until he could take it no more. “Leave me,” he said finally. “Let there be no quarreling in my presence.”

He was so weak by then that the words came out in practically a whisper. Only Omar managed to hear him, but that was enough. Using his commanding presence to full advantage, he laid down the law. “The messenger of God is overcome by pain,” he said. “We have the Quran, the book of God, and that is sufficient for us.”

It would not be sufficient, though. It could have been, and perhaps even should have been—Omar’s words are still quoted today as the example of perfect faith—but it was not. The Quran would be supplemented by the sunna, the practice of Muhammad as established in the vast body of hadiths as related by those who claimed to be closest to him, and by the ongoing accumulation of clerical rulings that would make up Sharia law. For now, however, Omar prevailed. His words had their intended effect, and the sickroom subsided into a somewhat shame-faced silence. If Muhammad had indeed intended to name a successor, he had left it too late. In the grip of fever, blinded by agonizing spasms, he was no longer in any condition to impose his will. The scribe never arrived, and by dawn the next morning Muhammad could barely move.

He acknowledged now that the end was near. He made one last request, and this one was granted: “Pour seven skins of water from seven wells over me so that I may go out to the men and instruct them.” And though he did not say it, all the wives were certainly aware that this was part of the ritual for washing a corpse. When it was done, he asked to be taken to morning prayers in the mosque.

It took two men, Ali and his uncle Abbas, to support him. The few yards across the courtyard to the mosque itself must have seemed an infinite distance, and the shade of the mosque an exquisite relief from the blinding glare of the early-morning sun. Muhammad gestured to be seated beside the pulpit, where his old friend abu-Bakr stood to lead the prayers in his place. Those who were there would remember him smiling as he listened. They’d say his face was radiant, though there’s no knowing whether it was the radiance of faith or the flush of fever and impending death. They watched as he listened to the chanting of the words he had first heard from the angel Gabriel, and persuaded themselves that it was not the last time they’d see him. He was on the mend, his energy was returning, all would be well. But once the morning prayers were over and Ali and Abbas had carried him back to Aisha’s chamber, he had only a few hours left.

Some were more clear-sighted than others. “I swear by God that I saw death in the prophet’s face,” Abbas told Ali once they had settled Muhammad back on his pallet and left the sickroom. Now was their last chance to have him clarify the matter of succession. “Let us go back and ask him. If authority be with us, we shall know it, and if it be with others, we will ask him to direct them to treat us well.”

But Ali could not bear the idea of placing any more pressure on Muhammad. Or perhaps even he was not ready for too much clarity. “By God I will not,” he said. “If it is withheld from us, none after him will give it to us.”

Not that it would have helped. Even as the two men were talking, Muhammad lapsed into unconsciousness, and this time he would not recover. By noon of that Monday, June 8 in the year 632, he was dead.

e died, Aisha would say, with his head on her breast, or as the original Arabic has it with vivid delicacy, “between my lungs and my lips.” She’d been holding him, and realizing suddenly how heavy his head had become, had looked down to find the empty glaze of death in his eyes. Her account would become part of Sunni tradition, but it would not go unchallenged: Shia tradition would maintain that as he died, Muhammad’s head lay not on Aisha’s breast but on Ali’s.

Who held the dying prophet would matter. Whose ears heard that final breath, whose skin it touched, whose arms supported him would matter with particular intensity, as though his spirit had somehow leaped from his body at the precise moment of death to enter the soul of the one who held him. Was it Aisha, the daughter of the man who was to become the first caliph, or Ali, the man who many remained convinced should have been the first?

Whichever it was, no words were needed to carry the news. The wailing did that. Every one of the wives broke into a terrible, piercing howl that sounded for all the world like a wounded animal hiding in the bush to die. It spoke of ultimate agony, of pain and sorrow beyond comprehension, and it spread through the oasis at the speed of sound. Men and women, old and young, all took up the wail and surrendered themselves to it.

“We were like sheep on a rainy night, moving this way and that in panic,” one of them would recall. Sheep, that is, with neither shepherd nor shelter. Their wailing was not only for the one who had died but for themselves, leaderless without him. How could it be? Hadn’t they just seen him in the mosque, his face radiant as they knelt and bowed and chanted the prayer responses? It was too awful a thing to contemplate, too terrible a thing to accept.

Even Omar, that sternest of warriors, could not absorb it. The man who just the day before had asserted that the Quran was all they needed was no more able than the panicked crowd to accept that death had won the day. Before anyone could stop him, he stood up in the forecourt of the mosque and shouted that it was not so. A curse on those who even entertained such an idea. “By God, Muhammad is not dead,” he insisted. “He has gone to his lord as Moses went and was hidden from his people for forty days, returning to them after it was said that he had died. By God, the messenger will return as Moses returned, and will cut off the hands and feet of all men who allege that he is dead!”

But if his intention was to calm the crowd, the sight of a figure as courageous as Omar in hysterical denial only gave rise to greater panic. That was when the small, stooped figure of abu-Bakr appeared beside him. “Gently, Omar, gently,” he said, “be quiet,” and he took the towering warrior by the arm and slowly led him aside.

All eyes focused on abu-Bakr as he took Omar’s place before the terrified throng. His voice was startlingly strong, not at all what one would expect from such a frail body, as he recited the Quranic revelation that had come after the believers had fled the Battle of Uhud thinking that Muhammad had been killed. “Muhammad is naught but a messenger,” abu-Bakr declaimed. “Why, if he should die or be slain, should you turn back on your heels?”

And then he added what they had all been dreading, yet at the same time what was most needed. “For those who worshipped Muhammad,” he announced, “Muhammad is dead. For those who worship God, God is alive, immortal.”

There was a stunned silence as the words sank in, and then Omar reacted. “By God,” he would remember, “when I heard abu-Bakr say those words, I was so dumbfounded that my legs would not bear me and I fell to the ground, knowing that the prophet was dead.” The older man’s calm realism had subdued the terrifying giant, turning him into a weeping child. And with this confirmation of mortality, the rituals of grief began. Men and women alike slapped their faces repeatedly, rapidly, with both hands; beat their chests with clenched fists so that their bodies echoed like hollow trees; raked their fingernails over their foreheads until blood streaked down over their eyes and their tears turned red. They scooped up handfuls of dust and poured it over their hair, abasing themselves in despair throughout the afternoon, into the evening, and all through the night.

Ali and three of his kinsmen took over Aisha’s room and began the work of the closest male relatives. They prepared Muhammad for the grave, washing him and rubbing herbs over him, wrapping him in his shroud, and sitting in prayer with the body. But others were thinking further ahead. With no clear heir apparent, the “lost sheep” were faced with the daunting task of acclaiming one of their own as their new leader. If Ali trusted that it would be him, that trust would now prove misplaced. Even as the mass of believers grieved in the courtyard of the mosque, the clan leaders of Medina gathered with the rest of Muhammad’s senior aides in a shura, a traditional council of elders, to decide who his successor would be.

The shura went on through that Monday night and far into the following day. Each clan and tribal leader, each elder, had to have his say, and at length. Success would depend on consensus, and while that was a high ideal, in practice it meant that the meeting would go on until those opposed to the general feeling had either been persuaded or simply worn down and browbeaten into going along with the majority.

Ali might have seemed the natural candidate by virtue of his closeness to Muhammad, but that closeness was exactly what now worked against him. It was argued that to choose him as Muhammad’s nearest kinsman would risk turning the leadership of the umma into a form of hereditary monarchy, and that this was the opposite of everything Muhammad stood for. This was why he had never formally declared an heir, they said. He had faith in his people’s ability to decide for themselves, in the sanctity of the decision of the whole community, or at least of their representatives.

It was an argument for democracy, in however limited a form. And since history is nothing if not ironic, it was also an argument against exactly what would happen just fifty years into the future, when abu-Sufyan’s son Muawiya would establish the first Sunni dynasty in Damascus by handing his throne over to his eldest son. It was in fact an argument against all the dynasties to come over the ensuing centuries, whether caliphates, shahdoms, sultanates, principalities, kingdoms, or presidencies. And while it won the day immediately after Muhammad’s death, it would be destined to lie dormant for thirteen centuries thereafter.

Ali’s uncle Abbas urged him to abandon his vigil over the body, offering to keep watch in his place while the younger man asserted his claim to leadership at the shura. But as he had done when Abbas had urged him to clarify matters in Muhammad’s final hours, Ali refused. To leave the man who had been father and mentor to him before consigning him back to the earth from which he had come? He would not. He stayed with Muhammad’s body, and as the light faded on Tuesday evening, the news arrived that the shura had finally reached consensus. The first caliph would not be Ali, but abu-Bakr.

By now a full day and a half had passed since Muhammad had taken his last breath, and for reasons all too obvious in the intense June heat, the matter of burial was becoming urgent. Custom decreed that a body be buried within twenty-four hours, but with all the tribal and clan leaders at the shura, Ali and Abbas had seen no option but to wait. Now that the leadership had gone to abu-Bakr, however, things were very different. Since abu-Bakr would surely make Muhammad’s funeral a stage for confirmation of his own election as the successor, Ali would deny him that opportunity.

In the small hours of that Wednesday morning, Aisha was woken by scraping sounds echoing around the courtyard of the mosque. Since Muhammad’s body was lying in her room, she had moved in with her co-wife Hafsa, just a few doors down. Sunk deep in grief, she didn’t get up to investigate the noise. If she had, she’d have discovered that what had woken her was the sound of steel digging into rocky soil. With pickaxes and shovels, Ali and his kinsmen were digging Muhammad’s grave. And they were digging it in Aisha’s room.

Muhammad had once said that a prophet should be buried where he had died, they would later explain, and since he had died on the sleeping platform in this small room, this was where he had to be laid to rest. They dug the grave at the foot of the platform, and when it was deep enough, they tipped up the pallet holding the shrouded body, slid it down into the earth so that it faced toward Mecca as though in prayer, then quickly covered it and laid a simple slab of stone on top.

There was no pomp or circumstance, no elaborate ritual or mass procession, no throngs of mourners, no eulogies. Muhammad was buried in the dead of night, as quietly and inconspicuously as he had been born, and one has to think that this is exactly as he would have wished it. As he entered his grave, he was simply a man again, free of the intense public scrutiny that had hemmed him in. The peace and quiet he had sought would finally be his. At last, he would find some rest.