The Prophet's ﷺ Grief in Medina

Shaykh Yasir Qadhi explains:

❧LIVE NEWS FROM 700 KILOMETERS AWAY

While the battle unfolded at Mu'tah, the Prophet ﷺ described it to the gathered companions in the Medina masjid as though watching it happen. Anas ibn Mālik reported, in a rigorously authenticated hadith, that the Prophet ﷺ announced the deaths of Zayd, then Jaʿfar, then Ibn Rawāḥah, each in turn as the banner passed, before any messenger had returned from the battle, his eyes visibly filling with tears, concluding only that then a sword from among the swords of Allah took up the banner, and Allah granted victory through him, a reference to Khālid, still unnamed at that point.

❧A GRIEF THAT SAT HIM DOWN

ʿĀʾishah relates that when the deaths were confirmed, the Prophet ﷺ sat down, visibly overcome with grief. Zayd's loss struck deepest: raised in his household for some thirty years since the marriage to Khadījah, once offered his freedom by his own father and uncle and choosing to remain rather than leave the Prophet ﷺ, the moment the Prophet ﷺ had proclaimed him "Zayd ibn Muḥammad" before the Kaʿbah, a bond later clarified rather than severed by the Qur'anic ruling on adoption in Sūrat al-Aḥzāb. Ibn ʿAbbās said he had no idea Zayd wasn't the Prophet's ﷺ literal son until that revelation. Jaʿfar's death, too, cut deeply, the cousin the Prophet ﷺ had embraced with unrestrained joy at Khaybar barely weeks before, after thirteen years apart.

❧THE MESSENGER AND THE DUST

As word spread through Medina, the women of Jaʿfar's household began wailing in mourning, technically forbidden in Islam, though understandably difficult for women tested by sudden loss for the first time. A relative came to the Prophet ﷺ three times asking what to do; each time the Prophet ﷺ said simply to have them stop, and each time the man returned admitting he could not control them. On the third return, the Prophet ﷺ, clearly exasperated in his own grief, told him: go throw dust in their mouths, a common Arabic expression of frustration, not a literal instruction. ʿĀʾishah, watching her husband's visible pain from behind a curtain, turned her own frustration on the hapless messenger instead: it was he, she said, who deserved to have dust thrown at him, for neither controlling the women nor sparing the Prophet ﷺ this needless third visit in the middle of his grief.