The Qirtas and the Question of Succession

Shaykh Yasir Qadhi explains:

The death of the Prophet ﷺ and what followed is where the Sunnī–Shīʿah split begins, and one cannot treat the Qirṭās without it. The controversy is simple: the Shīʿah hold that the Prophet ﷺ meant to write the waṣiyyah naming ʿAlī ibn Abī Ṭālib the successor, and that ʿUmar's intervention prevented it, so that Ibn ʿAbbās's "calamity of Thursday" was, on their reading, the failure to record ʿAlī's caliphate. Ibn ʿAbbās did not say that; it is their interpretation.

❧Ghadir Khumm

A related incident of the final months is Ghadīr Khumm, the pool of Khumm, which the Shīʿah hold of the utmost importance, and which we affirm one hundred percent; it is in our books and we have no difficulty with it. Our reading differs: in context the Prophet ﷺ was defending ʿAlī against those who had found fault with him, saying that whoever is irritated by ʿAlī irritates him, and that whoever takes him ﷺ as his mawlā, ʿAlī too is his mawlā. It was a rebuke of ʿAlī's detractors, never an appointment to the khilāfah.

What decides the matter for us is that in his very last days he ﷺ singled out Abū Bakr again and again, and insisted he lead the ṣalāh, never before had he ﷺ ordered another to lead the prayer while he lived and was in the masjid, saying that Allah and His Messenger refuse anyone but Abū Bakr; and when Abū Bakr could not be found and even ʿUmar had begun, he had ʿUmar step back and Abū Bakr brought. These are not trivial matters.

❧Three questions

The controversy can be met with three questions. First: how do we understand ʿUmar's stance? The classical scholars offer many readings. Al-Khaṭṭābī (d. 388) says ʿUmar never meant that the Prophet ﷺ was mistaken; rather he saw the severity of the fever and feared something ambiguous might be uttered that the munāfiqūn would exploit, and the Companions were known to negotiate with him ﷺ where circumstance allowed, as at Badr's camping and at Ḥudaybiyyah, so ʿUmar took this for such an occasion. Al-Māzirī (d. 453) and al-Qurṭubī (d. 676) say a command always carries signs that may mark it as a request, and ʿUmar must have seen something that softened it to a request, an ijtihād for which he is rewarded. Ibn al-Jawzī and Ibn Ḥajar report and accept these. Al-Nawawī (d. 676) says the scholars are agreed the incident displays ʿUmar's understanding and farsightedness: he feared something being written that they could not perform and would be punished for, took the Qurʾān's own testimony that the religion was complete, الْيَوْمَ أَكْمَلْتُ لَكُمْ دِينَكُمْ, and مَّا فَرَّطْنَا فِي الْكِتَابِ مِن شَيْءٍ, and wished to spare the Prophet ﷺ further strain and to protect the Ummah from misguidance; al-Bayhaqī (d. 438) says the same, that ʿUmar acted from compassion at his suffering.

Here we must be honest: as Sunnīs we come to this biased, as the other side comes biased. Our bias rests on ʿUmar's record, twenty years behind him and thirteen ahead, and the ḥadīths in his praise: were there a prophet after me it would be ʿUmar; when Shayṭān sees ʿUmar on a path he flees it; if any of this Ummah were divinely inspired it would be ʿUmar. In light of that résumé we make a leap of faith that his motive, whatever it was, was sound, and it is a leap; his action here is genuinely ambiguous, and the scholars' explanations are good attempts, no more, for none of us was there. Those who do not love him will not make the leap: if you love someone and they err ambiguously you forgive; if you do not, you read the worst into it.

Second: whatever his motive, what did the Prophet ﷺ actually want written? Many say it was the three charges he then spoke aloud when the writing did not happen. But a number of early scholars, Sufyān ibn ʿUyaynah (d. 198) among them, hold he meant the very opposite of the Shīʿah claim, to dictate that Abū Bakr be the successor, for it is authentic in al-Bukhārī and Muslim that before this illness he ﷺ had said as much.

Third, and decisive whatever one holds of the first two: the incident was Thursday, and he ﷺ died Monday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday and into Monday, four full days, and in all that time he said nothing more of it, though ʿAlī and Fāṭimah and all of them were visiting. As Ibn Ḥajar notes, it is impossible he ﷺ would have left a matter of such weight uncommented for four days. And al-Nawawī frames the only two possibilities: either Allah had commanded the writing, in which case, had Companions diverted it, was he ﷺ ever stopped from carrying out Allah's command, so it must have been abrogated, or it was his own ijtihād, which he then set aside. Either way, a matter of that importance could not have been left undone.

And this sets aside the many other evidences for Abū Bakr: that in the year he ﷺ could not make Ḥajj he sent Abū Bakr to lead it, and when ʿAlī was sent after, Abū Bakr asked, do you come as commander or as one commanded, and ʿAlī said, I am not the commander. In the Ḥajj, which one delegates, and in the ṣalāh, he ﷺ delegated Abū Bakr, a further track showing, for us, that al-Ṣiddīq was what the Prophet ﷺ intended.