The burial, and the grief of Medina

Shaykh Yasir Qadhi explains:

So many elegies were written, rithāʾ, the poetry of mourning and praise for the departed, by Ḥassān ibn Thābit, poet of the Prophet ﷺ, by Abū Bakr, and by other Ṣaḥābah. Ḥassān asks why sleep will not come to his eyes, as though the paths of his tears had worn into permanent channels dark as kuḥl; he wishes he had died and been buried in al-Baqīʿ before this day, that he had never lived to hear the news; he asks how he can dwell in Medina now that the Prophet ﷺ is gone, and longs for the Day of Judgment only to meet him, "O son of Āminah," the light of the whole world, whoever took from that light was guided, and swears that as long as he lives he will weep for no death after that of the family of Muḥammad ﷺ, closing that the Anṣār, from whom the Prophet's ﷺ own great-great-grandmother of the Khazraj had come, were the ones honoured at last to hold his grave.

❧The washing and the shrouding

On the Tuesday the family gathered to wash him, al-ʿAbbās and his elder sons al-Faḍl and Qutham (ʿAbdullāh ibn ʿAbbās being too young), ʿAlī, and Safīnah, the freed servant of the Prophet ﷺ who, like the others he had freed, stayed on out of love. Unsure whether to remove his clothes to wash him, they were overcome by sleep and heard a voice they could not place, Jibrīl's, saying, "wash him with his garments on," and they awoke all remembering it, and so they washed him clothed, as befitted him ﷺ, and shrouded him in three white cloths of Suḥūl, a town of Yemen famed for fine garments, with no shirt and no turban.

❧Where a prophet is buried

Then they differed on where to bury him, some said al-Baqīʿ, some under the minbar, some where he used to pray, until Abū Bakr said, "I heard the Prophet ﷺ say that Allāh takes a prophet's soul only at the place where he is to be buried," and with that the discussion ended, for every prophet was buried where he died. So the grave was dug beneath the bed, the small mattress, in ʿĀʾishah's room, right where he lay. And because there was as yet no khalīfah to lead the funeral prayer, the whole city and the surrounding tribes, tens of thousands, came and prayed over him individually, group after group, through all of Tuesday and all of Wednesday, the men, then the women, then the children, never in congregation. He was buried on the Wednesday evening, in the very spot he died: he passed after Dhuhr on Monday, and was laid in the earth on Wednesday night. When Fāṭimah entered and saw the fresh grave where his bed had been, she turned to Anas, the young servant who had helped, and said, "how could your souls bear to pour dust upon the Messenger of Allāh ﷺ?" And it was Anas who said, years later, that the day the Prophet ﷺ entered Medina was the brightest of their lives, and the day he was buried the darkest; that Medina went so dark after they buried him that, as al-Bukhārī reports him, "if one of us stretched out his hand he could not see it", not a darkness of the eyes but of grief and shock, "and by the time we finished burying him, we no longer recognised our own selves," so emptied were they, they did not know who they were.

❧"No calamity like the calamity of me"

Two of his final ḥadīths remain the Ummah's consolation. In Ibn Mājah, an authentic ḥadīth from these days: "O people, whoever of my Ummah is stricken by a calamity, let him be consoled for it by the calamity that befell him through me, for no one will ever be struck by a calamity greater than the calamity of losing me." The death of the Prophet ﷺ was the single greatest disaster to befall the Ummah, for you had a Messenger among you, receiving revelation, and suddenly he is gone: who will guide, who will tell you ḥalāl from ḥarām?, so that any grief in your own life is small beside it, and consolation itself. And the last: "how I long to meet my brothers." "Are we not your brothers, O Messenger of Allāh?" they asked. "No, you are my Companions; my brothers are those who come after you, who have never seen me yet believe in me, and one of whom would give up all his wealth and family for a single sight of me." That, he said, is the group he longed to see. Dare we hope, the shaykh asks, that it could be us? Would we truly give our wealth and our families for one glimpse of him? The Prophet ﷺ has gone, and we were not granted the honour the Ṣaḥābah were; but the glimmer of hope left to us is this, that if we truly love him, his Sunnah and his Sīrah remain with us, and if we follow them and embody who he was, perhaps he will be glad to see us, and perhaps we will be raised among his ikhwān, those he yearned to meet, and at whose Ḥawḍ we pray, O Allāh, to drink from his blessed hand.