The Incident of Thursday: the Qirtas

Shaykh Yasir Qadhi explains:

One incident of the Prophet's ﷺ final days was set aside earlier to be told here, on the way to the election of Abū Bakr, for the Sīrah is usually reckoned to end not with the death itself but with that election and the sending of Usāmah's expedition to Shām. It is the Incident of Thursday, also called the incident of the Qirṭās, the parchment or writing-material they used.

❧"Bring me a writing-material"

The ḥadīth is in al-Bukhārī and Muslim, muttafaqun ʿalayh, wholly authentic, and narrated in pieces; the fullest is Ibn ʿAbbās's. He would say: Thursday, and what a Thursday it was, meaning what a grievous one. As the Prophet's ﷺ pain grew heavier he said: bring me a writing-material, and I will write for you a document after which you will never go astray.

ʿUmar ibn al-Khaṭṭāb said: the Prophet ﷺ is overcome by pain; we have the Book of Allah, and it suffices us, حَسْبُنَا كِتَابُ اللَّهِ. And some said that the Prophet ﷺ was speaking under the fever, as a man does not speak clearly in a high fever, though who said this is named in no book of ḥadīth of the Sunnī tradition; the Shīʿah traditions attribute it too to ʿUmar, but from our books we simply do not know who said it. Others said: confirm what he wants, ask him. And the Companions fell to differing, and the voices, the laghaṭ, went back and forth.

Seeing them differ, the Prophet ﷺ said: قُومُوا عَنِّي, leave me; it is not fitting that there be dispute in my presence. And Ibn ʿAbbās used to say: the calamity, the whole calamity, was what came between the Prophet ﷺ and his writing that document.

❧The three deathbed charges

Then, the same day, or the next, Ibn ʿAbbās says he charged them with three things before he died: expel the mushrikūn from the Arabian Peninsula; honour the delegations that come to you as I used to honour them; and, the sub-narrator says, I forgot the third. Ibn Ḥajar, gathering the other narrations, holds the forgotten third was one of two things said near the end: that Usāmah's army be sent to Shām, or that his ﷺ grave not be made into an idol.

❧What Bukhari drew from it

Al-Bukhārī narrated this ḥadīth in seven places, and drew from it benefits apart from the controversy: the importance of writing down knowledge, since the Prophet ﷺ called for pen and paper; the duty of receiving delegations who come to learn Islam with hospitality, among his last counsels; that differing is disliked, and in his ﷺ presence was ḥarām, it is not fitting that dispute occur before me; and, from the etiquette of visiting the sick, that one should not sit too long, lest it burden the ill.