The passing of the Prophet ﷺ

Shaykh Yasir Qadhi explains:

Now it is Monday, the 12th of Rabīʿ al-Awwal, and the fever is at its fiercest. He is passing in and out of consciousness. He would dip his hand into a jar of water set beside him and wipe it over his face, and those around him, al-ʿAbbās among them, marvelled that a body could bear such heat and still live; his fever, they said, was as the fever of ten of them. And from him they heard إِنَّ لِلْمَوْتِ سَكَرَاتٍ, "death has its agonies." Even our Prophet ﷺ tasted the pangs of death; do you and I imagine we will be spared them? He kept turning to Allāh, asking to be helped and eased across that passage.

❧The finger, and the siwāk

Usāmah, whose army still waited a day or two outside the city, could not bear to stay away and came in to see him. But the Prophet ﷺ could no longer speak; all he could do was raise a finger toward the sky and toward Usāmah, a silent duʿāʾ, that Allāh was with him, that he should still march. Then ʿĀʾishah's brother ʿAbd al-Raḥmān entered with a siwāk he had been using. The Prophet ﷺ eyed it, and ʿĀʾishah, who knew him as no one else did, understood: "do you want the siwāk?" He motioned yes. So she took it, softened its tip in her own mouth and loosened it, and gave it to him, and he cleaned his teeth with a vigour that astonished her, "I had never seen him use it so," she said, wondering where such strength had come from. Following the Sunnah, beautifying himself, freshening his mouth to meet Jibrīl and go up, to the very end.

❧"O Allāh: the highest Companion"

Cradled against ʿĀʾishah's chest, he raised his eyes and his lips began to move, so faintly that she leaned down to catch the words. She heard him recite مَعَ الَّذِينَ أَنْعَمَ اللَّهُ عَلَيْهِمْ مِنَ النَّبِيِّينَ وَالصِّدِّيقِينَ وَالشُّهَدَاءِ وَالصَّالِحِينَ, with the prophets, the truthful, the martyrs, and the righteous, and then, three times, "O Allāh, forgive me, and have mercy on me, and join me with the highest Companion." His last words in this world were اَللَّهُمَّ الرَّفِيقَ الْأَعْلَى, "O Allāh, the highest Companion." Scholars differ on the meaning: some say the company of the prophets in the loftiest Jannah; others, that al-Rafīq is a name of Allāh Himself, and he was saying, "I want to be with You." Both meet in the end. ʿĀʾishah remembered then a thing he had once told her, that the Angel of Death does not take a prophet's soul until he asks the prophet's leave, and the prophet consents, and when she heard "the highest Companion," she knew he had chosen his Lord over them, and that he was gone. He passed away just after Dhuhr, on Monday the 12th of Rabīʿ al-Awwal of the eleventh year. Among the greatest gifts Allāh gave her, ʿĀʾishah would say, was that he died in her house, on her day, between her neck and her chest, with her saliva, from that softened siwāk, in his blessed mouth.

❧ʿUmar's denial

The news broke the Ṣaḥābah like a blow to the skull. They sat stunned, dazed, wandering, "like headless chickens," as we would say, losing the one man they could not conceive of living without. Abū Bakr was not there: seeing the Prophet ﷺ smile at Fajr that morning, and having camped in the masjid a whole week without going home, he had gone at last to his wife and children, thinking the worst had passed. So the senior man in the masjid was ʿUmar, and ʿUmar could not accept it. Out of love his mind simply refused the news; he stood declaring that the hypocrites were spreading lies, that he would strike the neck of any man who said the Prophet ﷺ had died. Like Mūsā, he insisted, he had gone to his Lord for a time and would return, and anyone who said otherwise would answer to his sword. The whole masjid stood terrified, ʿUmar raging, no one knowing what to do.

❧Abū Bakr steadies the Ummah

Then Abū Bakr came galloping back, and here his wisdom shows: he did not stop at the masjid, but rode straight to his daughter's house, to the one thing he needed to see. He uncovered the Prophet's ﷺ face, bent, and kissed his forehead, weeping: "may my father and mother be your ransom, how I would give everything to have you back. Allāh has spoken the truth: you have tasted the one death you were promised. How beautiful you are, O Messenger of Allāh, in life and in death." Then he came out to the crowd and to the raging ʿUmar and said, "sit down, ʿUmar", the one man with the courage to say it, and when ʿUmar, not registering a word, would not sit, Abū Bakr rose to the minbar. Even now his love held him back: no one, from that day until that minbar was retired, ever stood on its top step; he took the lower place. He praised Allāh and said the words that steadied the whole Ummah: مَنْ كَانَ يَعْبُدُ مُحَمَّدًا فَإِنَّ مُحَمَّدًا قَدْ مَاتَ، وَمَنْ كَانَ يَعْبُدُ اللَّهَ فَإِنَّ اللَّهَ حَيٌّ لَا يَمُوتُ, "whoever used to worship Muḥammad, let him know that Muḥammad has died; and whoever used to worship Allāh, then Allāh is Living and never dies." And he recited آل عمران 3:144, أَفَإِنْ مَاتَ أَوْ قُتِلَ انْقَلَبْتُمْ عَلَىٰ أَعْقَابِكُمْ. ʿUmar, the mountain of a man whom all of Quraysh had feared, who had announced his own Hijrah at the Kaʿbah and dared any to stop him, collapsed to the ground where he stood, his legs gone from under him, and said it was as though he had never heard the verse until that moment. And so the Ummah knew, at last, that the Prophet ﷺ was truly gone.