There is no harder day in the whole of the seerah than this one. We have walked with him ﷺ for a hundred days now, from before his birth to the Farewell Hajj, and we have come, with heavy hearts, to the day the ummah lost him. Take it slowly. Read it the way you would sit with a loved one in their final hours: quietly, with adab, with salawat on your tongue.
He ﷺ returned to Madinah from the Farewell Hajj and never left it again. A few weeks later, in the house of Maymunah, the fever began. What follows is the last ten days of the most beloved life that was ever lived, and the morning the companions woke to a world without him in it.
The last command: an army pointed at the horizon
Before the illness, there was a final order. Late in Safar he called the people to arms and prepared an expedition toward the lands of the Romans, toward Syria and Palestine, and over it he placed Usama ibn Zayd, a young man of seventeen or eighteen. Usama was the son of Zayd, the freed slave the Prophet ﷺ had once adopted and loved like his own, and the son of Umm Ayman, who had cradled the Prophet ﷺ as an infant and was nearly the last soul alive who remembered his mother and father. Usama was raised in the Prophet's ﷺ own home.
Some murmured that the boy was too young, that his father had been a freed slave. The Prophet ﷺ answered them plainly: if you criticize his leadership now, you criticized his father's before him, and by Allah Zayd was worthy, and this boy is worthy too, and he is among the most beloved of people to me after his father. Dr. Yasir Qadhi pauses on what it means that Allah chose for him ﷺ to pass away with this order standing: a man who held the whole of Arabia would not let Islam stop at Arabia's borders. The faith was never meant to be an Arabian thing. With his last strength he aimed his companions at the horizon, at Jerusalem itself, and then he was called home before the army marched.
The signs no one let themselves read
إِنَّكَ مَيِّتٌ وَإِنَّهُم مَّيِّتُونَ
“Indeed, you are to die, and indeed, they are to die.”
Surah az-Zumar 39:30 Read 39:30 with tafsir
The warnings had been there all along. The reason no one saw them, Sheikh Yasir says, is the most human reason there is: we do not let ourselves think about the death of the people we love, and the more we love them, the less we can bear the thought. So when Allah said to His Prophet ﷺ, you are to die, and they are to die, the companions heard the words and never once imagined the day. When Abu Bakr recited this verse to them later, one of them asked, almost in disbelief, is this really in the Qur'an, as though he had never heard it before.
There were quieter signs too. That year Jibril came in Ramadan and reviewed the Qur'an with him not once, as he had every year, but twice. When Surah an-Nasr was revealed, with its promise of the conquest and the people entering Allah's religion in crowds, and its command to praise Allah and seek His forgiveness, it was Ibn Abbas who understood: this was a gentle notice that the work was complete and the time to meet Allah was near. He told Mu'adh, as he sent him to Yemen, that he might never see him again. He went out to the graves of Uhud and prayed over the martyrs as one bidding farewell, and to the graveyard of Baqi in the dead of night, and said to those buried there, wait for me, I will meet you. He told a servant that Allah had offered him the choice between the keys of this world and a long life followed by Paradise, or to meet his Lord now, and that he had already chosen. No one let the meaning land. They could not imagine the world without him ﷺ.
The fever, and the chamber he asked to rest in
وَمَا جَعَلْنَا لِبَشَرٍ مِّن قَبْلِكَ الْخُلْدَ ۖ أَفَإِن مِّتَّ فَهُمُ الْخَالِدُونَ
“And We did not grant to any man before you eternity [on earth]; so if you die - would they be eternal?”
Surah al-Anbiya 21:34 Read 21:34 with tafsir
The fever took hold in the house of Maymunah, around the first days of Rabi al-Awwal. It was a fierce illness, and they had no medicine for it, nothing to soften the pain the way we soften ours; the Prophet ﷺ himself had called fever a taste of the Fire in this world. For a few days he kept moving from house to house, fair to his wives to the very end, until he was too weak to manage it. Then he asked their permission, though by his rank he never needed to ask, to be allowed to rest in one chamber. They all agreed at once. It was the chamber of Aisha.
And here the Qur'an had already spoken the unspeakable: We did not grant eternity on this earth to any man before you, so if you die, would they live forever? If anyone in all of creation had a claim to live forever, it was him ﷺ. And even he was returning to his Lord. Aisha would recite over him and blow the prayers he had taught her, and keep a vessel of water beside him to cool the heat that the strongest of the companions said burned like the fever of ten men.
Settling every debt, and the door left open
When the fever rose, he wrapped a cloth tightly around his throbbing head and asked to be carried out to the people, leaning between Abbas his uncle and Ali. The masjid was already packed: word of his illness had spread, and the companions who had no house nearby were sleeping in the masjid out of sheer worry, the way you cannot sit still when someone you love is suffering. He climbed the minbar he could no longer stand on and began, gently, to set his affairs in order.
He warned them, with his own grave already on his mind, that Allah had cursed those before them who took the graves of their prophets as places of worship: do not do that to mine. Then he said something that pierced them. If I owe any of you a debt, come and take it now. If I have ever struck anyone unjustly, here is my back, take your right from me in this world before the Day of Judgment. He asked, and asked, and asked again, until a man, embarrassed, admitted three small silver coins, and the Prophet ﷺ had them paid at once. This is the man who held all of Arabia, making certain he met Allah owing no one anything.
Then he ordered every private door that opened into the masjid to be shut, every household's door but one. The door of Abu Bakr would stay open. The companions did not yet understand what they were being shown. Dr. Yasir Qadhi reads it the way they would only read it later: of all of them, Abu Bakr was being singled out and brought near.
A servant given the choice, and the friend who wept
From the minbar he told them of a servant of Allah who had been offered the choice between this world and what is with his Lord, and who had chosen his Lord. He said it in the third person, so most of them simply marveled at how fortunate that servant was. Only one man in the whole masjid began to weep, and weep hard, because only Abu Bakr understood that the servant was the Prophet ﷺ himself, and that he was saying goodbye.
The Prophet ﷺ looked at him in front of everyone and said: do not weep, Abu Bakr. You are the one I trust most in your companionship and your wealth, and were I to take a khalil, a dearest closest friend, from among mankind, it would be Abu Bakr. But Allah has already taken me as His khalil. Between us, though, is the brotherhood of Islam and its love. It is one of the tenderest moments in the whole seerah: a dying man comforting the friend who could not yet say out loud what he already knew.
Go and tell Abu Bakr to lead the people
Soon he could not stand long enough to lead the prayer himself. He tried; he fainted, was revived with water, asked have the people prayed, and tried again, and again, until his knees would not hold him. Then he said: tell Abu Bakr to lead the people in prayer. In ten years in Madinah, no one had ever led the prayer while the Prophet ﷺ was present in the city. The companions did not miss the weight of it.
Aisha, hearing her own father named, tried gently to turn him aside. My father is soft-hearted, she said, he weeps when he recites and the people will not hear him; choose someone else. It was not a lie, but it was not her real fear. She did not want her father blamed for pushing himself forward, and she dreaded that his standing in the Prophet's ﷺ place would forever be tied, in people's memory, to this loss. She enlisted Hafsa to plead the same case. And from his sickbed he saw straight through it: tell Abu Bakr to lead the people; Allah and the believers will accept none but Abu Bakr; you are like the women around Yusuf. So Abu Bakr led the prayers, and on one of those days the Prophet ﷺ found a little strength and was carried out and seated beside him, praying seated while Abu Bakr stood and the rows followed Abu Bakr. The people's eyes were on Abu Bakr; the true imam was the one sitting silently at his side. Dr. Yasir Qadhi calls it the clearest sign of all, given a day and a half before the end.
The last smile, the miswak, and the Highest Companion
On the morning of Monday the twelfth of Rabi al-Awwal, while Abu Bakr led the dawn prayer, the Prophet ﷺ pulled back the curtain of Aisha's chamber and looked out at his ummah standing in rows. The companions had not seen his face for two days, and Anas said they nearly broke their prayer for joy. He was smiling. Abu Bakr stepped back, thinking he was coming to lead, but he motioned to him to stay, and let the curtain fall. That smile, his ummah at prayer, was the last sight the companions had of his blessed face.
Then the fever climbed. Fatima came, and seeing her father in that pain she cried out how it grieved her, and he told her: your father will suffer nothing after today. He whispered to her that Jibril had reviewed the Qur'an with him twice this year and that he knew his time had come, and she wept; then he whispered again that she would be the first of his family to follow him, and the mistress of the women of Paradise, and she smiled through her tears, because she did not want a life without him in it. Aisha cradled his head against her chest. Her brother came in with a fresh miswak, and the Prophet ﷺ looked at it, and she understood, and softened it in her mouth and gave it to him, and he used it with a vigor that astonished her, clean and presentable to the very last, readying himself to meet Jibril. Then his eyes lifted, and his lips moved, and Aisha leaned close to hear. With those who have been blessed, he was saying, the prophets and the truthful and the martyrs. O Allah, forgive me and have mercy on me and join me with the Highest Companion. He said it three times. The last words were al-rafiq al-a'la, the Highest Companion, and he was gone. He passed ﷺ in her chamber, on her day, his head against her, a little after the sun had risen on a Monday. Of all Allah's gifts to her, Aisha said, this was among the greatest.
Whoever worshipped Muhammad ﷺ
وَمَا مُحَمَّدٌ إِلَّا رَسُولٌ قَدْ خَلَتْ مِن قَبْلِهِ الرُّسُلُ ۚ أَفَإِن مَّاتَ أَوْ قُتِلَ انقَلَبْتُمْ عَلَىٰ أَعْقَابِكُمْ ۚ وَمَن يَنقَلِبْ عَلَىٰ عَقِبَيْهِ فَلَن يَضُرَّ اللَّهَ شَيْئًا ۗ وَسَيَجْزِي اللَّهُ الشَّاكِرِينَ
“Muḥammad is not but a messenger. [Other] messengers have passed on before him. So if he was to die or be killed, would you turn back on your heels [to unbelief]? And he who turns back on his heels will never harm Allāh at all; but Allāh will reward the grateful.”
Surah al-Imran 3:144 Read 3:144 with tafsir
When the news broke, the companions came apart. Umar, the mountain of a man whom everyone feared, could not accept it; he stood in the masjid and swore the Prophet ﷺ had not died, that he had gone to his Lord as Musa once did and would return, and that he would strike the neck of anyone who said otherwise. It was not denial of the truth so much as a heart that could not survive the truth. Abu Bakr was away at his home; he had seen the smile that morning and thought the worst had passed. He rode back, went straight to his daughter's chamber, uncovered the Prophet's ﷺ face, kissed his forehead, and wept: how good you are in life and in death, O Messenger of Allah. Then he steadied himself and walked out to the people.
He told Umar to sit, and Umar, in shock, would not. So Abu Bakr stood, on the lower step of the minbar, for no one ever again climbed to the place where the Prophet ﷺ had stood, and he praised Allah, and said the words that held the ummah together on the worst day of its life: whoever used to worship Muhammad ﷺ, let him know that Muhammad ﷺ has died; and whoever worships Allah, then Allah is alive and never dies. And he recited this verse, the verse revealed years before at Uhud when they had first feared they had lost him: Muhammad is no more than a messenger; messengers have passed away before him; so if he dies or is killed, will you turn back on your heels? Umar said his legs gave way beneath him and he fell to the ground, and it was as if he were hearing the verse for the very first time. The grief was real and bottomless, but the faith did not turn back. Allah was still Allah.
The darkest day, and the brethren he longed to meet
They washed him ﷺ with his clothes on, the way they understood they were meant to, and shrouded him in three white garments with no turban, and they could not agree where to bury him until Abu Bakr remembered: a prophet is buried where he dies. So the grave was dug in the floor of Aisha's chamber, beneath the bed he had lain in. There was no khalifa yet to lead a funeral prayer, so the people of Madinah came in waves across two whole days, group after group, men then women then children, each praying over him alone. Anas, who had seen the Prophet ﷺ enter Madinah on its brightest day, said the day they buried him was the darkest of their lives, that Madinah went so dark with grief they felt they could not see their own hands.
And there is one word from these final days that reaches across the centuries to find us. He told the companions, near the end, how he longed to meet his brethren. Are we not your brethren, they asked. No, he said, you are my companions. My brethren are those who will come after you, who never saw me and yet believed in me, who would give up their wealth and their families just to see me once. He was speaking of people not yet born. He was, if we dare hope it, speaking of us. He never met us, but he loved us, and he asked Allah for us. The seerah ends not in a grave in Madinah but in that longing: that we love him ﷺ enough, and follow his Sunnah closely enough, that on the Day of Gathering he is glad to see us too.