For about three months after returning from Mecca, Muhammad lived a normal life. He taught and led prayers, dealt with envoys from other parts of Arabia, and planned another military expedition to Syria. He may have begun to feel unwell but just pushed ahead, as people do. And then one day he came down with severe pain in his head. Still he led prayers and tried to act normal. He preached that there was a “servant” among God’s servants who had been offered everything in this life, or the things of God in the next, and that servant had chosen the things of God. His closest companions realized he was speaking of himself and predicting his death.
Muhammad lived on a schedule within his house; each wife had a room, and he went to each room in its turn. The first night he got sick, he was at Maymunah’s room; she was one of his most recent (and older) wives, a Qurayshi cousin. A’isha said that before he went to Maymunah’s room, he stopped to tell her he was very sick. For the first few days, he kept to his schedule, but as he grew feverish and in more pain, he began asking, “Where will I be tomorrow?” and they realized he was asking if it was A’isha’s turn yet. The wives decided to let the sick man be taken to A’isha’s room to stay.
The Syrian expedition lingered in Medina, instead of leaving. Muhammad had appointed Zaid’s son Usamah as commander, but Usamah was relatively young and at first the men didn’t want to follow him. Muhammad needed to make a personal appearance to address the problem, so he asked his wives to give him a special ritual washing before he went out. They had to bring seven buckets of water from seven wells. With this done, he appeared with assistance in the mosque (which was his courtyard, so quite nearby). With his direct affirmation of the appointment, the expedition set out. After this, Abu Bakr led the prayers.
Traditional Muslim narrative is that Muhammad’s illness was caused by a long-lasting effect from some poison fed to him by a Jewish woman at Khaybar. To me at least, this doesn’t make good sense because it had been about two years since then. His symptoms sound to me roughly like meningitis (severe headache and fever), so I wonder about amebic meningitis, caused by tainted water. It’s just speculation, of course. What we know is that he got sicker and sicker, for about ten days. Sound and light were painful.
His closest companions and immediate family came to sit with him. A sick room then, and certainly the sick room of an important leader, was not an isolated, quiet place. We know that Abu Bakr and Umar (whose daughters were his wives A’isha and Hafsah) and Uthman (who had married two of his daughters) were with him a lot; they were both friends and family. A team of scribes was in and out, and they included Mu’awiya, son of the powerful Abu Sufyan and Hind (the liver-eater). As we’ve seen with other famous men, “I was there at his sick bed” is a claim that many people want to make later. But to be sure, probably at least a hundred different people, kin and disciples, could make that claim.
Muhammad also had his blood kin, like Uncle Abbas and many cousins. Closest of all, Fatimah and Ali with their four children (two boys, two girls), also visited. A’isha tells that she would withdraw to give them privacy when they came. On one occasion, she saw from the doorway that Muhammad whispered something to Fatimah and she burst into tears. Then he whispered to her again, and she smiled. Later, A’isha asked Fatimah what that was about. Fatimah said that first he told her he was going to die of this illness, but then he told her that she would join him in Paradise next, so she smiled.
Near the end, Muhammad had mostly stopped speaking, but he struggled one day, sat up to drink some water, and asked for them to bring paper and pen (and, presumably, a scribe to use them). This particular story is not told by either Martin Lings or Mohiuddin’s fairly comprehensive book, so I’m indebted to Lesley Hazelton’s After the Prophet, which relates some Shi’ite stories. Hazelton tells that those around Muhammad stirred uneasily and began discussing what to do. Although they had always obeyed Muhammad without questions, now they hesitated. Maybe each thought another should go run the errand, while some argued that it was too taxing for the sick man at all. The way it worked out, they argued until the Prophet signaled that the noise was painful. He didn’t speak about it again.
The next day, when he died, he made a request to be specially washed and taken out to the mosque prayers. Abbas and Ali half carried him out, and then back in after prayers (led by Abu Bakr). A’isha says that Muhammad died while leaning on her, in her arms. Shi’ites report that Ali was the one holding the Prophet, his foster father, when he died. There’s no way for us to know which actually happened, and even at the time probably various hearsay versions passed quickly around the community.
It mattered so much because SO MANY people were closely related to the Prophet, and they needed to look for clues about who was preferred. For some, there was no open question: the successor was Ali, whether Muhammad died in his arms or not. Muhammad had climbed onto a dais of saddles three months before and said to everyone “If I am your guardian, then Ali is your guardian.” But Muhammad’s spiritual force of will had held the people together for 20 years, and with him gone, they were about to lapse into more typical human disunity and conflict faster than anyone imagined.