Les Derniers Jours de Muhammad

Hela Ouardi

4 ideas

1. The Thursday Calamity: A Refused Deathbed Document

   Days before his death in Medina in 632, the sick Prophet asks for something to write on so he can dictate a document that would keep his community from going astray. According to reports preserved in both Sunni and Shia sources, Umar objects that he is overcome by illness and that the Book of God suffices, a quarrel breaks out, and Muhammad sends everyone away with nothing written. Ouardi treats this 'calamity of Thursday' as the pivotal scene in which his last instructions, likely about succession, are blocked by his own companions.

2. Forced Medicine and the Khaybar Poison

   The sources report that while Muhammad was unconscious, members of his household forced a medicine (ladd) into his mouth against his earlier refusal. On waking, he ordered that everyone present be given the same dose, except his uncle al-Abbas.

3. Canonical Texts Read as a Case File

   Ouardi treats the canonical sources like witness statements in a cold case. She reads them for contradictions, silences and oddly specific details rather than for a single harmonized account. Because these texts were compiled generations later under rival political and sectarian pressures, the tensions they fail to smooth over become evidence of conflicts the compilers could not fully erase.

4. Succession Politics Outran the Burial

   Ouardi argues that the struggle for power began at the deathbed and overrode the obligations owed to the dead man. While Ali and the Prophet's family attended the body, Abu Bakr and Umar secured the leadership at the Saqifa assembly, and the burial was delayed, by one to three days depending on the source. The order of these events shows that controlling the succession mattered more to key companions than honoring the Prophet's final wishes or his corpse.

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