But Ali would hear nothing of it. “By God I will not,”
he said. “If it is withheld from us, none after him will
give it to us.” Not even Ali, it seemed, was ready for too
much clarity.
By then, in any case, it was too late. Even as the two
men were talking, Muhammad lapsed into
unconsciousness, and this time he did not recover. By
noon of that Monday, June 8 in the year 632, he was
dead.
He died, Aisha would say, with his head on her breast
—or, as the original Arabic has it with vivid delicacy,
“between my lungs and my lips.” That is the Sunni
version. But the Shia say that Muhammad’s head lay not
on Aisha’s breast but on Ali’s. It was Ali’s arms that
cradled the dying prophet in his last moments, they say,
and Ali who heard the Prophet, with his dying breath,
repeat his chilling last words three times: “Oh God, have
pity on those who will succeed me.”
Who held the dying prophet matters. Whose ears heard
that ɹnal breath, whose skin it touched, whose arms
supported him as he passed from life to death matter
with particular intensity. It is as though his last breath
had carried his spirit, leaping from his body at the
precise moment of death to enter the soul of the one who
held him. That was the person who held not only the
past but the future of Islam in his arms. Or hers.