Hussein. They were the outward expression of
abandonment, of being abandoned and of abandoning
oneself to mourning—not only for the one who had died
but for themselves, leaderless, without him.
“We were like sheep on a rainy night,” one of the
Emigrants was to recall—moving this way and that in
panic, with nobody to guide them and no shelter to be
found. How could the Prophet be dead? Hadn’t they just
seen him in the mosque, his face radiant as they chanted
the responses to prayer? It was so awful a thing to
contemplate, so impossible to get one’s mind around,
that even Omar, the bravest of warriors, could not
absorb it. The man who had asserted with such
authority that the Book of God, the Quran, was
suɽcient, now refused to accept that death had won the
day.
It could not be so, Omar insisted. It was heresy even to
entertain such an idea. Muhammad was gone only for
the moment. There would be a resurrection, as there had
been with the last great prophet, Jesus. The Messenger
would return from the dead and lead his people to the
Day of Judgment. And in a panic of blind grief, before
anyone could stop him, this most severe of men stood up
in the forecourt of the mosque and berated the fearful
crowd.
“By God, he is not dead,” he declared, even as the tears
ran down his face and over his beard. “He has gone to