Free After the Prophet: The Epic Story of the Shia-Sunni Split in Islam by Lesley Hazleton

It spoke of ultimate agony, of pain and sorrow beyond all comprehension, and it spread through the oasis at the speed of sound.
    Men and women, old and young, everyone took up the wail and surrendered themselves to it. They slapped their faces with both hands, a rapid rat-a-tat on either cheek; beat their chests with clenched fists so that the sound echoed as though the whole torso were a hollow tree; raked their foreheads with their fingernails until blood streaked down over their eyes and their tears were stained red; scooped up handfuls of dust from the ground and poured it over their heads, abasing themselves in despair. These were the time-honored rituals of grief, the same public rituals still carried out every year at Ashura, when the Shia mourn the tragic death of Ali’s son 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 sufficient, 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 his lord as the prophet Moses went and was hidden from his people for forty days, returning to them after it was said that he had died. By God, the Messenger will return as Moses returned and will cut off the hands and feet of all men who allege that he is dead!”
    But if this was intended to calm the wailing crowd, it had the opposite effect. The sight of Omar in hysterical denial only gave rise to greater panic. It took the small, elderly figure of Abu Bakr to pull Omar back. “Gently, gently,” he said, “be quiet”—and one can almost hear it, the soothing tone, urging calmness as he took the towering warrior by the arm and slowly led him aside, then took his place before the terrified throng.
    His voice was startlingly strong, not at all what one would expect from such a frail body, and though the message he delivered was a terrible one, it was also oddly reassuring. “For those who worshiped Muhammad,Muhammad is dead,” he announced. “For those who worship God, God is alive, immortal.” The Messenger is dead, long live Islam.
    There was a sudden silence as Abu Bakr’s words sank in, and then Omar’s knees gave way and he collapsed to the ground, bent over in agonized tears. The older man’s calm realism had subdued the terrifying giant, turned him into a weeping child, and as Abu Bakr continued, reciting the revelation that was to become part of Sura 3 of the Quran, everyone wept along with Omar.
    “Muhammad is naught but a Messenger,” Abu Bakr declaimed. “Messengers have passed away before him. Why, if he should die or be slain, should you turn back on your heels?”
    And with this confirmation of mortality, as the tears flowed and the agonized wailing continued through the day and far into the night so that even the pack animals were restless in their pens and the jackals and hyenas in the