The Prophet Muhammad Died in Medina
On this day · 8 June 632
After a single decade of preaching, the founder of Islam died in 632 having bound much of a fractured Arabia into one faith.
On June 8, 632, Muhammad died in Medina, the city in western Arabia that had sheltered him after his flight from Mecca a decade earlier. He was roughly sixty-two. According to tradition he succumbed to a sudden fever in the home of his wife Aisha, and was buried on the very spot where he died.
In just over twenty years of preaching, Muhammad had transformed a scattering of feuding desert tribes into a single religious and political community. His farewell pilgrimage to Mecca months earlier drew thousands, a measure of how far the new faith had spread across the Arabian Peninsula.
He left no son and named no clear successor, and the question of who should lead would shape Islam for centuries.
The vacuum opened a fierce debate over leadership. Muhammad’s close companion Abu Bakr was chosen as the first caliph, beginning the line of “rightly guided” successors. The split over rightful authority eventually hardened into the enduring divide between Sunni and Shia Muslims.
Sources & references
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