"We Prophets Leave No Inheritance": Abu Bakr's Solitary Narration, Fatima's Claim, and the Case of Fadak

The Caliph, the Daughter, and Six Months of Silence

Medina, in the days after the Prophet's death. His daughter Fatima — the only one of his children to outlive him — comes to the man the community has just chosen as its leader. She asks for what any daughter in Medina could ask for: her father's inheritance. A share of Khaybar, and a farm called Fadak. Abu Bakr answers her with a single sentence which, he says, he heard from her father himself — and no one else in the room is recorded as producing that sentence with him at that moment. On the strength of it, the property did not change hands. What followed is told by Sahih al-Bukhari, the most authoritative hadith collection of Sunni Islam: the Prophet's daughter went home angry, never spoke to Abu Bakr again, died within six months, and was buried at night — the caliph not informed of her funeral.

Nearly every word of the previous paragraph comes from Sunni sources. The argument over what those words mean has continued for fourteen centuries.