The Suckling Verses: Recited at His Death, Absent from the Mushaf

A Sheet of Paper Under a Bed

Medina, the eleventh year of the Hijra. The Prophet of Islam has died, and his household is drowned in grief. The whole city is fixed on one room — the room of Aisha, where he drew his last breath. But according to a report preserved in Sunan Ibn Majah, something else was in that room: a written sheet, a sahifa, kept under the bed. On it, Aisha says, were verses — the verse of stoning, and the verse of suckling an adult ten times. And while the family was occupied with the death of the Prophet, a small domestic animal walked in and ate the sheet.

This is not a story invented by critics. It is a hadith in a canonical Sunni collection, narrated by the Mother of the Believers herself. Beside it stands a second report, this one in Sahih Muslim, in which Aisha states that verses of "ten known sucklings" were revealed as Quran, then abrogated by "five known sucklings" — and that these were still being recited as Quran when the Prophet died. Around these two texts, fourteen centuries of scholarship built careful structures: the doctrine of abrogated recitation, chains of transmission weighed narrator by narrator, and rules of law on which the madhhabs are divided to this day. Today we open those books.