6 answers to the claim that the Prophet died from poisoning

Khaybar happened in year 7 after the migration to Medina. He died in year 11.^[1]

In between he led the lesser pilgrimage to Mecca under the treaty of Hudaybiyyah, took Mecca itself with almost no bloodshed, fought the tribes at Hunayn, led the long march to Tabuk, received delegations from across Arabia, and delivered the farewell sermon at the pilgrimage of year 10 to a very large crowd. At that gathering the verse came down, “Today I have perfected your religion for you.”^[2]

If the poison killed him, it took four years to do it while he ran a military and political campaign. Poison does not behave that way, and the sources do not say it did. The critic’s strongest point is the verse in which God tells him that he will be protected from the people.^[2] The same Quran says that messengers passed away before him, and asks whether, if he dies or is killed, his followers will turn back. The protection promised is for the delivery of the message, and that message was delivered in full.

Bishr ibn al-Barāʾ, a Companion of the Ansar, ate from the same dish. He died of it. The accounts differ on how quickly: some say he died where he sat, others that he sickened and died some time afterwards.^[3] In every version he died long before the Prophet.

Same meal. Same poison. One man dead, the other alive for another four years. The reports also say that the Prophet took a morsel and spat it out, which is why the dose he received was small.

Anyone using this episode to argue that God failed to protect his prophet has to explain the companion who received no protection whatsoever and died exactly as you would expect. The difference between the two men is the thing the sources put at the centre of the story: one of them was warned.

Asked why she had done it, the woman said she wanted to find out what he was. A king, and she would be rid of him. A prophet, and she assumed he would be told. The early sources name her as Zaynab bint al-Harith, whose relatives had been killed in the fighting at Khaybar.^[3]

That is her framing, from the narrations, not something an apologist bolted on later.

The same narrations say he stopped the meal and told everyone to take their hands off the food because the foreleg had informed him it was poisoned. Believe that or do not. But the polemic needs the narration where he eats and needs to bin the narration where he is warned, and both come from the same collections through the same chains.

The reports also differ on her fate. The narration of Anas in Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim says he did not punish her, and notes that Anas kept seeing a mark of the poison on the Prophet’s palate.^[4] Other accounts say she was handed over for retaliation once Bishr had died. Scholars have joined the two by holding that he pardoned her at first, and gave her up when a family claimed its right. Picking one report and dumping the other requires a reason. So far the only reason on offer is that one produces the desired conclusion.

The narration everyone cites has ʿĀʾishah reporting that in his final illness he said he still felt what he had eaten at Khaybar, and that he felt at that moment as though his aorta were being cut.

Read it again. That is a man describing pain, using a simile. The illness the sources describe in his last days is a fever with severe headache, which came on a couple of months after the farewell pilgrimage and ran for ten days or more, during which he continued to lead the prayer for a time and to give instructions to the community.

Some exegetes concluded the poison contributed to his death. Others held the narration records sensation and nothing more. Muslim scholars have argued about it openly for centuries, which tells you the sources are not hiding anything. You cannot suppress a text you have been publicly disputing for generations. Nothing in the report gives poison as the cause of death, and the people who transmitted it were the same ones who transmitted his warning at the table.

Take the strongest version of the claim: the poison contributed.

The polemicist assumes that is damaging. Inside the tradition it is the opposite, because a man who dies from such an injury holds the rank of martyr, and some reports and scholars describe the Prophet’s death in just those terms: God gave him martyrdom as well as prophethood. The Quran gives the martyr a high rank, and Islam counts suffering as no mark against a prophet.

Worth remembering who else the objection catches. The Hebrew prophets were killed in numbers, and scripture itself laments it. The Quran says the same of earlier Israelites, that they killed prophets without right.^[5] Jesus, on the Christian account, was tortured and executed by the state.

A theology that treats violent death as disqualifying has a much bigger problem than Muhammad.

Where does the expectation of immunity even come from? Usually Mark 16:18, the promise that believers will pick up snakes and drink deadly poison unharmed.^[6]

That verse sits in the longer ending of Mark, verses 9 to 20. It is missing from the earliest and best Greek manuscripts, including the great fourth-century codices Sinaiticus and Vaticanus, and most modern critical editions and printed Bibles flag it as doubtful in a footnote or set it apart on the page. The early Church writers Eusebius and Jerome both observed that nearly all the Greek copies they knew ended at verse 8.

The test the Hebrew Bible actually gives for a false prophet is different: his prophecy fails to come true, or he calls people to other gods.^[7] Poison does not appear in it anywhere. By that test the Prophet stands where the Torah puts a true prophet, since he called to the one God and his word came to pass.