Why didn't the Prophet (saw) write a Will regarding his inheritance?

[Hani]

al-Salamu `Aleykum,


The Muslims were ordered to write wills, because they worked, they owned shops, they owned lands, they had wealth, they had debts... So Allah ordered that they write their Wasiyyah or "will" to clear it all out, and they all wrote their wills and many wills can be found in the books of Hadith such as that of `Ali (ra). Allah (swt) mentioned in Surat al-Baqarah verse 180, Surat al-Nisa' verse 11 and Surat al-Ma'idah verse 106 for the Muslims to write such documents.


Question to the Imami Rafidhah who claim the Prophet (saw) had left behind a great inheritance, WHY DID HE NOT WRITE A WILL? Usually when men write wills there are witnesses and it becomes an official document, why did he (saw) not do this if he really did leave behind wealth as you claim?


wal-Salamu `Aleykum,

[Husayn]

Assalamu Alaikum,

Standard Shi'i response will be "Event of Thursday". The Prophet (SAWS) apparently waited until he was near death / very sick to write out his will, and then the murtad companions stopped him from doing so.

[Hani]

wa `Aleykum al-Salam,

There are four problems with this response:


1- He (saw) was not writing his "Will", he only said "Let me write for you a thing after which you will never go astray." Thus this cannot be used as evidence for him writing a "Will" as it does not declare that this document was a "Will", this evidence falls.


2- He (saw) had more days to live, yet he still never wrote a "Will", nor did we hear that he asked `Ali (ra) or anyone else to write his "Will" for him.


3- Authentic traditions state explicitly that he never wrote a Will, more than one Hadith clearly state that he didn't write one and that he only ordered them to hold on to the Qur'an.

4- In Islam we don't only wait until our death to write a "Will" we do not know when we will die as mentioned in the book of Allah, so we must always have a Will ready.


And so, all evidence points to what we said in our opening post.

[muslim720]

Salaam alaykum,
It is no secret that our Shia brothers use the "Tragedy of Thursday" to prove that the Prophet [saw] was about to dictate a will, in other words, inform us about the Imamat (of Ali r.a.)  Yet, I read somewhere, that this narration is no where in Shia texts.

Interestingly, the one time (as it is alleged) that the Prophet [saw] came so close to writing about Imamat was somehow missed by the infallible Imams [ra]..........they somehow forgot to narrate it to their "followers".

[Suleiman]

A pretty decent, fairly unbiased analysis here:

[Furkan]

Brother muslim720, welcome to TS.