However...

However, some of the audience, through their special political guess-work, understood the reason for the demand of the pen. So they opposed the Prophet's orders and did not provide him with it.

While weeping profusely Ibn Abbas used to say: the Muslims’ calamity started on the day where the Prophet, severely ill, asked for a pen so that he could write something which could stop the Muslims’ misery after his death but at this moment there was a dispute among those present: some agreed, but others disagreed. Finally, seeing this opposition, the Prophet gave up doing what he had planned to.

[^2] Upon the death of Zayd Ibn Haritha, the army commander, in the war with the Romans, the Prophet, in his last days, started collecting some troops and made some distinguished men of Muhajirs and Ansars its members and appointed Usamah as the army commander. He then prepared a flag and submitted it to Usamah but that day the Prophet had come down with a fever which caused him to fall ill. At this time there started confusion and disagreements among the Prophet's close followers.

Some became upset over Usamah's election as the leader and angrily asked the Prophet to take away that position from him. A group for whom the Prophet's death was imminent refused to attend the battlefields rationalizing that it was not advisable to leave Medina at such a critical moment. Whenever the Prophet became aware of his army-men's negligence to carry out their military operations, he would become furious and irritated and would issue strict orders to them to leave for the roman borders.

Despite the orders however some of the troops ignored the Prophet's commands and preferred to follow their own wishes. The objections of some of the Prophet's followers to his orders far exceeded these two cases. Such people expressed their disagreement towards the Prophet even at Hudabiyyah while the Prophet was convening a peace treaty with the Quraish.

The objections of such people to the Prophet's orders after his death are more, because these people changed the quality of prayer and call for prayer and ignored the verse on temporary marriage and performed the special prayers of Ramadan in congregation while they had to be performed individually. They brought forth some other changes in inheritance laws as well. The elaboration of each one of these distortions, disturbances and conflicts is beyond the scope of the present book.