The crying tree trunk

For the first years of the Masjid al-Nabawī, there was no minbar. When the Prophet ﷺ stood to deliver the Friday sermon, he leaned against the trunk of a date palm that had been set into the earth of the masjid. He would rest his back against it. He would place his hand on it as he spoke. The Companions who sat close saw this every week. It was not a decoration. It was a thing that carried him while he spoke to them, in the way a wall carries a leaning man.

Then the community grew, and standing became difficult, and a woman of the Anṣār — the narrations differ slightly on who she was — sent word that she had a carpenter among her household and that she would have a minbar built for him. He ﷺ accepted. The minbar was built. It was small. Three steps. On the next Friday, he ﷺ walked past the trunk of the date palm and mounted the minbar, and he began his sermon from there.

What the Companions heard

The narration is in Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī, and it is one of those narrations that is so widely transmitted that the scholars call it mutawātir bi-l-maʿnā — narrated by so many, from so many, that its meaning cannot be doubted. It is not a private report. Jābir ibn ʿAbd Allāh, Anas ibn Mālik, Ibn ʿAbbās, Ubayy ibn Kaʿb, Sahl ibn Saʿd — Companions who did not usually narrate the same incidents narrate this one. Because they all heard it.

They heard the trunk cry.

The word used in the ḥadīth is حَنِين — ḥanīn — the low, longing sound that a she-camel makes for her calf when the calf is taken from her. Anas says the trunk wept until the masjid trembled with the sound of it. Ibn ʿAbbās says it cried like a small child. Jābir says it sobbed like a boy being consoled. They are not competing. They are reaching, each of them, for a comparison that will carry the sound to someone who did not hear it. And the reaching is itself a kind of testimony — that the thing they were describing was not a creak in the wood, not a settling in the timbers of a hot afternoon, but a voice.

The Prophet ﷺ stepped down from the minbar. He walked to the trunk. He put his arms around it. And he held it — the way a person holds a person — until the crying stopped.

What was actually happening

There is a way of reading this incident that treats it as a curiosity — a small, sweet miracle among a longer catalogue. That reading undersells it. To see what was happening, you have to hold two things together at once.

The first is the theology. The Qurʾān says plainly, in Sūrat al-Isrāʾ, that وَإِن مِّن شَيْءٍ إِلَّا يُسَبِّحُ بِحَمْدِهِ وَلَٰكِن لَّا تَفْقَهُونَ تَسْبِيحَهُمْ — there is nothing that does not exalt Him with praise, but you do not understand their exaltation. The created world is not silent. It is speaking; we simply do not hear it. Every stone, every leaf, every piece of wood is engaged in تَسْبِيح — an active, ongoing declaration of the transcendence of its Lord. The default state of a tree, in the Qurʾānic account, is that it is praising.

The second is what such a tree would experience when the one who was most beloved to its Lord stood against it, week after week, while that praise was being offered. The trunk was not a passive backrest. It was a piece of the created order that had been placed in nearer proximity to the Prophet ﷺ than nearly anything else in the masjid. And when that proximity was withdrawn — when the minbar was built and the Prophet ﷺ walked past it — the trunk did what a creature does when it is separated from what it loves.

Al-Ḥasan al-Baṣrī used to weep when this ḥadīth was mentioned. He would say: if a piece of wood cried out of longing for him ﷺ, then a believer has more right to long for him. The comparison is exact. And it is uncomfortable, which is why it is exact. The wood, being wood, could not conceal its longing. We can.

The embrace

There is a detail in some of the narrations that I keep returning to. When the Prophet ﷺ embraced the trunk, and the crying began to subside, he ﷺ was heard to say to it — quietly, the way you speak to something you love that is in pain — that if he had not embraced it, it would have continued weeping until the Day of Judgment.

Read that sentence again slowly. He ﷺ did not console the trunk with an argument. He did not explain to it why the minbar was necessary. He embraced it. And then, in some narrations, he ﷺ gave it a choice: it could be planted in Paradise, where it would drink from its rivers and bear fruit that the friends of Allah would eat, or it could remain in the earth of the masjid as it had been. The narration says he chose the first for it, and had it buried beneath the minbar, so that it would rise again on the Day when the earth gives back what has been given to it.

The whole incident lasts, in the reports, perhaps a few minutes of a Friday morning. But everything essential to what love for the Prophet ﷺ is supposed to feel like is inside those few minutes. The nearness. The withdrawal. The unconcealed crying. The embrace that does not argue. The promise of a garden.

Where the trunk still cries

I want to be careful here. It would be easy to reach for the sentimental conclusion — are we not less than a tree, if we do not weep for him? — and something in me resists it, because sentimentality about the Prophet ﷺ is one of the ways the love of him is quietly cheapened. The Companions did not perform their love for him. They lived near him, and near-ness had consequences.

What the trunk shows is that near-ness is real. It is not a feeling. It is not a metaphor. It is a physical fact about the created order — that to be near the beloved of Allah is to be changed by that nearness, and to be separated from that nearness is to feel the separation whether one has the words for it or not.

We are further from him ﷺ than a wooden post in the masjid, and yet we have been given something the post was not given — the words he spoke, the sunnah he left, the ṣalawāt we send upon him, which reach him and are answered. The trunk had proximity without means. We have means without proximity. Neither of these is the full thing. But the means are what we have, and the means, when they are used, close the distance the trunk was crying about.

إِنَّ اللَّهَ وَمَلَائِكَتَهُ يُصَلُّونَ عَلَى النَّبِيِّ ۚ يَا أَيُّهَا الَّذِينَ آمَنُوا صَلُّوا عَلَيْهِ وَسَلِّمُوا تَسْلِيمًا

Indeed, Allah and His angels send blessings upon the Prophet. O you who believe, send blessings upon him and greet him with peace. (al-Aḥzāb 33:56)

The trunk cried because it was near him and could not follow. We send ṣalawāt because we cannot yet be near him — and every one of them, we are told, is a step closed. Allāhumma ṣalli ʿalā sayyidinā Muḥammad wa ʿalā ālihi wa ṣaḥbihi wa sallim.

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