The Weeping Palm Trunk

In the mosque of Medina, the Prophet ﷺ delivered his sermons leaning against a palm trunk. The day a pulpit (minbar) was installed and he left the trunk, it moaned like a living being, until the Prophet ﷺ came to stroke — or in another version, embrace — it to soothe it. This is one of the most firmly attested miracles: reported by more than ten Companions, it reaches the degree of tawatur.

In the early days of Medina, the Prophet's ﷺ mosque was a simple construction of palm trunks and branches. When he addressed the faithful, the Prophet ﷺ would stand leaning against one of these trunks.

A Companion proposed having a pulpit (minbar) of three steps made for him, so he could stand higher and everyone could hear his Friday sermon. The Prophet ﷺ accepted.

But on the day he mounted the minbar, leaving the trunk he had stood by for so long, the trunk began to groan. Jabir ibn Abdillah reports that it was heard weeping like a camel with young, to the point of cracking. According to another version, it moaned like a child. The Prophet ﷺ came down, went to it and stroked it with his hand — in one version, he embraced it — until it was soothed, 'as the suckling child is soothed when comforted.'

It is reported that the trunk was weeping for the remembrance of God (dhikr) it used to hear in the Prophet's ﷺ presence. Later, when the mosque was rebuilt, the Companion Ubayy ibn Ka'b took this trunk and kept it in his home, until time and termites reduced it to dust.

This account is the opposite of a doubtful story. Far from being a legend with a weak chain, the groaning of the trunk (hanin al-jidh') is classified as tawatur — the highest degree of certainty in hadith scholarship, reached when so many independent transmitters report the same fact that a concerted fabrication becomes impossible. Ibn Kathir enumerates more than ten Companions who reported it (Ubayy, Jabir, Anas, Ibn Umar, Ibn Abbas, Sahl ibn Sa'd...), and it appears in Sahih al-Bukhari (no. 918 and 3583-3584). An honest nuance nonetheless: the core of the account — the trunk groans and the Prophet ﷺ soothes it — is authentic and tawatur. But certain additions sometimes heard (for example a dialogue in which the Prophet ﷺ offers to replant the trunk in Paradise) come from weaker chains outside the Two Sahihs. We report the solid, signal the fragile, and do not mix them.

The weeping trunk recalls that even the inanimate can feel the absence of the Prophet ﷺ and the love of God's remembrance. If a piece of wood wept with longing for the dhikr it used to hear, what should the ardour of a human heart be?