DETIK-DETIK WAFATNYA NABI MUHAMMAD SAW ::

Sebelum malaikat Izrail diperintah Allah SWT untuk mencabut nyawa Nabi Muhammad SAW, Allah SWT berpesan kepada malaikat Jibril. “Hai Jibril, jika kekasih-Ku menolaknya, laranglah Izrail melakukan tugasnya!” Sungguh berharganya manusia yang satu ini yang tidak lain adalah Nabi Muhammad SAW.

Di rumah Nabi Muhammad SAW, Tiba-tiba dari luar pintu terdengar seorang yang berseru mengucapkan salam. “Bolehkah saya masuk?” tanyanya. Tapi Fatimah tidak mengizinkannya masuk sambil berkata, “Maafkanlah, ayahku sedang demam” kata Fatimah yang membalikkan badan dan menutup pintu. Kemudian Fatimah kembali menemani Nabi Muhammad SAW yang ternyata sudah membuka mata dan bertanya pada Fatimah, “Siapakah itu wahai anakku?”. “Tak tahulah ayahku, sepertinya orang baru, karena baru sekali ini aku melihatnya” tutur Fatimah lembut.

Lalu, Rasulullah menatap puterinya dengan pandangan yang menggetarkan. Seolah-olah bahagian demi bahagian wajah anaknya itu hendak dikenang. “Ketahuilah wahai anakku, dialah yang menghapuskan kenikmatan sementara, dialah yang memisahkan pertemuan di dunia. Dialah malaikatul maut” kata Rasulullah, Fatimah pun menahan ledakan tangisnya. Malaikat maut pun datang menghampiri, tapi Rasulullah menanyakan kenapa Jibril tidak ikut bersama menyertainya.

Kemudian dipanggillah Jibril yang sebelumnya sudah bersiap di atas langit dunia menyambut ruh kekasih Allah SWT dan penghulu dunia ini. “Jibril, jelaskan apa hakku nanti di hadapan Allah?” Tanya Rasululllah dengan suara yang amat lemah. “Pintu-pintu langit telah terbuka, para malaikat telah menanti ruhmu. Semua surga terbuka lebar menanti kedatanganmu” kata malaikat Jibril.

Tapi itu ternyata tidak membuat Rasulullah lega, matanya masih penuh kecemasan. “Engkau tidak senang mendengar khabar ini?” Tanya Jmalaikat ibril lagi. “Kabarkan kepadaku bagaimana nasib umatku kelak?” “Jangan khawatir, wahai Rasul Allah, aku pernah mendengar bahwa Allah berfirman kepadaku: Kuharamkan surga bagi siapa saja, kecuali umat Muhammad telah berada di dalamnya” kata malaikat Jibril. Detik-detik semakin dekat, saatnya malaikat Izrail melakukan tugasnya. Perlahan ruh Rasulullah ditarik.

Nampak seluruh tubuh Rasulullah bersimbah peluh, urat-urat lehernya menegang. “Jibril, betapa sakit sakaratul maut ini.” Perlahan Rasulullah mengaduh. Fatimah terpejam, Ali yang di sampingnya menunduk semakin dalam dan Jibril memalingkan muka. “Jijikkah kau melihatku, hingga kau palingkan wajahmu Jibril?” Tanya Rasulullah pada Malaikat pengantar wahyu itu. “Siapakah yang sanggup, melihat kekasih Allah direnggut ajal” kata Jibril.

Sebentar kemudian terdengar Rasulullah mengaduh, karena sakit yang tidak tertahankan lagi. “Ya Allah, dahsyat sekali maut ini, timpakan saja semua siksa maut ini kepadaku, jangan pada umatku” Badan Rasulullah mulai dingin, kaki dan dadanya sudah tidak bergerak lagi. Bibirnya bergetar seakan hendak membisikkan sesuatu, Ali mendekatkan telinganya. “Uushiikum bis-shalaati, wamaa malakat aimaanukum (peliharalah shalat dan peliharalah orang-orang lemah di antaramu)”.

Di luar, pintu tangis mulai terdengar bersahutan, sahabat saling berpelukan. Fatimah menutupkan tangan di wajahnya, dan Ali kembali mendekatkan telinganya ke bibir Rasulullah yang mulai kebiruan. “Ummatii, ummatii, ummatiii! (Umatku, umatku, umatku)”. Dan, berakhirlah hidup manusia yang paling mulia yang memberi sinaran itu. Allaahumma sholli ‘alaa Muhammad wa’alaihi wasahbihi wasallim.

Ya Allah, Berikanlah untuk Muhammad “al wasilah” (derajat) dan keutamaan. Dan tempatkanlah ia di tempat terpuji sebagaimana yang telah Engkau janjikan”. Betapa mendalam cinta Rasulullah kepada kita ummatnya, bahkan diakhir kehidupannya hanya kita yang ada dalam fikirannya. Sakitnya sakaratul maut itu tetapi sedikit sekali kita mengingatnya bahkan untuk sekedar menyebut namanya.

Maulana Lee (galipat)

Late in April, after Native American actors walked off in disgust from the set of Adam Sandler’s latest film, a western sendup that its distributor, Netflix, has defended as being equally offensive to all, a glow of pride spread through several Native American communities.

Tantoo Cardinal, a Canadian indigenous actress who played Black Shawl in “Dances With Wolves,” recalled thinking to herself, “It’s come.” Larry Sellers, who starred as Cloud Dancing in the 1990s television show “Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman,” thought, “It’s about time.” Jesse Wente, who is Ojibwe and directs film programming at the TIFF Bell Lightbox in Toronto, found himself encouraged and surprised. There are so few film roles for indigenous actors, he said, that walking off the set of a major production showed real mettle.

But what didn’t surprise Mr. Wente was the content of the script. According to the actors who walked off the set, the film, titled “The Ridiculous Six,” included a Native American woman who passes out and is revived after white men douse her with alcohol, and another woman squatting to urinate while lighting a peace pipe. “There’s enough history at this point to have set some expectations around these sort of Hollywood depictions,” Mr. Wente said.

The walkout prompted a rhetorical “What do you expect from an Adam Sandler film?,” and a Netflix spokesman said that in the movie, blacks, Mexicans and whites were lampooned as well. But Native American actors and critics said a broader issue was at stake. While mainstream portrayals of native peoples have, Mr. Wente said, become “incrementally better” over the decades, he and others say, they remain far from accurate and reflect a lack of opportunities for Native American performers. What’s more, as Native Americans hunger for representation on screen, critics say the absence of three-dimensional portrayals has very real off-screen consequences.

“Our people are still healing from historical trauma,” said Loren Anthony, one of the actors who walked out. “Our youth are still trying to figure out who they are, where they fit in this society. Kids are killing themselves. They’re not proud of who they are.” They also don’t, he added, see themselves on prime time television or the big screen. Netflix noted while about five people walked off the “The Ridiculous Six” set, 100 or so Native American actors and extras stayed.

But in interviews, nearly a dozen Native American actors and film industry experts said that Mr. Sandler’s humor perpetuated decades-old negative stereotypes. Mr. Anthony said such depictions helped feed the despondency many Native Americans feel, with deadly results: Native Americans have the highest suicide rate out of all the country’s ethnicities.

The on-screen problem is twofold, Mr. Anthony and others said: There’s a paucity of roles for Native Americans — according to the Screen Actors Guild in 2008 they accounted for 0.3 percent of all on-screen parts (those figures have yet to be updated), compared to about 2 percent of the general population — and Native American actors are often perceived in a narrow way.

In his Peabody Award-winning documentary “Reel Injun,” the Cree filmmaker Neil Diamond explored Hollywood depictions of Native Americans over the years, and found they fell into a few stereotypical categories: the Noble Savage, the Drunk Indian, the Mystic, the Indian Princess, the backward tribal people futilely fighting John Wayne and manifest destiny. While the 1990 film “Dances With Wolves” won praise for depicting Native Americans as fully fleshed out human beings, not all indigenous people embraced it. It was still told, critics said, from the colonialists’ point of view. In an interview, John Trudell, a Santee Sioux writer, actor (“Thunderheart”) and the former chairman of the American Indian Movement, described the film as “a story of two white people.”

“God bless ‘Dances with Wolves,’ ” Michael Horse, who played Deputy Hawk in “Twin Peaks,” said sarcastically. “Even ‘Avatar.’ Someone’s got to come save the tribal people.”

Dan Spilo, a partner at Industry Entertainment who represents Adam Beach, one of today’s most prominent Native American actors, said while typecasting dogs many minorities, it is especially intractable when it comes to Native Americans. Casting directors, he said, rarely cast them as police officers, doctors or lawyers. “There’s the belief that the Native American character should be on reservations or riding a horse,” he said.

“We don’t see ourselves,” Mr. Horse said. “We’re still an antiquated culture to them, and to the rest of the world.”

Ms. Cardinal said she was once turned down for the role of the wife of a child-abusing cop because the filmmakers felt that casting her would somehow be “too political.”

Another sore point is the long run of white actors playing American Indians, among them Burt Lancaster, Rock Hudson, Audrey Hepburn and, more recently, Johnny Depp, whose depiction of Tonto in the 2013 film “Lone Ranger,” was viewed as racist by detractors. There are, of course, exceptions. The former A&E series “Longmire,” which, as it happens, will now be on Netflix, was roundly praised for its depiction of life on a Northern Cheyenne reservation, with Lou Diamond Phillips, who is of Cherokee descent, playing a Northern Cheyenne man.

Others also point to the success of Mr. Beach, who played a Mohawk detective in “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” and landed a starring role in the forthcoming D C Comics picture “Suicide Squad.” Mr. Beach said he had come across insulting scripts backed by people who don’t see anything wrong with them.

“I’d rather starve than do something that is offensive to my ancestral roots,” Mr. Beach said. “But I think there will always be attempts to drawn on the weakness of native people’s struggles. The savage Indian will always be the savage Indian. The white man will always be smarter and more cunning. The cavalry will always win.”

The solution, Mr. Wente, Mr. Trudell and others said, lies in getting more stories written by and starring Native Americans. But Mr. Wente noted that while independent indigenous film has blossomed in the last two decades, mainstream depictions have yet to catch up. “You have to stop expecting for Hollywood to correct it, because there seems to be no ability or desire to correct it,” Mr. Wente said.

There have been calls to boycott Netflix but, writing for Indian Country Today Media Network, which first broke news of the walk off, the filmmaker Brian Young noted that the distributor also offered a number of films by or about Native Americans.

The furor around “The Ridiculous Six” may drive more people to see it. Then one of the questions that Mr. Trudell, echoing others, had about the film will be answered: “Who the hell laughs at this stuff?”