Demise of Father Abdullah in Yathrib

The caravan that carried Abdullah ibn Abdul-Muttalib out of Makkah was part of the rhythm by which the Quraysh lived, the winter and summer journeys that the Qur'an itself would one day memorialise in the chapter named for them. Ibn Sa'd, transmitting from al-Waqidi, states that Abdullah went off to Ghazza, Gaza, in a trading caravan of Quraysh; Martin Lings says simply that he had gone for trade to Palestine and Syria with one of the caravans, and on his way home he lodged with his grandmother's family in Yathrib. The trade of Makkah ran through a string of ancient markets toward Syria, and the young men of Quraysh earned their place in its caravans by trustworthiness and diligence. Abdullah went, as the accounts imply, shortly after his marriage, leaving behind in Makkah his bride Aminah with the blessed conception already begun, though he could not have known the full weight of what he left, nor what awaited him on the road. The journey north was long, measured in weeks, through valleys and along caravan tracks where illness was the traveller's constant companion.

The world into which Abdullah rode was a world of distances without mercy. The caravans of Quraysh moved at the pace of laden camels, watering at wells a day apart, sleeping at stations whose names the later Seerah literature kept, and exposed on every stage to fevers that the medicine of that age could neither name nor master. To fall gravely ill far from Makkah was a calamity the Arabs knew well, and their poetry is full of the grief of those who died among strangers; but Abdullah was not among strangers, for the route home passed by Yathrib, the town of his grandmother's clan, and the kin of Salma bint Amr would receive him as a son of their house. In the providence of Allah, the lonely road was furnished with family at the exact point where the journey would break him. What comfort for every believer who walks a hard road: Allah, Glorified and Exalted be He, had prepared the shelter before the sickness arrived, and the kinsmen of Yathrib were standing at their doors before Abdullah ever knew he would need them.

The purpose of the journey was accomplished; the caravan finished its business and turned south toward home. But on the return, in the town of Yathrib, Abdullah was overtaken by sickness. Lings records that he had lodged with his grandmother's family there, and the fuller reports explain the connection: Abdullah's grandmother Salma bint Amr, the mother of Abdul-Muttalib, had been a woman of Banu Adi ibn al-Najjar of the Khazraj, so that the clan of al-Najjar in Yathrib were the Prophet's kin through his great-grandmother, and were known in the household as his maternal uncles. The oasis town, with its groves of date palms and its mixed settlement of Arabs and Jews, lay on the route that the Syrian caravans of Quraysh commonly took, and its hospitality to a sick traveller among his own kinsmen was a matter of course. Abdullah was made comfortable among Banu Adi ibn al-Najjar, and his companions in the caravan went on ahead to Makkah without him, promising to send word and expecting his recovery.

Al-Waqidi's account, which Ibn Kathir transmits through Ibn Sa'd with its full chain, states that Abdullah stayed with them sick for one month while his friends continued back to Makkah. There Abdul-Muttalib asked them about his son, and they told him that Abdullah had fallen sick and had been left in the care of his relatives of Banu Adi ibn al-Najjar. The old chief, whose love for this youngest son was the love of a lifetime, immediately sent to him his oldest son al-Harith, with instructions to accompany his brother home as soon as he should be well enough to travel. Al-Harith made the journey north with the anxiety that any brother would feel, and the tradition preserves the moment of his arrival with terrible economy: when he reached the house of his Yathrib cousins, they answered his greetings with commiserations, and he knew at once that his brother was dead. Lings renders the same moment: when Harith arrived at the house of his Yathrib cousins they answered his greetings with condolences, and he understood before anyone spoke plainly that Abdullah was gone.

Abdullah ibn Abdul-Muttalib died in Yathrib at the age of twenty-five, in the flower of the youth that had made him the Joseph of his people, and he was buried in the house of al-Nabighah. The reports give his age precisely: the Messenger of Allah ﷺ was at that time still a foetus, states the account transmitted by Ibn Sa'd, and Abdullah son of Abdul-Muttalib was twenty-five when he died. Thus the son he never saw was left an orphan before birth, the orphanhood of which Ibn Kathir writes with wonder: this is the epitome and highest rank of being an orphan, the highest degree which no one else shares with him, for a child may lose a father in infancy, but the Seal of the Prophets ﷺ was deprived of his father's face entirely, and was formed in the womb while his father was being lowered into the earth of Yathrib. The house of al-Nabighah in which Abdullah lay would in time be absorbed into the growing town, and centuries later the visitor to Madinah could still be shown the place where the father of the Prophet was buried, the site which the graces of Allah would cause to be remembered and honoured.

There was great grief in Makkah when al-Harith returned with the news. Lings writes that Aminah's one consolation was the unborn child of her dead husband, and her solace increased as the time of her delivery drew near. The widow of Abdullah was young, and her loss was total: the husband whose face had carried the light was gone before the light he had transmitted had come to term. Yet the reports of her state are those of a woman sustained from beyond herself: the voice that had spoken to her at the conception, the light she had been shown, the words of protection she had been taught for the child, and the name she had been commanded to give him. The grief of Abdul-Muttalib, for his part, was the grief of a father who had once ransomed this son with a hundred camels and had known, ever since, that the boy stood under a special providence; Abdullah's brothers and sisters mourned with him, and the sons of Abdul-Muttalib gathered around their father in the hour in which his beloved was taken. The whole of Banu Hashim shared the loss, for the marriage of Abdullah had been the pride of the clan and the hope of its future.

The timing of the death became a matter of differing transmissions among the early historians, and their disagreement is itself instructive, for it shows how precisely the Seerah scholars weighed every date that touched the Prophet. The account of Ibn Sa'd from al-Waqidi, given with its chain from Ayyub ibn Abd al-Rahman ibn Abi Sa'sak, states that the Messenger of Allah was still a foetus when his father died, and al-Waqidi asserted that this is the most firmly based of the accounts of the death of Abdullah and of his age. Against this, other reports reached the compilers: Muhammad ibn Sa'd transmitted from Hisham ibn Muhammad ibn al-Sa'ib al-Kalbi, from his father and from Awana ibn al-Hakam, the claim that Abdullah died after the Messenger of Allah had reached twenty-eight months, and it is also said seven months; and al-Zubayr ibn Bakkar transmitted from Muhammad ibn Hasan, from Abd al-Salam, from Ibn Kharbudh, that Abdullah died in Yathrib when the Messenger of Allah was two months old. Ibn Kathir reviews all of these and settles the matter: al-Waqidi held it probable, and Ibn Sa'd wrote, that when his father died the Messenger of Allah was still a foetus in his mother's womb. The master date of this event, as the collective memory of the Ummah has fixed it, is therefore the death of Abdullah before the birth of his son, and the alternative reports are retained in the books as variants whose chains the critics have weighed and, in the main, set aside.

What Abdullah left behind was modest in the ledger of this world. Ibn Sa'd's Tabaqat records that he left his unborn son a small estate: five camels, a flock of sheep, and the Abyssinian servant woman Barakah, known ever after as Umm Ayman, who had served in the household of Abdullah and would live to nurse, guard, and love the child of the house she had been bequeathed to. Umm Ayman would remain with the Prophet through his childhood, his mission, and his death, until he would one day tell her that she was of the people of Paradise and call her his mother after his mother; the little inheritance of camels and sheep passed, and the boy was born to a widow's care. The scholars have always seen a design in this austerity: the Messenger of Allah ﷺ was to be a man who owned nothing of the world's padding, whose greatness would owe nothing to a father's fortune, and whose trust would be placed in Allah from the first breath. The Lord of the worlds strips His most beloved of every worldly prop, that all creation may see that his greatness was Allah's gift alone.

The Qur'an itself bears witness to this orphanhood, and the believer should read the testimony with the hair standing on the arm. In the chapter Al-Duha, revealed years later in Makkah when the revelation was new, Allah addressed His Messenger directly: Did He not find you an orphan and give you shelter, and find you wandering and guide you, and find you in need and make you self-sufficient? The three states named in those verses trace the Prophet's childhood exactly: the orphan of the dead father, then of the dead mother, then of the dead grandfather; the boy carried from household to household; and the young man of no fortune. And the three gifts named against them trace the answer of Allah to each: shelter in the houses of Abdul-Muttalib and Abu Talib, guidance through the revelation, and sufficiency through contentment of heart. No biography of any great man begins with a verse so tender; the orphanhood of Abdullah's son was not a misfortune that befell the mission of Islam, it was a state which Allah chose for His beloved, purified him with, and then openly honoured with His own words. Let every orphan raised in hardship take heart from this: the state the world pities was the state Allah chose for the best of His creation.

The Prophet's own practice would forever carry the mark of this event. He ﷺ said, in the rigorously authenticated hadith transmitted by Sahl ibn Sa'd in the Sahih of al-Bukhari: I and the one who looks after the orphan will be in Paradise like this, and he joined his index finger and middle finger together. A man orphaned before birth became the shepherd of every orphan in his Ummah; the one who never saw his father made the care of the fatherless a highway to his own side in the Garden. When the believers of later centuries built the orphanages and endowments of Islamic civilisation, they were building upon this verse and this hadith, that is, upon the tomb of Abdullah in Yathrib, though the world did not know it.

There remains the question which the early scholars addressed with great care: the religious fate of Abdullah and of the Prophet's parents who died before the revelation. In the Sahih of Muslim it is authentically transmitted from Abu Hurayrah (RA) that a man came to the Prophet and asked: O Messenger of Allah, where is my father? He said: in the Fire. When the man turned away with a stricken face, the Prophet called him back and said: indeed my father and your father are in the Fire. The scholars have read this hadith exactly as it stands, without evasion and without excess, and alongside it the verse of the Qur'an in which Allah says: We never punish until We send a messenger. Ibn Taymiyyah and the scholars who followed his method concluded that the Prophet's parents died in the period of fatra, the interval in which no living messenger had reached their people, and that whoever dies in such an interval without a message reaching him is not held culpable in the hereafter; the traditions on the fate of the Prophet's kin were received with the same fidelity as the rest of the Sunnah, and the matter was left where the revelation left it, with the justice of Allah encompassing all. The Seerah is not embarrassed by such questions; it records the hadith with its chain and the principle with its verse, and the believer's heart rests in the fairness of the Lord of Abdullah's son.

The providence hidden in this event can be traced in one more line, which the later history of the revelation would illuminate. The clan that hosted the dying Abdullah, Banu Adi ibn al-Najjar of the Khazraj, would stand in the market of Mina years later and pledge to protect his son; the town that closed its earth upon the father would open its walls to the son; and the quarter of Banu al-Najjar in Yathrib would become the ground upon which the mosque of the Messenger of Allah and the first city of Islam were raised, bought from two orphan boys of that same clan, so that the inheritance of the orphan fatherless at birth flowed back, in the design of Allah, to the orphans of the very family that had buried him. The believer who traces these lines is tracing nothing less than the artistry of the Lord of history, who set the death of a young man in an oasis town as the first stone of the city that would carry His name.

The memory of Abdullah has been kept alive by the Ummah with a peculiar tenderness, for his name is inseparable from the name of his son. Every believer who pronounces the full name of the Messenger of Allah, Muhammad ibn Abdullah, speaks the name of the young man who died at twenty-five in Yathrib; and there is no other father in the history of mankind whose name is carried, honoured and beloved, upon the tongues of hundreds of millions in every generation. The scholars have noted the fittingness of the name itself: Abdullah, the slave of Allah, was the father of the one whom Allah called His slave and His Messenger in a single Qur'anic phrase, so that the sonship of the Prophet joined his father's name to his own mission, servitude to servitude. The biographers of the later centuries, from al-Qadi Iyad to the scholars of our own day, return to the grave of Abdullah as to a station of the Seerah, and the visitor who stood by it was shown the place where the father of the best of creation awaited, with all the dead, the rising of his son's Ummah.

Abdullah ibn Abdul-Muttalib died as he had lived, briefly, purely, and before the eyes of the world had learned to watch him. He had carried the light for a season and handed it on; he had married the noblest woman of Banu Zuhrah and left her with child; and he had gone down into the earth of Yathrib at twenty-five, entrusting the future of the prophethood entirely to Allah. When the caravan schedules of Quraysh resumed the next season, there was an empty place in them, and a widow in the quarter of Banu Hashim whose sorrow was already being transformed, by the promise she carried, into the expectation of a birth that would console not only her but all the worlds. The death of Abdullah is therefore not a dark prelude to the Seerah but one of its necessary foundations: by it the Messenger of Allah was consecrated to dependence upon Allah alone, and the first verse of his biography was written in the ink of trust.