Two years is a short season in the life of a grown man, but in the life of a child it can hold an entire world, and so it was in the two years that the orphan of Abdullah spent beside his grandfather. Every day of those years the boy had known the couch in the shade of the Kaaba, the summons to the old man's table, the hand that stroked his back, and the voice that told Makkah, leave my son alone, for great things lie ahead of him. Then, in about the year 578 of the Christian calendar, when the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ was eight years old, the shelter itself was called away, and the child who had entered Makkah from al-Abwa in the arms of Barakah now walked behind a bier through the streets of the same city. Allah, Glorified and Exalted be He, had written for His beloved that he should taste the stripping away of every earthly dependence in his earliest years, so that nothing would stand between his heart and his Lord when the Day of Reckoning came; and the believer who follows this thread through the sirah feels its severity and its wisdom together, as the weaning of a soul that Allah Himself had chosen to raise.
The last days of the patriarch were of a piece with the nobility of his life. Abdul-Muttalib, some eighty years old and the veritable master of Makkah, felt death approaching and summoned his six daughters to his side; their names have been kept by the sirah as names of honor are kept: Arwa, and Umayma, and Barra, and Safiyyah, and Atika, and Umm Hakim the White. And he said to them that they should compose elegies for him, the laments called ritha in the speech of the Arabs, in which the virtues of the dead are set in measured words; and he sat listening while they mourned him with verses of such eloquence that Ibn Ishaq recorded them in full, describing in great detail what each daughter said. It was the custom of the Quraysh, a dignified and public farewell, in which grief is not hidden but given form and craft, and the old chief did not shrink from looking upon his own death and letting the love of his children surround it. Ibn Hisham, the editor of Ibn Ishaq's work, remarked upon these verses that he had never met any scholar of poetry who knew them, a testimony both to their rarity and to the fidelity with which the sirah has preserved the voices of the women of the House of Hashim.
There was one errand, however, that the dying man set above the elegies, and it was the errand of love. As death approached Abdul-Muttalib, the chroniclers transmit, he charged his son Abu Talib with the care and the safekeeping of the Messenger of Allah ﷺ. In the idiom of the Arabs this was a wasiyyah, a binding entrustment, spoken by a chief whose word was law among his people, and the object of the trust was not silver or land or the offices of the sanctuary but an orphan of eight years. The patriarch who had said, leave my son alone, at the couch in the Kaaba's shadow, now said in effect to all his house: when I am gone, this boy is the charge I place upon you, Abu Talib, you the full brother of his father through one mother, Fatimah daughter of Amr. The following event of this chronology records how that charge was honored through a lifetime; here the dying breath itself deserves the reader's reverence, for it shows that the guardian's last thought was not for his own name but for the boy whom Allah had placed in his keeping.
Then Abdul-Muttalib died, and Makkah stopped. The funeral of the master of the valley drew the clans and the quarters, the elders of the Assembly and the keepers of the sanctuary's offices, and through the grief of them all moved the small figure of the Prophet ﷺ, eight years old, walking behind the bier of the man who had been his father, his table, and his public honor. The master chronology of this project preserves the memory of that walk as the Ummah has received it: the young child wept bitterly behind his grandfather's funeral procession, and the tears of the Best of creation watered the road to al-Hajun. Let no one suppose such tears a weakness, for the Sunnah itself would later sanctify them; and let no believer read this scene without feeling in his own chest what the believers of Makkah felt in theirs, the orphan's grief that Allah had already numbered and would one day answer with the verse of His Book: did He not find you an orphan and give you shelter.
They buried Abdul-Muttalib at al-Hajun, and the place itself belongs to the story. Al-Hajun is the well-known mountain and burial ground lying to the east of Makkah, a rising ground above the valley where the people of the sacred city have long laid their dead, so near the House of Allah that the pilgrim roads pass it still. Ibn Ishaq's simple notice, transmitted by Ibn Kathir, that Abdul-Muttalib died and was buried at al-Hajun, has been received by the Ummah with the weight of a landmark; the very name recalls that the greatest of the Quraysh ended where all the living end, and the believer's heart recalls with it that in later years Khadijah (may Allah be pleased with her), the first believer and the beloved of the Prophet ﷺ, would be buried in that same ground of al-Hajun. The hillside that received the grandfather would receive also the wife, and between the two graves the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ would pass from shelter to shelter in this world, learning each time the lesson that the Qur'an sets in one line: everyone shall taste death.
With the death of the patriarch the arrangements of the House of Hashim shifted visibly, and the chroniclers record the shifting with precision. Ibn Ishaq states that when Abdul-Muttalib died, the control of providing water for the pilgrims, the siqayah, together with Zamzam and the rifadah, the provision of food, passed after him to al-Abbas (may Allah be pleased with him), who was the youngest of his brothers; and this control remained his until the coming of Islam, after which the Messenger of Allah ﷺ confirmed it to al-Abbas. Here the believing reader sees the division of an inheritance with the eye of faith: the offices of water and food, the outward service of the sanctuary, went to the son of means; and the boy, who was treasure rather than task, went to the son of the heart. Providence does not weigh its gifts with the world's scales; al-Abbas received the wells and the storerooms, and Abu Talib received the orphan who would outweigh the world, and each son was honored in what he was given, for each was honored with a trust.
The grief of the boy deserves to be measured by what he had already endured, for the sirah asks the reader to count it: a father dead before his birth, in distant Yathrib, so that the son never saw his face; a mother dead at al-Abwa when he was six, upon the very journey she had made to show him her kin and his; and now the grandfather dead at eight, the man who had stood between the child and the world with the whole authority of Makkah. Three removals in eight years, each of the world's shelters taken in turn, as a builder removes scaffolding from a wall that must stand alone against the sky. The scholars of the sirah have always read in this succession of losses a divine pedagogy: Allah was cutting away, in the tenderest years, every prop of creaturely reliance, so that His Messenger ﷺ would stand upon nothing but Allah; and the believer who has himself known orphanhood or bereavement finds in these eight years a companionship of the heart, for the Best of creation walked the road of the stripped ones before any of us were asked to walk it.
And how did the Prophet ﷺ himself, in his maturity, regard such tears as he wept behind the bier at al-Hajun? The Sahih collections answer with the account of his visit, in the years of his mission, to the grave of his mother at al-Abwa. Abu Hurayrah (may Allah be pleased with him) relates that the Prophet ﷺ visited his mother's grave and wept, and his weeping moved all who were with him to weep, and then he said: I asked my Lord's permission to visit my mother's grave, and He allowed me; and I asked His permission to seek forgiveness for her, and He did not permit me. So visit the graves, for they remind you of death. Muslim transmits this hadith in his Sahih, and Ibn Kathir sets it down in this very stretch of his first volume, in the section on the Prophet's ﷺ parents, where it belongs to the material of this period of his life. The tears of al-Hajun and the tears of al-Abwa are one and the same love, taught to the world by the one who wept them: grief at the grave of the beloved is not rebellion against the decree, for the same mouth that wept commanded the visiting of graves, and the same Book that decreed the death decreed the tenderness.
There is a word of the Prophet ﷺ, transmitted from Anas ibn Malik (may Allah be pleased with him), which the Ummah has always set beside every bereavement, and which the young boy's grief at al-Hajun prefigured: the eye weeps, and the heart grieves, and we say only what pleases our Lord. The full hadith belongs to the death of his son Ibrahim in Madinah, when the Prophet ﷺ held his dying child and his tears flowed, and he was told of his own saying against weeping, and he answered that this was mercy, and that the eye weeps and the heart grieves, and that the tongue says nothing but what pleases the Lord. Bukhari transmits it in his Sahih in the Book of Funerals. What was fulfilled in Madinah was present in essence at al-Hajun: a child's sorrow poured out freely at the grave, with no complaint upon the lips against the One who gives and takes; and the believers may therefore let their own tears fall with a good conscience, for the tears of the Best of creation fell before theirs, in Makkah, behind the bier of the man who loved him.
There is a matter of honesty which the scholars of the sirah have never hidden, and the believer does not hide it either, but receives it with the adab that revelation itself teaches. Ibn Kathir transmits, in the same passage of his first volume, the authentic reports that the Prophet ﷺ was asked about his own parents and about his grandfather, and that he answered according to what was revealed to him, and that al-Bayhaqi, after relating those reports, commented that the father and grandfather of the Prophet ﷺ died upon the way of their people, not following the religion of Isa son of Maryam (peace be upon him), and that this in no wise impaired the lineage or the honor of the Prophet ﷺ, for the marriages of that time were valid in their time. Ibn Kathir then reconciles the reports with the doctrine of the interregnum, the fatra, saying with the exegetes of the verse that Allah never punishes a people until He sends a messenger, and that those who died between two prophets, among them the children and the heedless, will be tested in the assemblies of the Last Day, some to answer and some not to answer, and there is no contradiction, praise be to Allah. The believer holds the reports as they were transmitted, entrusts the final matters to the Perfect Justice of Allah, and keeps for Abdul-Muttalib the honor that the sirah itself keeps for him: that Allah chose him to shelter His Messenger ﷺ, and that the Prophet ﷺ honored his memory with undiminished tenderness all his life.
To variant reports the same honesty is owed, for the sirah is a disciplined science and not a legend. Ibn Kathir transmits from al-Umawi, through Walid ibn Abd al-Rahman al-Waqisi, whom he names a weak authority, from al-Zuhri, from Sa'id ibn al-Musayyab, an account which places the grandfather's death when the Prophet ﷺ was ten, and which says that after the death the two uncles al-Zubayr and Abu Talib together took responsibility for him, and that in his early teens al-Zubayr took him on a journey to Yemen in which signs appeared, and that al-Zubayr died when the Prophet ﷺ was fourteen, whereafter Abu Talib alone took charge of him. The scholars received this line and weighed it as they weigh every line: the narrator named weak by the transmitter himself, against the notice of Ibn Ishaq that the Messenger of Allah ﷺ was eight when his grandfather died, which the Ummah at large has followed from the earliest generations to the master database of this project. Lings, following the earliest sources, reckons the same two years after the death of the mother at al-Abwa, which agrees with the age of eight. The lesson is not that the sirah is uncertain, but that it is certain the honest way: every report carried by its chain, and the weighing done in the open.
The elegies of the daughters round off the human picture of those days, and they teach the Ummah something that easy pieties forget: that mourning may be dignified, formal, and beautiful without being forbidden, and that the dead may be honored with the art of the living. The six sisters of the dying chief, summoned to his side, composed for their father laments which Ibn Ishaq set down at length, and which the editor Ibn Hisham declared unmatched in his own wide knowledge of poetry, so that the grief of that house entered history with the polish of the language of Quraysh upon it. It is given to few households to mourn with verses; it is given to every household to mourn with dignity, to speak well of the dead, to bathe and shroud and carry and pray, and to let the tears fall where the living may see them, as the tears behind the bier fell before all of Makkah. The child who watched his aunts lament his grandfather with the craft of poets was learning, without knowing it, that grief and reverence may walk in the same procession.
What then did this death settle in the economy of sacred history? Every soul shall taste it, as the Qur'an says, and even the shelter of the Best of creation was a shelter on loan. Yet the believer notes with awe how the loan was recalled: not in famine or feud, but in the fullness of years, at home in Makkah, with the succession already spoken and the uncle already standing by. Allah, the Lord of the Kaaba, removed one wall of the orphan's house and raised another in the same hour, and the boy's tears at al-Hajun were drying already upon a providence he could not see. Within days he would be sleeping in the house of Abu Talib, and Fatimah bint Asad would fold a mother's kindness around him, and the hills of Ajyad would know his figure as he earned his qirats with the flocks, and through all the next years the grandfather's dying charge would be honored as surely as if the old man still walked the courtyard of the sanctuary. The believer closes this event the way the believers of Makkah closed that day: with tears, with the talqin of a good opinion of Allah upon His decree, and with the certainty that the Guardian who never dies had said of His Messenger ﷺ, before any man said it, the words that no death can revoke: did He not find you an orphan, and give you shelter.