Death of Qasim ibn Muhammad

The first bereavement that entered the house of Muhammad ﷺ and Khadijah bint Khuwaylid (may Allah be pleased with her) came in the first decade of their marriage, in the years the master chronology assigns to about 600 and 601 of the Christian calendar, when the Prophet ﷺ was about thirty years old: the death of their firstborn son, al-Qasim, the boy from whose name the father had taken the kunya by which all Makkah called him, Abul-Qasim, the father of Qasim. The chronicle has set down the boy's birth in its own place, the joy of the naming, the dignity the kunya gave to the young orphan who had become, before he was thirty, the root of a family of his own; this entry must now set down the taking away, and the manner of the taking, for the manner of it has instructed the whole Ummah. The man who buried his firstborn in Makkah before the revelation had come was the same man who would one day teach the world how to weep and how to bow at once; and the believer who grieves today over a small grave has, in this event, the first page of the Prophet's ﷺ own school of grief.

The sources carry the death as they carry most of the household history of these years, with reserve; and the reserve itself teaches reverence. No report preserves the name of the illness, the day of the taking, the words spoken at the graveside; what the reports preserve instead is the fact, the age, and the meaning, as though the tradition had judged that the meaning was the history. The fact is agreed: the boy died in Makkah, in the years before the call, the first of the Prophet's ﷺ children to return to Allah. The age is preserved in several readings which the reader must be given whole, for the honest presentation of variance is the mark of this science. Martin Lings, following the early material, writes plainly that the boy died before his second birthday, a flower cropped in its first bloom; this is the reading the master record follows when it speaks of his passing at around two years of age. Ibn Kathir, gathering the reports of the earlier scholars, transmits the other readings: some said that al-Qasim attained an age when he could ride, even upon light and swift camels, and died after the call to prophethood; others said that he died while still unweaned. And a later summary of the received account, in the tradition of Al-Sheha, reads the span yet more strictly, saying that the child lived but few days. The reports differ because the memory of a private grief, kept in a household and not in a public register, was carried out of the house in the retelling of several channels; the chronicle does not force them into one, and it observes, with the scholars, that the master record's placement of the death in these years stands upon the early material and upon the order of the reports that make al-Qasim the first of the children to die.

Among the variants one report carries a luminous saying that must be handled with the precision the scholars have given it. In the channel that says the child died while still unweaned, the tradition appends the words of the Messenger of Allah ﷺ concerning him: in heaven there is a place for the child where he completes his suckling. Ibn Kathir, with the scrupulousness that makes his work a trust, sets beside the saying the correction of the scholars: it is well known that this statement applied to his son Ibrahim, the child of the Madinan years, who was born to Maria the Copt long after the Hijrah and taken in his second year. The believer receives both halves of the transmission: the tenderness of the picture, that the mercy of Allah follows the unweaned child into the next world and appoints him a place where what earth cut short is completed in heaven; and the precision of the correction, that the saying's certain occasion is the later son, not this one. This is the sirah's own way, to carry the report and the scrutiny together, and neither to lose the comfort by denying the report nor to misplace the comfort by ignoring the scrutiny.

Consider now the mother, for the grief of Khadijah (may Allah be pleased with her) is part of the event's truth. The later scholars of the sirah have written of these losses with an insight the believer should keep: there was nothing in this successful marriage to raise concern, they observe, except the fact that Khadijah was grieved at the death of all her sons, and this in a society where sons were given a high status, where daughters were buried alive, and where the fathers' faces grew dark with anger and gloom at the news of a daughter's birth. She had borne the heir, the boy whose name the city had given his father; she had seen the kunya become the man's public dignity; and now the boy himself was gone, and with him, in the arithmetic of that age, the house's standing in the eyes of a people who counted daughters as nothing. The mother who had been the richest woman of Quraysh measured, in that small grave, the poverty of the world's esteem; and the tradition does not record her words because it does not need to: every mother who has stood where she stood has heard her heart. What the tradition does record is what she did not do; she did not grow bitter against her Lord, and she did not withhold her womb or her house from the years that remained, and to the end of her life, which was near, she was, in the witness of her husband, the trusted adviser of all his troubles and the first soul on earth to believe him.

And consider the father, for the grief of the Prophet ﷺ is the event's very lesson. A scholar of the later tradition has written of these losses a sentence the believer should carry: as a father, his heart grieved when he lost his sons, and the old pains of his orphanhood were revived by this loss. Here is a depth the casual reader passes by. Muhammad ﷺ had never seen the father whose name the dead boy carried; he had lost his mother at six at al-Abwa on the road from Yathrib; he had stood as a small boy behind the bier of the grandfather who loved him; and now, at the height of his manhood, honored in the city, blessed in his house, he felt the orphan's wound open again in the father's wound, the child who had been left learning at last what it is to be the one who is left. The same scholar goes on to say, in words this chronicle preserves as received: it was as if Allah wanted sad tenderness to be a part of his being; for the men who rule nations adopt haughtiness only when their hearts are nurtured on harshness and egotism, and when they live in happiness without a touch of sadness; whereas those who have experienced pain are the quickest to sympathize with those who are sad and grief-stricken. The believer sees here the divine pedagogy in its most tender form: the Lord of the worlds was making, in the furnace of this house, the heart that would carry the griefs of all the widows and orphans of Taif and of Uhud and of every year of the mission, and He was making it by first breaking it gently, in private, where no eye saw but His.

What, then, did the father do at the grave of his firstborn? The reports of this death itself are silent as to his words; but the Sunnah he established at the deaths that followed, and the Book that came through him, allow the believer to see with certainty the shape his sorrow took, for the shape was his own teaching. The Quran, revealed through his tongue in the years after this grief, fixes the grammar of the Muslim's loss: those who, when a calamity strikes them, say, indeed we belong to Allah, and indeed to Him we return. The istirja', the word of return, was not invented at the revelation; it was the deep habit of a soul that had returned, again and again, everything it loved, and the verse came down upon a tongue that had already said the meaning in the cemetery of Makkah. And at the death of another child, in the Madinan years, the same tongue would give the balance that has steadied every grieving Muslim since: the eye weeps, and the heart grieves, and we say nothing except what pleases our Lord. Tears, in the Sunnah of the Prophet ﷺ, are not the opposite of patience; they are patience's natural voice; rebellion alone is refused, and murmuring against the decree, and the measuring of Allah's wisdom by the world's arithmetic. The father at the grave of Qasim wept, for he was the most tender of hearts; and he bowed, for he was the most surrendered of hearts; and both at once, which is the whole art of the believer's grief, was perfected in him before the Book that teaches it came to be.

Upon that grief the revelation later poured two promises that this chronicle must set beside the grave, for they are the consolation of every parent who follows the Prophet ﷺ down this road. In the Book, the Lord binds the patient bereaved to His own testimony: upon them are the blessings of their Lord and mercy, and they are the rightly guided; and in another place, that the patient are given their reward without reckoning, a wage measured by no accountant's scale. And in the Sunnah, from the Mother of the Believers Umm Salamah (may Allah be pleased with her), the Prophet ﷺ taught the afflicted the very supplication for the moment of the istirja': O Allah, reward me in my affliction, and give me in exchange better than it; and he promised that Allah would surely do so. She herself, when she said the prayer over her own Abu Salamah and then wondered what Muslim could be better than he, was answered by Allah with the Messenger of Allah ﷺ himself, given to her in marriage; the replacement prayer is not a formula but a door. And in another transmission, from Abu Musa al-Ash'ari (may Allah be pleased with him), the Prophet ﷺ related what Allah says to His angels when a servant's child dies: the angels answer the Lord's questions that the servant praised his Lord and declared that to Allah he belonged and to Him he would return; and Allah, Mighty and Majestic, commands: build for My servant a house in Paradise, and name it the House of Praise. The report is carried by the collections of the Sunan with a good grading, and the believers have never read it without tears; the child is not lost but translated, and the father's grief, borne with praise, becomes architecture in the next world.

There remains a mercy in this story that only Makkah could have written, and it is the mercy of the kunya. Among the Arabs, a man's kunya lived and died with the child it named; the father who lost his son was often quietly re-addressed by another title, for the name of the dead child on a living man's lips was a wound renewed at every greeting. Not so in the streets of Makkah. The city had called him Abul-Qasim in the boy's life, and the city went on calling him Abul-Qasim after the boy's death, year upon year, through the marriage's remaining decade, through the years of the revelation, until the name that had been the announcement of a birth became the banner of a mission. Every time a Qurayshite called out to the father of Qasim, the father heard his firstborn named, and the enemies of the man never once thought to use the kunya against him, for it had ceased to be a grief and become a glory; and in the fullness of Islam the kunya remained forever bound to him, so that the name of the child of Makkah is pronounced wherever the Ummah speaks of its Prophet, in the books and the pulpits and the daily speech of the believers, to the end of time. What comfort this is, and what a banner: the boy who died before his second birthday is remembered in the daily speech of billions, not for anything he did, for he did nothing but die and be mourned, but because his father bore his name as a father bears a birthright. The believer whose children have gone ahead may take the same standing: in the economy of Allah no loved name is ever wasted.

The years would test the lesson of this grave twice more before the prophethood, and the chronicle sets down those testings in their own places; here it marks only the pattern. The enemies of the mission, when it came, would try to turn these very losses into a weapon, jeering that the Messenger's progeny was cut off, comparing him in their councils to the sunbul, the date palm whose root is broken, which bears no more; and a later scholar of the sirah preserves their oath and the answer of the Book, for Allah revealed to His Messenger, in the Surah of al-Kawthar, the divine reversal: He has been given the abundance, and it is the scoffer who is cut off. The daughters whom the age despised lived to believe, and through Fatimah the blood of the Prophet ﷺ runs in the veins of the Ahl al-Bayt and of countless believers today, while the lines of the jeerers are dust; the grave in Makkah that seemed to the city the ending of a house was, in the ledger of Allah, the planting of one. The losses of the daughters, when they came in the Madinan years, the chronicle will narrate in its own entries; and the birth and taking of the younger son Abdullah, the last child, set down in the preceding entry of this record, still lay in the future of the years this entry keeps. But the theology of all of them was fixed here, at the first bereavement: children are a loan and not a possession, and the Lord who lends is free to recall, and the servant's honor is in the manner of the returning.

The believer closes this event at the smallest and greatest of its meanings. Smallest, because the world saw nothing: no war shifted its course, no market emptied, Makkah went about its buying and selling on the day the Prophet of Allah ﷺ stood at a child's grave. Greatest, because heaven saw everything, and was preparing through it the tenderness that would one day make that same Prophet ﷺ wipe the tears of a mother whose child had died and promise her, from his own experience of the like, the mercy that had carried him. Let every Muslim who stands where he stood take his bearing from him: to say the istirja' with the tongue, to let the eye weep what it must, to keep the heart from every charge against the Wise Decree, to answer the affliction with the prayer for recompense and better, and to believe, against all the arithmetic of grief, that in the House of Praise a cradle is kept. And let the Ummah never forget that its Prophet ﷺ was a bereaved father before he was a messenger, so that no grieving father or mother on earth can ever say that he does not understand; for he was chosen acquainted with grief, and the acquainted are the gentle, and the gentle are his heirs.