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The Year of Sorrow — Two Deaths and the Road to Ta'if
Within about forty days, the Prophet (SAW) lost his uncle and his wife — the man who shielded him from the outside and the woman who held him up from within. Stripped of protection, he walked to a neighboring city to ask for a hearing, and was stoned out of its streets. What he prayed for at that moment is the reason this chapter matters.
The Story of Muhammad (SAW) · Chapter 11
The life that changed the world — written for non-Muslims, beginners, and the curious.
Adapted from Dr. Yasir Qadhi's seerah lecture series. This chapter draws on episodes 19 and 20.
At the end of Chapter 10, the boycott collapsed and the Prophet's clan walked out of the valley and back into Makkah. They had survived three years of engineered starvation.
They had been home about five or six weeks when the losses began.
Two people died within roughly forty days of each other. They were the two people holding up his entire life — one from the outside, one from the inside. Afterward, this year was given a name that has stayed with it for fourteen centuries: 'Am al-Huzn, the Year of Sorrow.
The uncle who would not say it
Abu Talib — the uncle who had raised him, refused to hand him over, and gone into exile with him rather than abandon him — fell ill in Rajab and was dying.
The Prophet (SAW) came to his bedside. Sitting there already were Abu Jahl and Abdullah ibn Abi Umayyah, two of the fiercest enemies of the message. What follows is recorded in Sahih al-Bukhari.
He asked his uncle for one sentence:
Hadith“O uncle, say: none has the right to be worshipped except Allah — so that I may argue for your case with it before Allah.”
The two men beside the bed cut in immediately, every time: Abu Talib — will you turn away from the religion of Abdul Muttalib? They kept saying it. And Abu Talib's last words were that he was on the religion of his father. He never said the sentence.
Privately, though, he had already admitted why. In a narration in Sahih Muslim he tells his nephew plainly: were it not that Quraysh would blame me and say fear of death drove me to it, I would have said it and delighted your eyes.
That is the whole tragedy in one line. He believed it. He had watched his nephew for forty years and never once caught him in a lie. What stopped him was not doubt. It was what people would say about him.
The Prophet (SAW), grieving, said he would keep asking God's forgiveness for his uncle unless he was forbidden. He was then gently corrected by revelation — not scolded, but told this is not for you to do:
Quran“It is not for the Prophet and those who have believed to ask forgiveness for the polytheists, even if they were relatives, after it has become clear to them that they are companions of Hellfire.”
And, in the narration in Muslim, a second verse came down about the same moment — one of the most quietly devastating lines in the Quran:
Quran“Indeed, you do not guide whom you like, but Allah guides whom He wills. And He is most knowing of the rightly guided.”
Read that again with the situation in mind. The Prophet of God could not deliver the one man he most wanted to save. Belief is not something one person can install in another — not even him, not even for family.
It was Ali (RA) who came to tell him his father had died. Go and bury him, the Prophet (SAW) said. Ali objected that his father had died outside the faith. The instruction did not change: go, bury him, and come straight back.
That small exchange settles a question people still ask: a Muslim may absolutely attend a non-Muslim relative's funeral, help bury them, and grieve them. What they don't do is take part in religious rites that aren't their own.
Later, his uncle Abbas (RA) asked whether all that protection had counted for anything. The answer is reported in both Bukhari and Muslim: yes — he is in the shallowest part of the Fire, and were it not for me he would have been in its depths.
It is not a comfortable answer. It is not meant to be. But notice what it refuses to do: it does not pretend, and it does not erase forty years of loyalty either.
Knowing is not the same as accepting
There is a point here worth slowing down for, because it clears up a common confusion about what Islam actually asks of a person.
Abu Talib knew. He said so. By any ordinary definition he had the information and he found it credible. Yet he is not counted as a believer — because Islam does not mean knowing the truth. It means submitting to it.
The Quran makes the same distinction with Iblis (Satan), who is never portrayed as ignorant. He addresses God directly, accepts that prophets are prophets, and believes in the Day of Judgment. His failure is described in four words:
Quran“He refused and was arrogant, and became of the disbelievers.”
Refused. Not misunderstood. This is why "faith" is a poor translation of iman — faith is one ingredient of it, not the whole thing.
It's also, uncomfortably, a mirror. The gap between someone who says I'm a Muslim and does nothing about it, and someone like Abu Talib who acknowledged everything and did nothing about it, is narrower than we'd like.
The wife who believed first
About five weeks later — on the 10th of Ramadan — Khadijah (RA) died.
She was the first person on earth to believe him. She was the one who wrapped him in a blanket when he came down from the cave shaking, and told him God would never disgrace him. She spent her entire fortune on a community that was boycotted for three years, and she died not long after that fortune was gone.
Formal prayer had not yet been made obligatory, so there was no funeral prayer for her. The Prophet (SAW) went down into the grave himself and laid her in it.
Companions said afterward that they did not see him smile for months.
Years later in Madinah, Khadijah's sister Hala came to the door and asked permission to enter. Her voice was so like her sister's that the Prophet (SAW) startled and said, "O Allah — Hala!" Aisha (RA), young and stung with jealousy, said what she later regretted: why do you keep remembering an old woman of Quraysh, long dead, when Allah has given you better than her? (Sahih al-Bukhari 3658)
Other narrations preserve his reply, and it is worth knowing even though it sits outside the two great collections. No — God had not given him better than her. She believed in him when nobody else did. She supported him when everyone else cut him off. She stood by him when the world turned on him. Aisha (RA) never spoke about Khadijah that way again.
Abu Talib was his shield in the streets. Khadijah was his home. In forty days he lost both.
When the shield came down
The practical consequence was immediate and dangerous.
Abu Talib had been the Prophet's protection in a society with no police and no courts — where a man without a clan behind him could be killed with no consequence. That was gone.
Abu Lahab, another uncle and one of the message's worst enemies, briefly stepped in — not out of affection, but because he had inherited leadership of the clan and a chief who fails to protect his own looks weak. He announced the Prophet (SAW) would have exactly what he'd had before. Asked whether he had converted, he said no: he was protecting his people, nothing more.
Abu Jahl broke it within about a week, with a single well-aimed question. He told Abu Lahab to ask his nephew where Abdul Muttalib — their father, the man in whose name the protection was being given — had ended up.
The Prophet (SAW) answered without cruelty and without lying: he is with his people. Abu Lahab left satisfied. Then Abu Jahl explained to him what it meant. The protection was withdrawn.
The persecution that followed was open in a way it had never been. (The incident with the camel's entrails thrown on his back while he prayed, which we saw in Chapter 8, may in fact belong to this period — nobody stepped in to stop it.)
There was no longer a safe position for him anywhere in the city of his birth.
The walk to Ta'if
So he looked at the nearest city that mattered: Ta'if, about sixty miles away, a green hill town of gardens and vineyards, home to the tribe of Thaqif.
He went on foot, quietly, and he did not go alone. He took Zayd ibn Harithah (RA) — the freed slave he had adopted as a son.
In Ta'if he went to the three brothers who led Thaqif and asked for a hearing. Their answers are preserved in the early biographies, and they were designed to humiliate:
- If God really sent you, I'd tear the covering off the Kaaba.
- Could God find nobody better than you to send?
- If you're a prophet, you're too important for me to talk to. If you're a liar, you're beneath me.
He asked them for one thing only: don't tell Quraysh I came here. If Makkah heard he'd gone looking for allies, it would go badly for him. They refused that too.
He stayed about a week anyway, speaking to ordinary people in the marketplace. When one man showed genuine interest, the leaders decided they'd had enough.
They set the town's crowd on him. He was stoned through the streets and driven out of the city. He bled until his sandals filled with blood. Zayd (RA) was wounded from head to foot trying to shield him with his own body — a detail worth pausing on, because Zayd is usually the forgotten figure in this story.
They chased him roughly five miles out of town.
Years later Aisha (RA) asked the Prophet (SAW) whether any day had ever been harder than the battle of Uhud. He said the worst day of his life was this one — and that afterward he walked in such grief that he did not register where he was until he had gone miles.
What he prayed for
He stopped in the shade of a wall belonging to a vineyard, sat down bleeding, and made the supplication that has been carried through Muslim memory ever since as the du'a of the oppressed.
A note on sourcing, because it matters: this prayer comes from the early biography of Ibn Ishaq, not from the rigorously authenticated hadith collections. Scholars transmit it, teach it, and love it — but it does not carry the same grade as the reports quoted above.
Its substance is this. He complains to God not about his enemies, but about his own weakness — the little strength he has, his helplessness, how lightly people treat him. He asks: to whom are You entrusting me? And then the line that is the heart of it:
If You are not angry with me, then I do not care.
Look at what is missing. There is no request for revenge. There is no request to be rescued. Sixty miles from home, rejected by two cities, bleeding through his sandals — the only thing he actually asks about is whether God is displeased with him.
This is exactly the posture the Quran gives to Ya'qub (Jacob) in his own grief:
Quran“I only complain of my suffering and my grief to Allah.”
To God, not about God. That distinction is most of the difference between despair and prayer.
The grapes
The vineyard belonged to Utbah and Shaybah ibn Rabi'ah — Makkans, distant relatives, and no friends of his. Watching him from their garden, they felt a flicker of something and sent their servant out with a bowl of grapes.
The servant was a young Christian slave named Addas.
Before eating, the Prophet (SAW) said "Bismillah" — in the name of God. Addas stopped. Nobody here says that.
They talked. Where are you from? Nineveh. And then:
"The city of Yunus, son of Matta?"
Addas was stunned — nobody in this desert knew that name. How do you know Yunus?
"He is my brother. He was a prophet, and I am a prophet."
Addas bent and kissed his head and hands and feet, and believed on the spot. His masters mocked him for it when he came back: he's bewitched you.
Hold this next to everything else in the chapter. On the worst day of his life, having been rejected by the leadership of two cities, he still said Bismillah over a bowl of grapes — and a slave from Iraq became a Muslim because of it. He never once hid what he was, even at the bottom.
There is a postscript. About five years later, at the Battle of Badr, Utbah and Shaybah tried to make Addas fight against the Muslims. He refused. Both masters died in that battle.
The offer he turned down
Then, walking away from Ta'if, something happened that is recorded in Sahih al-Bukhari — and it is the moral center of this entire chapter.
A cloud moved over him and shaded him. In it was the angel Jibril, who told him that God had heard exactly what his people had said to him, and had sent the angel of the mountains to take his orders.
The angel greeted him and made the offer plainly: if you wish, I will crush them between the two mountains.
The city that stoned him. The city that starved his clan for three years. The city that killed and tortured his followers. He was given, explicitly, the power to end all of it.
Hadith“No — but I hope that Allah will bring forth from their descendants people who worship Allah alone and associate nothing with Him.”
He said no. And he did not say it grudgingly — he said it while hoping for the children of the people who had just stoned him.
That prayer was answered. Ta'if accepted Islam within about ten years. The ground where he was driven out is a city of mosques today.
Getting back in
There was still the problem of how to re-enter Makkah at all. He had left with no protector; he could not simply walk back in.
He sent word to three men in turn. Two refused. The third was al-Mut'im ibn Adi, chief of Banu Nawfal — a man who was never a Muslim, and who readers of Chapter 10 have already met, because he was one of the men who worked to break the boycott.
Mut'im accepted. He armed his four sons, escorted the Prophet (SAW) into the city, stood at the Kaaba and publicly declared that Muhammad was under his protection. Abu Sufyan asked if he had converted. No, Mut'im said — I am giving protection, not following him. Quraysh honored it.
That protection held for the remaining year and a half in Makkah.
The Prophet (SAW) never forgot it. Years later, after the Battle of Badr, he said that if Mut'im had been alive and asked him for the prisoners, he would have released every one of them to him (Sahih al-Bukhari 3010).
A man who died outside the faith is honored by name fourteen hundred years later — because he stood up for someone when it cost him something. That is not a small thing to notice, and it sits alongside what we saw with the Negus of Abyssinia.
The lowest point
Step back and look at the year. His protector: dead. His wife: dead. His clan protection: withdrawn. His appeal to the neighboring city: answered with stones. His own city: enterable only on a non-believer's charity.
Ten years of preaching had produced a community you could fit in a large room.
By any measurement available at the time, the mission had failed.
And it is precisely here — at the absolute bottom, with nothing left to lose and no earthly reason for hope — that the single most extraordinary night of his life was about to happen.
Up next: The Night Journey — from the lowest point of his life, the Prophet (SAW) is taken in one night from Makkah to Jerusalem and then through the heavens themselves, meeting the prophets who came before him. It is the moment the story stops being about one city.
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