A Boy in Makkah — The Birth and Early Childhood of Prophet Muhammad (SAW)

The Story of Muhammad (SAW) · Chapter 2

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 6 and 7, with background from episode 5.

The world we left off in Chapter 1 — a peninsula full of tribes, a Kaaba surrounded by 360 idols, a society where a baby girl could be buried alive without anyone caring.

Into that world, in a city that should not have existed, a boy was about to be born.

But before we get to him, we have to talk about the year he was born in. Because that year, the Arabs would remember forever.

An army with elephants

Far to the south of Makkah, in Yemen, sat a Christian governor named Abraha.

Abraha was the viceroy (a kind of regional governor) of Yemen on behalf of the Christian kingdom of Abyssinia (modern Ethiopia and Eritrea). Every year he watched the Arabs of Yemen pack up and travel north to make pilgrimage to a pagan stone cube in Makkah.

It infuriated him.

So he decided to build a rival.

In his capital city of Sana'a, Abraha built a magnificent cathedral — al-Qulays — out of stone and stained glass imported from across the empire. He intended it to be the biggest church in all of Arabia. He decreed that from now on, Arabs would come here to make their annual pilgrimage. Not to Makkah.

The Arabs ignored him.

In fact, one Bedouin Arab — angry about the whole project — sneaked into Abraha's beautiful church and defecated inside it.

Abraha was furious.

He swore he would not rest until he had marched on Makkah and destroyed the Kaaba itself. Then, with no rival left, his church would have no competition.

He gathered an army. And because his soldiers came from Abyssinia, they brought something the Arabs had never seen before: elephants.

Somewhere between 8 and 20 of them. The lead elephant was named Mahmud.

"I am the lord of the camels — the House has its own Lord"

When the news of the approaching army reached Makkah, the Quraysh panicked.

They had no army of their own that could stop this. Abraha's force outnumbered them many times over. The elephants alone were terrifying — Arabs had never fought against animals like these.

The chief of Makkah at the time was a tall, handsome, dignified man named Abdul Muttalib. He happened to be Prophet Muhammad's grandfather — though Muhammad (SAW) was not yet born.

We'll meet Abdul Muttalib properly in a moment. For now, what matters is what he did when Abraha's army arrived.

Abraha's soldiers had seized over 200 of Abdul Muttalib's camels as they advanced. Abdul Muttalib rode out to Abraha's tent to negotiate.

Abraha was so struck by Abdul Muttalib's bearing — tall, calm, leader-like — that the king stood up from his throne and sat with his guest on the floor as a sign of honor.

Then Abraha said: "I have no problem with you personally. Just clear the city. I will destroy your stone house. There's nothing personal in this."

Abdul Muttalib replied: "I did not come to you about the house. I came to you about my camels."

Abraha was stunned. "I am here to destroy your most sacred temple, and you are talking to me about livestock?"

Then Abdul Muttalib delivered the line that would echo through every history book of Arabia:

"The camels have a lord — me. And the House has its own Lord, who will protect it. It is my job to look after my camels. It is His job to look after His House."

Abraha, baffled, returned the camels.

The Quraysh evacuated Makkah and watched from the surrounding mountains as Abraha's army turned to march on the empty city.

The elephant that wouldn't move

The army marched. And then the strangest thing happened.

The chief elephant Mahmud — the one Abraha was depending on — simply refused to step toward the Kaaba.

They whipped him. They beat him bloody. They pulled with all their strength. He would not budge.

But the moment they turned him in any other direction, he walked freely.

Then the sky darkened.

A flock of birds — the Quran calls them Ababil — appeared overhead. Each bird carried small stones. The Quran calls them "stones of baked clay."

The birds dropped the stones onto the army.

And every stone struck a soldier, his skin and flesh would dissolve, and he would collapse into a heap.

Abraha himself was the worst affected. His body began to rot as his army carried him back south. He died just before reaching Yemen.

This entire event is the subject of a whole chapter of the Quran — Surah Al-Fil (which literally means "The Elephant"):

Quran

“Have you not seen what your Lord did to the people of the Elephant? Did He not make their plan go astray? And He sent against them flocks of birds, striking them with stones of baked clay, so that He made them like chewed-up straw.”

— Surah Al-Fil 105:1–5

People would later remember this year forever. They called it the Year of the Elephant.

The traces of the elephants were still visible in Makkah when Prophet Muhammad (SAW) was a young child — one of his Companions reported as an old man that he remembered, as a small boy, his mother taking him out to show him the dried droppings of the elephants.

So when was the Prophet born?

Most historians place the Year of the Elephant around 570 CE.

It's hard to date precisely because the Arabs of the time did not have a written calendar. They dated their years by events — the year of the drought, the year the river flooded, the year of the elephant.

What is certain, though, is what year the Prophet was born in.

He himself told us. In a famous hadith preserved by Sahih Muslim, someone once asked him why he fasted on Mondays. He replied:

"That was the day I was born. And that was the day revelation began."

So we know:

• Day: Monday
• Year: The Year of the Elephant (~570 CE)

What about the date in the month? Surprisingly, that's contested. Early Islamic scholars proposed at least ten different dates — the 2nd, 8th, 10th, 12th, 17th, and 22nd of the month of Rabi al-Awwal, or even (according to one early historian) in the month of Ramadan altogether.

The most popular date today is the 12th of Rabi al-Awwal. But academically, that's actually one of the weakest — it was the opinion of only one early historian (Ibn Ishaq), with no chain of transmission, while better-supported dates have backing from multiple early authorities.

It became popular for one specific reason: about 500 years after the Prophet's death, the Fatimid dynasty in Egypt began celebrating his birthday as a state festival — on the 12th. From there it spread.

For the first 500 years of Islam, no Muslim celebrated the Prophet's birthday. Birthdays were not an Arab custom. The Prophet's own preferred way of honoring his birth was simply to fast on Mondays — the day he was born.

The point: nobody knows the exact date, and the people closest to him didn't think it mattered enough to record one.

His grandfather, Abdul Muttalib

To understand the boy, we have to understand his grandfather.

We already mentioned Abdul Muttalib — the man who stood up to Abraha. He deserves a fuller introduction.

His real name was Shaybah, meaning "the one with white hair" — he had been born with a streak of white in his hair as a baby.

His father, Hashim, was the same Hashim from Chapter 1 — the merchant who established the trade routes that made the Quraysh wealthy. Hashim died young, on a trading trip to Gaza in Palestine. (He is buried in Gaza to this day, in a mosque named after him.)

Hashim had married a woman from Yathrib (the city later renamed Madinah). When he died on the road, she took the young Shaybah back to her hometown and raised him there for years — among her relatives, the Banu Najjar.

Pause for a second to notice that.

Allah was already laying down a connection. The Prophet's own grandfather grew up as a boy in the very city the Prophet would one day migrate to. Forty years before Muhammad (SAW) would even be born, a thread was being tied between his family and Yathrib.

Eventually one of Hashim's brothers tracked the boy down in Yathrib and brought him back to Makkah on a camel. When people in Makkah saw the uncle arriving with the boy, they assumed he had bought a slave. They started calling the boy "Abd al-Muttalib" — meaning "the slave of Muttalib" (after the uncle).

The name was a mistake. But it stuck. For the rest of his life — and for history — Shaybah was known as Abdul Muttalib.

He grew up to be tall (around six feet, in a society where men averaged much less), handsome, dignified, wealthy — and eventually the unquestioned chief of Quraysh. He lived almost to 100, an extraordinary lifespan in an era when most people died before fifty.

He had over 200 camels. He had 12 sons and 6 daughters by several wives. And he had two stories attached to his name that everyone in Makkah knew by heart.

The well that came back

The first story is about Zamzam.

The Zamzam well, just steps from the Kaaba, is — for Muslims — the most sacred spring on earth. Tradition holds that Allah caused it to burst out from the desert for the baby Ismail (Abraham's son) thousands of years before Muhammad (SAW), when his mother Hajar was running between two hills, desperate for water for her dying son.

But by the time of Abdul Muttalib, the well had been lost for over 300 years.

A defeated tribe had buried it during an ancient war, so the victors would never have it. Over generations, people forgot exactly where it had been. The people of Makkah were forced to hike out to distant wells for water.

Then one night, Allah showed Abdul Muttalib in a dream the exact spot to dig.

He ignored the first dream. But the dream came back. Eventually he understood.

He took his single shovel, his one young son al-Harith, and started digging — right beside the Kaaba — while the Quraysh stood around mocking him: "You think you'll find what nobody has found in centuries?"

He dug until water bubbled up.

It was Zamzam.

Suddenly, the same Quraysh elders who had been mocking him surrounded him and claimed the well belonged to all of them. He refused. The dispute nearly became violent.

In the heat of that pressure, in that moment when he stood almost alone against the entire tribe — Abdul Muttalib made a vow.

The vow

He vowed that if Allah ever granted him ten sons strong enough to defend him, he would sacrifice one of them in gratitude.

Years passed. Allah granted him those ten sons.

True to his word, when his sons reached adulthood, Abdul Muttalib gathered them at the Kaaba and told them about the vow. They cast lots in the customary way of the Arabs.

The arrow fell on his youngest, his most beloved son — Abdullah.

Abdul Muttalib took Abdullah by the hand. He was prepared to fulfill his vow.

The Quraysh stopped him. "You can't kill your own son. There must be another way."

They consulted an elderly Arab woman who served as a kind of religious authority. She told them: cast lots between Abdullah and a number of camels. If the arrow falls on Abdullah, add more camels and cast again. Keep increasing until the lot falls on the camels.

They started with ten camels. The arrow fell on Abdullah. They added ten more. Again on Abdullah. Again. Again.

At 100 camels, the arrow finally fell on the camels.

Abdul Muttalib slaughtered 100 camels and freed his son.

That number stuck. To this day, in classical Islamic law, the diyah (blood money for a killing) is 100 camels — set by this very incident.

And Abdullah — the boy who almost died at the Kaaba — would soon become Prophet Muhammad's father.

Abdullah and Aminah

Right after the camels saved him, Abdul Muttalib decided his beloved son should marry.

He chose for Abdullah a young woman named Aminah bint Wahb — the daughter of the chieftain of Banu Zuhrah, another respected family within the Quraysh.

Abdullah was about 20. Aminah was about 18 or 19. A chieftain's son marrying a chieftain's daughter.

The wedding took place just before the summer trade caravan was due to leave for Syria.

Abdullah and Aminah spent three to five days together as husband and wife.

Then he joined the caravan north.

He never came home.

On the return journey, somewhere along the way, Abdullah fell ill. By the time the caravan reached Yathrib (Madinah), he was too sick to travel further. He told them, "I have relatives here, the Banu Najjar — I'll stay until I'm well. Don't wait for me. Tell Aminah I'll be home soon."

(Those relatives in Yathrib? They were the same Banu Najjar his own father Abdul Muttalib had grown up with. The thread tying his family to Yathrib was still being woven.)

The caravan came back to Makkah without him. Word reached Aminah that he was ill. A few weeks later, word reached her that he had died.

Aminah, the most likely conclusion, never even got to tell him she was pregnant.

She was a widow at 18 or 19, carrying his child, alone.

The birth

A few months later, on a Monday in the Year of the Elephant — likely the spring of 570 CE — Aminah gave birth to a boy.

There is a beautiful narration preserved by Imam Ahmad in which the Prophet (SAW) later said:

"My mother saw a light emanate from her — a light so bright it illuminated the palaces of Busra in the land of Sham (Syria)."

Busra is in modern southern Syria, about a thousand miles from Makkah. The light, however interpreted — as a vision, as a true light — was a foreshadowing. Within thirty years of his death, Busra would be the first major city outside Arabia to embrace Islam.

The birth itself: a normal birth, by a young single mother. Many legends would later be invented about it — that he was born already circumcised, that he was born prostrating in worship, that pagan temples around the world collapsed at that moment. These are pious stories, not facts. The earliest seerah books contain none of them.

The simple, attested fact is that a healthy baby boy was born in Makkah, in his mother's small home, attended by her servant. His grandfather Abdul Muttalib was overjoyed.

On the seventh day, by Arab custom, Abdul Muttalib held a feast and circumcised the boy himself, and announced the name he had chosen.

He chose a name no one in Makkah had ever heard before.

Muhammad.

It means "the one who is praised."

When the elders of Quraysh asked Abdul Muttalib why he picked such a strange, unfamiliar name, he gave the answer history would never forget:

"I want him to be praised by the people of the earth, just as he is praised by the people of the heavens."

A note on "(SAW)"

This is a small reminder for new readers (we covered this in Chapter 0): you'll see (SAW) after Prophet Muhammad's name throughout the rest of this series.

It stands for the Arabic phrase sallallahu ʿalayhi wa sallam — "may Allah's peace and blessings be upon him."

Muslims are encouraged to actually say that phrase, out loud or quietly in our hearts, every time we mention the Prophet's name. It's a small daily act of love.

If you're not Muslim, you're welcome to say it with us, or just pause for a moment when you see it. Please don't skip past it.

Thuwaybah — the first wet-nurse

In Arab culture, well-off mothers did not nurse their own babies. They hired wet-nurses — women who breastfed other people's children for pay.

The first wet-nurse the baby Muhammad (SAW) had was a slave woman named Thuwaybah.

She belonged to one of his uncles — a man we will run into again later, by the name of Abu Lahab.

For now, you only need to know one thing about Abu Lahab. When his slave Thuwaybah came running with the news that his brother Abdullah's son had been born, Abu Lahab — in his joy at the birth of his nephew — turned to her and said: "You're free."

He freed her on the spot.

Years later, after both Abu Lahab and the Prophet (SAW) had died, the Prophet's uncle al-Abbas reported seeing Abu Lahab in a dream. By then, Abu Lahab had become one of the Prophet's bitterest enemies and had died in disbelief. In the dream, he was being punished with the harshest punishment imaginable.

Al-Abbas asked him: "Did anything from your relationship with the Prophet ever help you?"

Abu Lahab answered: "No — except that on the day his birth was announced, I freed Thuwaybah. Because of that one moment of joy, I am given a few drops of water."

A reminder that small acts of love — even from people who would later become enemies — are noticed by Allah.

Out into the desert

Among the elite of the Quraysh, there was a custom Western readers will find strange: shortly after birth, a baby was handed over to a Bedouin (desert-tribe) woman to be raised in the open desert for the first few years of life.

The reasons were practical:

• Disease. Crowded Makkah was full of contagious illness. Infant mortality was brutal. In the open desert, with only a few people around, a baby was far more likely to survive.
• Toughness. The desert was harder than the city. Quraysh wanted their children — especially future leaders — to grow up used to hardship, so that the rest of life would feel easy.
• Language. Spoken Arabic in Makkah was being "polluted" by foreign merchants and travelers. The Bedouins of the deep desert spoke the purest, most ancient Arabic.

The most famous of these desert tribes — the one whose Arabic was considered the most flawless — was a tribe called the Banu Sa'd ibn Bakr.

Once a year, women of the Banu Sa'd would travel into Makkah looking for wealthy newborns to nurse for two or three years in exchange for payment.

One of those women was named Halimah bint Abi Du'ayb.

This year, she and her husband were in terrible poverty. They had two children of their own — a newborn son and a daughter named Shayma, probably 7 or 8 years old.

Halimah arrived in Makkah with about a dozen women from her tribe. Each woman scouted around for a baby to take home. But there was one baby everyone skipped: the orphan child of the late Abdullah. The whole point of fostering, after all, was the payment — and an orphan, with no father to negotiate fees, was assumed to bring less money.

By the end of the week, every one of Halimah's friends had a baby. Only Halimah did not.

She was embarrassed to go home empty-handed.

Her husband — a poor man, but a good one — said something that would change his family forever:

"Why not take the orphan boy? Maybe Allah will bless us through him."

So Halimah went back to Aminah's house and took the baby Muhammad (SAW).

The miracles in Halimah's tent

Halimah's own accounts of those years, preserved across many books of seerah, are some of the warmest stories in the entire Prophet's life.

She said as soon as she took the baby home, everything started to bless them.

She had an old goat that hadn't given milk in years. The moment Muhammad (SAW) entered the tent, the goat's udders filled. The family had milk again.

Her donkey, which had been the slowest in the entire caravan on the way to Makkah, became the fastest animal in the group on the way home.

Whatever they had, multiplied. Their poverty turned into prosperity.

Two years passed. The standard foster contract was up. Halimah brought Muhammad (SAW) back to his mother.

And then she made up every excuse she could think of to extend the arrangement. "He's still so small. Makkah is full of disease. Let us keep him another year."

The truth, of course, was that she knew exactly where her family's barakah (blessing) was coming from.

Aminah agreed. Muhammad (SAW) returned to the desert.

The splitting of the chest

When Muhammad (SAW) was about four years old, something happened in Halimah's tent that no one — not Halimah, not her husband, not anyone — was prepared for.

He was playing outside with his foster siblings, Shayma and Halimah's son.

Suddenly, a man appeared. The other children, terrified, ran. But the four-year-old Muhammad (SAW) — even at his age — stood his ground.

The man, who was not a man, was the angel Jibreel (the angel known in the Bible as Gabriel).

According to a hadith preserved by Sahih Muslim, narrated by Anas ibn Malik (the boy who would later serve the Prophet for ten years), Jibreel laid the small child down. He opened his chest. He took out his heart, removed something dark from it, and washed the heart with water from the Zamzam well in a golden basin. Then he closed the chest.

Jibreel told him, holding up the dark substance he had removed:

"This was Shaytan's portion of you."

The other children, breathless, ran back to Halimah screaming that a man had killed their brother.

Halimah found him sitting alone — pale, quiet, but not crying. "The bravest four-year-old," as one scholar puts it, "the world has ever seen."

This event — Muslims call it Shaqq al-Sadr (literally "the splitting of the chest") — is one of the most well-attested miracles in the Prophet's life. The Quran itself refers to it:

Quran

“Have We not opened your chest for you?”

— Surah Ash-Sharh 94:1

And Anas ibn Malik, narrating this hadith fifty-six years later, added a remarkable detail: he said the physical scar of the line on the Prophet's chest was still visible when the Prophet (SAW) was an old man.

Allah could have healed it cleanly. He didn't. He left the scar as evidence.

Halimah, terrified by what she didn't understand, brought the child back to his mother in Makkah and never asked for him again.

Back to his mother — and then losing her

Muhammad (SAW) was now about 4 or 5. He came home to his mother Aminah for the first time he could really remember.

He had maybe a year or two with her.

When he was around six, Aminah decided to take him north to Yathrib — the city where her late husband Abdullah had died, and where her father-in-law's old relatives, the Banu Najjar, still lived. She wanted her boy to see his cousins there. She probably wanted to visit her husband's grave.

So Aminah, her young son, and her loyal servant Umm Ayman packed onto a caravan and traveled the 270 miles north to Yathrib.

The boy met his maternal-side relatives. He stayed for what was probably a few months. (Decades later, when he would migrate back to that same city as a 53-year-old man, his Companions would notice that he recognized certain houses — he remembered them from this childhood visit.)

Then, on the return trip home, somewhere in a small settlement called al-Abwa, halfway between Yathrib and Makkah —

Aminah herself fell ill. And died.

The villagers of al-Abwa buried her there. Umm Ayman, alone with the boy, brought him the rest of the way home to Makkah.

He was six years old. He had lost his father before he was born. He had now lost his mother too.

Her grave is still in al-Abwa to this day.

"I cried at her grave"

Many decades later, when Muhammad (SAW) was already the Prophet and was traveling back from a journey near al-Abwa with his Companions, he silently veered off the road.

His Companions followed him in silence — they had learned that when he did something unusual, they should not ask.

He found a grave. He sat down beside it. And he wept — wept until his beard, which was long, was wet with his tears.

His Companions had rarely seen him cry like that.

When he finally looked up, he explained:

"I had forbidden you from visiting graves. But I asked my Lord for permission to visit my mother's grave. He has permitted me. So now I permit you, too — visit graves. It will remind you of death."

(In the Sahih Muslim version of this story.)

This is, in fact, where the entire Islamic tradition of visiting graves to remember death comes from. It started at his mother's grave.

---

Up next: The Quiet Years — a six-year-old orphan returns to Makkah, finds a home with his nearly-100-year-old grandfather and then his uncle, watches sheep in a desert valley for coins, and quietly earns a nickname the whole city would use: al-Amin — "the Trustworthy."