The Year of Sorrow

The tenth year of prophethood is called Aam al-Huzn, the Year of Sorrow. The Prophet ﷺ named it himself. Two people he loved died inside a few months of each other. The mission did not pause for his grief, and he did not pretend his grief was not there.

This is a small window into how Allah's messenger ﷺ carried loss. It is also a window into how mercy holds when the people who carry you in this world are no longer there.

Khadijah, the first to believe

Khadijah RA was the first person on earth to accept Islam. She was the Prophet's ﷺ wife of twenty-five years. She was older than him by some accounts, and she had married him when he was twenty-five and she was a widow with her own wealth and standing. She proposed to him through a third party. He accepted.

For the first nine years of prophethood, she carried the mission with him. When he came down from the cave at Hira shaking and afraid, it was Khadijah who covered him with a cloak and told him Allah would not disgrace him because he kept ties of kinship, helped the destitute, served the guest and stood for what was right. Those were her words, recorded in Sahih al-Bukhari (Bukhari 3).

She spent her wealth on the believers during the boycott in the valley of Banu Hashim. By the time the boycott ended, three years of food shortage had cost her her health. She died not long after.

The Prophet ﷺ never stopped mentioning her. Years later, in Madinah, married to Aisha RA, he would still bring up Khadijah's name. He would send portions of meat to her old friends. Once Aisha RA asked him why he kept remembering an old woman whom Allah had replaced with someone better. He answered that Allah had not replaced her with anyone better. She believed in him when no one else did. She gave him children. She supported him with her wealth. (Recorded in Musnad Ahmad and Sahih al-Bukhari 3818.)

A mercy to the worlds does not mean a man without grief. It means a man whose grief stays loyal. This is one of the quieter scenes that shows the Prophet ﷺ as a mercy to the worlds, and it sits inside the mercy thesis at the heart of this site.

Abu Talib, the uncle who never converted

Within the same year, his uncle Abu Talib also died. Abu Talib had raised the Prophet ﷺ from the age of eight. He had stood between him and the chiefs of Quraysh for ten years of prophethood. He had refused to hand him over. He had endured the boycott alongside Banu Hashim because of him.

On Abu Talib's deathbed, the Prophet ﷺ sat with him and asked him to say La ilaha illa Allah, one sentence that would let him intercede for him on the Day. The chiefs of Quraysh were also there. They reminded Abu Talib of the religion of his fathers. He died on the religion of his fathers. The verse came down later that the Prophet ﷺ cannot guide whom he loves, but Allah guides whom He wills (Qur'an 28:56).

This is a hard mercy to read. The Prophet ﷺ loved his uncle. His uncle protected him. His uncle did not believe. The Prophet ﷺ wept and asked forgiveness for him until the verse came down forbidding it (Qur'an 9:113). And still, on the Day of Judgement, scholars say the Prophet ﷺ will be permitted a small intercession for him that lifts his punishment from the deepest fire to a shallow one. Not paradise. But not the deepest fire either. (Sahih al-Bukhari 3885, Sahih Muslim 209.)

The lesson is not soft. Belief is the line, and Allah does not move it for the people we love. But mercy still walks up to that line as close as it can.

What changed after the Year of Sorrow

After Khadijah and Abu Talib died, the Prophet ﷺ lost his two strongest shields. Quraysh saw it and intensified. They threw dirt on his head as he walked. One of them poured the contents of an animal's intestines on him while he prayed.

It was in this state, raw with grief and unprotected, that he set out for Ta'if. He walked to a town he hoped might shelter the believers, and they answered him with stones. The story of Ta'if belongs in its own essay. What matters here is that the Prophet ﷺ walked toward Ta'if not from a place of strength, but from a place of loss.

The mercy that came after Ta'if, the angel of the mountains offering destruction and his answer of "perhaps from their descendants", came out of a man who had just buried his wife and his uncle and been chased out of two cities. The mercy was not soft. The mercy was tested.

Allah comforted him in this period with the verse:

And the Hereafter is better for you than the first. (Qur'an 93:4)

The whole of Surah ad-Duha was a hand on his shoulder in those months. Read it slowly and you can hear it speaking to a man in grief.

What this teaches the reader

The Prophet ﷺ never pretended grief was un-Islamic. He cried at the death of his son Ibrahim and said the heart grieves, the eye weeps, and we do not say except what pleases our Lord (Sahih al-Bukhari 1303). He named his year of loss the Year of Sorrow. He kept Khadijah's name on his lips for twenty-three years after she was gone.

Grief is not a failure of trust. It is a part of being human. The mercy of the messenger ﷺ is that he carried his own grief openly, and still walked toward Ta'if when the next step was asked of him.

If you have lost someone, you are not behind in your iman. You are walking the path the Prophet ﷺ walked. The aam al-huzn is in the seerah for a reason. Allah did not edit it out.

These are the duas the Prophet ﷺ turned to when the ground gave way.