The Year of Sorrow

The tenth year after the revelation began is called am al-huzn, the year of sorrow. The name comes later, from those looking back, and it is unusually direct. The tradition did not soften it.

Two losses

Khadijah died. She had been the first to believe him, at a moment when believing him cost everything and gained nothing. For twenty-five years she was the person he came home to. Years after her death he was still sending portions of meat to her old friends, and Aisha, who never met her, said she was never jealous of any woman as she was of Khadijah.

Abu Talib died in the same period. He had never accepted Islam, which the sources do not conceal. What he gave was protection, and in that society protection was not sentiment but structure. A man under his clan’s shield could be opposed but not casually destroyed. When Abu Talib died the shield came down, and the change was immediate. A man threw dust on the Prophet’s head in the street, something unthinkable a year earlier.

So: the person who steadied him privately, and the person who shielded him publicly, in the same season.

Ta’if

His response was to go looking for somewhere else to be heard. Ta’if was sixty miles away, and he made the journey largely on foot.

They refused him, which was expected. What was not expected was the manner. They set the town’s children on him and he was stoned out, bleeding from his feet, and had to stop outside the town to recover.

The dua attributed to him at that moment is not a request for victory or for punishment of the people who did it. It is mostly a complaint about his own weakness, and it turns on a single line: as long as You are not angry with me, I do not care. Everything he had counted on had been removed, and what he checked was whether the one thing he had not counted on was still there.

The return

He could not simply walk back into Mecca. With Abu Talib gone he needed a new protector to re-enter the city, and he had to send word to several men before one, Mut’im ibn Adi, agreed. Mut’im was not a Muslim. He armed his sons, walked the Prophet ﷺ into the sanctuary, and announced publicly that he was under his protection.

The Prophet ﷺ did not forget it. Years later, after Badr, he said that if Mut’im were alive and asked him for the prisoners, he would have given them to him.

What the year teaches

The Isra and Mi’raj are usually placed near the end of this period, and the sequence is the point: the year of the heaviest loss is also the year of the greatest honour. But the honour did not arrive as compensation in the middle of the grief. It came after.

The other thing worth sitting with is how ordinary the mechanics of survival were. He was not carried through the year by miracle. He walked to Ta’if and was driven out, negotiated for protection like anyone else, and accepted it from a man who did not share his faith.

The year is in the sira because the loss is not edited out. That is unusual in the biography of a founder, and it is the reason the account can be leaned on by people going through their own version.