Two Graves
The boycott's privations claimed their price. In the tenth year of the mission Abū Ṭālib sickened and died. At his deathbed the Prophet ﷺ pleaded, “O my uncle, say lā ilāha illa'Llāh — a word by which I may argue for you before God”; but Abū Jahl and his fellows sat at the pillow saying, “Will you forsake the religion of ʿAbd al-Muṭṭalib?” — and the old man died, as Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī records, upon the religion of his fathers. To his nephew's grief came the verse: “You do not guide whom you love, but God guides whom He wills.”12
Weeks later — some say days — Khadījah died, and was buried at al-Ḥajūn. She had believed when no one believed; for twenty-five years she had been wife, counsellor, treasury, and rest. Years afterward, ʿĀ'ishah would say she was never jealous of any woman as she was of Khadījah, dead before she ever saw her, because the Prophet ﷺ never ceased to mention her, and would send portions of every slaughtered sheep to her friends.3 The believers called it ʿĀm al-Ḥuzn — the Year of Sorrow — and with Abū Ṭālib gone, Makkah's restraint went too: even the street felt the change, and dust was poured on the Prophet's ﷺ head.45
The Road to Ṭāʾif
Seeking a new base and a protector, the Prophet ﷺ walked with Zayd ibn Ḥārithah to Ṭāʾif, the walled garden-city of Thaqīf sixty miles to the southeast. Its three ruling brothers received him with studied contempt — “Could God find no one but you to send?” — and, refusing even the courtesy of silence, set their slaves and street-boys on him. He was stoned along the road until blood ran into his sandals, Zayd shielding him with his own body.45
The two took refuge in an orchard belonging, of all men, to ʿUtbah and Shaybah of Makkah. There, tradition places the supplication that generations have memorised as the nadir and the summit of the mission at once: “O God, to You I complain of my weakness, my little resource, and my lowliness before men… If You are not angry with me, I do not care.” The orchard's owners, momentarily moved, sent their Christian slave ʿAddās with a plate of grapes. Hearing the Prophet ﷺ say “In the name of God” and speak of Yūnus son of Mattā, “my brother — a prophet as I am a prophet,” ʿAddās of Nineveh kissed his head and hands.46
The Angel of the Mountains
Years later ʿĀ'ishah asked him: was any day ever harder than Uḥud? He answered that the hardest was the day of Ṭāʾif — and told her how, on the road back, a cloud shaded him, and Jibrīl called from it with the angel of the mountains, who offered to close the two mountains of Makkah upon its people. The reply that Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī and Muslim preserve is the mission in a sentence: “Rather, I hope that God will bring forth from their loins those who will worship God alone, associating nothing with Him.”7
He could not re-enter his own city without protection, and it came from an unexpected quarter: al-Muṭʿim ibn ʿAdī — a pagan, one of the five who had torn up the boycott — armed his sons and escorted the Prophet ﷺ into Makkah under his formal protection. In the straitened months that followed came his marriage to the widow Sawdah bint Zamʿah, an emigrant to Abyssinia whose husband had died — the first easing of a devastated household.45