Abu Talib

When the leaders of Mecca's other clans decided that Muhammad's preaching against their gods had to be stopped, the obstacle in their way was not Muhammad himself but his uncle. Abu Talib had become head of Banu Hashim on his father Abd al-Muttalib's death, and Arabian custom placed every member of a clan, believer or not, under that chief's protection. Abu Talib never accepted his nephew's message, by the account Sunni biographers preserve, but he refused every demand that he withdraw his protection, and a chief's protection in pre-Islamic Mecca was a fact other clans had to respect or answer for.

The pressure escalated into a formal boycott. A document was hung in the Kaaba forbidding any Meccan from trading with, marrying into, or speaking to Banu Hashim until they surrendered Muhammad. For roughly three years the clan, Muslim and non-Muslim members together, was confined to a narrow valley the biographers call the shi'b of Abu Talib, living on what could be smuggled past the boycott by sympathetic outsiders. Abu Talib did not need to share his nephew's faith to see what handing him over would mean for a chief's standing, and the account credits him with holding the clan together through the confinement.

The boycott ended when, per the same tradition, the document in the Kaaba was found eaten by insects down to its opening formula, and the confinement lapsed. Abu Talib died not long after, the same year as Khadijah, close enough that biography names it the Year of Sorrow: the two who had done most to shield Muhammad, one through wealth and belief, the other through clan authority, were both gone within months, just before the Hijra made a different protection possible.

Sunni and Shia biography agree on almost every fact of Abu Talib's life and disagree sharply on the one question that mattered most to each tradition afterward: did the man who protected Islam's Prophet for forty years, at real cost to himself, ever actually believe in what he was protecting.

The Sunni account, resting on hadith in which Muhammad is described as grieving that he could not secure his uncle a better fate, holds that Abu Talib died as he had lived, honoring and shielding his nephew without ever accepting his message, and is therefore counted among the unbelievers despite his services to Islam. Twelver Shia scholarship reads the same events differently, arguing that a man who defended the Prophet at the cost of his clan's standing and years of privation in the boycott is more plausibly read as a believer who concealed his faith for the same reason many early converts did, to keep functioning as Muhammad's protector rather than becoming one more person needing protection. Shia sources marshal poetry attributed to Abu Talib that speaks approvingly of the new religion as part of the case.

The dispute is not merely antiquarian. Sunni tradition's reading of Abu Talib as an unbeliever sits behind later arguments about who among the Prophet's family counts as rightly guided; Shia tradition's reading of him as a secret believer supports its case that faithfulness ran continuously through the house of Hashim from Abd al-Muttalib through Abu Talib to Ali. Both traditions agree on the fact underneath the disagreement: whatever Abu Talib privately believed, what he publicly did was protect his nephew without interruption until his own death, close enough to Khadijah's that year that biography groups the two losses together as the Year of Sorrow.