Hasan ibn Ali

Al-Ḥasan ibn ʿAlī, the first grandson of the Prophet (ﷺ), was born to ʿAlī ibn Abī Ṭālib and Fāṭimah bint Muḥammad, most likely in Shaʿbān of the fifth year of the Hijrah (a minority report instead places him in Ramaḍān of the fourth year, with his brother Ḥusayn taking the fifth-year date). When ʿAlī named him Ḥarb (meaning "war," a common pre-Islamic name), the Prophet (ﷺ) overruled it, saying he would instead be Ḥasan ("beautiful, good"), consistent with his broader practice of replacing derogatory or self-glorifying names with positive but modest ones, recorded by al-Bukhārī in al-Adab al-Mufrad. The Prophet (ﷺ) personally performed the adhān in his right ear and insisted on carrying out the ʿaqīqah himself rather than leaving it to Fāṭimah, sacrificing two sheep, most of the hadith corpus on the rulings of ʿaqīqah derives from his instructions on this occasion.

The Prophet (ﷺ) showed him extraordinary affection throughout his life, famously interrupting a khuṭbah to rush and pick him up after he stumbled and fell in the masjid, and on another occasion deliberately holding him through an entire khuṭbah before declaring, in a hadith recorded in Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī: "Inna ibnī hādhā sayyid, wa laʿalla Allāha an yuṣliḥa bihi bayna fiʾatayni ʿaẓīmatayni min al-muslimīn", this son of mine is a leader, and perhaps Allah will use him to reconcile two great factions of the Muslims. This was fulfilled decades later: after ʿAlī's assassination by the Khawārij, al-Ḥasan was given the bayʿah in Madinah as the fifth caliph while Muʿāwiyah was separately given the bayʿah in Syria, the first period of two rival caliphs in Islamic history. After roughly six months of standoff, al-Ḥasan chose to abdicate for the sake of the Ummah's unity rather than risk further war between Muslims, in Rabīʿ al-Awwal of 41 AH, ending the crisis and giving Muʿāwiyah undisputed rule, a settlement widely understood to fulfill the Prophetic hadith (Musnad Aḥmad) that the caliphate "upon the methodology of prophethood" would last thirty years, calculated precisely from the Prophet's (ﷺ) death to this abdication.

He is counted, along with his brother Ḥusayn, among the "leaders of the youth of Jannah," per the well-known hadith describing them together as such, "and their father is better than them." He died in 50 AH, the same year as Juwayriyyah bint al-Ḥārith.