The Birth and Naming of Hasan ibn Ali

Shaykh Yasir Qadhi explains:

The Prophet's (ﷺ) first grandson, born to ʿAlī and Fāṭimah, is most likely dated to Shaʿbān of the fifth year of the Hijrah (a minority report reverses the birth order of the two brothers, placing al-Ḥasan instead in Ramaḍān of the fourth year and al-Ḥusayn in Shaʿbān of the fifth), the two brothers were born less than a year apart, essentially as soon as Fāṭimah's postpartum period had ended.

When ʿAlī named his son Ḥarb (a common pre-Islamic name meaning "war"), the Prophet (ﷺ) overruled the choice: "No, he is not War, he is Beauty, Ḥasan." This reflected a broader habit recorded by al-Bukhārī in al-Adab al-Mufrad: the Prophet (ﷺ) consistently replaced names with negative connotations (once renaming an elderly woman with an ugly name to "Ḥassānah," "the beautiful one") as well as names that were self-glorifying, his stepdaughter Barrah ("the pious one," implicitly self-praising) was renamed Zaynab. When al-Ḥusayn was born less than a year later, the Prophet (ﷺ) did not even need to be asked; he simply gave him the diminutive form of his brother's name, Ḥusayn, "little Ḥasan."

The Prophet (ﷺ) personally performed the adhān in Ḥasan's right ear (recorded in Abū Dāwūd), and when Fāṭimah asked whether she should arrange his ʿaqīqah, he insisted on doing it himself, sacrificing two sheep and hosting the invitation personally, most of the hadith corpus establishing the rulings of ʿaqīqah (including the instruction to shave the newborn's head and give the equivalent weight in silver to charity) derives from his guidance to Fāṭimah on this occasion. Dr. Qadhi reads all of this as clear testimony to how proud and affectionate the Prophet (ﷺ) was toward his first grandchild.