Wailing for Hamzah, and the Prohibition of Wailing

Shaykh Yasir Qadhi explains:

When the survivors returned to Madinah, the women and children lined the streets to learn who had come back and who had not. Wailing (nawḥ), loud, ritualized public grief, typically performed by women crying out set phrases of lament, sometimes accompanied by beating themselves, tearing their clothes, or loosening their hair, had not yet been forbidden in the Sharīʿah at this point, and it broke out across the city as families learned the fate of some seventy of their men.

Returning home, the Prophet (ﷺ) noticed something: amid all this mourning, no one was wailing for Ḥamzah. He remarked on it, that of all the households in mourning, his own uncle, Sayyid ash-Shuhadāʾ, had no women wailing for him. Word of this reached the Anṣār, and the women of the Anṣār gathered outside the Prophet's (ﷺ) house and began wailing for Ḥamzah there and then, a single word from him was enough to move the community to act.

When the Prophet (ﷺ) came out and saw them, he thanked them for their kindness, and then used the occasion to issue a general prohibition: from that point forward, wailing was forbidden in the Sharīʿah. This is the origin point of the ruling against nawḥ, issued in the direct aftermath of Uḥud.

Shortly afterward (Mustadrak al-Ḥākim), when an Anṣārī couple had a son born and asked the Prophet (ﷺ) what to name him, he told them to give the child the name most beloved to him, Ḥamzah, a measure of how present his grief for his uncle still was. (This predates his later, better-known ruling that the names most beloved to Allah are ʿAbdullāh and ʿAbd al-Raḥmān.) Dr. Qadhi notes the broader principle here: there is nothing wrong, in fact it is commendable, to name a newborn after someone who has passed, as a way of carrying their memory into the next generation.