The Birth of the Light

The Prophet ﷺ was born in Mecca in the Year of the Elephant, the year Allah turned back Abraha's army, which the historians place at about 570 CE. Two companions born in that same year confirmed it: Suwayd ibn Ghaflah, who said he and the Prophet ﷺ were born in the Year of the Elephant, and Qubath ibn Ashyam, who told Uthman, "The Messenger of Allah ﷺ is greater than me, but I am older than him," for he remembered as a child the dried dung the elephants had left outside Mecca. The Prophet ﷺ himself told us the day; when asked why he fasted on Mondays, he said:

ذَاكَ يَوْمٌ وُلِدْتُ فِيهِ، وَفِيهِ أُنْزِلَ عَلَيَّ

"That is the day I was born, and on it revelation came down to me." It is related that he was born at high noon, when the sun was at its peak.

His father Abdullah had died at Yathrib before he was born, so he came into the world an orphan, in the care of his mother Aminah and his grandfather Abdul-Muttalib. The Prophet ﷺ related a sign that came with his birth, that his mother saw a light go forth from her:

خَرَجَ مِنِّي نُورٌ أَضَاءَتْ لَهُ قُصُورُ بُصْرَىٰ مِنْ أَرْضِ ٱلشَّامِ

"There came forth from me a light by which the palaces of Busra in the land of Sham were lit", a sign of the distant lands his message would one day reach.

On the seventh day his grandfather Abdul-Muttalib circumcised him and held a feast, and chose for him a name almost unknown among the Arabs: Muhammad (مُحَمَّد), "the praised one." When the Quraysh asked why he had not named the boy after his forefathers, he answered, "I wish that he be praised by the people of the earth, as he is praised by the people of the heaven."

When the news of the birth reached his uncle Abu Lahab, he freed his slave girl Thuwaybah in his joy, and she became the first to nurse the infant Prophet ﷺ. Yet Abu Lahab would later become so bitter an enemy that Allah condemned him by name:

تَبَّتْ يَدَا أَبِي لَهَبٍ وَتَبَّ

"Perish the two hands of Abu Lahab, and perish he!" (al-Masad 111:1). And Al-Abbas saw him in a dream after his death, suffering the punishment of his denial; asked whether anything availed him, Abu Lahab said that he was given a few drops of water each day, for that one deed of freeing Thuwaybah at the Prophet's ﷺ birth.

Of the Prophet's ﷺ birth-date the early historians preserved no single agreed day: some said the second of Rabiʿ al-Awwal, some the eighth, some the tenth, and the twelfth, the date later made famous, rests on the report of Ibn Ishaq alone, without a chain. What is certain is far simpler and dearer: that he was born on a Monday, in the Year of the Elephant, a mercy sent to all the worlds, رَحْمَةً لِّلْعَالَمِينَ.