Under the Wing of the Chieftain

With both parents gone, the orphan was entrusted to his grandfather Abdul-Muttalib, chieftain of Quraysh, now very old and blind. By the Kaʿbah stood a raised seat in the shade where Abdul-Muttalib would sit each afternoon to settle the affairs of Quraysh, a place so honoured that none of his sons or grandsons dared sit upon it. Yet when the little boy came and climbed up beside him, and his uncles moved to pull him down, Abdul-Muttalib said, "Leave my son", and let him sit at his side, for he saw in him a great future.

Once his uncles sent the boy, scarcely seven or eight, to search for lost camels, for they had noticed that no task was ever given him but that it ended in success. When he was late returning, Abdul-Muttalib grew frantic, pacing in worry; and when the boy came back safe he embraced him and said, "I shall never let you out of my sight again."

But the old chieftain too soon passed away, when the Prophet ﷺ was eight years old, his third bereavement, after his father and his mother. On his deathbed Abdul-Muttalib entrusted the boy to his son Abu Talib, the full brother of the Prophet's ﷺ father Abdullah; and Abu Talib would shelter and protect him for nearly half a century, until his own death when the Prophet ﷺ was past fifty.