The Loss of a Mother

When the Prophet ﷺ was about six, his mother Aminah took him to Yathrib to visit his kin there, for his great-grandmother had been of that city, the one tie the family of Quraysh had to the place he would one day call home. With them went Umm Ayman, the freedwoman whom Abdul-Muttalib had given to the household, who would remain a witness to these years and live until the caliphate of Abu Bakr.

They stayed some months, and the Prophet ﷺ would later recall, returning as a man, the houses and the places he had known there as a child. But on the journey home, at a small settlement called al-Abwāʾ, between Mecca and Madinah, Aminah fell ill and died. Umm Ayman buried her there, and her grave remains at al-Abwāʾ to this day. So the boy who had never known his father now lost his mother, and came back to Mecca a complete orphan.

Many years later, the Prophet ﷺ passed by that place with his Companions and turned aside from the road; he sat by his mother's grave and wept until his beard was wet, a weeping the Companions had rarely seen, and they wept with him though they did not yet know why. Then he said: "I had forbidden you to visit graves; but visit them, for they remind you of death." He told them that he had asked his Lord's permission to visit his mother's grave and been granted it. From his longing for his mother Aminah, then, comes the permission in our religion to visit the graves.