He was a boy of perhaps eight or nine when the household around him began to change. He could not have named what was happening. He only knew that the man and the woman he lived with, the two people he loved and trusted most in the world, had started to stand together in the dark and bow their heads to something he had never seen. He waited until they had finished, and then he walked up and asked the only question a child could ask: what is this? The answer he received was not softened for him. It was the call to worship Allah alone, given to him with full seriousness, as if his soul were already a grown man's. And from that night, the first young man in the history of this religion began to pray.
His name was Ali ibn Abi Talib (may Allah be pleased with him), and to understand the courage that would one day make him the Lion of Allah, you have to begin with the house that raised him and the mother who carried him there.
The house of poverty, the woman who fed it
Ali was the youngest of four sons of Abu Talib, the brothers spaced roughly a decade apart: Talib, then Aqil, then Ja'far, then Ali. Their father's given name was Abd Manaf, though the world remembered him by the name of his eldest son. Theirs was a house pressed hard by poverty, and it never truly left them, clinging to the family through the years of Ali's childhood and staying with them, in one form or another, even into Islam.
His mother was Fatimah bint Asad, and her place in this story is larger than is usually told. She was the first woman of Banu Hashim to accept Islam, among the very first ten or eleven souls to embrace the message at all. When the Prophet ﷺ told her, she did not hesitate for a moment. She had always sensed there was something set apart about him, and she had reason to: she had raised him. From the age of six until he married Khadijah at twenty-five, the Prophet ﷺ grew up in her care, and he never forgot it. He remembered the days of hunger when she would keep only a little food for herself and divide the rest among her children and the orphan she was raising. He called her his mother, and when she lay dying he wrapped her in his own shirt and made supplication at her bedside until she passed with her eyes on his face, then climbed down into her grave himself to receive her body. This was the woman who named her son Asad, a lion, the name his father later changed to Ali while away on a journey, never knowing her instinct would be proven true. Years on, the Prophet ﷺ would call her son Asadullah, the Lion of Allah, for the way he carried himself in battle. A mother's intention, set aside at birth, returned to him as a title of honour.
There is a quiet miracle hidden in how Ali came into the Prophet's home at all. When a famine struck Makkah and large families suffered most, the Prophet ﷺ, newly married and now able to give, went to his uncle Abbas with a plan to ease Abu Talib's burden: each of them would take one of his sons to raise. Abu Talib agreed, on the condition that they leave him Aqil. So the Prophet ﷺ took up the infant Ali and held him close, and Abbas took Ja'far. It could so easily have gone another way. The Prophet ﷺ might have adopted Ali, as he did Zayd; Khadijah might have nursed the child, which would have made Ali her son in the law of milk kinship. Either path would have closed forever the door to the marriage Allah was quietly preparing, the marriage of Ali to Fatimah. Neither happened, and the histories give no reason. It was simply decreed, early and unseen, that this boy would grow in the Prophet's house as near as a son and yet remain free to become far more.
The first young man to believe
So Ali was inside the household on the night that everything began. He saw the Prophet ﷺ come home from the cave shaken; he saw Khadijah steady him; he watched, as a child watches, the change come over the home he lived in. When the command to pray descended, the Prophet ﷺ and Khadijah began to pray together at night, and the boy waited until they finished and asked, "O Muhammad, what is this?"
The answer was the heart of the whole religion: "This is the religion of Allah, which He has chosen for Himself and with which He has sent His messengers. I call you to Allah alone, with no partner beside Him, and to reject Lat and Uzza." The Prophet ﷺ did not talk down to him. He pressed the full seriousness of the message onto a child of eight or nine, and the child took it seriously in return. Ali did not say, "This looks interesting, let me join in." He said, with a maturity beyond his years, "This is something I have never heard of before today. I cannot decide this without speaking to my father, Abu Talib." The Prophet ﷺ smiled, and asked only one thing of him: if you do not accept this, keep it to yourself.
That night Ali could not sleep. The words turned over in him until they settled into his heart. He had grown up in a house that never worshipped an idol, so there was no idol to abandon, only a truth to embrace. By morning he had decided. He went to the Prophet ﷺ, asked him to repeat the call once more, and when he heard it again said simply, "I submit." He never did go to Abu Talib first; he had heard the truth and could not wait. The Prophet ﷺ received revelation on a Monday; Ali accepted Islam on the Tuesday. He was the first young man, the first child, to believe.
The boy who walked beside the Prophet ﷺ
In the early days the call was quiet, given at private meals where the Prophet ﷺ would speak softly to a few relatives of Banu Hashim at a time. Ali went along on those errands. Sometimes it was only the two of them; sometimes Abu Bakr came too. The boy did not speak; he was too young to argue with grown men. But he was there, watching how the message was carried.
Then came the day on the hill of Safa, when the Prophet ﷺ broadened his call into the open. He gathered the clans and asked: if I told you an army was massing behind that mountain to attack you, would you believe me? Of course, they said, you are as-Sadiq al-Amin, the truthful one, you have never lied to us. Then he warned them of a punishment to come, called them to the worship of Allah alone, and asked: who will support me in this? A silence fell over the crowd. These were the same people who had just sworn they would believe him, and now not one of them moved. They loved him too much to insult him, and they were too far from his message to follow it.
And then one hand went up. It was the boy's. "O Messenger of Allah," Ali said, "I will support you." It changed nothing in the crowd, and it changed everything in him. The only one who rose to stand with the Prophet ﷺ in that public moment was a child. Abu Lahab cursed his nephew: may you perish, is this why you gathered us? The people walked away. The Prophet ﷺ was left standing, and the boy walked home beside him, unharmed in body but already tasting the loneliness the message would bring. From those days on, Ali would later say, the people of Makkah would turn their faces away from the Prophet ﷺ as he passed, while every stone and every tree gave him greetings of peace.
The boy had sharp eyes and a gift for reading people, and the Prophet ﷺ put it to use. Ali would stand near the Kaaba and study the faces of travellers, watching for anyone who looked as though they had come seeking the new message, so he could quietly guide them. It was through Ali, watching the crowd, that Abu Dharr al-Ghifari found his way to Islam.
There is a scene from those years that the heart should slow down to picture. A merchant named Aftif al-Kindi came to Makkah in the days before Islam and lodged with Abbas. One noon, with the sun at its peak, he passed the Kaaba and saw something he could not explain: a young man facing the House with his hands raised, a boy beside him raising his hands the same way, a woman standing behind them, and all of Makkah ignoring them. He watched them bow and prostrate together, then went to Abbas. That is my nephew Muhammad, Abbas told him, who claims his Lord is the Lord of the heavens and the earth and has commanded him to this religion, and beside him is his cousin Ali, and behind them his wife Khadijah. By Allah, there is no one on the face of the earth who follows this religion except those three. Aftif went on with his trade. Years later, when Islam had grown, he became a Muslim, and for the rest of his life he would weep and say: I wish I had been the fourth. He could have been the fourth person on the earth to bow to Allah, and he had walked past it.
One of the early scholars compared that scene to a much older one: Ibrahim and Hajar and the infant Ismail, a prophet with his wife and his child, standing alone before the House of Allah and calling on Him when no one else did. Once again, a prophet, his wife, and his child stood before that House, declaring the oneness of their Lord while the world turned its face away.
The night he lay in the Prophet's bed
The first great test of Ali's courage came on the night the Prophet ﷺ left Makkah. Seven clans had conspired to murder him, a youth chosen from each so that the blood would be shared among them all and no single tribe could be held to account, snuffing out any chance of revenge. On the eve of his departure, the Prophet ﷺ asked Ali to sleep in his bed in his place.
Think about what was being asked. The Prophet ﷺ knew the assassins were coming. Ali's presence would give them a body to see in the dark, buying the time the Prophet ﷺ needed to reach the cave with Abu Bakr. And the men outside were no longer making idle threats; they were killing believers by then. If they pulled back the cover and found a young man who was not their target, they would very likely kill him anyway. His protector Abu Talib was dead, and he came from a poor family with no power to avenge him. By any reckoning, lying in that bed was lying down to die.
Ali did it without a flicker of hesitation. He would later say that he slept that night as he had never slept before, deeply and at peace, while outside the house men gathered to break in and kill whoever lay beneath the blanket. This is what trust in Allah looks like when it is total. Abbas would say that Ali ransomed every part of his body from the Fire that night by putting all of it on the line for the Prophet ﷺ. The same tranquillity Allah sent down upon the Prophet ﷺ and Abu Bakr in the cave, He sent down upon the heart of this young man in the bed. When the men finally rushed in and pulled back the cover and saw it was not the Prophet ﷺ, they recoiled in disgust, and Ali simply rose and walked away, untouched.
Even then the demands on him were not finished. Before leaving, the Prophet ﷺ had charged Ali with a task that says everything about the character of the man they were trying to kill: to remain behind and return the trusts. The people of Makkah, the very people plotting the murder, had left their valuables in the Prophet's safekeeping, because even as they hated him they knew he was honest, and he would not leave their property unreturned. So Ali stayed, gave back every trust to its owner, and only then set out. He made the migration alone, on foot, with no companion and no camel, too poor to afford a mount, sleeping through the punishing heat of the day and crossing the wilderness by night. The Prophet ﷺ waited at the outskirts and went out looking for him, the last to arrive because he had come the whole way alone, and embraced him when at last he appeared.
Brother, son-in-law, and the one beloved to Allah
In Madinah the Prophet ﷺ joined the believers in pairs of brotherhood, and he took Ali as his own brother. There were thirty years between them, and Ali had grown up in his house almost as a son, yet the bond was that of brothers, easy and warm. The histories preserve the way they joked. Ali, who took up labouring jobs to feed himself, once worked a whole day for a woman and was paid twelve dates. Knowing the Prophet ﷺ was hungrier than he was, he set six before him and kept six for himself. When the companions gathered around, Ali pushed his own six date-pits over in front of the Prophet ﷺ and announced, "Look at the Messenger of Allah, he eats and leaves me hungry." The Prophet ﷺ laughed and answered, "Look at Ali, when he eats his dates he swallows the pits." His tender nickname for Ali was Abu Turab, the father of dust, and despite the gap in age, the Prophet ﷺ sought his counsel as he sought few others'.
After the Battle of Badr, Ali married Fatimah, the Prophet's daughter, and so the one raised like a son became also a son-in-law. We will come to that marriage in its own place. What the histories make plain is the rank Allah gave this man. Imam Ahmad observed that no companion of the Prophet ﷺ had more authentic narrations spoken in his praise than Ali. To love him took nothing away from Abu Bakr or Umar or the rest; the believers saw no contradiction in it. Drawing on the truth that Allah is the protector of the believers, the Prophet ﷺ said of Ali, "Whoever takes me as his mawla, then Ali is his mawla."
God is the ally of those who believe: He brings them out of the depths of darkness and into the light. As for the disbelievers, their allies are false gods who take them from the light into the depths of darkness, they are the inhabitants of the Fire, and there they will remain.
Qur'an 2:257
When the Prophet ﷺ set out for Tabuk, he left Ali behind in Madinah to care for the women and children, as he sometimes did precisely because Ali was trustworthy and beloved. The hypocrites seized on it and mocked him, whispering that he had been cast aside, and it began to trouble him. When the Prophet ﷺ returned and saw it weighing on him, he said, "Are you not content, Ali, that you are to me as Harun was to Musa, except that there is no prophet after me?" Musa, when he went to his Lord, had left Harun in charge of his people. It was not a setting-aside; it was a trust given to the one most fit to hold it.
The signs of his standing came again and again. The hypocrites of Madinah could be known, Abu Sa'id reported, by their hatred of Ali, and Ali himself said the Prophet ﷺ had told him that none but a believer would love him and none but a hypocrite hate him. At Khaybar the Prophet ﷺ said he would give the banner the next day to a man who loved Allah and His Messenger and whom Allah and His Messenger loved, and every man there longed to be the one. In the morning he called for Ali, who was suffering so badly in his eyes that he could not see. The Prophet ﷺ applied his own blessed saliva to them, his sight returned clear again, the banner was placed in his hands, and Allah granted victory through him. And on the day of Badr, the Prophet ﷺ told Abu Bakr and Ali that one of them had Jibril at his side and the other Mika'il, the day the angels were sent down to support the believers.
What Ali's life asks of our faith
It is easy to read a life like Ali's and feel mostly awe: the boy in the deadly bed, the warrior who stepped forward when grown men hung back, the Lion of Allah. Awe is a poor place to stop. His life is not a statue to admire from a distance; it is a set of questions laid against our own faith.
Begin where he began, with belief that did not wait. A child heard the truth, lost a night's sleep turning it over, and submitted by morning, before his father knew, before it was safe, before anyone else his age had done it. He did not delay until the religion was popular and the cost was low. Compare him to Aftif al-Kindi, who saw the same truth at the same Kaaba and walked on, meaning to come back when it was easier, and spent the rest of his life weeping that he had not been the fourth. Both saw clearly. One acted and one postponed. Our own postponements wear ordinary clothes: the prayer we will start praying properly later, the sin we will leave when the time is right, the turning to Allah we keep meaning to make. Ali's life asks whether you will answer the call you have already heard, today, or keep telling yourself there is time.
Then there is the bed. To lie down in the place of a hunted man, certain that killers are on their way, and to fall into the deepest sleep of your life, is not the absence of fear. It is the presence of something larger than fear. Ali was in complete reliance upon Allah, and so the same tranquillity that descended on the Prophet ﷺ in the cave descended on him in the bed. Most of us are kept awake by far smaller things: money, reputation, the worry of what tomorrow holds. His trust did not remove the danger; it removed the terror, because he knew Whose hand the outcome was in. That kind of trust is built, not wished for, by handing Allah the small fears first, until the heart learns that He is enough.
Look, too, at the trusts he stayed behind to return. The men who had left their property with the Prophet ﷺ were the same men plotting to kill him, and still he would not let a single deposit go unreturned. There was no one to applaud the honesty and every excuse to abandon it. This is ikhlas worked into the smallest corners of conduct: to be exactly as upright with people who wrong you as with people who watch you, because you are doing it for Allah and not for them. Ask where, in your own dealings, you would quietly cut a corner if you knew no one would notice. That hidden place is where your sincerity is really tested.
And notice how he carried being overlooked. Left behind at Tabuk and mocked for it, he felt the sting, as anyone would, until he was told that this was his Harun, a trust and not a slight. So much of our discontent comes from feeling unseen, passed over, given the smaller part. His life answers that the worth of your role is set by the One who assigned it, not by the crowd that misreads it. The quiet duties, the work no one praises, may be exactly the trust your Lord has measured out for you, and your contentment with it is itself an act of worship.
There is one concrete thing to take from him into an ordinary week. Do for the sake of Allah a duty that brings you no credit and may even bring you mockery: keep a promise that has become inconvenient, return what you owe in full when you could quietly shave it, take the unseen task and do it well. Do it the way Ali lay in that bed and stayed behind for those trusts, with the outcome left to Allah and the watching of people forgotten. That is how the first young man to believe lived, in courage that came from trust and in honesty that owed nothing to applause, and it is a way still open to anyone who wants it. May Allah be pleased with Ali, the Lion of Allah, raise us upon a measure of his courage and his trust, and gather us in the company of those whom Allah and His Messenger love.
This chapter follows the account of Ali ibn Abi Talib (RA) in Dr. Omar Suleiman's series The Firsts (Yaqeen Institute). The Qur'an translation is from M.A.S. Abdel Haleem (2:257). Where the histories carry more than one narration, the most widely reported has been followed.