There are men whose names fill the history books, and there are men whose names are almost lost inside the stories of others. This chapter is about one of the second kind. Before we ever arrive at the famous Amr ibn al-As (may Allah be pleased with him), the brilliant general who would one day carry Islam into Egypt, we have to sit with the family that made him: a father who became one of the most hated men in the eyes of Allah, and a younger brother, Hisham (may Allah be pleased with him), who believed early, suffered long, and was loved more in heaven than he was ever known on earth.
The title given to this story is a wicked father and a "better" brother, and the word "better" is in quotation marks on purpose. By the end, it will make sense who decided that question, and how.
A house divided by two mothers
Amr and Hisham were the only two sons of al-As ibn Wa'il, and they were half-brothers. Amr's mother was a slave woman named Layla bint Harmalah. Hisham's mother was a woman of high rank, Umm Harmalah bint Hisham ibn al-Mughirah, and her brother was none other than Abu Jahl, the chief of Banu Makhzum. That single fact pulled the whole family into the center of Quraysh. Through his mother, Hisham was a nephew of Abu Jahl and a cousin of Khalid ibn al-Walid (may Allah be pleased with him). Through his father, he belonged to Banu Sahm, another powerful clan of Makkah.
So this was a family of chiefs and warriors, of lineage and wealth, the kind of house that finds its pride in exactly those two things and almost nothing else. And it would be split straight down the middle. The favored son of a powerful mother would walk away from all of it and follow the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ. The father would spend the last decade of his life raging against the very message his son had embraced.
The father: a wealth that fed on the weak
To understand Hisham, you first have to understand what he refused to become.
Al-As ibn Wa'il was one of the wealthiest men in Makkah, and he used that wealth as a weapon against people who could not fight back. The Prophet ﷺ once said that people are like precious stones: the best of you in the days of ignorance are the best of you in Islam. The reverse is also true. Some men carried their lowest qualities straight into their opposition to the message, and only grew worse with them. Al-As was such a man.
There is a scene from before Islam that tells you everything. A trader came up from Yemen, from the tribe of Zubayd, to sell his goods in Makkah during the sacred months. He had no clan in the city to protect him. He sold some of his goods to al-As, and when he came to collect his payment, al-As simply refused. Go claim your money somewhere else, he was told. Who are you to demand anything here. The Yemeni man stood before the Kaaba and shamed the whole city with his poetry: is this how the custodians of the sacred house treat the stranger and the weak? It was not righteousness that moved Makkah, it was embarrassment. But an uncle of the Prophet ﷺ, al-Zubayr ibn Abd al-Muttalib, was genuinely outraged, and out of that incident came the famous Hilf al-Fudul, the Pact of the Virtuous, in which the tribes swore to protect anyone wronged among them. The Prophet ﷺ, still a young man, was a party to that pact and honored it for the rest of his life. So al-As had been the catalyst for something noble, by being the villain of it.
When Islam came, that same instinct for cruelty turned a particular way. Al-As was clever, witty, sharp-tongued, and his chosen weapon against the Prophet ﷺ was not the sword. It was mockery. Istihza. He is one of the men the scholars name again and again in the books of tafsir as the target of verse after verse: the one who demanded an angel be sent down, the one who scoffed that he would only pay his debts "in the Garden," the one who carried a rotted bone to the Prophet ﷺ, crumbled it in the air, and sneered. The Qur'an answers that bone directly:
Can man not see that We created him from a drop of fluid? Yet- lo and behold!- he disputes openly, producing arguments against Us, forgetting his own creation. He says, 'Who can give life back to bones after they have decayed?' Say, 'He who created them in the first place will give them life again: He has full knowledge of every act of creation.
Qur'an 36:77-79
His mockery reached its cruelest edge with the weak Muslims. When Khabbab ibn al-Aratt (may Allah be pleased with him), a blacksmith and a slave, came to collect payment for a sword he had forged, al-As told him he would not pay a single coin until Khabbab disbelieved in Muhammad ﷺ. Khabbab answered that he would not disbelieve, not in life, not in death, not even on the Day he was raised again. Al-As laughed at the very idea of being raised, and then said the words that would be recorded forever: you claim there is gold and silver in the Garden, so I will pay you there. Allah answered him in a passage that turned his boast into his sentence:
Have you considered the man who rejects Our revelation, who says, 'I will certainly be given wealth and children'? Has he penetrated the unknown or received a pledge to that effect from the Lord of Mercy? No! We shall certainly record what he says and prolong his punishment: We shall inherit from him all that he speaks of and he will come to Us all alone.
Qur'an 19:77-80
He was the one, too, who called the Prophet ﷺ al-abtar, "the cut off," because the Prophet ﷺ had buried his sons and had no male heir to carry his name. When he died, al-As said, his memory will be forgotten. Surah al-Kawthar came down in answer, and history settled the matter so completely that there is no need to argue it: the most mentioned name on the face of the earth is Muhammad ﷺ.
The thorn
In the worst days of the persecution, when the Muslims were being starved and broken, al-As and Abu Jahl chased the Prophet ﷺ down one day to mock him, and Abu Talib was no longer alive to shield him. After hearing their insults, the Prophet ﷺ made a very particular supplication against al-As. He did not pray for him to be struck down with something great. He asked Allah to give a thorn, one of the small thorns of the earth, power over him.
The dua was answered in a way that matched the smallness of it exactly. Al-As stepped on a thorn. The wound became infected, his legs failed him, his body began to rot and swell, and he was left bedridden. His son Amr, still a disbeliever then, raced toward Ta'if looking for a physician who could save his father. By the time he returned, al-As was dead, his body swollen and ruined. A man of vast wealth, undone by the least thing in creation. He came to Allah all alone, exactly as the verse had said.
The scholars note that Allah does not even name these men in the Qur'an. He leaves them as a category rather than a person, partly because there is an al-As in every generation, wearing different clothes, and partly as a dismissal: you are too low to be named, you are simply fuel, like the mockers who came before you and the mockers who will come after.
The brother who went first
Now look at what Allah did with the family of the man who called the Prophet ﷺ "cut off."
His two sons, his only two sons, the very name he was so afraid of losing, both became Muslim, and both carried the name of Muhammad ﷺ to the ends of the earth. The Prophet ﷺ said of them, the two sons of al-As are two believers, Amr and Hisham. The man who mocked the Prophet ﷺ for having no future watched his future walk into Islam.
And the one who went first was Hisham. He embraced Islam so early that he was among the believers of Dar al-Arqam, that first secret house of faith, long before his older brother Amr. He had been, by Amr's own admission, the more beloved of the two sons to their father, partly because his mother was a woman of rank. That is part of what poisoned al-As: it was his favorite child who slipped away to the Prophet ﷺ. Hisham took the kunya Abu al-As, after his father. But the Prophet ﷺ, who had a habit of turning bad names into good ones, noticed what the name al-As actually means: the disobedient one. The name fit the father. So the Prophet ﷺ renamed him Abu Muti', the father of the obedient one. He never had a son to carry it; it simply became his name, a quiet correction stitched into history.
His own household tortured him. The elites of Makkah did not flog their own children in the open the way they flogged Bilal and the slaves; they did it privately, behind their own walls, and al-As tried everything to break his son's faith. Amr took part in it too. In the end Hisham fled with the believers in the second migration to Abyssinia, while Amr, still an enemy of Islam, was the very man sent to Najashi to demand the refugees be handed back. Picture that: Amr standing before the king, arguing that this was only a domestic dispute, give us back our runaways, while his own brother stood among the believers he was trying to drag home. Amr was clever, and he tried hard, and by the grace of Allah he failed.
Ten years in the dark
Then came the part of Hisham's life that asks the hardest question of all.
A rumor reached Abyssinia that the elites of Makkah had embraced Islam, that it was safe to return. It was not true, but about forty of the believers set out for home, and Hisham was among them. The moment he reached Makkah he was seized, and the persecution this time was worse than before. He was imprisoned in what amounted to a dungeon, an abandoned house, and left there for roughly ten years. He missed Badr. He missed Uhud. He missed the Trench. Ibn Abbas (may Allah be pleased with him) reported that they would beat a man until he could not even sit up on his own, then ask, between the blows: are Lat and Uzza gods besides Allah? They beat and starved him until, at last, his tongue gave out and he said the words they wanted, even as his heart stayed full of faith.
That is the wound underneath the wound. It was not only the body. Hisham, and others forced to utter words of disbelief under torture, came to believe they were now beyond forgiveness, that the words had damned them no matter how their hearts had recoiled. His own cousin Umar ibn al-Khattab (may Allah be pleased with him) had planned to make the Hijrah to Madinah together with Hisham and a third man; they agreed to meet at dawn on the edge of Makkah, and if one did not appear, the others were to assume he had been caught and go on. Hisham did not appear. He had been taken by his own family, by his brother Amr, and by men of Banu Sahm.
And then the verse came down, and Umar, one of the few who could write, copied it out with his own hand and had it smuggled into Makkah:
Say, '[God says], My servants who have harmed yourselves by your own excess, do not despair of God's mercy. God forgives all sins: He is truly the Most Forgiving, the Most Merciful.
Qur'an 39:53
Hisham said that when Umar's letter reached him with that verse, he carried it out into a valley on the edge of the city, and he read it over and over, begging Allah to let him understand, asking whether it could possibly be meant for him. And he understood. Allah was telling them they could still come back. All those years in the dark, the Prophet ﷺ had been making dua for them by name, asking Allah to deliver Hisham and the others left behind in Makkah.
Carried out on someone's back
After the Battle of the Trench, the Prophet ﷺ turned to the companions and asked, who will go and bring back these two men for us, Ayyash and Hisham, it has been too long. It was the most dangerous mission imaginable. The man who stood up was al-Walid ibn al-Walid (may Allah be pleased with him), the brother of Khalid, who had accepted Islam long before Khalid did. He slipped into Makkah in disguise, into the very city where his own brother Khalid was still an enemy who would have cut him to pieces if he were caught. He tracked the movements of the city until he spotted a woman carrying food toward the prisoners, followed her to the dungeon, waited for night, created a distraction, broke in, and cut the chains. The two men were so weak they could not stand. He lifted them both onto his animal and rode for Madinah. On the way he tore a finger badly, and it would not stop bleeding, and he is remembered for the verse of poetry he spoke about it: you are nothing but a finger that bled, and what you met was only in the path of Allah.
So Hisham came at last to Madinah, one of the few who made both migrations, to Abyssinia and then to Madinah, having lost a decade of his life to torture and never once turning bitter against his Lord. There is a narration from the two brothers, in Muslim and in the Musnad of Ahmad, of a day they called the best gathering they ever had with the Prophet ﷺ: they came upon young men arguing over the meanings of verses, setting one part of the Qur'an against another, and the brothers held back, sensing the Prophet ﷺ would not be pleased with it. He came out with anger plain on his face and said the nations before them were destroyed by exactly this, by quarreling over the Book and striking its verses against one another. Then he gave them a measure for the rest of their lives: whatever of the Book you understand, act by it, and whatever you cannot, simply believe in it. The brothers were glad all their days that they had been the two who held back.
There is one more detail that captures who Hisham was. Despite everything, al-As had left instructions in his will to free a hundred slaves. Hisham freed fifty of them on his father's behalf, then went to ask Amr to free the rest. The Prophet ﷺ told them the truth of it plainly: had their father been a believer, their charity and their freeing of slaves on his behalf would have reached him, but as it was, the deeds were theirs and not his. Al-As was beyond their reach. Yet the scene shows you the heart of the son, willing to do good even in the shadow of a father like that.
What Hisham's life asks of our faith
It is easy to read this story as a tale of two men getting what they deserved, the mocker brought low by a thorn, the believer carried home in triumph. But the deeper question is not about them. It is about what we believe concerning Allah when we cannot see how the story ends.
Hisham spent ten years in a dungeon. He missed every great day the others lived. He was beaten until he broke, and then he was tormented by the fear that the breaking had cost him his salvation. From inside that cell, there was no visible reason to keep trusting Allah. And the verse that reached him is the same one that reaches us: do not despair of the mercy of Allah, He forgives all sins. That is the first thing his life asks of your faith. There is no sin so large, no failure so complete, no decade so wasted, that the door of return is shut. If despair is whispering to you that you have gone too far, that whisper is not from Allah. It is the same lie that nearly broke Hisham, answered by the same mercy.
The second thing his life asks is harder, because it concerns the unfairness we can all see in the world right now. Al-As mocked, stole, and oppressed for years while he sat on his wealth, and the believers starved. If you had stood in Makkah in those years, you might have wondered whether Allah was watching at all. He was. He has a plan for the mockers and a plan for the mocked, a plan for the oppressors and a plan for the oppressed, and the man who called the Prophet ﷺ "cut off" died alone and rotting while his own beloved sons carried the Prophet's name across the world. Do not lose faith in Allah when you see the wicked prosper and the faithful suffer. That is not the end of the story. It is the middle of it, and Allah does not abandon the middle.
But the truest lesson is in the title. Years later, Amr ibn al-As, by then one of the most famous men in Islam, was making tawaf when he heard young men debating which of the two brothers was better, the celebrated Amr or his lesser-known brother Hisham. Amr sat down with them, lowered his head, and answered the question himself. The night before the battle of Yarmuk, he said, my brother and I prayed together that Allah would accept us as martyrs. Allah took him and left me. He is better than me. Hisham had fought at Ajnadayn, where, when the Muslims faltered, he tore off his helmet and called out, Muslims, are you fleeing from the Garden? He plunged into the lines and they followed him, and it turned the battle. At Yarmuk he was martyred, his body cut to pieces, and Amr walked the field afterward gathering the parts of his only brother to bury in a single grave. When the news reached Umar, he said, may Allah have mercy on my brother Hisham, what a great supporter he was to Islam.
Here is what that asks of you. Hisham was not seeking to be in the history books. He was not seeking to be discussed in study circles or remembered by name. He was seeking his name with Allah, and so he was content to go first into the prison, first into the migration, first onto the battlefield, and first into martyrdom, while the fame went to others. That is ikhlas, sincerity, the rarest and most valuable thing a believer owns: to do the work for Allah alone and not need the world to know your name. Ask yourself how much of what you do is bent toward the eyes of people, and how much you could do the way Hisham did it, in a dungeon no one saw, on a battlefield where the credit went to someone else, content that Allah was watching.
So take one thing from him into your ordinary life. Refuse to despair of Allah's mercy, no matter what you have done. Trust His promise to the oppressed even when the wicked seem to be winning. And do one good deed today that no one will ever credit to your name, for Allah alone, the way the brother who went first lived his whole short life. May Allah be pleased with Hisham, and with his brother Amr, and with al-Walid who carried him home, and may He write our names with Him as He wrote theirs, even if the world never learns them at all.
This chapter follows the account of the family of Amr ibn al-As (RA) in Dr. Omar Suleiman's series The Firsts (Yaqeen Institute). Qur'an translations are from M.A.S. Abdel Haleem (36:77-79, 19:77-80, 39:53). Where the histories carry more than one narration, the most widely reported has been followed.