Some of the people in this book are remembered for what they gave. These are remembered for what they took. They were the crowds of a city that turned the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ away on the worst day of his life. They lined the road and threw stones until his feet bled. They were the slaves and the street children who were set loose on a tired, grieving man who had come to them with nothing but the truth and a hope that they might listen. And yet, when the chance came to wipe them off the face of the earth in a single moment, the Prophet ﷺ refused, because of them. Not the adults who mocked him. Their children. He looked past the hatred in front of him and saw a future no one else could see, and he asked Allah to spare them all for the sake of a faith that had not yet been born in a single one of their hearts.
This is the chapter of the children of Ta'if (may Allah be pleased with those of them who believed), and it is, in the end, a chapter about hope.
The worst day
To understand the children, you have to stand where the Prophet ﷺ stood. He had gone to Ta'if after years of rejection in Makkah, after the deaths of the two people who had shielded him, looking for one tribe, one leader, one open door. He found none. The chiefs of the city refused him, and then they did something crueler than refusal. They turned their young against him.
When the Prophet ﷺ left, they lined the path on both sides. The slaves and the children of Ta'if pelted him with stones until the blood ran down and filled his sandals, until he could barely stand. He was driven out of the city this way, hounded by mockery and the laughter of boys who had been told that this man was a fool worth hurting. He took shelter at last in a garden, broken and alone, and there he made the quiet, shattering supplication that has reached us across the centuries, complaining to Allah of his weakness, of his helplessness before people, and asking only that, if Allah was not angry with him, none of it would matter.
Years later, our mother Aisha asked him directly whether he had ever known a day worse than the day of Uhud, where he had been wounded and nearly killed. He answered, looking back across his whole life, that the worst of it was the day of Ta'if. He had gone to its people and they had not answered him as he had hoped. He departed in grief, his face heavy with it, and he did not find relief until he reached that garden. Of all the suffering this man endured, and he endured almost every kind, the day the children of Ta'if stoned him is the day he named as the hardest. Hold that in your mind, because it is the measure of everything that comes next.
The angel and the two mountains
As he sat in that garden, wounded and exhausted, he looked up and saw a cloud move to shade him. Out of it came the angel Jibril, who called to him and told him that Allah had heard exactly what his people had said to him and how they had answered him. And Allah had sent, along with Jibril, another angel: the angel of the mountains, placed entirely at the Prophet's command, ready to do whatever he asked.
The angel of the mountains, whom the Prophet ﷺ had never met before, greeted him and then offered him the whole of Ta'if. If the Prophet ﷺ wished it, the angel would fold the two great mountains that stood on either side of the city together and crush every soul between them. It could all be over. These people had given him the worst day of his life. They had drawn his blood and laughed while they did it. He was, by every measure of justice the world has ever known, entirely within his right to say yes.
Consider, for a moment, what that offer truly was. There is a sacred saying that whoever shows enmity to a friend of Allah, Allah declares war on him. So what of the people who had just done this to the most beloved of all Allah's creation? The fire was already lit. The judgment was already justified. The angel was only waiting for a word.
The Prophet ﷺ said no.
And then he gave his reason, and the reason is the heart of this entire story. He said that he hoped Allah would bring forth from the loins of these people, from their children and their children's children, those who would worship Allah alone and associate nothing with Him. That was the answer. Spare them, because of what their descendants might one day become.
What the refusal reveals
Pause here, because it is easy to rush past this and call it mercy and move on. It is mercy, but it is something more precise than that, and the more precise thing is what should reach into your own heart.
Look at what the Prophet ﷺ did not say. He did not say, "Spare them, maybe their children will believe in me." He did not say, "Maybe their children will accept me, or love me, or finally give me the loyalty their parents withheld." He had every reason to want some vindication after a lifetime of rejection. He said none of it. He said: maybe their children will worship Allah and not associate any partner with Him.
This is one of the purest expressions of sincerity, of ikhlas, in the entire seerah. The wounds on his body were still fresh. This was piled on top of years of grief in Makkah. He was fully entitled to make this about himself, about his own pain, his own dignity, his own name. And he refused to make his mission about his feelings at all. His concern was not whether Muhammad ﷺ would be honored or shamed. His concern was whether Allah would be worshipped on this earth.
You see the same spirit later, on the eve of Badr, when he raised his hands and pleaded with his Lord. He did not pray that he himself be saved from humiliation. He prayed that if this small band of believers were destroyed, there would be no one left on earth to worship Allah. His fear was never for his own name. It was for the Name of Allah. That is the methodology he is teaching us through the garden of Ta'if: that a person can be dragged through the mud, can bleed in the dust, and still care for only one thing, that something good for Allah might grow from that very soil. If the price of that harvest is his own suffering, he is content to pay it.
The child who never forgot
So a question hangs over the scene. As the Prophet ﷺ stood there, reciting, leaning on a stick because he could barely hold himself up, did any of those children actually listen? When the enslaved boys were ordered to throw their stones, did none of them look at this gentle, wounded man and wonder why they were doing this to him? The natural disposition Allah places in every child, the fitrah, does not learn cruelty on its own. Cruelty has to be taught. And something taught can sometimes be unlearned.
There is one narration that answers the question, and it is precious because it is the only direct witness we have from a child of that day. A man named Uthman ibn Abi al-As, who later became one of the noble companions, was asked by his son to tell the story of how he came to know the Prophet ﷺ. He said that he had been there, a young man, when the Prophet ﷺ came to Ta'if. And he said it was as if he could still see him: standing, leaning on something for support, reciting the Qur'an to the very end of a passage that struck the boy so deeply he never forgot a word of it.
He memorized it then, he said, in the days of ignorance, as a disbeliever. The recitation of the Prophet ﷺ in that desperate, lonely hour, with no people around him and only strangers and enemies before him, was so profound that it lodged in the heart of a child who had no intention of believing. And the persecutors knew the danger of it. After the stoning, they interrogated the young people: what did you hear from this man? Get it out of your minds. The leaders told them, we know our companion better than you do, and if he were truly what he claims, we would have followed him first, so forget whatever he said.
But you cannot take a thing out of a heart once Allah has placed it there. The words stayed. Years later, that same young man came to the Prophet ﷺ and accepted Islam, and he had the honor of reciting in faith the very passage he had memorized in disbelief. He remembered it twice: once in the darkness, and once in the light. You never know who is listening. You never know whose heart is quietly keeping what you say.
The youngest of the delegation
The hope of the Prophet ﷺ was not disappointed. Years after the stoning, after the long siege of Ta'if during the campaign of Hunayn, a delegation came from that same city to Madinah, and they embraced Islam. They went home, and the people of Ta'if accepted Islam as a result. The city that had driven the Prophet ﷺ out with stones became a Muslim city. The supplication in the garden was being answered.
Among that delegation was its youngest member, the same Uthman ibn Abi al-As, the boy who had memorized the recitation. The scholars note that the eldest of the delegation was one of the chiefs who had once mocked the Prophet ﷺ. The youngest was this young man, described as a person of virtue, the trusted one. And there is evidence that he had quietly become Muslim even before that delegation arrived, hiding his faith from his own people so that he could go along with them and serve the cause from within. He came to the Prophet ﷺ already carrying some of the Qur'an, already knowing something of the religion, not one of the leaders who challenged the Prophet ﷺ on every point, but a young heart that had already turned.
The Prophet ﷺ was impressed by him, and he loved him. When the famous conversation with the delegation ended, the Prophet ﷺ appointed this youngest man as the leader of Ta'if, trusting his faith more than anyone else's. He had come as the youngest of the group. He left Madinah as their commander. The Prophet ﷺ is reported to have told the others, in effect, that this young man was something special, that they did not yet understand him, and that they should take care of him and use him well. Abu Bakr and Umar remembered the love the Prophet ﷺ had carried for him. Under their leadership he became a governor and a fierce commander, one of the warriors who led expeditions against the Persian Empire, who later settled in Basra and taught and transmitted hadith there, planting the message in one of the great strongholds of Islamic history.
So watch the strange and beautiful arc of it. People who began by giving the Prophet ﷺ the worst day of his life ended by carrying his message to distant cities. The supplication of the garden, spare them, for their children might worship Allah, ran straight through a frightened boy with a stone in his hand and came out, years later, as a leader spreading the word of Allah across an empire.
The harvest we cannot see
We do not know what became of most of them. We do not know whose hands today are descended from those children, which scholars and narrators and quiet believers across the generations trace their blood to a boy who once stood on that road in Ta'if. With the exception of a handful, history does not record their names. Of the enslaved who were set on him, of the others in the crowd, the record is silent. But the silence is not emptiness. It is a harvest too vast to count.
There is a principle here worth carrying out of this chapter. When children are taught to hate, the hatred sits unnaturally on them, because it is against the fitrah Allah gave them. You may see a child groomed in something terrible, raised on hostility. And still there is hope, because beneath the grooming the natural disposition remains, and if it is nurtured rather than crushed, that child can be brought back. This is why the call to Allah must continue even past the abrasive, hardened adults who reject it. The hope is in the future. The hope is always in the future. The Prophet ﷺ looked at a crowd that had bloodied him and saw not enemies to be destroyed but ancestors of believers yet to come.
What the children of Ta'if ask of our faith
It would be easy to read this as a story about patience under abuse, or about the high character of the Prophet ﷺ, and to admire it from a safe distance. But that is not what it is asking of you. It is asking about the object of your heart, the thing you are really living for.
The Prophet ﷺ refused vengeance not because he was incapable of anger, but because his mission was never about him. That is the question this chapter puts to your own iman: when you do good, when you give, when you serve, when you endure, who is it for? He could have made the call to Allah about his own dignity, and he refused. Most of us cannot give a small thing without wanting it noticed. Ask honestly how much of your worship, your charity, your patience is quietly bent toward the eyes of people, toward being thanked, toward being seen as good, and how much of it could be done the way he did it in that garden, with blood still on his feet, caring only that Allah be worshipped. That is ikhlas, and it is the difference between a deed that rises to Allah and a deed that dissolves into nothing. Take one act this week and strip it bare. Give something, forgive someone, pray something, and tell no one, and let it be for Allah alone.
And learn to see as he saw. He looked at the hardest hearts in front of him and refused to write off their children. There are people in your own life you have quietly given up on: the relative who will not listen, the friend who mocks what you believe, the version of someone they have not yet become. The Prophet ﷺ teaches you to hold your hope past them and toward what Allah can still do. Allah brings the living out of the dead. He can place faith in a heart you have already buried, sometimes through a single word you said and forgot, that lodged in someone the way that recitation lodged in a frightened boy. So do not stop. Speak the good word. Plant it gently and leave the harvest to Allah, because you will never know who is listening, and you will never see most of what grows.
That is the deepest comfort in this story. The Prophet ﷺ never met most of those children as believers. He died the year after the delegation came. He scattered a hope he would not live to see fulfilled, and trusted Allah to bring it to fruit after he was gone. Your good is the same. What you do for Allah is not lost because you cannot see its end. He keeps it. He grows it in soil and seasons you will never witness. You are asked only to be faithful in the planting and content to leave the rest with the One who gave the children of Ta'if to faith.
May Allah be pleased with those of them who believed, and gather us among the hope of His Prophet ﷺ. May He make us of those who carry the call without needing to see its fruit, who do for His sake what no one will ever know, and who never give up on a heart while there is still breath in it. And may He give life to the dead hearts around us, and protect our own hearts from ever growing cold.
This chapter follows the account of the children of Ta'if in Dr. Omar Suleiman's series The Firsts (Yaqeen Institute). The supplication of the Prophet ﷺ, the encounter with the angel of the mountains, and the narration of Uthman ibn Abi al-As are drawn from the hadith literature as related in that series. Where the histories carry more than one narration, the most widely reported has been followed.