There was a man who, if he walked into Madinah in the first decades after the Prophet ﷺ was buried, would empty a gathering of its pride. Companions who had fought at Badr, who had memorised the Qur'an from the mouth of the Prophet ﷺ himself, would rise to their feet for him, take his hand and kiss it, lower themselves before an old man with two grey braids falling to his shoulders, and ask him to make du'a for them. The next generation, who never saw the Prophet ﷺ and ached for any thread that still touched him, would crowd around the same old man and whisper, who is he? And the answer was the most beautiful answer a man could carry: that is the uncle of the Prophet ﷺ. That is what is left of him among us.
His name was al-Abbas ibn Abd al-Muttalib (may Allah be pleased with him), and he appears in nearly every story of the seerah without ever quite getting a story of his own. You hear his name again and again, the man at the edge of every scene, and then you move on. His own son, Abdullah ibn Abbas, would grow so luminous that the father is often reduced to a single line of introduction in the life of the son. But to understand the mercy of the Prophet ﷺ toward his family, and what it means for Allah to know what is in a heart the world cannot see, you have to slow down and look directly at the uncle.
The lion before the roar
He was one of the youngest sons of Abd al-Muttalib, born only about three years before the Prophet ﷺ, close enough in age that the two looked like brothers more than uncle and nephew. When the Prophet ﷺ received revelation, four of his uncles were still alive. The two elder ones were Abu Talib, who protected him without believing, and Abu Lahab, who abused him and died his enemy. The two younger ones, half uncle and half older brother, were Hamza and al-Abbas, and these two would enter Islam.
Their very names tell you something. Both mean a lion, but each describes a different moment of the hunt. Al-Abbas is the lion as it circles its prey and begins to roar, deliberate and watchful. Hamza is the lion once it has seized its prey and begun to tear into it, all force and fearless attack. And the names fit the men. Hamza (may Allah be pleased with him) threw himself into the heart of the enemy, the Lion of Allah. Al-Abbas was the careful one, who took his time reading a situation before he moved. Allah names His servants, sometimes, before they become what they will be.
He was, by every account, a striking man: noble, awe-inspiring, intelligent, beautiful. He had hayba, that presence Allah clothes certain people in, so that a room naturally quiets when they enter. He was fair-skinned and among the tallest men of Makkah, built, it was said, like a camel when he rose to his full height. And he had one gift peculiar to him alone: a voice that carried for miles. In his old age he would simply climb to a high place and call out, and his words would reach men far in the distance. It was not an arrogant voice. It was an instrument, and one day, in the panic of a battlefield, that instrument would save an army.
The man you asked about Makkah
Before any of that, al-Abbas held a particular place in the life of his city. His father had entrusted him with the care of Zamzam, so he stood near the centre of Makkah's hospitality, tending to the pilgrims who came from far away. He was one of the richest men in the city, a tradesman who travelled to Syria and Yemen, famous for the spices and musk he carried back. And because he knew the wider world through his trade, he was the first man a traveller would seek out for news. If you came to Makkah and wanted to know what was happening, you went to al-Abbas.
So it is no accident that he keeps surfacing in the stories of others. When Afif al-Kindi, a business partner of his, came to Makkah and saw the strangest sight of his life, a man praying before the Kaaba in a way he had never seen, bowing and prostrating, a boy at his side and a woman behind them, it was al-Abbas who explained it: that is my nephew Muhammad ﷺ, the boy is Ali, the woman is Khadijah, and no one on the face of the earth follows this religion but those three.
His own wife was already among the believers. Lubabah bint al-Harith, Umm al-Fadl (may Allah be pleased with her), was very likely the first woman to accept Islam after Khadijah, and she never hid it. And so al-Abbas lived in a house full of belief while his own position remained ambiguous, a righteous wife praying at his side and quietly praying for him, asking Allah to bring her husband to Islam and to free him from the usury he dealt in, sensing its harm even before it was forbidden.
The uncle who was never an enemy
When the Prophet ﷺ first announced his message, al-Abbas was never hostile. Like Abu Talib, he took a protective but neutral stance: you are my nephew, I will defend you, but I will not profess your religion. Why he held back is one of the great puzzles of the seerah; the scholars cannot agree on when, exactly, he became Muslim, and some narrations suggest he had believed in secret long before. What is clear is that his hesitation never came from disbelief or enmity. His heart was already leaning, even while his tongue stayed silent.
When Abu Talib died and the oldest shield was gone, al-Abbas stepped into the role of protector. And here you see the strange split inside one family. While Abu Lahab walked behind the Prophet ﷺ in the marketplaces and at Hajj, stoning him and calling him a liar, the other uncle took him by the hand and walked him toward the tribes who came from afar, searching for a people who might take his nephew in. Abu Lahab was working to bury the message. Al-Abbas was working to find it a home.
That search led to the Ansar. When that small band of young men from Yathrib offered themselves, al-Abbas was the skeptic, and his caution is moving precisely because it was love. Almost none of the Ansar were over twenty-five. They might be sincere, he worried, but did these youths understand what they were signing up for? So on the night the second pledge was taken, in the lowest part of Aqaba, it was al-Abbas who spoke first. He told them plainly: this man is honoured among his own family, who will protect him whether they follow him or not. If you take him, every Arab will turn against you. If you are a people of war who can bear that, then take him; if not, leave him, and we will care for him. They answered that they were a people of war who had inherited it. And when one asked what they would receive in return, and the answer came back, Paradise, they said: we accept, we want nothing else.
Then comes the irony at the centre of his life. As that pledge of Islam was sealed, it was al-Abbas standing there, joining the hands, sending the Prophet ﷺ off to safety with these strangers. And by every outward measure, al-Abbas himself was not yet a Muslim. He arranged the Hijrah; he did not make it.
The prisoner at Badr
Then came Badr, and with it one of the most quietly devastating scenes in his life. Before the fighting, the Prophet ﷺ told his companions that there were men on the other side who had been dragged out against their will, and named two of them. One was al-Abbas. Do not kill them, he said. Capture them if you can.
A small companion named Abu al-Yusr found him on that field. Al-Abbas was an enormous man and Abu al-Yusr was slight, so the encounter should have been impossible. But Abu al-Yusr described what he saw: al-Abbas was standing perfectly still, like an idol, hands at his sides, and his eyes were wet. He was weeping, this man dragged into a battle against his own nephew, watching fathers and brothers about to kill one another. He surrendered without a fight and was led back, to the astonishment of the companions. How did you capture him, the Prophet ﷺ asked. A man helped me, said Abu al-Yusr, a man I have never seen before or since. And the Prophet ﷺ smiled and said a noble angel had helped him.
That night the Prophet ﷺ could not sleep. When his companions asked why, he said he could hear his uncle groaning in his chains. Some of them went and loosened al-Abbas's bonds, and the Prophet ﷺ, hearing of it, was pleased, but he said: then do it for all the prisoners, not only for him. He would not let his uncle be treated as a special case, just as he had said that if his own daughter Fatimah stole he would apply the punishment to her.
Then the ransoming came. The Prophet ﷺ told him to ransom himself and three of his kin. And here al-Abbas said it at last: O Messenger of Allah, I was already a Muslim. The Prophet ﷺ answered with perfect justice and perfect trust: Allah knows your reality best; if what you claim is true, He will reward you for it. But as for the outward matter, it stands against you, so ransom yourself. He would not bend the visible law on the strength of a private claim. When al-Abbas pleaded that he had no money, the Prophet ﷺ named the exact sum he and Umm al-Fadl had hidden away, and the instruction he had given her in case he died in battle, words no living soul but the two of them had heard. Al-Abbas trembled. By Allah, he said, you are truly the Messenger of Allah, for no one knew of that but me and Umm al-Fadl. He paid the largest ransom of Badr; more captives were freed through his wealth than through anyone else's.
And about that day, Allah sent down words that al-Abbas would carry for the rest of his life:
Prophet, tell those you have taken captive, 'If God knows of any good in your hearts, He will give you something better than what has been taken from you, and He will forgive you: God is forgiving and merciful.'
Qur'an 8:70
Al-Abbas understood the verse was about him. By Allah, he would say, I knew it was true. In place of the gold that was taken from me, Allah gave me far more, twenty servants, each with wealth in his hands, who went out and increased my fortune. And as for the forgiveness, he would add, I am still waiting and hoping for the forgiveness of Allah. He had given what was taken, and trusted the promise that what is surrendered to Allah is never lost.
The family brought home
After Badr he could no longer be forced out against the Prophet ﷺ, and he held himself back from every battle on the wrong side. When the conquest of Makkah approached and al-Abbas set out to migrate so he could earn the full reward, the Prophet ﷺ met him on the road and told him: you are to me as the seal of the migrants, just as I am the seal of the prophets. He had negotiated the Hijrah out of Makkah; now he negotiated the return into it, the peaceful reconciliation with the very family who had cast the Prophet ﷺ out. The man who had sent him away was the man who brought him home.
Not all the Ansar understood at first why this latecomer was so honoured, and more than once the Prophet ﷺ had to correct them, and his words were severe with love. What is it with people who hurt me by hurting my uncle? Whoever harms al-Abbas has harmed me. He is what remains of my forefathers; honour him. And in another narration, the heaviest of all: by Allah, faith will not enter a man's heart until he loves al-Abbas for the sake of Allah and for my sake, because he is my kin.
At the Battle of Hunayn, when the Muslims were scattered in the first shock and many fled, it was al-Abbas who held the reins of the Prophet's mount and stayed, and it was that great voice of his that the Prophet ﷺ told him to raise. He called the fleeing men back: come back, he is the Messenger of Allah. And the army turned, and rallied around the Prophet ﷺ, and the day was won. The gift Allah had placed in him in the days of ignorance now served the religion.
In Madinah at last, the Prophet ﷺ built a home for him beside his own. Our mother Aisha (may Allah be pleased with her) said she never saw anyone the Prophet ﷺ honoured or loved more than al-Abbas. He would keep him close, kiss his forehead, place him again and again on that pedestal of a father, and pray that Allah forgive al-Abbas and his children with a forgiveness that leaves no sin behind, the hidden and the open. And his children were many, more than fifteen, among them Abdullah ibn Abbas, the boy who slept in the Prophet's house and shadowed him and became the great scholar of the ummah. The family was whole again, and the Prophet ﷺ kept it close until the end.
The most honoured man in Madinah
When the Prophet ﷺ passed, al-Abbas helped wash his body, and then he became the anchor of the household that remained. Ali himself, it is narrated, would kiss the hands and feet of al-Abbas, saying, O my uncle, be pleased with me. And the two great caliphs honoured him in ways almost hard to picture. Umar gave the veterans of Badr a stipend, and to al-Abbas more than them all. Once Umar and Uthman, seeing al-Abbas approach on the road, dismounted from their camels, unwilling to sit higher than him as he passed.
And in the year of the great famine, when the rains would not come and people were dying, Umar did something that has echoed ever since. He gathered the people for the prayer for rain and brought al-Abbas forward, and he said: O Allah, when our Prophet ﷺ was among us and drought struck, we would draw near to You through him. Now our Prophet is gone, and we draw near to You through the uncle of our Prophet, so give us rain. Al-Abbas wept and made du'a, Umar made du'a, and the rain came and filled Madinah and the valleys around it as they had not seen since the days of the Prophet ﷺ. A grandson of Abu Lahab, of all people, a believer named after this same al-Abbas, stood there and put it into verse: that by his uncle, Allah had given water to the people of Hijaz.
His passing
He lived in Madinah for more than two decades after the Prophet ﷺ, the last living warmth of a father everyone had loved. He died in the time of Uthman, soon after his wife Umm al-Fadl, at eighty-six. And when the people of Madinah heard that the uncle of the Messenger of Allah ﷺ had died, they poured in from every direction until the city was overwhelmed. It may have been the largest funeral of any companion ever buried in Madinah. The crowds pressing to carry him, to touch him one last time, became so dense that they could not get him to the grave; Uthman had to send men to push the people back from Banu Hashim so that the family could finally lay him down. Even his burial was a measure of his honour.
His son Abdullah, drowning in grief beside the grave, was approached by a bedouin who said something he never forgot: what awaits you now, as a reward for grieving your father, is better for you than your father was; and what Allah will be for al-Abbas now is greater than anything you could ever be for him. His lineage spread across the Muslim world, and from it came the long Abbasid line. But the title that mattered was never a dynasty. It was the one the Prophet ﷺ gave him: al-Abbas, the uncle of the Messenger of Allah ﷺ.
What al-Abbas's life asks of our faith
It is easy to read the life of al-Abbas and feel only the warmth of it, the honour heaped on a beloved old man. But there is a sharper question buried in his story, and it is about what Allah sees.
For years al-Abbas carried something the world could not read. He loved the Prophet ﷺ, he defended him, he believed, perhaps, long before he said so, and yet outwardly he stood in an ambiguous place, even on the wrong side of a battlefield. The Prophet ﷺ would not bend the visible ruling for him, because justice is justice. But Allah was not fooled for a moment. If God knows of any good in your hearts, the verse says, He will give you something better. Al-Abbas lived to see that promise kept twice over, in wealth restored and forgiveness hoped for. Here is what that asks of you: stop performing your faith for people who can only see the outside, and start tending the part of your heart that only Allah can see. The good He is looking for is not the good others applaud. It is the sincerity, the ikhlas, that you keep between yourself and Him, the intention no one will ever verify. Al-Abbas's whole reward turned on what was inside him. So will yours.
Then notice what he did with what was taken from him. They stripped his gold at Badr, and he did not grasp after it or grow bitter; he let it go, trusted the promise, and watched Allah return it multiplied. Later, when the Prophet ﷺ abolished the usury he was owed and encouraged him to forgive even the principal, al-Abbas forgave it, for the sake of a shade on the Day of Judgment. This is contentment with Allah's decree turned into action: the conviction that nothing surrendered to Allah is ever truly lost, that what the world calls a loss He may be recording as the very thing that saves you. When something is taken from you, money, comfort, a plan you loved, his life asks whether you can open your hand the way he did, certain that the One who took it has something better.
And there is the great voice. Allah gave him a gift that could have been mere vanity in a shallow society, and at Hunayn he turned it toward the Prophet ﷺ and called a fleeing army back to the truth. You have been given something too: a skill, a presence, a means, a circle of people who will hear you. The question is the same one his life puts to all of us. Will you spend your gift on yourself, or raise it, the way he raised his voice, in the service of what Allah loves? Do one concrete thing with it today, for Allah alone: use your means to bring someone back toward Him, forgive a debt no one will know you forgave, give in a silence only He will witness.
The quality to take from al-Abbas is this: to live for the eyes of Allah and not the eyes of men, and to trust that He sees and keeps every hidden good. It is a quiet, unglamorous faith, the faith of a careful man, and it is open to anyone. May Allah be pleased with al-Abbas, the uncle of His Messenger ﷺ, reward the good he kept hidden in his heart, and grant us the sincerity to live for His sight alone, until He gathers us in the company of His Prophet ﷺ and his household and his companions.
This chapter follows the account of al-Abbas ibn Abd al-Muttalib (RA) in Dr. Omar Suleiman's series The Firsts (Yaqeen Institute). The Qur'an translation is from M.A.S. Abdel Haleem (8:70). Where the histories carry more than one narration, the most widely reported has been followed.