The Years of the Valley

Hamzah (ra) and Umar (ra) inside the city, a just king sheltering believers beyond the sea: Quraysh felt the matter slipping, and reached for a colder weapon. The clans drafted a pact against Banu Hashim and Banu al-Muttalib, the Prophet's ﷺ kin who, believers or not, would not surrender him: no marriage with them, no trade with them, no buying, no selling, no peace, until they hand Muhammad over for killing. The document was hung inside the Ka'bah to make it sacred.

Abu Talib, too noble to surrender his nephew and too realistic to fight the whole city, withdrew the two clans into his valley, the Shi'b of Abu Talib, a gorge outside Makkah. For about three years the siege held. Food ran so short that the valley's children could be heard crying with hunger from beyond it, and men ate the leaves of trees. Supplies reached them only when caravans passed and a sympathetic Makkan, at personal risk, would drive a loaded camel toward the gorge by night.

Not every conscience in Makkah had signed. Hisham ibn Amr smuggled food; and at last he gathered four other men of standing, each from a different clan, who agreed the pact was an obscenity. They stood by the Ka'bah, denounced it publicly from five directions, and demanded it be torn up. When the document was brought out, the matter had already been judged: termites had eaten the parchment, the sirah relates, sparing only the words written in Allah's name. The boycott collapsed.

The clans walked out of the valley in the tenth year of the mission, gaunt and unbroken. They had not handed him over. But the three years had drained the strength of the two people whose protection had made everything possible, and the hardest year of his ﷺ life was about to begin.