Hamza ibn Abdul Muttalib

Hamza ibn Abdul Muttalib (died 3 AH / 625 CE) was a paternal uncle of Prophet Muhammad ﷺ, close to him in age, and one of the most formidable defenders of the Muslim community during its persecuted years in Mecca. He fought at the Battle of Badr and was killed at the Battle of Uhud in 625 CE, where his body was mutilated after death.

He is unusual among the Companions in that the fullest surviving account of his death comes from the man who killed him, given decades later after that man had himself become Muslim, and preserved in Sahih al-Bukhari.

A Note on Sources and on the Epithet "Lion of Allah"

Hamza is widely known as Asad Allah wa Asad Rasulih, the Lion of God and of His Messenger, and as Sayyid al-Shuhada, the Chief of Martyrs. Both epithets are ancient and both are used with affection across the Muslim world. Neither is established in Sahih al-Bukhari or Sahih Muslim.

The reports carrying them are transmitted in later collections and in the biographical literature, and the hadith scholars have generally graded them weak. This article therefore uses them as what they are — honorific titles by which he has long been remembered — and does not present either as a saying of the Prophet. The distinction matters under the ordinary rules of attribution: a title the community has given a man is a fact about the community's regard for him, which is not the same kind of claim as a statement attributed to the Prophet.

What is in the two Sahih collections about Hamza is, in outline: that Abd al-Rahman ibn Awf considered him a better man than himself and wept over the contrast between Hamza's death and his own prosperity; a domestic incident before the prohibition of wine in which the Prophet rebuked him; and the long account of his killing at Uhud given by Wahshi ibn Harb. The mutilation of his body, the identity of who ordered it, and the Prophet's mourning are reported in the sira and maghazi literature — Ibn Hisham, al-Waqidi, Ibn Sa'd — and are presented here on that authority rather than as hadith.

Family and Early Life

Hamza was a son of Abd al-Muttalib ibn Hashim, the chief of the Banu Hashim, and so an uncle of the Prophet on his father's side. His mother was Hala bint Wuhayb of the Banu Zuhra, a relative of Aminah bint Wahb, the Prophet's mother, which made the two men kin on both sides.

The sources place his birth only a short time before the Prophet's — two to four years, according to different reports — and record that the two were also foster-brothers, having been suckled by the same woman, Thuwaybah, a freedwoman of Abu Lahab. Milk kinship established a recognised bond in Arabian custom, and it means that Hamza's relationship to the Prophet was threefold: paternal uncle, near-contemporary, and foster-brother. He was, in practice, more like an elder cousin than a figure of an older generation.

Of his life before Islam the sources record little beyond his standing. He was known in Mecca for physical strength and for skill in archery and wrestling, and he was a hunter. Nothing reliable survives about his occupation, his household, or his opinions in that period, and this article does not fill the gap.

Acceptance of Islam

The account of Hamza's conversion in the sira literature runs as follows. Abu Jahl abused the Prophet near the Safa, and a woman who had witnessed it reported the incident to Hamza when he returned from hunting. Hamza went to the Ka'ba, found Abu Jahl seated among the Quraysh, struck him with his bow, and declared that he had accepted the religion of Muhammad and that Abu Jahl might answer him if he could. Men of Abu Jahl's clan rose to defend him, and Abu Jahl waved them off, acknowledging that he had insulted Muhammad grossly.

This account comes from Ibn Ishaq through Ibn Hisham and is repeated by Ibn Sa'd and Ibn Kathir. It is the standard narrative and there is no early source that contradicts it. It is not in the hadith collections, and this article reports it as the testimony of the biographers.

The dating is usually given as around the sixth year of the Prophet's mission. What can be said about its effect is more secure than the details of the scene: Hamza's public allegiance added to the small Muslim community a man of the Prophet's own clan with a reputation for force, at a period when the community's principal difficulty was that its members could be assaulted with impunity. Tribal protection in Mecca was not abstract. It meant that an attack on a man invited retaliation from his kin, and Hamza's declaration extended that calculation to cover the Prophet more visibly than before.

The Meccan Years

Hamza remained in Mecca through the years of escalating pressure on the Muslims — the boycott of the Banu Hashim, the migration of a group of Muslims to Abyssinia, the deaths of Abu Talib and Khadijah. The sources describe him as among those who stood physically between the Prophet and hostile crowds. Specific incidents beyond the conversion narrative are sparse, and the general picture is more reliable than any individual anecdote.

He emigrated to Medina with the other Muhajirun, and on arrival was paired in the bond of brotherhood (mu'akhah) that the Prophet instituted between the emigrants and the Ansar.

Badr

Hamza fought at Badr in 624 CE, the first major engagement between the Muslims of Medina and the Quraysh. He was among those who took part in the single combats with which the battle opened, and he killed Tu'ayma ibn Adi ibn al-Khiyar.

That killing is not a minor detail. It is the reason Hamza was singled out at Uhud a year later, and the connection is established in Sahih al-Bukhari rather than inferred: Wahshi's account states plainly that because Hamza had killed Tu'ayma at Badr, Tu'ayma's nephew Jubayr ibn Mut'im — Wahshi's master — offered Wahshi his freedom if he would kill Hamza in revenge (Sahih al-Bukhari 4072). The blood feud that killed Hamza was set in motion by his own success at Badr.

The Incident of Ali's Camels

One episode from the Medinan period involving Hamza is recorded in Sahih al-Bukhari in two places, on the authority of Ali ibn Abi Talib. It is included here because it is authentic, because it is often omitted, and because the collectors themselves supply the context that governs how it should be read.

Ali had two she-camels — one his share of the spoils of Badr, one given him by the Prophet — and had set them down by the door of a house belonging to a man of the Ansar, intending to load them with idhkhir grass to sell to the goldsmiths of Banu Qaynuqa and use the proceeds for his wedding feast on marrying Fatimah. Hamza was inside that house drinking, with a singing woman who sang a line urging him toward the fat she-camels. Hamza went out with his sword, cut off the camels' humps, opened their flanks, and took portions of their livers.

Ali said that when he saw it he could not help weeping. He went to the Prophet, who came with Zayd ibn Harithah, went to Hamza and spoke to him harshly. Hamza looked up and said, "Are you anything but the slaves of my forefathers?" — and the Prophet withdrew and went out (Sahih al-Bukhari 2375; Sahih al-Bukhari 4003).

Bukhari's own text closes the account with the decisive note: this happened before the prohibition of wine. That is not an excuse added by later apologists; it is part of the transmitted report, and it places the episode in a period when what Hamza did was not a violation of a rule that existed. The report is in fact usually cited in the chapters on the prohibition of intoxicants precisely because it illustrates the state of affairs before the prohibition. What it shows about Hamza is a man of violent temper under the influence of drink, speaking to his nephew in the language of clan seniority; what it shows about the Prophet is that he rebuked him and then left rather than escalate. Both are worth knowing, and neither is diminished by being stated.

Uhud

The Quraysh returned in 625 CE with a force of about three thousand to a position near Mount Uhud, outside Medina, where a Muslim force of roughly seven hundred met them. The Muslims held the advantage in the early fighting. Then a body of archers left the position they had been ordered to hold, in order to gather spoils, and the Meccan cavalry under Khalid ibn al-Walid — not yet a Muslim — came round and struck the Muslim rear. The formation collapsed, the Prophet was wounded, and a rumour spread that he had been killed.

Hamza was killed in that fighting. The account of how, and by whom, is preserved in the words of the man responsible.

Wahshi's Account

Wahshi ibn Harb was an Abyssinian slave of Jubayr ibn Mut'im and a specialist with the short throwing spear. Years after the events, living at Hims in Syria, he was sought out by Ubaydullah ibn Adi al-Khiyar — Tu'ayma's own kinsman — and Ja'far ibn Amr ibn Umayyah, who asked him to tell them about the killing of Hamza. His answer is recorded at length in Sahih al-Bukhari 4072.

He explained the bargain first: Hamza had killed Tu'ayma ibn Adi at Badr, and Jubayr had told him that if he killed Hamza in revenge for his uncle he would be set free. When the armies drew up at Uhud, a Quraysh champion named Siba' came forward and called for single combat. Hamza came out against him, addressed him by his mother's name in terms of contempt, and asked whether he meant to challenge God and His Messenger. Then Hamza attacked and killed him.

Wahshi's own words for what followed are brief and without embellishment. He had concealed himself behind a rock; when Hamza came near, he threw his spear, which struck him low in the body and passed through, and Hamza died.

The account continues past the battle. Wahshi returned to Mecca with the army and remained there until Islam prevailed in the city, then went to Ta'if. When the people of Ta'if sent a delegation to the Prophet, he was told that the Prophet did not harm envoys, and he went with them. The Prophet, seeing him, asked: "Are you Wahshi?" He said yes. "Was it you who killed Hamza?" Wahshi answered that what had happened was as he had been told. The Prophet said: "Can you keep your face hidden from me?"

Wahshi then relates that after the Prophet's death he went out against Musaylima, saying that he would kill him and so make some amends for having killed Hamza; and that at Yamama he threw his spear into the man's chest, and an Ansari struck him on the head with a sword.

Three things in this report are worth drawing out, since it is the primary evidence.

The Prophet did not have Wahshi killed, and did not refuse his Islam. What he asked was that Wahshi keep his face out of his sight — a limit on personal contact, not a withholding of the religion or of amnesty. The two things are frequently run together in retellings; the text distinguishes them.

Hamza's death was not a chance casualty in a melee. He was killed by a man engaged specifically to kill him, from concealment, in payment of a blood debt he had incurred at Badr. Wahshi does not present it as a feat of arms and does not claim to have faced him.

And Wahshi himself regarded the act as requiring amends, and spent the rest of his account explaining how he had sought them. That is his own framing, preserved by Bukhari, and it is the reason the report exists: two men connected to the dead had come to hear it, and he told them.

The Mutilation

That Hamza's body was mutilated after death is reported consistently in the sira and maghazi literature, and the Prophet's grief at the sight is described there in strong terms. Ibn Hisham, al-Waqidi and Ibn Sa'd are the sources; Wahshi's account in Bukhari does not mention it.

The most widely quoted report — that the Prophet said he would have left the body for the beasts and the birds had it not been that Safiyyah, Hamza's sister, would be distressed — is transmitted at Jami' at-Tirmidhi 1016 and is graded da'if by Darussalam. It is recorded here as a weak transmission and no conclusion rests on it.

The account that Hind bint Utbah mutilated the body and took a portion of the liver is from Ibn Ishaq and al-Waqidi. It is not in the Sahihayn, and Wahshi, who was present and had every reason to describe the aftermath in full, says nothing of it. It is reported here as the testimony of the biographers and no further.

What is authentic and grave enough on its own is the Quranic response. The commentators, including al-Tabari and Ibn Kathir, connect the verse "And if you punish, then punish with the like of that with which you were afflicted; but if you are patient, it is better for those who are patient" (Quran 16:126) with the aftermath of Uhud and the impulse to answer mutilation in kind. The connection is tafsir rather than an explicit statement in the verse, and it is reported on that footing. The prohibition of mutilating the dead was in any case established in the Prophet's standing instructions to commanders (Sahih Muslim 1731).

Burial

The Muslim dead at Uhud were many and the available cloth was little. Jabir ibn Abdullah reported that the Prophet shrouded Hamza in a single namira cloth (Jami' at-Tirmidhi 997, graded sahih). Anas's account of the burials — men shrouded two or three to a garment, buried in shared graves, the Prophet asking which of them knew more of the Quran so as to place him toward the qibla — is transmitted at Jami' at-Tirmidhi 1016 and carries the same weak grading as the report of the Prophet's words in that chain.

Hamza was buried at Uhud, where the graves of the martyrs of the battle remain a visited site.

How the Companions Remembered Him

The clearest surviving indication of Hamza's standing among his contemporaries is not a formal encomium but a scene recorded twice in Sahih al-Bukhari.

Food was brought to Abd al-Rahman ibn Awf while he was fasting, and instead of eating he began to speak of the dead. Mus'ab ibn Umayr, he said, was killed and was better than he was, and was shrouded in a cloak so short that if his head were covered his feet showed and if his feet were covered his head showed. "And Hamza was killed, and he was better than I." Then such worldly wealth was spread out for us as has been spread out — and he said he feared their good deeds had been hastened to them in this life. He wept until he left the food untouched (Sahih al-Bukhari 1275; Sahih al-Bukhari 4045).

The measure is worth noting. One of the wealthiest men of the community, decades after Uhud, used Hamza's death as the standard against which to judge his own prosperity, and found himself wanting. That is a stronger testimony to how Hamza was regarded than any title, and it is sahih.

The two verses most often read in connection with the losses of Uhud are Quran 3:140, on the alternation of fortune and the taking of martyrs from among the believers, and Quran 3:169, on those killed in the way of God being alive and provided for with their Lord. Both are Quranic statements about the martyrs of Uhud as a body rather than about Hamza individually, and are cited here as such.

Historical Significance

Hamza's importance runs along two lines, and it is worth separating them.

The first is the one the sira emphasises: that in Mecca he was among the men whose willingness to use force made the Prophet harder to attack, at a time when the community had no other protection. This was not a military role in any organised sense — there was no Muslim army in Mecca — but a matter of tribal deterrence, and it belonged to a specific and short period that ended with the migration.

The second is what his death did to the community. Uhud was the first reverse the Muslims suffered, and Hamza was its most prominent casualty. The loss of the Prophet's uncle and foster-brother, killed by arrangement and mutilated afterwards, gave the defeat a personal character that the accounts do not disguise. Abd al-Rahman ibn Awf was still weighing his own life against it half a century later.

Around both of these grew a very large body of later devotional and epic literature — most conspicuously the Persian and Mughal Hamzanama tradition, an adventure cycle attached to his name that has almost nothing to do with the historical man. That literature is a fact about Islamic cultural history and is noted here as such. It is not evidence about Hamza, and none of its material is used in this article.

Historiographical Note

Three points about the source position should be stated plainly.

The best evidence for the central event of Hamza's life — his death — comes from a hostile witness who later became Muslim, and is preserved in the most rigorously sifted of the hadith collections. This is an unusually strong position for a seventh-century biographical fact, and it is stronger than the evidence for most of the surrounding narrative.

Conversely, the material most often repeated about him — the epithets "Lion of God" and "Chief of Martyrs," the conversion scene at the Ka'ba, the mutilation and Hind's part in it, and the Prophet's words over the body — is either from the sira literature or from weakly graded transmissions. None of it is absurd and some of it is probably true. It is not on the same footing as Bukhari 4072, and this article has kept the two apart rather than levelling them into a single narrative voice.

The one sahih report that shows Hamza in an unflattering light, the incident of Ali's camels, is retained rather than omitted, together with the transmitted note that it preceded the prohibition of wine. Removing it would misrepresent the record; reporting it without that note would misrepresent the report.

References and Further Reading

Primary Islamic Sources

• Quran 3:140 — on the alternation of fortune between peoples and God's taking of martyrs from among the believers, revealed in connection with Uhud
• Quran 3:169 — on those killed in the way of God being alive and provided for with their Lord
• Quran 16:126 — "And if you punish, then punish with the like of that with which you were afflicted; but if you are patient, it is better" — connected by al-Tabari and Ibn Kathir with the aftermath of Uhud. The connection is tafsir, not an explicit statement of the verse
• Sahih al-Bukhari 4072 — Wahshi ibn Harb's own account of the killing of Hamza: the bargain with Jubayr ibn Mut'im in revenge for Tu'ayma ibn Adi killed by Hamza at Badr; Hamza's single combat with Siba' at Uhud; the spear cast from behind a rock; Wahshi's later coming to the Prophet, the questions put to him, and the instruction to keep his face hidden; and his killing of Musaylima at Yamama in the hope of making amends
• Sahih al-Bukhari 2375, 4003 — Ali's account of his two she-camels, Hamza's cutting of their humps and taking of their livers while drinking, the Prophet's harsh words to him and withdrawal, with Bukhari's own note that this preceded the prohibition of wine
• Sahih al-Bukhari 1275, 4045 — Abd al-Rahman ibn Awf weeping over food while fasting and saying that Mus'ab ibn Umayr and Hamza were both killed and were better than he was
• Sahih Muslim 1731 — the Prophet's standing instructions to commanders, including the prohibition of mutilating the dead
• Jami' at-Tirmidhi 997 — Jabir ibn Abdullah's report that the Prophet shrouded Hamza in a single namira cloth. Graded sahih (Darussalam)
• Jami' at-Tirmidhi 1016 — Anas's report of the burials at Uhud and of the Prophet's words on seeing Hamza's mutilated body. Graded da'if (Darussalam), and flagged as such in the body; no claim rests on it

Classical Islamic Sources

• Ibn Hisham. Al-Sirah al-Nabawiyyah. Edited by Mustafa al-Saqqa. Cairo: Mustafa al-Babi al-Halabi, 1955. [Original c. 833 CE, recension of Ibn Ishaq] — the conversion narrative, and the account of the mutilation
• Al-Waqidi, Muhammad ibn Umar. Kitab al-Maghazi. Edited by Marsden Jones. London: Oxford University Press, 1966. [Original c. 823 CE] — the fullest campaign account of Uhud
• Ibn Sa'd, Muhammad. Al-Tabaqat al-Kubra. Edited by Eduard Sachau. Leiden: Brill, 1904–1940. [Compiled c. 845 CE] — the biographical entry, including the foster-kinship with the Prophet through Thuwaybah
• Al-Tabari, Muhammad ibn Jarir. Tarikh al-Rusul wa al-Muluk. Edited by M.J. de Goeje. Leiden: Brill, 1879–1901. [Completed c. 915 CE]
• Al-Dhahabi, Shams al-Din. Siyar A'lam al-Nubala'. Beirut: Mu'assasat al-Risalah, 1981–1988. [Compiled c. 1348 CE]
• Ibn Kathir, Ismail. Al-Bidaya wa al-Nihaya. Beirut: Dar al-Kutub al-Ilmiyyah, 1994. [Compiled c. 1373 CE]
• Ibn Hajar al-Asqalani. Al-Isabah fi Tamyiz al-Sahabah. Beirut: Dar al-Kutub al-Ilmiyyah, 1995. [Compiled c. 1449 CE]

Academic and Scholarly Sources

• Watt, W. Montgomery. Muhammad at Medina. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956. — the standard critical treatment of Uhud
• Lings, Martin. Muhammad: His Life Based on the Earliest Sources. Cambridge: Islamic Texts Society, 1983.
• Donner, Fred M. Narratives of Islamic Origins: The Beginnings of Islamic Historical Writing. Princeton: Darwin Press, 1998. — on the relationship between the sira material and the hadith collections
• Seyller, John. The Adventures of Hamza: Painting and Storytelling in Mughal India. Washington: Freer Gallery of Art, 2002. — the standard study of the Hamzanama cycle, and a useful demonstration of how far that literature stands from the historical figure
• Faizer, Rizwi (ed.). The Life of Muhammad: Al-Waqidi's Kitab al-Maghazi. London: Routledge, 2011.

Further Reading

• Al-Mubarakpuri, Safi-ur-Rahman. Ar-Raheeq Al-Makhtum (The Sealed Nectar). Riyadh: Darussalam, 2002.
• Haykal, Muhammad Husayn. The Life of Muhammad. Translated by Isma'il Razi al-Faruqi. Indianapolis: North American Trust Publications, 1976.
• Rogerson, Barnaby. The Prophet Muhammad: A Biography. London: Little, Brown, 2003.