Ten Sons for a Vow

Now, during that whole incident — when they pressured him, when they came to him and said this belongs to all of us — ʿAbd al-Muṭṭalib felt that he was weak, because he had only one son to defend him. In tribal societies, your strength is based on how many men you have on your side, and you can only count on your relatives. That is how life in the desert was: your strength was how many sons, how many men you had with you, how many brothers, how many uncles — that was your strength. So ʿAbd al-Muṭṭalib felt weak; he had only one son on his side, al-Ḥārith. So he said: "O Allah, if You bless me with ten sons, I will sacrifice one of them for You." And Allah (swt) did bless him with ten male sons. He had ten sons and six daughters.

So when he had ten, it was time for him to fulfil his promise to Allah, to sacrifice one of them. They had these arrows next to Hubal — Hubal was one of their large idols — and they believed that these arrows were divine, so they would cast lots and leave the decision up to this random way of casting. So ʿAbd al-Muṭṭalib had the name of every one of his ten sons on these arrows. So it came out on whom? ʿAbdullāh. He did it a second time — it came out on ʿAbdullāh. A third time — it came out on ʿAbdullāh. So ʿAbd al-Muṭṭalib took his son ʿAbdullāh with him, right next to the Kaʿbah, and was ready with a knife to slaughter him.

Abū Ṭālib, one of the elder sons of ʿAbd al-Muṭṭalib, went to his father and said: "We can't allow you to kill your son." And then the maternal relatives of ʿAbdullāh came and said: "We're not going to allow you to kill our son." And people were coming and telling ʿAbd al-Muṭṭalib: "If you do it, it will become sunnah for the Arabs after you" — because ʿAbd al-Muṭṭalib was their leader, so if he did something, it would become a trend after that. And they said: "If you do it, then any one of us after that who has ten sons will follow your footsteps, and we will be killing each other. We are already killing our daughters, and now we will start killing our sons." So they insisted that ʿAbd al-Muṭṭalib not do it. ʿAbd al-Muṭṭalib told them: "This was a pledge that I made to Allah. I cannot give it up. I cannot break my promise." They told him: "No, you have to stop it." So they had a dispute — how could they solve it? "Let's go to the woman again." So they decided to go and visit her again.