One Death, Read Two Ways by the Family He Protected

Sunni and Shia biography agree on almost every fact of Abu Talib's life and disagree sharply on the one question that mattered most to each tradition afterward: did the man who protected Islam's Prophet for forty years, at real cost to himself, ever actually believe in what he was protecting.

The Sunni account, resting on hadith in which Muhammad is described as grieving that he could not secure his uncle a better fate, holds that Abu Talib died as he had lived, honoring and shielding his nephew without ever accepting his message, and is therefore counted among the unbelievers despite his services to Islam. Twelver Shia scholarship reads the same events differently, arguing that a man who defended the Prophet at the cost of his clan's standing and years of privation in the boycott is more plausibly read as a believer who concealed his faith for the same reason many early converts did, to keep functioning as Muhammad's protector rather than becoming one more person needing protection. Shia sources marshal poetry attributed to Abu Talib that speaks approvingly of the new religion as part of the case.

The dispute is not merely antiquarian. Sunni tradition's reading of Abu Talib as an unbeliever sits behind later arguments about who among the Prophet's family counts as rightly guided; Shia tradition's reading of him as a secret believer supports its case that faithfulness ran continuously through the house of Hashim from Abd al-Muttalib through Abu Talib to Ali. Both traditions agree on the fact underneath the disagreement: whatever Abu Talib privately believed, what he publicly did was protect his nephew without interruption until his own death, close enough to Khadijah's that year that biography groups the two losses together as the Year of Sorrow.