All Protectors

Protectors holds a figure defined by what he did for another person's safety and standing, rather than by an office, a miracle, or a place in a divine genealogy. Abu Talib ibn Abd al-Muttalib is the atlas's one entry so far. Chief of Banu Hashim after his father's death, he took the orphaned Muhammad into his household and remained his protector for the rest of his own life, most visibly by refusing Mecca's demand that he hand his nephew over or renounce him during the years their clan was placed under boycott in the valley that still carries his name. He is remembered too as the guardian who delivered the marriage sermon when Khadijah proposed to Muhammad, a second act of the same kind, standing in the formal role a father would otherwise have held.

What keeps Abu Talib in this heading rather than under Patriarchs, Founders or another office-based grouping is that his significance to the tradition rests specifically on protection rendered rather than on doctrine taught, a title held, or a lineage founded. Sunni and Shia sources disagree sharply about whether he died a believer, but neither account changes what he is remembered for doing. The heading is kept narrow and open rather than merged into a larger one because a protector figure is a distinct role a tradition can name for more than one person, and a second entry belongs here whenever another catalogued figure's significance rests on the same kind of act, shielding a founder or a central figure's life and standing, rather than on holding an office in their own right.