ʿAffān transmitted from Saʿīd ibn Mīnā, from Jābir and Ibn ʿAbbās, that they said:

“The Messenger of Allah ﷺ was born in the Year of the Elephant, on Monday, the twelfth of Rabīʿ al-Awwal. On that same day he was commissioned as a prophet, on it he was taken up to heaven, on it he emigrated, and on it he passed away.”

This, Allah knows best, is the view most widely held among the majority of scholars.

Another opinion states that he was born when seventeen nights of the month had gone by, as Ibn Diḥyah reports from certain Shiʿī authorities.

A third view maintains that eight nights of the month remained. Ibn Diḥyah cites this from the handwriting of the vizier Abū Rāfiʿ, son of the ḥāfiẓ Abū Muḥammad ibn Ḥazm, on the authority of his father. Yet the sound report from Ibn Ḥazm himself is that eight nights had already elapsed, as al-Ḥumaydī relates from him—and this is the firmer position.

A second overarching position holds that he was born in Ramadan. Ibn ʿAbd al-Barr attributes this to al-Zubayr ibn Bakkār. It is an exceedingly rare view, grounded on the undisputed fact that revelation first came to him in Ramadan when he was forty; from this they infer that his birth must also have fallen in Ramadan. This reasoning, however, is open to objection, and Allah knows best.

Al-Ḥāfiẓ Khaythama ibn Sulaymān narrated—through Khalaf ibn Muḥammad (Kurdūs al-Wāsiṭī), al-Muʿallā ibn ʿAbd al-Raḥmān, ʿAbd al-Ḥamīd ibn Jaʿfar, al-Zuhrī, and ʿUbayd Allāh ibn ʿAbd Allāh—from Ibn ʿAbbās, who said:

“The Messenger of Allah ﷺ was born on a Monday in Rabīʿ al-Awwal; prophethood descended upon him on a Monday at the beginning of Rabīʿ al-Awwal; and Sūrat al-Baqarah was revealed to him on a Monday in Rabīʿ al-Awwal.”

This chain is exceedingly uncommon, and was recorded by Ibn ʿAsākir (1).

Al-Zubayr ibn Bakkār said: “His mother conceived him during the Days of Tashrīq, in the mountain pass of Abū Ṭālib near the middle Jamarah. He was born in Mecca, in the house later associated with Muḥammad ibn Yūsuf—the brother of al-Ḥajjāj ibn Yūsuf—on the twelfth night of Ramadan.”

Al-Ḥāfiẓ Ibn ʿAsākir also transmitted (2) through Muḥammad ibn ʿUthmān ibn ʿUqbah ibn Mukram, from al-Musayyab ibn Sharīk, from Shuʿayb ibn Shuʿayb, from his father, from his grandfather, who said:

“The Messenger of Allah ﷺ was conceived on ʿĀshūrāʾ in Muḥarram and born on Monday, twelve nights into Ramadan, twenty-three years after the campaign of the People of the Elephant.”

Another scholar relates that when al-Khayzurān—the mother of Hārūn al-Rashīd—performed the pilgrimage, she ordered that this house be turned into a mosque, and it is still identified as such to this day (3).

Al-Suhaylī (4) stated that the Prophet’s ﷺ birth fell on the twentieth of Nīsān (April), which he regarded as the fairest and most temperate time of the year.