al-Muttalib—the Prophet’s uncle, whom the Prophet ﷺ loved and held in the highest esteem.

During the battle the Prophet ﷺ himself was struck; they hit his blessed face, split the skin, and blood streamed down. His daughter Fāṭimah—may Allah be pleased with her—kept washing the blood away, and when it would not cease she burned a mat woven of palm-fiber and packed its ash on the wound until the bleeding stopped. They even broke one of his upper incisors, and every sort of hardship befell him.

It was a grievous trial, about which Allah, Exalted is He, said: “Why is it that, when disaster struck you—although you had struck them with one twice as great—you said, ‘Whence is this?’ Say: It is from yourselves; Allah is capable of everything. And what befell you on the day the two hosts met was by Allah’s permission, so that He might make the believers known.” ⦗Āl ʿImrān 3:165-166⦘.

Since the matter took place by His permission, it was ultimately good. Severe as it was for the Prophet ﷺ and his Companions, when the martyrs were first carried toward Medina he ordered that they be taken back to the very spots where they had fallen and buried there, so that on the Day of Resurrection they will rise from the place where they sacrificed their lives—may Allah be pleased with them.

When ʿĀʾishah once asked the Prophet ﷺ, “Has any day been harder for you than the day of ʾUḥud?” he replied, “Yes,” and told her of his journey to Ṭāʾif. After calling the Quraysh in Mecca to Islam and finding them unresponsive, he traveled to Ṭāʾif to convey Allah’s word. There he invited its inhabitants, but they proved even more insolent than the people of Mecca: they gathered together with their rabble, lining both sides of the road, and pelted him with stones and pebbles until his heels bled. He left the town weighed down with sorrow and distress.