In the year 619, Muhammad’s wife Khadijah died. Most Sunni accounts say that she was significantly older than her husband, 65 years old to his 50. Her great age seems less likely when you consider that she left a daughter who was perhaps as young as ten, but really nobody knows. Of course, this was a great grief to their family, as the couple had been very close friends.
Muhammad’s uncle, Abu Talib, who had raised him and whose son he was in turn raising, was growing old and sick. He had been the official clan elder protector of Muhammad for the last five or six years. Before he passed away, the Quraysh elders made another attempt to get him on their side. They asked him to get his nephew to leave Mecca or stop attacking their city’s religion. On his deathbed, he made this request of Muhammad, but of course the Prophet instead asked them all to admit that God was one. The Quraysh elders left, disgusted. But what about Abu Talib?
Abu Talib died soon after the confrontation. He had never publicly embraced Islam, so did he finally repeat that there is no God but Allah? Shi’ite sources believe he did, that in fact he had privately professed faith even before this. They don’t believe that he had ever been an idolater. Sunni sources are in doubt, saying that Uncle Abbas told Muhammad he heard Abu Talib whispering the Shahada as he died, but Muhammad said only, “I did not hear it.” In this narrative, it was a lesson to remember that we cannot determine who God saves, just because we love them. It’s possible that Shi’ites exalt Abu Talib beyond what he deserved because he was the father of Ali; it’s also possible that Sunnis put down Abu Talib more than he deserved, because later political strife made them want to de-emphasize the genetic kin of Muhammad.
With Abu Talib’s death, the floodgates of persecution could open. Abu Bakr, now in poverty and being assaulted, set out for Abyssinia, but instead found a friend along the road who was amazed at the reversal of fortune and helped reinstate him in Mecca, under new protection. The new deal allowed Abu Bakr’s house to be a Muslim prayer refuge, but stories tell that neighbors threw dirt and blood over the wall.
Muhammad began putting out feelers to nearby towns, to see if the growing Muslim community could move there. These towns said no, and that isn’t surprising considering they were economically and socially part of Mecca’s orbit. But to the north and farther inland, there was a growing core of believers in the oasis of Yathrib. Yathrib had several Jewish clans, so it was more adapted to monotheism already. It was a place that Meccans passed through on their caravan journeys, but if anything, it was more firmly on the Spice Road than Mecca, so it was not economically dependent. Muhammad’s Banu Hashim clan had kinship ties in Yathrib, too. Yathrib looked like a good place to move from the troubles of Mecca.
In personal news, after some time had passed since Khadijah’s death, friends urged him to remarry. He married a widow named Saudah, who was about 30 and could step in and take up the household work. But then Muhammad also became betrothed to Abu Bakr’s daughter Aisha. We’ll talk more about Aisha later. In mainstream Sunni telling, at her betrothal Aisha was only six, and it made little difference to her life. The tie served to bring Abu Bakr and Muhammad closer, so that they were family, not just friends.