Ghazzah

Ghazzah (Gaza) is an ancient town of southern Palestine, near the Mediterranean coast at the southern edge of the Syrian lands, which figures in the sīrah chiefly as a terminus of the trading route of Quraysh toward Syria and as the place where Hāshim ibn ʻAbd Manāf, the great-grandfather of the Prophet Muḥammad ﷺ, died and was buried. Because of his grave there the town was known to the Arabs as Ghazzat Hāshim, “Ghazza of Hāshim,” and this association is the principal link of the town with the family of the Prophet ﷺ before Islam.

Ghazzah lay upon the caravan road that joined Makkah and the Ḥijāz to Syria, the route along which the merchants of Quraysh carried their trade in the “journey of the summer” mentioned in the Qurʼān in the Sūrat Quraysh. As one of the marts at the Syrian end of this road, Ghazza was among the places frequented by the Makkan traders, and the wealth and standing of Quraysh rested in great part upon this commerce between the south of Arabia and the markets of the north. The town thus belonged to the commercial world in which the Prophet’s ﷺ forefathers, and in his youth the Prophet ﷺ himself, took part.

It was during this trade that Hāshim ibn ʻAbd Manāf, who held the office of providing for the pilgrims and who had established the two seasonal journeys of Quraysh, died at Ghazza while traveling toward Syria, and was buried there. His death in the north left his young son Shayba—later known as ʻAbd al-Muṭṭalib, the grandfather of the Prophet ﷺ—to be raised for a time among his mother’s people in Yathrib, until his uncle al-Muṭṭalib brought him to Makkah. The grave of Hāshim at Ghazzah was remembered in the tradition, and the by-name Ghazzat Hāshim preserved his memory there for the later generations.

Beyond this connection, Ghazzah had no part in the events of the Prophet’s ﷺ mission, lying as it did within the Byzantine territory of the north, far from the theatre of the sīrah. It enters the history of Islam proper only afterward, in the period of the conquests, when the armies of the Muslims advanced into Palestine in the caliphate of Abū Bakr and ʻUmar, and Ghazza, with the other towns of the region, passed under Muslim rule. The traditions record that an early engagement took place in its vicinity in the course of these campaigns, and the town thereafter became a place of Muslim settlement.

In later memory Ghazzah retained its association with the Prophet’s ﷺ family, and the connection with Hāshim was sometimes recalled in the literature, the more so as the town came also to be linked, in some reports, with the birth or early life of the jurist al-Shāfiʻī, who was of Qurashī and Hāshimī descent. But for the sīrah properly speaking, the significance of Ghazzah rests upon the single fact of the grave of Hāshim and upon the trade route of which it was a terminus, the commerce that sustained Quraysh and that formed the worldly background of the house into which the Prophet ﷺ was born.

In the sīrah tradition, then, Ghazzah is remembered as Ghazzat Hāshim, the northern town where the Prophet’s ﷺ great-grandfather died upon the Syrian trade and was laid to rest: a place at the far end of the caravan road of Quraysh, bound to the family of the Prophet ﷺ by the grave it held, and entering the larger history of Islam only with the conquests that followed the age of the Prophet ﷺ.