The songs furnish ample evidence as to the high position which Abd al Muttalib held among the Kureisch.  His death was a great loss to his nation, but it was a greater calamity to his little foster-child, for it brought him from ease and riches to comparative poverty and obscurity with his uncle, Abu Talib.  None of Abd al Muttalib’s sons inherited the nature of their father, and with his death the greatness of the house of Hashim diminished, until it gave place to the Omeyya branch, with Harb at its head.  The offices at Mecca were seized by the Omeyya, and to the descendants of Abd al Muttalib there remained but the privilege of caring for the well Zemzem, and of giving its water for the refreshment of pilgrims.  Only two of his sons, except Abu Talib, who earns renown chiefly as the guardian of Mahomet, attain anything like prominence.  Hamza was converted at the beginning of Mahomet’s mission, and continued his helper and warrior until he died in battle for Islam; Abu Lahab (the flame) opposed Mahomet’s teaching with a vehemence that earned him one of the fiercest denunciations in the early, passionate Suras of the Kuran: 

  “Blasted be the hands of Abu Lahab; let himself perish;
  His wealth and his gains shall avail him not;
  Burned shall he be with the fiery flame,
  His wife shall be laden with firewood—­
  On her neck a rope of palm fibre.”

Mahomet, bereft a second time of one he loved and on whom he depended, passed into the care of his uncle, Abu Talib.  This was a man of no great force of character, well-disposed and kindly, but of straitened means, and lacking in the qualities that secure success.  Later, he seems to have attained a more important position, mainly, one would imagine, through the lion courage and unfaltering faith in the Prophet of his son, the mighty warrior Ali, of whom it is written, “Mahomet is the City of Knowledge, and Ali is the Gate thereof.”  But although Abu Talib was sufficiently strong to withstand the popular fury of the Kureisch against Mahomet, and to protect him for a time on the grounds of kinship, he never finally decided upon which side he would take his stand.  Had he been a far-seeing, imaginative man, able to calculate even a little the force that had entered into Arabian polity, the history of the foundation of Islam would have been continued, with Mecca as its base, and have probably resolved itself into the war of two factions within the city, wherein the new faith, being bound to the more powerful political party, would have had a speedier conquest.

With Abu Talib Mahomet spent the rest of his childhood and youth—­quiet years, except for a journey to Syria, and his insignificant part in the war against the Hawazin, a desert tribe that engaged the Kureisch for some time.  In Abu Talib’s house there was none of the ease that had surrounded him with Abd al Muttalib.  But Mahomet was naturally an affectionate child, and was equally attached to his uncle as he had been to his grandfather.