al-Qasim ibn Muhammad ﷺ

Al-Qasim was born in Makkah to Muhammad ibn Abd Allah and Khadija bint Khuwaylid before the beginning of the Prophetic mission. Ibn Ishaq's material as preserved by Ibn Hisham places him among the children of the couple and states that the Prophet was known by the kunya Abu al-Qasim through him. Al-Bayhaqi also preserves reports presenting al-Qasim as the eldest of the Prophet's children. His identity and parentage are therefore well established across major Sunni and Imami biographical traditions.

The sources preserve almost no independent narrative of his childhood. He died before reaching adult responsibility and consequently left no documented marriage, descendants, public office, teaching, journey or political role. His profile must not be expanded with imagined scenes or sayings. What can be stated securely is his place in the earliest family life of Muhammad and Khadija and the lasting association of his name with the Prophet's kunya.

The age at which he died is not reported uniformly. Subul al-Huda transmits from Ibn Sa'd that al-Qasim died at two years of age, while another report says that he had reached an age at which he could ride an animal and travel over the ground. These accounts cannot both provide an exact age. They agree only that he died young, and the difference should be preserved instead of turning a later estimate into a precise birth or death year.

There is also a chronological difference in the narrative tradition. Ibn Ishaq's sira says that al-Qasim and the other sons born to Khadija died in the pre-Islamic period. Other later reports connect the death of a son with the insult that Muhammad had become cut off and with the remembrance of Surah al-Kawthar. Because those reports do not always identify the same son or chronology, this profile does not claim that al-Qasim's death was certainly the immediate occasion of a particular Qur'anic passage.

No strong early evidence located for this profile identifies a distinct grave for al-Qasim. Later public memory sometimes associates him with the cemetery of al-Mualla in Makkah, where members of the Prophet's family are traditionally remembered, but a general cemetery attribution is not the same as a verified individual grave. His historical importance lies in his secure membership in the Prophetic household, the Abu al-Qasim kunya and the record of bereavement within the Prophet's early family life.