Eclipses in Hadith

It is said that, after the Prophet’s young son Ibrāhīm died, the sun eclipsed. When the people said that the sun had eclipsed because Ibrāhīm had died, the Prophet said that eclipses do not occur due to deaths, and led eclipse prayers. This paper argues that while the hadith corpus correctly records an annular solar eclipse in 632 CE, Ibrāhīm ibn Muḥammad did not die on that day. Rather, one set of hadith records Ibrāhīm’s death and burial, and another set of hadith records the eclipse; by the mid-ninth century, the two strands fused into a single story. This story, in turn, parallels accounts of an eclipse after the martyrdom of the Prophet’s grandson, al-Ḥusayn ibn ʿAlī (d. 680), at the Battle of Karbala. While some Muslims present the Ibrāhīm-eclipse story as a way of showing how Islam broke from pre-Islamic notions of eclipses, the Ibrāhīm-eclipse and Karbala-eclipse narratives together still retain ancient associations between eclipses and death, lament, battle, the fall of notables, and apotropaic ceremonies. This paper also exemplifies how reports of astronomical events in hadith can yield insights into Islamic history, and a supplementary appendix explores some later eclipses mentioned in the Shiʿi hadith corpus.