Ḥasan

Ḥasan was born on December 11, 1199, in a Mudéjar hamlet on the Castilian side of the frontier uplands, where Muslim families farmed and paid dues through Christian lords and their officials. In his household people spoke Andalusi Arabic, and his father, ʿAbd Allāh, managed orchards and fields worked by tenants, including a man named Yahyā who brought accounts and requests to the house.

On the seventh day Maryam arranged the naming. She washed the baby, wrapped him tight, and had Qur’an recited in the main room. Meat from the family’s animals went into a meal shared with kin, with extra portions sent out for the poor. She kept the kitchen busy after dawn prayers, then carried milk and eggs to a nearby market and returned with salt and oil. Cloth was always in hand: wool to spin, a small piece to mend, a bundle to trade. Fāṭima, born in 1193, hovered close. She handed her mother pins and thread, and she learned to keep Ḥasan calm while Maryam weighed produce and argued over measures.

Through the spring of 1200 he slept on rolled mats near his sister, began crawling under benches in summer, and by winter was pulling himself upright and taking his first steps in the yard. In late August 1201 he fell ill—a fever that would not break, then stillness.

His father and an older kinsman washed the small body while Maryam poured water over his head and limbs. They wrapped him in a plain shroud and carried him outside the settlement for burial, laying him in the ground facing the qibla and saying the funeral prayer.