Early Care by His Mother, Aminah

The light which the women of Banu Hashim had seen fill the house of Aminah on the morning of the birth had scarcely dimmed in the telling before the practical mercy of Allah, Glorified and Exalted be He, settled over the newborn like a second dawn. The infant Prophet Muhammad ﷺ, may the peace and blessings of Allah be upon him, lay in the quarter of Banu Hashim beneath his mother's eye, and the days of his earliest infancy belong to her. Aminah bint Wahb (may Allah be pleased with her) was a widow still young, delivered of a son whose father had gone to the grave before the child came to the light; and the whole arrangement of that first season, the milk, the roof, the watchful servants, the reverence of the grandfather, was the first installment of the divine answer to the orphan which Allah Himself would later seal in His Book: Did He not find you an orphan and give you shelter? What believer's heart does not soften at the thought of those days: the best of creation, the Seal of the Prophets, the one by whom the east and the west would be transformed, curled as any infant is curled against his mother's breast, utterly dependent, wholly entrusted, and watched not by the great of the earth but by a widow of Makkah, a slave girl, and an old man who loved him.

The first recorded act of Aminah's motherhood after the delivery was not of the body but of the spirit. She had been instructed while she carried him, as Ibn Kathir transmits the account in his chapter on the birth and as Lings renders it from Ibn Ishaq, that when the child dropped to the ground she was to say: I invoke for him the protection of the One, Allah, from the evil of all who envy, from everyone committed to his oath and every prowling slave; and that the proof of what she had been told would be the light that accompanied him, filling the castles of Busra in Syria. The shorter form which Lings gives from Ibn Ishaq reads: I place him beneath the protection of the One, from the evil of every envier; then name him Muhammad. Either way the substance is one: the mother of the Messenger of Allah ﷺ was taught to hang the protection of her son upon Allah Himself before she had done anything else for him. The believers have never ceased to walk in her footsteps at every cradle. Every mother who whispers over her sleeping child the refuge of her Lord, who recites the closing chapters of the Quran over the small quilted bundle, who says the words of isti'adhah at the first cry, is repeating in her own small key the first motherhood of the best of mothers: the guarding of children begins not with locks and walls but with the Name with which no harm keeps company. And the whole biography of the Prophet ﷺ would vindicate the invocation: the envy of the envious, the ambushes of the roads, the poisons of later years, the arrows of Uhud, none of it reached what Allah had reserved for him to accomplish.

The words she was taught have an echo which the believer hears long afterward, for when the fullness of revelation came, the Quran itself put into the mouth of the Messenger of Allah ﷺ the refuge which the Ummah still recites over its children at their sleeping and their waking: say, I take refuge with the Lord of the daybreak, from the evil of what He created, and from the evil of the darkening when it settles, and from the evil of those who blow upon knots, and from the evil of the envier when he envies. The envier is the last peril named in the surah, as he was the peril named over the cradle of the newborn; the light which the reports said shone from the castles of Syria was itself an answer to the envy which the child would draw; and the scholars of the sirah have observed that the whole life of the Prophet ﷺ was lived beneath two refuges, the one whispered by his mother at his birth and the one revealed by his Lord in His Book, so that his infancy was opened and his mission completed under the same Name, Allah, the One, from whose protection no harm passes.

Within the house, the care of the infant was shared. Ibn Kathir opens his account of the rearing and suckling with the woman whom the Prophet ﷺ himself would treat as a second mother: Umm Ayman, whose given name was Barakah, the Abyssinian slave girl whom his father Abdullah had left among his little estate of five camels, a small flock of sheep and goats, and this one servant. She reared him, Ibn Kathir records; and when he grew to manhood and his own means came, he emancipated her, married her to his freed slave Zayd ibn Harithah (may Allah be pleased with them both), and she became the mother of Usamah ibn Zayd, the beloved of the Prophet's ﷺ household. What began as inherited property ended as beloved kin, and the woman who tended the newborn beside his mother outlived him and wept at his grave. Near her stood the towering figure of Abdul-Muttalib ibn Hashim (may Allah be pleased with him), the chief of Quraysh, the custodian of the Kaaba, the man who had carried the boy into the Holy House and prayed the prayer of thanksgiving for him. Ibn Ishaq's summary, which Ibn Kathir transmits at the close of the suckling account, says that the Messenger of Allah ﷺ stayed with his mother Aminah and his grandfather Abdul-Muttalib in the care and trust of Allah, and that Allah nurtured him like a fine plant for the honour He intended for him. The horticultural image is Ibn Ishaq's own, and it is the whole method of the infant years in a single sentence: rooted in a household, tended by those nearest, grown by none of their powers but by the care and trust of Allah.

The nursing of those first weeks was Aminah's own. Ibn Kathir states the master sequence in one sentence of his account of the suckling, and it deserves to be read slowly, for upon it the whole order of the infant events rests: the Prophet ﷺ was suckled, as well as by his mother, by the freed slave of his uncle Abu Lahab who was named Thuwaybah, and later by Halimah of the Sa'd. His mother's milk therefore came first, as nature itself decrees and as the later revelation of the Quran would confirm in the law given to all mothers: mothers shall suckle their children for two complete years, for whoever desires to complete the suckling. Around that maternal nursing came the few days of Thuwaybah's nursing, of which the eighth event of this chronicle tells in its measure; and after her, in the course of the weeks that followed, the fosterage of Halimah among Banu Sa'd, of which the ninth and tenth events tell. The precise duration of each stage is not fixed by the sources. The biographers agree upon the order and differ within it: some read the accounts as though Thuwaybah's days flowed directly toward Halimah's arrival, others leave a quieter interval under the mother's sole care; the master record of this project keeps the honesty of that range while holding the order firm. This is not the vagueness of legend but the exactness of a tradition which carried forward what was known and declined to invent what was not. The term which the Quran fixes for the general law, two complete years, was in his case gathered from more than one breast, and the scholars have drawn from this a lesson of providence rather than of deprivation: the child whom Allah intends for the whole earth is fed by the whole of it, a mother of Quraysh, a freed woman of Makkah, a Bedouin of the Sa'd, each contributing her season to the making of the man whom no single household could have contained.

Why a mother would ever give her infant to another household's milk is the question which the desert answers. Lings opens the chapter which he calls the Desert with the custom of the Arab towns: it was the practice of the great families to send their sons, soon after their birth, into the desert, to be suckled and weaned and to spend part of their childhood among one of the Bedouin tribes. Makkah had every reason to follow the custom, for epidemics were not infrequent in the settlements and the rate of infant mortality was high; and beyond the health of the body the desert had bounty for the soul. Quraysh had only lately come to the sedentary life; the nobler way, as they counted it, was the way of the tent, and the tongue of the desert was nearest to poetry, so that a child reared among the pure speakers carried eloquence for life. Fresh air for the breast, pure Arabic for the tongue, freedom for the soul: that is Lings' summary of the old calculation, and it is a faithful one. Among the tribes most famed for the nursing and rearing of children stood Banu Sa'd ibn Bakr, an outlying branch of Hawazin, whose pastures lay to the south-east of Makkah; and Lings records the resolve of the mother: Aminah was in favour of entrusting her son to the care of a woman of this tribe. It was her choice, made in the wisdom Allah gave her: the child would gain the desert's iron and the desert's tongue, and she would have him returned to her when his years were strong enough for the town. The believer who stands at this point of the story sees the hand of Allah in the mother's resolve as plainly as in the mother's milk: the Messenger of Allah ﷺ would owe to a woman of Banu Sa'd both the strength of his body and the purity of his speech, so that he could say of himself, as Ibn Ishaq relates, the words the biographers have kept: I am the most Arab of you all; I am of Quraysh, and I was suckled among Banu Sa'd ibn Bakr.

The student of the sources should also be shown where the accounts travel by different roads. The line of al-Umawi, which Ibn Kathir transmits with the frank label of a weak authority, sets out a course different from that of Ibn Ishaq: in it Abdul-Muttalib ordered one of his sons to carry the babe around the quarters of the bedouin until a foster-mother should be found, and the son eventually hired Halimah to suckle him; while in the course of Ibn Ishaq the women of Banu Sa'd come in their annual caravan to Makkah, and the child is offered to them by his mother. Both roads arrive at the same house: the household of al-Harith ibn Abd al-Uzza and Halimah the daughter of Abu Dhu'ayb; and the difference lies in the manner of the meeting, not in the fact of the fosterage. Ibn Kathir's practice in such places is the scholars' practice: he carries both courses, marks the weak link by name, and leaves the fuller fame to the account of Ibn Ishaq which the Ummah has told for fourteen centuries. This is the believer's honesty, never the believer's doubt; the difference of the reports concerns the arrangements of men, while the arrangement of Allah, that the child should be nursed in the desert that formed him, is beyond dispute among them.

Over all these arrangements lay the guarding of Allah from a dimension the eye cannot see. In the rigorously authenticated hadith of Sahih al-Bukhari, in the Book of the Commentary on the Quran, on the verse in which the mother of Isa (peace be upon him) sought refuge for her child, Abu Hurayrah (may Allah be pleased with him) related that the Messenger of Allah ﷺ said: no child is born but that Satan touches it at its birth, so that it cries out from his touch, except Maryam and her son. Lings places the hadith at this very stretch of the Prophet's infancy, and the scholars have always joined it to what came after: for the Messenger of Allah ﷺ the general condition of the sons of Adam was not left to stand. The purification which the authentic hadith of Anas ibn Malik in Sahih Muslim describes, the opening of the breast of the boy in the desert, the drawing out of the black clot which the angel called Satan's portion, the washing of the heart in a basin of gold with the water of Zamzam until it was clean, is the account of the guarding completed in the flesh; and Ibn Kathir, transmitting the report of Anas, adds the detail every lover of the Prophet ﷺ treasures: Anas used to see the mark of the stitching on his chest. The mother's invocation at the birth and the angels' work in the desert are one continuous mercy: Allah protected him from what touches every child, and purified him beyond every child, from the first days of his mother's care.

The bond forged in those first days never aged out of him. Decades later, the Messenger of Allah ﷺ came to the grave of his mother at al-Abwa, the station on the road between Makkah and Yathrib where Aminah had been laid to rest when he was a child. The rigorously authenticated hadith of Sahih Muslim preserves the visit: the Prophet ﷺ visited the grave of his mother and wept, and he made all who were around him weep; and then he said: I asked my Lord's permission to seek forgiveness for her, and it was not granted me; and I asked His permission to visit her grave, and it was granted me; so visit the graves, for they remind of death. The scholars have paused in reverence before the exactness of the two permissions: the love of the son could not alter the justice of the Judge, for Aminah had died upon the way of her people before the revelation came; yet the tenderness itself was not refused, for the visit was granted, the tears were shed, and the Ummah received the sunnah of visiting graves out of the grief of the best of creation for his mother. What was sown in the days of his infancy, the invocation at the cradle, the milk, the watchfulness, flowered at her grave as a grief that was pure, bounded, and obedient to Allah; and the believers learn from it that love for a mother is never cancelled, only enfolded within the law of her Lord.

The weeks of the mother's direct care were the preface to a wider design. The women of Banu Sa'd were expected in Makkah shortly; the custom of the desert stood like a road already laid; and Aminah's resolve, formed in the shadow of the Kaaba and the counsel of Abdul-Muttalib, waited only for the caravan's arrival. When the events of this chronicle proceed, the first nursing of Thuwaybah, the drought year among Banu Sa'd, and the acceptance of Halimah, the reader should carry one conviction through them all: nothing in the infancy of the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ happened by the accident of men. The mother who guarded him with invocation, the uncle who freed a nurse at the news of him, the barren land that hungered for milk, the woman who took the orphan because she could find no other child, each was placed in the road like a stone in a causeway, and over the causeway passed the mercy to the worlds. The orphan whom Allah found and sheltered, according to the oath of Surah Ad-Duha which stands over the whole childhood like a title written afterward in heaven, received in succession the milk of his mother, of Thuwaybah, and of Halimah; and of each of the three the sources speak with honor, because each was, in her hour, the entire provision of Allah for His Messenger ﷺ. Aminah's hour was first; and the Ummah has honoured it ever since, reciting over its own infants the invocation she was taught to recite over him.