Naming Ceremony & Seventh-Day Customs

Seven days after the morning that changed the world, the house of Abdul-Muttalib ibn Hashim (may Allah be pleased with him) put on the garments of a feast. The women of the household had spent the week tending the newborn son of Abdullah, the lamps of the quarter of Banu Hashim had scarcely stopped burning with the talk of the light that was seen at his delivery, and now the head of the clan of Hashim, the custodian of the Kaaba and the master of the well of Zamzam, did for this orphaned grandson what the honoured Arab of that age did for a beloved son: on the seventh day he made sacrifice for him and invited Quraysh to the feast. Ibn Kathir transmits the scene in his chapter on the birth, and behind its few lines stands the whole weight of the desert's customs: the blood of the sacrifice, the meat divided among the guests, the poor fed from the surplus, the child brought out to be seen, and the name, which among the Arabs was never a mere label but a hope, a prayer, and sometimes a prophecy spoken over a life before it could walk. What believer's heart does not quicken at the thought of the seventh day of the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ, may the peace and blessings of Allah be upon him: the nobility of Quraysh gathered in the courtyard of the very man who had carried this child into the House of Allah, and the name that would one day be called from every minaret on earth was about to be given in a small feast in a town of merchants and shepherds.

Before the feast, the grandfather had performed the dedication which the master record of this chronicle preserves. When Aminah bint Wahb (may Allah be pleased with her) had sent him word that a boy had been born to him and he came to her, she related to him what she had seen when she bore him, what she had been told about him, and what she had been ordered to name him; and then, Ibn Kathir relates, Abdul-Muttalib took the boy and carried him to the Sanctuary and into the Holy House, where he stood and prayed a prayer of thanksgiving to Allah for this gift. The transmitted text places the chief idol of Quraysh, Hubal, inside the Kaaba in those years, and the honest reading of the scene belongs to the monotheism of Ibrahim (peace be upon him) rather than to the idols that had crowded his sanctuary: the prayer the old man prayed, and the verses the sources preserve on his lips, addressed the Lord of the Pillared House, the One who had given him this fine and wonderful boy; I entrust his safety, he said, to the Pillared House, until he becomes the epitome of young men, seeking for him the protection of Allah from all who hate, from the envious and the unstable, and confessing of the child: you are he who was named in the ancient books, in books whose meanings are well established. The believer who reads those verses over the newborn in the sanctuary sees the whole future of the Kaaba in a single image: the idol stood in the hall, but the prayer passed through it to the Lord of the hall, and the child in the old man's arms would one day return to cleanse that House of every idol, restoring the sanctuary to the worship of the One whose name would be joined to his own.

Then came the naming, and the sources have kept the dialogue entire. When the guests had feasted, they said to Abdul-Muttalib: tell us, what have you decided to name this son of yours whom you have honoured? And he answered: I have named him Muhammad. A murmur of wonder must have passed along the guests, for the name was new among them, and they said: why have you preferred that he not bear one of the names of his kinsfolk? And the old chief gave the reason which the Ummah has carried in its heart ever since: because I wanted Allah to praise him in heaven and His creatures to praise him on earth. The biographers have never tired of that sentence. It is the whole of his biography in a single wish, spoken over a week-old orphan by a man who did not know that he was pronouncing the most accurate prophecy in the history of names: that the child would be praised by Allah in the highest assembly, and by creation in every tongue and every age. The believer reads the wish and then reads the world, and finds it answered past all accounting: the salawat rise to him at every hour from every land, his name is on the lips of billions, and the very calendar of a quarter of the earth's peoples turns upon his mission.

The name itself repays contemplation. The language scholars, as Ibn Kathir transmits, say that all which invites the qualities of good is named Muhammad: the root is hamd, praise, and the name means the praised one, the one worthy of praise, the one in whom praiseworthiness is gathered. Ibn Kathir adds the observation of some scholars, that Allah Almighty and Glorious inclined the hearts to name him thus so that word and deed be joined, and the name and the one named be congruent in form and meaning. And he transmits the verse which the uncle Abu Talib composed upon him, a verse which some also attributed to Hassan ibn Thabit (may Allah be pleased with him): Allah took a part of His own name to honour him, for He of the Throne is named Mahmud, the Praised One, while he is Muhammad. The line is the desert's plain theology in ten words: the name of the servant is derived from the attribute of the Master, so that every time the name Muhammad is spoken, the hamd of Allah is echoed in the world; and the believers to this day name their sons Muhammad more than any other name, seeking the barakah of the derivation, and the scholars have counted that no name in the history of the nations has been borne by so many millions.

Yet the deepest wonder of the naming is that the grandfather was not alone in it. Aminah had been commanded in the vision which came to her while she carried him: at his birth, call him Muhammad, for in the Torah his name is Ahmad, and the hosts of earth and heaven give him praise; in the Gospels his name is Ahmad, the hosts of heaven and earth giving him praise; and his name in the Quran is Muhammad, the praised one. Ibn Kathir transmits this from Ibn Ishaq's account of the mother, and Lings renders its compact form: then name him Muhammad. The father had gone to his grave at Yathrib while the son was yet unseen; the mother held her command in her heart while the weeks of her pregnancy passed, and the grandfather arrived at the same name by his own hope and his own judgement, and neither conferring with the other, the two witnesses met upon one name. The scholars of the sirah have always read this convergence as part of the divine tawfiq, the arrangement of the details of his life before his life began: the name given by the mother's vision and confirmed by the patriarch of the clan, as the prophethood itself would be given from heaven and confirmed by the tongues of men. And the vision's appeal to the Torah and the Gospel is not an ornament, for the Quran itself bears witness to the same promise in the verse which records the words of Isa (peace be upon him): and when Isa son of Maryam said: O children of Israel, I am the Messenger of Allah to you, confirming what came before me of the Torah, and bringing good tidings of a Messenger to come after me, whose name is Ahmad. The name spoken at the feast in Makkah was the name promised in the Scriptures centuries before, and the People of the Book who heard it could not claim that they had not been told.

The name had been kept, as a treasure is kept, against its hour. Ibn Kathir transmits from the Qadi Iyad's book al-Shifa the observation that regarding the name Ahmad mentioned in the Books, and of whom the prophets gave glad tidings, Allah in His wisdom prevented anyone from being named by it before him, so that no confusion or doubt should descend upon those weak of heart; and similarly with Muhammad, none of the Arabs or any other people was named by it until shortly before his birth word was spread that a prophet would be sent whose name would be Muhammad. Then a small number of Arabs gave their sons the name in hope that the promised one might be theirs: Ibn Kathir lists them as they have been listed ever since, Muhammad ibn Uhayhah ibn al-Julah of the Aws, Muhammad ibn Maslamah of the Ansar (may Allah be pleased with him), Muhammad ibn Barra of Bakr, Muhammad ibn Sufyan ibn Mujashi, Muhammad ibn Humran of Jufi, and Muhammad ibn Khuzai of Sulaym; and no seventh person was so named. And Allah protected all who bore the name from any false claim, until the signs were realized in him alone; for the verse of the Quran which Ibn Kathir places over the whole matter is: Allah knows best where He places His message. What the believer learns from the guarded history of a single word is the guardianship of Allah over His revelation entire: the name was reserved, the claimants were restrained, and the word Muhammad entered history clean, attached to the one man whose life could carry it.

The Messenger of Allah ﷺ himself confirmed the names and their meanings after prophethood came. In the rigorously authenticated hadith of Sahih al-Bukhari, Jubayr ibn Mut'im (may Allah be pleased with him) related that the Messenger of Allah ﷺ said: I have five names: I am Muhammad, and I am Ahmad, and I am al-Mahi, through whom Allah effaces disbelief, and I am al-Hashir, at whose feet the people will be gathered, and I am al-Aqib, the final one after whom there is no prophet. Ibn Kathir opens the great book of the life with a survey of his names which the tradition gathered from the science of the hadith scholars: he was Muhammad and Ahmad; he was al-Mahi, the Effacer, by whom disbelief was abolished, and al-Aqib, the Ultimate, after whom no prophet would follow, and al-Hashir, the Gatherer, he at whose feet the people would gather, and al-Muqaffi, the Tracker; he was the Prophet of Mercy, the Prophet of Repentance, the Prophet of the Fierce Battle, and the Seal of the Prophets; he was Taha and Yasin and Abdullah, the servant of Allah. Al-Bayhaqi added the names which the Quran itself bestows upon him: messenger, prophet, unlettered, witness, bearer of good tidings, admonisher, he who calls to Allah by His permission, an illuminating lamp, kind and compassionate, a reminder; and Ibn Kathir notes that the jurist Ibn al-Arabi counted his names as sixty-four, while some scholars of the later centuries gathered them by the thousand, as names for his qualities, and Allah knows best. The feast of the seventh day had only opened the register; the qualities of the child would fill it, and the Ummah's poets and scholars have never ceased adding to the description of the one whom Allah named His own.

The seventh day carried, besides the sacrifice and the naming, the customs which his own prophethood would later fix into law for his Ummah. In the hadith collections, Samurah ibn Jundub (may Allah be pleased with him) related the command which the Messenger of Allah ﷺ gave after his mission: every child is held in pledge for its aqiqah, which is sacrificed for it on its seventh day; on that day it is given a name, and its head is shaved. Al-Tirmidhi declared the report of the hasan-sahih rank, and the later scholars authenticated it; and the believers have ever noted the harmony: what Quraysh did by ancient custom for the newborn son of Abdullah, the Prophet ﷺ legislated by revelation for the children of his Ummah, so that every aqiqah on every seventh day is an unconscious testimony to the customs which surrounded his own infancy. As for the circumcision, the sources are carried with an honesty the reader should see whole. Ibn Kathir transmits the report of al-Bayhaqi from al-Abbas (may Allah be pleased with him) that the Messenger of Allah ﷺ was born circumcised and with his umbilical cord severed, which amazed his grandfather, and he records the gradings exactly: there is dispute over the veracity of this; some authorities claimed authenticity for the lines of transmission, and some claimed even the status of consecutive testimony, however, this is debatable. He transmits Ibn Asakir's line from Anas, and the line from Nafi from Ibn Umar (may Allah be pleased with them), in the same terms, and then the report which Ibn Asakir related from Abd al-Rahman ibn Uyayna, that Gabriel circumcised the Prophet ﷺ when he cleansed his heart, of which Ibn Kathir writes: this is extremely strange. And he transmits one further report, that it was his grandfather Abdul-Muttalib who circumcised him and held a celebration for him to which he gathered all Quraysh, closing with the sentence which is the scholar's surrender before what is not established: but Allah knows best. The master record of this project keeps the honesty of that survey: the naming and the feast and the thanksgiving at the Kaaba are established in the transmitted accounts, while the details of the circumcision are separately sourced, differing among the reports, and none of the graded claims has been adopted beyond its rank.

There is one further witness to the name which the sources preserve, and it belongs to the strangeness which the honest scholar carries openly. Abu Nuaym relates, and Ibn Kathir transmits with the observation that there is some strangeness in the account, the story of a Syrian monk at Marr adh-Dhahran who had come to Makkah awaiting the prophet of the end: no birth occurred in the town but that he asked about it, and he always said, he has not come yet; until the morning after the birth, when Abdullah son of Abdul-Muttalib stood at the foot of his cell, and the monk, looking down, asked what he had named the newborn; and when he heard the name Muhammad he cried out: by Allah, this is he for whom I left the land of plenty and came to the land of hunger, for his star arose yesterday and his name is Muhammad, the name awaited in the books. The account is strange, as Ibn Kathir says, and among its strangenesses is that it places Abdullah alive after a birth which the stronger reports place after his death; yet it is cited in the tradition, not as evidence, but as a memorial of a fact which stands upon other grounds: that the name Muhammad was awaited among those who read the Books, and that the Arab world on the morning of that seventh day was holding a prophecy it did not yet understand.

The wish of the grandfather was fulfilled past all human reckoning, and the verses of the Quran keep the receipt of the fulfilment. Allah bears witness in His Book that Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah, and He commands in the verse the Ummah never tires of reciting: Allah and His angels send blessings upon the Prophet; O you who believe, send blessings upon him and greet him with peace. The praise of heaven which Abdul-Muttalib wished for him is a standing act of heaven: the salawat of Allah and His angels, unceasing since the command was revealed; and the praise of earth has been measured out in the devotion of every generation since: the name is joined to the declaration of faith which is upon the tongue of every believer in every prayer, I bear witness that there is no deity but Allah and that Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah, so that the shahadah of the Ummah cannot be spoken without speaking his name. The boy of the feast grew into the name as a river grows into its bed: the praised one was praised by his enemies before they died, loved by those who never saw him, and honored by his Lord who joined His own name to his in the kalimah itself. What was spoken at a feast in Makkah on a seventh day in Rabi al-Awwal of the Year of the Elephant has thus become the most frequently uttered name in the history of speech; and the believers hold the certainty that every blessing sent upon the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ returns upon the sender, for Allah and His angels are the first senders of it, and the one who echoes the heavens is answered from them.