In the days that followed the birth, while the talk of the light was still passing from house to house in the quarter of Banu Hashim, the newborn Prophet Muhammad ﷺ, may the peace and blessings of Allah be upon him, received milk from more than one breast. His mother Aminah bint Wahb (may Allah be pleased with her) nursed him, as the sixth event of this chronicle has told; and beside her milk, for some days before the arrival of the desert foster-mothers, came the milk of Thuwaybah. The master record of this chronicle keeps both spellings of her name, Suwaybah and Thuwaybah, for the sources carry both; she was the mawlat, the freed maidservant, of his uncle Abu Lahab ibn Abdul-Muttalib, and Ibn Kathir states her place in the sequence in a single sentence of his account of the suckling: 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. She was, therefore, the first woman after his mother to hold the Messenger of Allah ﷺ to her breast, and the first outsider to be drawn into the circle of provision which Allah was weaving around the infant: a widow's milk, then a freed woman's milk, then a Bedouin's milk, each in her season.
How Thuwaybah came to be free is one of the strangest and most instructive turns in all the infancy of the Prophet ﷺ. Abu Lahab, whose name the Quran itself fixed as the emblem of the enemy of revelation, was the master of this maidservant; and it was she, the transmitted accounts relate, who carried to him the bushra, the good news of the birth of his nephew, the son of his dead brother Abdullah. The Arab custom of the great households was to mark overwhelming news with liberation, and the joy of Abu Lahab at the birth boiled over in that very coin: he emancipated her at once, upon the news, in the first transport of his gladness. What believer can read this without awe at the wisdom of Allah? The man whose hand would be raised against the Prophet's ﷺ mission until his dying breath, the man whose eternal abode his Lord would proclaim in His Book, was moved by nothing more than kinship's joy to set free the woman who would feed the Messenger of Allah ﷺ at his first days. The enemies of the truth are not outside the arrangements of the Truth: Allah used the very gladness of the man who would hate him to pay for the milk of the child he would hate. And the scholars of the sirah have always paused over the lesson: if a disbeliever's single hour of joy at the Prophet's ﷺ birth was not left unrewarded, how shall the believers' lifelong love for him be left unrewarded?
The act of emancipation itself deserves its own contemplation, for it stands at the junction of two ages of the same truth. In the world into which the Prophet ﷺ was born, the freeing of a slave was the noblest coin a man could spend, the mark of overwhelming feeling in joy or in grief, and a gauge by which the Arabs measured a household's greatness of soul; the sunnah which came afterward through the Prophet ﷺ raised the same act into the architecture of law and of the hereafter, for the freeing of a slave became an atonement, a charity, and a door of paradise, and the Quran describes the steep path of the righteous as the freeing of a captive and the feeding of the hungry in a day of hunger. The believer who reads of Thuwaybah's emancipation therefore reads the meeting of the old nobility of the Arabs, which in its best hours had always inclined to liberty, with the perfection of that inclination in the Book which the newborn himself would one day recite. Allah chose to pay for the early milk of His Messenger with an act of freedom, and the choice is a sermon: the feeding of the best of creation was priced in the liberty of a human being, and the Ummah has understood ever since that Allah loves the freeing of His servants, and that no house which frees the enslaved is left without a blessing upon its milk and its bread.
The nursing itself was brief and stands honestly recorded. Thuwaybah suckled the newborn for some days, the accounts agree; and in the order of the sources she belongs to the interval between his mother's first nursing and the arrival of the caravan of Banu Sa'd women, of which the ninth and tenth events of this chronicle tell. The modern summary of Al-Sheha preserves the same succession in one line: his wet nurses were Thuwaybah, Abu Lahab's bondwoman, and Halimah as-Sa'diyyah. The sources do not fix the number of her days with an arithmetic, and the master record of this project keeps that honesty; what they fix is her rank in the order, and her identity, and the consequences in kinship which her milk would bear for the rest of Islamic history.
Those consequences the two Sahihs themselves have preserved. Imam al-Bukhari and Imam Muslim both extracted, as Ibn Kathir relates in his account of the suckling, the hadith of Umm Habibah bint Abi Sufyan (may Allah be pleased with her), on the chain of al-Zuhri, from Urwah ibn az-Zubayr, from Zaynab bint Umm Salamah, from Umm Habibah herself. She said: O Messenger of Allah, marry my sister, the daughter of Abu Sufyan. He said: would you like that? She said: yes; for I am not alone with you in what I have of goodness, and the one who shares best with me in goodness is my sister. He said: that would not be permissible for me. She said: we were speaking of the daughter of Abu Salamah. He said: even were she not under my care in my household, she would not be permitted for me, for she is my niece by suckling; her father Abu Salamah and I were both suckled by Thuwaybah. So do not propose your daughters or your sisters to me. In that exchange, preserved at the rank of the rigorously authenticated, the whole law of rida'ah stands open before the believer: the milk which Thuwaybah gave to the infant Messenger of Allah ﷺ created a real kinship in the sight of Allah, binding in the flesh across households, so that the daughter of his foster-brother Abu Salamah was a niece to him, and marriage with her was barred exactly as it would be barred with a niece of blood. The Prophet ﷺ was then a man with a house full of revelation, and the last thing he would have done was strain a single letter of the law; the hadith is the certificate of how seriously his Lord, and he himself, took the days of milk that a freed woman gave him in the year of the Elephant.
From the same fountain of the law the scholars drew the fuller consequences of what Thuwaybah's milk had made lawful and unlawful. The jurists of the Ummah established from the hadiths of Aisha (may Allah be pleased with her) in the two Sahihs that the prohibitions of suckling are the prohibitions of birth, and they weighed how many sucklings establish the tie, the transmitted legislation moving from ten known sucklings in the earlier years to five, as the reports of the Mother of the Believers preserve; and the whole discussion stands upon the principle which the Prophet's ﷺ own case had announced: milk is a maker of family. The biography itself would walk through the door which Thuwaybah's milk had opened. When Abu Salamah died of the wound he carried from the campaign of Uhud, the Messenger of Allah ﷺ honored the memory of his foster-brother by marrying his widow Umm Salamah (may Allah be pleased with her), and she entered the household of the Prophet ﷺ with her children, among them Zaynab bint Abi Salamah, his foster-niece, who was reared beneath his roof as a daughter of the house of the Messenger of Allah. The circle closed with a beauty the jurists have always noted: the household of the first milk was gathered at last into the household of the Book, and the woman whose daughter could not be given to him because of Thuwaybah's milk became, through the wide network of that same foster-bond, his honored wife. What a few days of nursing in the Year of the Elephant had woven, the whole of the Prophet's ﷺ later life wore.
The milk-map which Thuwaybah opens is one of the marvels of the sirah. From the hadith of the two Sahihs the believer learns that Abu Salamah ibn Abd al-Asad of the clan of Makhzum (may Allah be pleased with him), the valiant early believer who would migrate twice and die a martyr's death, and whose widow Umm Salamah the Prophet ﷺ would one day marry, was the Prophet's foster-brother: both had hung at the same breast. The biographical tradition records further, in the Tabaqat of Ibn Sa'd and in the chronicle of Ibn Kathir, that Thuwaybah had nursed Hamzah ibn Abdul-Muttalib (may Allah be pleased with him) as well, so that the Prophet's ﷺ paternal uncle was also his foster-brother by suckling, a double kinship in one man: the milk confirmed the blood. How fitting that when Hamzah accepted Islam, years later at the moment of Abu Jahl's insult to the Messenger of Allah ﷺ, he came to the faith as a brother twice over, and how the believers' hearts have always warmed at the thought that the master of the martyrs of Uhud was bound to the Prophet ﷺ by the same two bonds, the household of Abdul-Muttalib and the milk of Thuwaybah. The certain matter, from the hadith of the two Sahihs, is the nursing of Abu Salamah; the biographers complete the household with Hamzah, and the believer receives the map entire in the ranks its parts carry.
There follows from the same passage of the sources the report which has moved the preachers of the Ummah for fourteen centuries. Ibn Kathir transmits it in the account of the suckling: when Abu Lahab was dead, one of his family saw him in a dream, and asked him: what has happened to you? And Abu Lahab answered: I have experienced nothing good after leaving you, except that I am given to drink from this, for my having emancipated Thuwaybah; and he pointed to the hollow between his thumb and the adjoining fingers. Al-Suhayli and others, Ibn Kathir records, report that the one who saw him was his brother al-Abbas (may Allah be pleased with him), and that the vision came a year after Abu Lahab's death, which followed the battle of Badr; and in their account Abu Lahab said to al-Abbas: the punishment is alleviated for me on Mondays. This, the sources explain, is because when Thuwaybah told him the news of the birth of his nephew Muhammad, the son of Abdullah, he emancipated her at once; and he was rewarded thus for that. The believer should hold this famous report with the exactness of the scholars who carried it. It is not from the two Sahihs; its form is a dream told by al-Abbas; the hadith critics build no law upon it, and Ibn Kathir transmits it in the course of the biography without isnad of the Sahih rank. Yet the lesson the preachers of the Ummah have drawn from it is certain in the foundations of the faith which are independent of it: Allah does not wrong anyone by an atom's weight, and He repays even the disbeliever's good in the measure of this world, while the Fire remains the abode of him who dies upon his disbelief. The verse which names Abu Lahab stands forever: perish the two hands of Abu Lahab, and perish he; his wealth will not avail him, nor what he gained; he shall enter the flaming fire, and his wife, the carrier of firewood, upon her neck a rope of palm fiber. The certain verse and the famous dream are held together in the believer's hand: the one fixes the eternal end of the matter, and the other displays, in the small coin of a drink of water, the exact justice which does not let even the enemy's single hour of joy fall to the ground.
And the dream itself carries a signature which the believing reader should not miss: the alleviation was on Mondays. The day of the Prophet's ﷺ birth is established in the rigorously authenticated hadith of Sahih Muslim, from Abu Qatadah (may Allah be pleased with him), as a Monday: that is the day on which I was born, and the day on which revelation was sent down upon me. The biographers, reading the dream against the hadith, saw the hand of the same justice: the man was repaid on the weekly return of the very day on which his gladness had been kindled. Thus even in the region of the strange and the dream-told, the chronology of the sirah holds together like a woven cloth: the birth on Monday, the news and the emancipation upon it, and the tradition's conviction that the deed of that Monday was not forgotten.
What the Prophet ﷺ himself thought of the women who had given him milk, the events of his later years answer beyond any doubt. In the year of Hunayn, when his army had taken the women and children of Hawazin captive, a delegation of that tribe came to him at al-Ji'ranah, among them his foster-kin of Banu Sa'd, and their spokesman Zuhayr ibn Surad said: O Messenger of Allah, those prisoners in the stockades are your aunts and your nurses who looked after you; and he recalled, as Ibn Kathir transmits, the women who had suckled him, crying: have pity on the women you once suckled, whose pure milk filled your mouth. And the Messenger of Allah ﷺ answered: the prisoners that were due to me and to the family of Abdul-Muttalib I have given to Allah and to you; and the release followed, six thousand souls, men and women, with a generosity the story of the desert never forgot. Ibn Kathir closes that account with the sentence every preacher of the sirah has echoed: all this then came from his early blessings on earth, what blessings, then, will he bestow on those who follow him in the next world. The milk of Thuwaybah stands at the head of that honored register: the first woman after his mother to feed the Messenger of Allah ﷺ belongs to the class whose kindness he publicly confessed and publicly repaid; and the believers understand from it that no service to the Prophet ﷺ, however small its measure, is lost in the sight of Allah or of His Messenger.
The same honoring ran through every station of his life. Lings records that in the years of his household with Khadijah (may Allah be pleased with her) his foster-mother Halimah came on occasional visits and was always received with generosity, and that in a season of severe drought, when her flocks had been seriously depleted, Khadijah made her a gift of forty sheep and a howdah camel. What had begun with a few days of a freed woman's milk in the Year of the Elephant was continued at every visit of the nurses, honored at every feast, and crowned at al-Ji'ranah when the captives of the suckling-kin were freed by its remembrance; the milk of the infancy of the Prophet ﷺ was a debt which the mercy to the worlds carried in his ledger until the ledger itself was closed.
Thus the days of Thuwaybah's nursing, few as the sources allow them to have been, carry a weight out of all proportion to their length. In her person the providence of Allah joined four threads of the future: the emancipation which freed her, the milk which bound Abu Salamah and, in the tradition of the biographers, Hamzah into the Prophet's ﷺ kinship, the law of fosterage which the hadith of the two Sahihs fixed from her case, and the strange mercy shown to the very man who freed her in the first transport of a joy he would later renounce. The believer who traces the threads learns the manner of Allah's care for His Messenger ﷺ: it does not despise the small instruments. A freed slave girl of the household of the Prophet's ﷺ worst enemy was made the first carrier of the milk of the best of creation, and her name is carried in the Sahihs until the day the earth itself is carried away. Let every Muslim who serves the faith in what seems a small capacity take heart from Thuwaybah: the days were few, the task was only milk, and the record has never ended.