The Drought and Famine Affecting Banu Sa'd

The story of the Prophet's ﷺ infancy cannot be told without the desert, and the desert cannot be told without its thirst. The land which Allah had chosen for the nursing of His Messenger, may the peace and blessings of Allah be upon him, was the territory of Banu Sa'd ibn Bakr, an outlying branch of the great tribe of Hawazin, whose pastures stretched south-east of Makkah on the high road toward Ta'if. It was a land the geographers would call bare and the poets would call free: no rivers, no wells of note, only the rain that fell or did not fall, and upon the rain depended everything, the grass for the flocks, the milk in the udders, the life of the tents. In the year of which the sources speak, the rain withheld itself. Ibn Kathir's rendering of Halimah's account calls it a year of famine, and Lings' rendering from the same Ibn Ishaq calls it a year of drought and we had nothing left; the two words name one reality, the lean year in which the land of Banu Sa'd dried to its bones, and in which the household of al-Harith ibn Abd al-Uzza (may Allah be pleased with him) and his wife Halimah (may Allah be pleased with her) reached Makkah with nothing but their need.

Halimah's own words, which the Ummah has recited for fourteen centuries, are the authority for this event, and they deserve to be heard whole. I arrived at Makkah, she said, along with other women of Banu Sa'd looking for babies to suckle; and al-Waqidi relates, with chains of authorities, that they were ten in number from Banu Sa'd ibn Bakr who acted as foster-mothers along with her. I arrived on a dark grey she-ass worn out from riding. With us I had a boy of our own, and an old milch camel which, I swear, was not giving a drop of milk. That whole night, along with that boy of ours, we did not sleep at all: there was nothing in my breast of use to him, and nothing in our milch camel to feed him. We did, however, have hopes of rain and relief. The picture is complete and pitiless: a mother whose breasts have gone dry with the hunger of the land, a father whose camel, the family's whole capital of milk, has gone dry with the drought, a baby crying through an Arabian night for a feed that the earth could not give, and a road to Makkah ridden on a she-ass so worn that, as she says, it lagged behind the other riders because of its weakness and its thirst, much to their annoyance. What believer can read this opening of the infancy of the best of creation without seeing the hand of Allah in its very poverty? The Messenger of Allah ﷺ was not carried to the desert on cushions; the desert was brought low before him, emptied of every resource but the sky, so that what would fill the land afterward could be attributed to nothing beneath the sky.

For the desert of Banu Sa'd in that year was, by Halimah's own testimony, the neediest country she knew. Eventually we were back in Banu Sa'd territory, she says later in the account, and I knew no other part of Allah's earth more barren than it then was. The pastoral economy of the Sa'd lived upon grazing and the milk of the flock, and in a drought the udders close before the tents empty: the ewes go hungry, the she-camels waste, the kids and lambs die, and the tribe measures its year not in coin but in the milk that does or does not rise. Around Halimah's encampment, she records, no one, near or far, had their ewes give so much as a drop of milk, and their flocks always went hungry. The lean year was therefore not a private hardship of one household but the common condition of the whole district, the sort of year the Arabs called upon their poets to memorialize, the year in which the strong tribe is humbled to the measure of its grass. It was this common dryness, the scholar of the sirah should notice, that made the annual journey of the wet nurses necessary: the women of Banu Sa'd came to Quraysh for nurselings partly because the desert had mouths it could not feed, and the nurseling fee and the patronage of a Makkahn house were the desert's insurance against its own sky. The drought, in other words, was the road; and upon that road, unknown to all who traveled it, the providence of Allah was carrying the whole tribe toward the best bargain any people ever made.

The Arabs of that age had a way of remembering such years which shows how completely the drought owned their imagination: they dated their history by its memorable seasons, and the very year of the Prophet's ﷺ birth was called by them the Year of the Elephant, after the army which Allah had destroyed at Makkah; other years were called after great famines, after plagues, after abundant rains, because in a land without chronicles the sky itself was the calendar. The Hijaz lives between two uncertainties: the summer pilgrimage and the winter caravan journeys which the Quran mentions were possible because Quraysh had the House as their anchor, while the outlying tribes lived upon the grazing which the monsoon's edge sometimes reached and sometimes forgot. The highlands toward Ta'if, where the Sa'd kept their summer pastures, were the richest of that world and yet were still a world of thin margins, in which one dry season could thin a tribe for a decade. The believer should therefore feel the full weight of Halimah's oath, I swear, before the words that follow it: she is not describing an inconvenience but the condition of her house's survival, the sort of year which the old women of the Sa'd would remember until they died, and which Allah, Glorified and Exalted be He, had chosen as the stage upon which the whole world's greatest childhood would open.

The believer who stands back from the account sees a pattern which the Quran itself teaches in the law of trials: And We will surely test you with something of fear and hunger and a shortage of wealth and lives and fruits; so give good tidings to the patient. Hunger is named among the tests, and the year of the drought among Banu Sa'd was exactly that: something of fear, something of hunger, a shortage of the wealth that walks on four legs and of the fruits of the grazing. But the same Book teaches the economics of the aftermath: when your Lord proclaimed: if you are grateful, I will surely increase you; but if you are ungrateful, My punishment is severe. The drought and the barakah which followed the Prophet's ﷺ arrival in that same land are the two halves of the Quranic arithmetic displayed in history: the decrease that humbled the tribe, and the increase that no rain could explain, tied to a child and to the gratitude which his presence taught. What Allah did among the tents of al-Harith and Halimah is what He does among households still: He lets the means run dry so that when the milk comes, no one mistakes its sender.

And the milk came. The sources have fixed the sequence so that it can never be read as accident. No sooner had Halimah taken the orphan and brought him back to her baggage than, she swears, my breasts welcomed him, giving him all the milk he wanted, and he drank till he was satisfied, and his foster-brother, our own hungry child of the sleepless nights, drank his fill too. My husband then went over to that old milch camel of ours and, to his surprise, she was full; he milked her and we both drank till we were satisfied. We then spent a fine night together. Next morning my husband said: Halimah, by Allah I really think you have taken a person who is blessed; may Allah Almighty go on bringing us more benefit yet. The drought had not broken; the rain had not come; the land of Banu Sa'd remained what she had called it, the most barren part of Allah's earth she knew. But one tent now stood outside the statistics of the drought: my goats would graze free, she says, then leave the grazing satisfied and full of milk, and we would milk them as ever we wished, and this while no one around us, near or far, had their ewes give so much as a drop. The neighbors' shepherds were sent to graze where hers grazed, and still their flocks came home hungry: the barakah was not in the pasture but in the presence. Lings renders her summary: and we ceased not to enjoy this increase and this bounty from Allah until the babe's two years had passed, and I weaned him. The preachers of the Ummah have always read that sentence as the plainest human testimony to barakah in all the early literature: a Bedouin woman with no theology but the sky and the udder, swearing by Allah that the difference in her flock was the child.

There is a parable folded inside the neighbors' remedy which the preachers of the Ummah have never left unopened. When the Sa'd saw that one flock came home full while theirs came home empty, they did not petition the rain, nor accuse the pasture, nor blame the shepherd; they said to their shepherds: woe upon you, go and graze where the flock of the daughter of Abu Dhu'ayb grazes, and they grazed along the very path of the blessed flock, and still their own animals came home hungry, yielding no drop. The barakah was not in the grass; it was in the company of the child who grazed there; and the imitating shepherds, following the flock that fed the household of the Messenger of Allah ﷺ and finding nothing in the grass itself, are a parable of every imitator since: blessings are not caught by copying the outward path of the blessed while leaving the blessed one out of the account. The Ummah learned the positive lesson as well: to be near the Prophet ﷺ is the pasture, to keep his company, to walk his road, to raise his children, to carry his sunnah in the household, is the true grazing ground of provision, and the believer who wonders why his own year is dry while his neighbor's flows should ask first not about the neighbor's pasture but about his own distance from the caravan of the blessed.

The tradition adds, from the same cluster of fosterage reports, the sign which the drought makes most eloquent: the shade. Al-Waqidi relates, as Ibn Kathir transmits, that Halimah once went out to seek the Prophet ﷺ and found the animals of the household sleeping in the sun, and found him with his foster-sister, who said when asked about the heat: my brother does not get hot; I saw a cloud shading him, which stopped when he stopped and moved when he moved, until he came to this spot. In a land whose whole affliction was the sky's refusal, the sky itself was made to attend the child: the cloud which the pastures awaited for rain hung over the boy for shade, and the believer reads the mercy in the grammar of it, the same heaven which withheld water from the land yielding shadow to the orphan of Allah. The report is carried by al-Waqidi's line and belongs to the famous accounts of the fosterage, and it is received as the sirah receives such reports, in the rank its chain bears, within the frame of what is certain: that Allah guarded His Messenger ﷺ in the desert which He had chosen for him.

The student of the sources should be shown how this history stands. Halimah's account comes through the line which Ibn Ishaq records: Jahm ibn Abi Jahm, the mawla of a woman of Banu Tamim, related to him from one who related to him from one who heard Abdullah ibn Ja'far ibn Abi Talib say that it was related to him that Halimah, daughter of al-Harith, said these things. The chain is loose at its middle links, and the hadith critics would not build law upon it; but Ibn Kathir, transmitting the whole account, gives it the weight the tradition has always given it: this account, he says, has been related through various other lines as well, and it is one of the best known and most frequently told by the biographers and early historians. It is the mashhur, the famous, which the sirah holds in its own right: not sahih in the technical rank of the musnad hadith, yet carried by convergent lines, rendered independently by Lings from the same Ibn Ishaq, corroborated at its edges by al-Waqidi's details, and never once contradicted in fourteen centuries of transmission. The believer's honesty about the drought year is therefore of a piece with the believer's certainty: the account's rank is named, its fameness is established, and the picture it gives, of a land stripped by famine and filled by a child, has been received by the Ummah from its earliest historians to its latest.

What the drought accomplished, then, the believer must say plainly, for it is the heart of this event: the hardship which emptied the land of Banu Sa'd was the hook of providence hidden in the year's misfortune. Had the rains been green and the camels fat, ten contented women of the Sa'd might never have made the road to Makkah, or might have ridden home with the wealthy nurselings and without the orphan; it was the famine year, the dry camel, and the hungry nights which set Halimah on the she-ass, and it was the she-ass which carried her to the babe whom Allah had prepared for her before she knew the babe existed. Every believer who has endured a lean year, a failed season, a month when the ledger refuses to balance, should read the ninth event of the Prophet's ﷺ infancy and take heart: the droughts which empty our hands are sometimes the roads by which Allah's greatest gifts are carried to our tents, and the emptying is the first line of the provision, though no eye can read it until the milk returns. The tribe of Banu Sa'd was made poor for a season so that it could be made rich forever, honored among all the tribes of the Arabs as the people whose milk fed the Messenger of Allah ﷺ, whose tongue taught him the purest speech, and whose women would one day stand before him at Hunayn and plead, successfully, upon the milk.

So the land and the year were made ready, and the reader of this chronicle now stands with the ten women of Banu Sa'd in the lanes of Makkah, in the season when every one of them refused the orphan of Abdullah, all except the one whose poverty had matched his own. The drought has done its work; the barakah waits its hour; and upon the decision of the poorest woman among the ten, which the next event tells, the whole shape of the Prophet's ﷺ childhood would be set: the desert's air for his lungs, the desert's speech for his tongue, and the desert's poverty for his portion, until Allah, Glorified and Exalted be He, who had found him an orphan in Makkah, would show him in the tents of the Sa'd what shelter His care can build out of a barren land and a dry sky.