Acceptance by Halimah Despite His Orphanhood

The caravan of Banu Sa'd was packed to leave Makkah. The ten women who had come in the drought year, whose story the ninth event of this chronicle has told, had walked the lanes and the houses of Quraysh seeking nurselings, and now the season of their business was done: every woman had a child in her saddle, every she-ass was laden for the desert road, and the party stood at the hour in which the desert measures its year, the hour of departure. But one of them had nothing. Halimah (may Allah be pleased with her), the wife of al-Harith ibn Abd al-Uzza, the poorest of the ten by the reckoning of every account, had been passed over whenever the choice lay between her and another, and now she alone rode empty, matched in her emptiness by the one infant whom all her companions had likewise refused: the orphan son of the dead Abdullah, the boy of the light and the month of Rabi al-Awwal, the newborn Prophet Muhammad ﷺ, may the peace and blessings of Allah be upon him. The tenth event of the sirah is the meeting of the two refusals: the nurse whom nobody wanted and the nurseling whom nobody wanted, and it is among the most tender ironies in the whole story of the mercy to the worlds that these two, and only these two, chose each other.

Why they refused him, Halimah's own account records without a veil. I arrived at Makkah, she says, along with the other women from Banu Sa'd looking for babies to suckle, and I do not know one woman of us who was not offered the Messenger of Allah ﷺ, but all refused him when it was said that he was an orphan. We refused him, saying: what good could his mother do for us? What we want is some help from the boy's father. Lings renders the same moment: Aminah offered her son first to one and then to another until finally she had tried them all and they had all refused; that, said Halimah, was because we hoped for some favour from the boy's father; an orphan, we said; what will his mother and his grandfather be able to do for us? The economics beneath the words should be understood as the desert understood them, for the refusal was not cruelty but arithmetic. It was considered dishonourable, as Lings explains, for a woman to take a fee for suckling a child; what the nurse hoped for was not a payment but a patron, the enduring link of a great family, a son of the house who would look on his foster-mother as a second mother all his life and on her children as his own siblings, and whose family, meanwhile, would return the honor in protection and in gifts. But this orphan's father was in the grave at Yathrib, and the estate which Abdullah had left his son was, as the sources number it, five camels, a small flock of sheep and goats, and one slave girl; the grandfather was old, and when he died his sons, not his grandson, would be his heirs; and the mother was poor. What looked at the Sa'd women out of the arms of Aminah was thus, by every calculation the desert could make, the worst bargain of the year: a child of the great house, indeed, but the poorest nurseling among all who were offered. Only the poorest nurse was without a nurseling, and only the poorest nurseling was without a nurse: Lings' sentence has stood ever since as the epitaph of the world's arithmetic in the face of what Allah was about to do.

The decision which followed is preserved in the very words of the two who made it, and the believer should hear the words slowly, for they are among the plainest and most consequential ever spoken in the history of the Ummah. Having found no one except him, and being assembled to leave, Halimah said to her husband, al-Harith ibn Abd al-Uzza (may Allah be pleased with him): by Allah, I hate to go back amongst my companions without having a baby to suckle; I shall go to that orphan and take him. And her husband answered: it is not your duty to do so; and perhaps Allah will bring us blessings through him; in Lings' rendering: as you will; it may be that Allah will bless us in him. Two things should be marked in that exchange, for they are the event's soul. The first is the consultation itself: the desert woman did not decide alone, and the desert man did not command alone; the matter of taking a child into the tent was weighed between husband and wife, a mushawarah in the shadow of hardship, and the household which would nurse the Messenger of Allah ﷺ began its nursing in the manner he would one day legislate for his Ummah, by counsel and consent. The second is the quality of the husband's hoping: he did not promise, he did not calculate, he only lifted his eyes from the arithmetic of the orphans to the treasury of Allah, perhaps Allah will bless us in him, and the believer who learns to speak so in a lean season has learned the engine of every increase the Book of Allah has ever promised.

And then Halimah adds the sentence which has made her beloved to fourteen centuries of Muslims, the confession that strips every pretense from the greatest of fosterages: so I went and took him; and the fact is, by Allah, I only took him because I could not find anyone else. She does not say she took him because she foresaw his rank, or pitied his state above her hunger for honor, or was moved by a secret sign; she says she was empty-handed and he was the only child left. The scholars of the sirah have always treasured the honesty: the woman who would be honored above all the women of the Sa'd entered her glory through the door of admitting she had no better option, and Allah, Glorified and Exalted be He, whose wisdom loves to overturn the ledger of the proud, waited for exactly that sentence before He opened the treasuries. From the first hour the barakah came, and Halimah's account fixes its order beyond mistaking. No sooner had I taken him and brought him back to my baggage, she swears, than my breasts welcomed him, giving him all the milk he wanted; he drank till he was satisfied, and his foster-brother, our own hungry baby of the sleepless nights, drank his fill too. Then my husband 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, and we spent a fine night together. And 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 dry breasts of the drought year flowed on the first feeding; the dry camel of the drought year stood full at the first milking; the hungry household slept its first night of satisfaction; and the shepherd who had hoped for a blessing awoke confessing it with an oath. The reader should notice what the confession was: not that the pasture had changed, nor that the rain had come, but that the person was blessed, barakah attached to a child, and the eye of faith in al-Harith saw the person before it saw the provision.

The homeward road itself became the first public reading of what had happened. Then we left to return to our own land, Halimah continues, and my she-ass went ahead of all the other riders, with not a single donkey able to catch up with her; the worn-out beast which had lagged behind the caravan on the road to Makkah, annoying the riders with its weakness, now led the caravan home and could not be caught. Eventually my women companions said: hey there, daughter of Abu Dhu'ayb, is that the she-ass you were riding when you left with us? And I said: yes indeed, it is her. And they said: by Allah, something has really happened to her. Lings renders their cry more sharply: confound thee, wait for us; is not this ass of thine the same ass that thou didst come on; yea, by Allah, she is the very same; some wonder hath befallen her. Nine women had taken the sons of the rich of Quraysh, and the tenth, who had taken the fatherless boy whom no one else would take, rode home at the head of the caravan upon a mount made new. The desert itself, whose season had been drought, was made to publish the event on the road, and the women of the Sa'd who had weighed the orphan and found him light, now watched the wonder of his train and did not yet know what they had refused.

Aminah's part in the transaction should be stood beside her son's, for the event is hers as much as Halimah's. She offered her son first to one and then to another, as Lings preserves, until she had tried them all; the mother of the Messenger of Allah ﷺ walked the length of the caravan of the Sa'd with her baby in her arms and heard, from tent to tent, the same arithmetic: an orphan; what will his mother and his grandfather be able to do for us? What sustained her through that gauntlet of refusals the believer can only imagine: the widow of Abdullah, who had carried the light in her pregnancy and been commanded to invoke protection over her son and to name him Muhammad, standing in the lanes of Makkah offering to strangers' breasts the child of the promise, and being turned away by every calculation of the desert. Yet she did not withdraw him from the custom; and when Halimah came at last, the sources give the meeting without ornament: she went and took him. In that undramatic sentence the whole doctrine of Surah Ad-Duha touches the earth: Did He not find you an orphan and give you shelter? The shelter which Allah found for His orphan was not a palace but a poor woman's saddle on a dry year's road, and the faith of the believer learns from it that the answer to prayer frequently arrives wearing the very poverty which the prayer was made against.

The student of the sources should also be shown the other road by which one line of the tradition travels. Al-Umawi related, as Ibn Kathir transmits with the frank label of a weak authority, from Abd al-Rahman al-Waqasi, from al-Zuhri, from Said ibn al-Musayyab, a different course: that Abdul-Muttalib ordered his son to take the baby and go around the quarters of the bedouin until a foster-mother should be found, and that he eventually hired Halimah to suckle him; and in that account the boy stayed with her six years, being brought each year to visit his grandfather. Ibn Kathir carries the variant openly and lets it stand beside the account of Ibn Ishaq, in which the mothers come to Makkah and Aminah offers her son; and the two roads, differing in the manner of the meeting, arrive at the same house of al-Harith and Halimah, the same nursing, the same desert years. The lesson of the variant is not confusion but method: the sirah carries its courses with their weights attached, the famous account of Ibn Ishaq which the Ummah has always told, and the weaker line which corroborates the outcome while it differs on the arrangement; and the believer's certainty rests on what both roads share, that the Messenger of Allah ﷺ was nursed among Banu Sa'd by Halimah, in the drought year, as the drought-year poverty of both parties brought them together.

The household which received the trust deserves its own portrait, for the sources keep it entire. The foster-father, al-Harith ibn Abd al-Uzza, was of the line of Rifah ibn Malik ibn Nadr of Banu Sa'd ibn Bakr, the shepherd of the dry camel who became, by one night, the foster-father of the best of creation. The foster-brother, Abdullah ibn al-Harith, was the hungry baby of the sleepless nights, who drank his fill beside the Prophet ﷺ from the first hour and grew as his brother. The foster-sisters were Unaysa and Khuzaymah, the daughters of al-Harith, and of Khuzaymah, who was known as ash-Shayma', Ibn Kathir's transmitted account says that she would cradle the Messenger of Allah ﷺ along with her mother while he was with them; the sister who rocked him in the drought-year tent. Abu Dhu'ayb, Halimah's father, whose given name was Abdullah ibn al-Harith ibn Shajnah, stood at the head of the lineage of the foster-house; and the whole family, from the hour of the taking, lived inside the increase which the neighbors could see and not share. The Quran's economics of the event had been written before the event: whoever is mindful of Allah, He will make for him a way out, and provide for him from where he does not expect. The way out of Halimah's year of famine was an orphan nobody wanted; the provision from where she did not expect was in the udders of her own camel; and the household which took a child for the plain reason that it had no other child became, by no work of its own, the cradle of the purest Arabic and the strongest body in the peninsula.

Thus the tenth event closes with the two paradoxes which the whole prophetic biography will spend itself unfolding. The first is the paradox of the world's judgement: the women of the Sa'd weighed the sons of Quraysh in the scales of fathers and inheritances, and their scales refused the only child among them whose name is now carried by more human beings than any other name in history; Allah chooses what the world counts nothing, and the criterion of His choice is not the ledger which the world reads. The second is the paradox of the plain intention: Halimah took him to avoid an empty-handed homecoming, and al-Harith consented with a perhaps, and neither of them had any vision of what the taking would mean, and yet the barakah did not wait for their comprehension, it flowed with the first swallow of milk. The believer who serves Allah in small decisions made for plain reasons should draw the water of this event deeply: the decision which looks like mere expedience, if it lies upon the path of mercy, may be the hinge of a providence which the decider will only read in the next world. The caravan turned toward the highlands of the Sa'd with the she-ass of the poorest rider leading all the rest; inside her saddle the orphan of Abdullah slept upon the breast of Halimah; and over the road which the drought had emptied, the care of Allah, which had found him an orphan in Makkah, was carrying him to the tents where his tongue would be given the purest speech of the Arabs and his heart, in its time, would be washed for the revelation which was waiting for him beyond the years of the desert.