The weeks which followed the blessed birth in Makkah were weeks of preparation by Allah, Glorified and Exalted be He, though few in the city could have read them so. Among the great families of the Arab towns there was a custom older than memory: to send their newborn sons into the desert, to be suckled and weaned and to spend the first years of childhood among one of the Bedouin tribes. Makkah, for all the sanctity of its House, was no exception; its valley was dry, its seasons hard, epidemics were not infrequent in its crowded quarters, and the rate of infant mortality was high. The fathers and mothers of Quraysh wanted more for their sons than the shelter of walls: they wanted for their bodies the fresh air of the open country, for their tongues the purity of the desert speech, and for their souls the freedom which the Arabs held that the desert alone could give. So it was to be for the newborn Muhammad ﷺ, the orphan of Abdullah, as it had been for the sons of the greatest of Quraysh; and what follows is the account of how the Lord of the Kaaba arranged the shelter He had promised His Messenger.
The reasons of the custom are set out by Martin Lings with uncommon insight in his chapter The Desert. Quraysh had only recently taken to the settled life; until Qusayy had gathered them to build houses around the Sanctuary they had been nomads themselves, and the way of the tent remained in their eyes the nobler way. Nobility and freedom were inseparable in their reckoning, and the nomad was free; the townsman, fixed in one place yesterday, today, and tomorrow, seemed to them a prisoner of time, the ruiner of all things. Towns, they held, were places of corruption, where sloth and slovenliness lurked in the shadow of the walls, ready to take the edge off a man's vigilance; and even language decayed there, though few Arabs could read, beauty of speech was a virtue which all parents desired for their children, and a man's worth was assessed largely by his eloquence, whose crown was poetry. The best poets came almost always from the desert tribes, for it was in the desert that the spoken language was nearest to poetry itself. So the bond with the desert had to be renewed in every generation: fresh air for the breast, pure Arabic for the tongue, freedom for the soul; and many a son of Quraysh was kept in the desert as long as eight years so that it might leave upon him a lasting impression.
Some tribes had a particular reputation for the nursing and rearing of children, and chief among them in the knowledge of Makkah were Bani Sa'd ibn Bakr, an outlying branch of the great Hawazin confederation, whose territory lay to the southeast of the city. Their dialect was counted among the purest of all the tongues of the Arabs, and their women were famed as nurses. Aminah bint Wahb (may Allah be pleased with her), the widow of Abdullah, was minded from the first to entrust her son to a woman of this tribe, as the received accounts of the Seerah relate; and the desert women themselves, for their part, came periodically into Makkah seeking nurselings, for the bond of suckling was an enduring link between the nomad and the townsman, each poor where the other was rich and rich where the other was poor. The exchange was honorable on both sides, and among the Arabs of that day it was held dishonorable for a woman to take a direct fee for the nursing of a child: the recompense was of another order altogether, a second son to the house and a second mother to the child, a kinship that would last for life. The foster-mother gained a son who would feel a filial duty toward her for the rest of his days, and the child gained a family in the desert as well as the town.
Before the desert women arrived in that season, the infant had already been nursed for some days by Thuwaybah (may Allah have mercy on her), the freed slave-woman of his uncle Abu Lahab, who had emancipated her on the day the news of his nephew's birth was brought to him. Ibn Kathir opens his account of the rearing and suckling of the Prophet ﷺ with her name, and he establishes her nursing of him upon the rigorously authenticated hadith which al-Bukhari and Muslim carry from al-Zuhri, from Urwah ibn al-Zubayr, from Zaynab the daughter of Umm Salamah, from Umm Habibah (may Allah be pleased with her). She had wished the Messenger of Allah ﷺ to marry her sister, and he answered her: that would not be permissible 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 for me. From this passage, preserved in the two Sahihs, the scholars have drawn the fixed principle that the suckling relationship carries the force of kinship in the sacred law. And it is worth pausing, as a believer, to notice that the one whom Allah intended to be the Seal of the Prophets was given, even in his infancy, mothers and kin beyond the house of his father, so wide did the mercy of his upbringing reach.
But Thuwaybah's nursing was brief, and the arrangement intended by Allah for his earliest years lay in the tents of Banu Sa'd ibn Bakr. The season of the entrusting came in the month of Rabi al-Thani, about May or June of the year 571, and the story is carried by the woman who lived it, in what has become one of the most beloved first-person voices in the whole Seerah: Halimah bint Abi Dhu'ayb (may Allah be pleased with her), whose father Abu Dhu'ayb bore the given name Abdullah ibn al-Harith, and whose husband was al-Harith ibn Abd al-Uzza, both men of Banu Sa'd ibn Bakr. She herself tells it: I arrived at Makkah along with other women from Banu Sa'd looking for babies to suckle, and it was a year of famine; and al-Waqidi, transmitting with his chains of authorities, adds that they were ten in number, women of Banu Sa'd ibn Bakr who acted as foster-mothers along with her. I arrived, she said, on a worn-out grey she-ass, and we had with us an old milch she-camel which, I swear, was not giving a drop of milk; our own baby boy had kept us awake the whole of the night before, crying for hunger, for there was nothing in my breast of use to him and nothing in the camel to feed him. Our hope was in rain and relief. So I went on, on that weak she-ass of mine, which lagged behind the other riders because of its weakness and its thirst, much to their annoyance.
When the women reached Makkah the seeking of nurselings began, and Aminah (may Allah be pleased with her) offered her son to one and then to another, until she had tried them all and they had all refused him. Halimah's account gives the reason in the women's own words: what good could his mother do for us; what we want is some help from the boy's father. The child was an orphan; his father Abdullah was in the grave, and an old grandfather, however noble, was too remote a source of expectation, for when Abdul-Muttalib died it would be his sons, not his grandson, who would be his heirs; as for the boy himself, his father had been too young to acquire wealth, and had left him no more than five camels, a small flock of sheep and goats, and one slave girl. There stood, that season in Makkah, the strangest of spectacles: the son of one of the great families of Quraysh was by far the poorest nurseling offered to the women, and the only woman of Banu Sa'd left without a babe was Halimah, who was the poorest of them all. The poorest nurse and the poorest nurseling had been reserved, by the wisdom of Allah, for one another; and what believer's heart does not see the hand of the Best of planners in that reservation.
Then Halimah said the words which the Ummah has treasured ever since: by Allah, I hate to go back amongst my companions without having a babe to suckle; I will go off to that orphan and take him. And her husband al-Harith ibn Abd al-Uzza (may Allah be pleased with him) answered her with words that were prophecy, though the speaker did not know it: it is not your duty to do so; and so perhaps Allah will bring us some blessings through him. She concluded, with the honest simplicity which makes her account beloved: I went off and got him; and the fact is, by Allah, I only took him because I could not find anyone else. The Lord of the worlds had prepared the earliest shelter of His Messenger through a woman who expected nothing from him: no gift, no wage, no standing among the great of Quraysh; she took the orphan because returning empty-handed to her people in a famine year was harder for her to bear than the burden of one more mouth. And into that motive, empty of every worldly hope, Allah poured the fullness of His blessing; as her husband had hoped, so it was given.
The entrusting itself was made with the consent of his mother Aminah and under the guardianship of his grandfather Abdul-Muttalib, and Aminah gave her son up into the desert as the mothers of Quraysh did, trusting in Allah and in the way of their forefathers. From that day the child who had been refused by every nurse belonged to the household of Halimah, and that household to him. Years later the Qur'an would have him recite, in the words of his Lord, the account of his own orphanhood and shelter: Did He not find you an orphan and give you shelter, and the commentators of the Ummah have long read this verse of Surah Ad-Duha as the divine commentary upon this very season of his life. He had lost his father before his birth, and Allah gave him shelter first in the arms of Thuwaybah and then in the arms of Halimah; he was the poorest of nurselings and became the treasure of the poorest of households; and the Lord who made the dry udders flow for him was the same Lord who would one day make his own heart the spring of guidance for all the worlds. The believer who reads the arrangement sees the care of Allah as plainly as the sun at noon: no detail of the Messenger's childhood was left to chance, not even the choosing of the woman who would carry him into the desert.
The blessing began before the caravan had even formed. Halimah relates: no sooner had I taken him and brought him back to my baggage than my breasts welcomed him, giving him all the milk he wanted; he drank till he was satisfied, and his foster-brother, our own son, 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, and we spent a fine night together. And in the morning her husband said to her: Halimah, by Allah I really think you have taken a person who is blessed; you see what a blessed, happy night we passed when we took him; may Allah Almighty go on bringing us more benefit yet. The present event records the entrusting itself, and the unfolding of the increase belongs to the next chapter of the Seerah; but the first taste of it was given on the very day of the taking, for such is the way of Allah with His gifts: they arrive together with the deed done for His sake, not after it.
The entrusting also fixed the whole cast of the child's earliest world. In the tents of Banu Sa'd he would have a foster-father, al-Harith ibn Abd al-Uzza, a foster-mother, Halimah, and foster-siblings: Abdullah their son, and the daughters of the house, Unaysah and Khizamah, the latter of whom was known as al-Shayma, of whom Ibn Ishaq relates that she would cradle the little Messenger of Allah along with her mother while he was with them. The full account of these years belongs to the following events of the Seerah; here it is enough to mark that on the day of the entrusting the whole geography of the Prophet's ﷺ infancy was set: Makkah for the sanctuary and the kin of Quraysh, and the desert for the growing body and the forming tongue. The scholars of the Seerah have always seen in this double geography a double wisdom of preparation: the one who would restore the House of Ibrahim (peace be upon him) to its purity must know that House from childhood; and the one who would receive an Arabic Qur'an, the like of which no poet could match, must draw in his mother's milk the purest of Arabic tongues, the speech of Banu Sa'd, which the Arabs themselves acknowledged as nearest of all dialects to the pure language of the poets.
The honesty of the transmitted record deserves the believer's attention here, as everywhere in the Seerah. The account of the entrusting comes through Ibn Ishaq, whose chain as Ibn Kathir transmits it in his chapter, An Account of the suckling of the Prophet by Halimah daughter of Abu Dhu'ayb of the Sa'd tribe, names some of its links only generally; and Ibn Kathir remarks in his own voice that this account has been related through various other lines as well, and that it is one of the best known and most frequently told by the biographers and early historians. Al-Waqidi supplies, with his chains, the detail of the ten women; and the same story is rendered in full by Lings from the earliest sources. There is, besides, a divergent line which Ibn Kathir records and weighs openly: al-Umawi transmitted, through al-Zuhri from Said ibn al-Musayyab, an account in which Abdul-Muttalib is said to have ordered his son Abdullah to carry the babe around the quarters of the Bedouins until he found a foster-mother for him, and Halimah was eventually hired to suckle him, the child remaining with her six years and being brought each year to visit his grandfather. The isnad of this variant runs through a transmitter whom the critics declared weak, and its arrangement of the years differs from the received account of Ibn Ishaq; Ibn Kathir sets it down as it reached him and lets its weakness declare itself. The believer is not troubled by such variants: the scholars of the Ummah carried every report with its chain, the strong to be built upon and the weak to be known and set aside, and this fidelity of the Seerah sciences is itself part of the honesty of faith.
A question the thoughtful reader may ask: why did Allah, who had willed the shelter, permit His Messenger to be refused by every nurse in Makkah before he was taken? The reports themselves hold the answer the believer seeks. The refusal was the arithmetic of this world: an orphan is poor, and there were richer nurselings that season. And the taking, when it came, was for Allah alone, without wage or expectation, and therefore capable of receiving the whole reward which Allah gives to the deed done purely for His sake. Had the wealthiest of the nurses carried him off with her clients, the story would have been one of hire and fee; as it is, the story the Ummah has loved for fourteen centuries is of a hungry woman taking a fatherless child for the sake of not returning empty-handed, and being given, for that, the blessings of her household and a name among the foster-kin of the Messenger of Allah ﷺ until the end of the world. Thus Allah chose the poor of the desert to shame the calculations of the town, long before His Messenger ﷺ would be commanded to recite: Allah knows best where to place His message.
The legacy of the entrusting was lifelong, and it was written into the sacred law itself. Because of it the Prophet ﷺ grew up with a second family, and the milk-kin of Banu Sa'd remained his kin to the end: the suckling relationship, as the hadith of Umm Habibah establishes, carried the sanctity and the prohibitions of blood. In the eighth year after the Hijrah, at the battle of Hunayn, the tribe of his fosterage stood against him in the field and was taken captive, and the tie of that milk asserted itself in the most public manner, in his release of the prisoners of Hawazin; Ibn Kathir observes that the blessedness which had come down upon Halimah al-Sa'diyyah and her family when he was young reverted afterwards to the people of Hawazin, for they were related to him through his being suckled among them, and he released them, taking pity on them and treating them with kindness. And in Makkah, in the years before the mission, there were the visits of Halimah herself, at which Khadijah (may Allah be pleased with her) was always generous, once granting her forty sheep and a howdah camel in a year of drought. The entrusting made in Rabi al-Thani was thus not the hiring of a nurse but the grafting of the Messenger ﷺ onto a second people, whose women had fed him and whose tongue he would speak, and who would be honored among the Arabs forever because of him.
What remains is the meaning of the event for the believing heart. The infant who entered the desert was the most defenseless of creatures: orphaned of a father, dependent upon a mother left far behind, upon a nurse who had taken him by way of last resort, upon a household poorer than its neighbors, in a year of famine, and in a land the reports call the most barren quarter of the earth of Allah. And every one of those weaknesses was made, by the power of Allah, a door of blessing: the last resort became the best of foster-mothers; the poorest household became the most enriched; the barren land became, for its flocks, the most generous; and the orphan himself became, in time, the shelter of every orphan who would ever call upon Allah through him. So it is that the believer who entrusts a child to Allah finds the child returned with increase; and the Ummah, remembering this event, has never ceased to honor Halimah al-Sa'diyyah, to name its daughters after her, and to see in her story the proof that the company of the righteous, and above all the company of the Messenger of Allah ﷺ, may the peace and blessings of Allah be upon him, is itself a provision which the scales of this world were never made to weigh. The desert years had begun, and in the tents of Banu Sa'd the body of the best of creation was now to grow strong, and his tongue to grow pure, under a sky which the angels themselves watched over.