Increased Provision in Halimah's Household

The blessing of the entrusting did not wait for the caravan to reach the tents; it began in the very hour of the taking, while Halimah al-Sa'diyyah (may Allah be pleased with her) stood with her new nurseling beside the baggage of the women of Banu Sa'd in the streets of Makkah. Her account, which Ibn Ishaq transmitted and Ibn Kathir preserved in his chapter on the suckling of the Prophet ﷺ, tells it in words the Ummah has never tired of hearing: 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, my own hungry son, 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 passed a fine night together. The night before, that same woman had held a crying baby against a dry breast in a famine year, and that same camel had stood in the darkness giving not one drop; the contrast is the whole event compressed into a single household, and what believer's heart does not feel its warmth, for the Lord of the worlds had visited a poor tent, and the tent did not know yet what guest it carried.

In the morning the head of the household read the sign with the eye of faith. Halimah relates: my husband said to me, 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. And Lings renders the same moment as the awakening words of al-Harith ibn Abd al-Uzza (may Allah be pleased with him): by Allah, Halimah, it is a blessed creature that thou hast taken; and she answered with the humility of a believing heart: that is indeed my hope. The exchange deserves to be paused upon: neither of them yet knew whom they carried; they saw only a fatherless child of a poor family of Makkah, and they read the increase of their night rightly as the company of the child, and they attributed it rightly to Allah, Glorified and Exalted be He. The recognition of the Giver through the gift is the first lesson of every barakah, and the household of Banu Sa'd was given it whole, before any revelation had come to any Arab, by the plain arithmetic of dry udders made full.

Then the caravan set out for the desert, and the increase followed them onto the road. Halimah had come to Makkah on a grey she-ass so weak and emaciated that she had kept the other women waiting, lagging behind the riders to their annoyance, all the way into the city; and now, with the child in her arms, the same animal went off ahead of all the other riders, with not a single donkey able to catch up with her. Her companions called out to her in astonishment, saying: is that the she-ass you were riding when you came with us; and she answered: yes indeed, it is her; and they said: by Allah, something has really happened to her. Lings renders their cry: confound thee, wait for us; is not this ass of thine the same ass that thou didst come on; yea by Allah, she said, she is the very same; some wonder hath befallen her. The believing reader smiles and lowers his head in awe at once: even the dumb mount was honored by the burden it carried, and made a sign for the women of Banu Sa'd to read on the road; and none of them could yet know that the child in the saddle would, within seventy years, be the reason that the names of their tents were remembered in every land of the earth.

When they reached their country, the blessing settled upon the pasture itself. Halimah said: we reached our tents in the Banu Sa'd country, and I know of no place on the earth of Allah more barren than it then was; it was a year of famine, and the drought had made the grazing bare. But after we brought him to live with us, my flock would graze free, then leave the grazing satisfied and full of milk, and we would milk them as much as we wished, while no one around us, near or far, had their ewes give so much as a drop, and their flocks always went hungry. Ibn Kathir's translation of her account continues: the others said to their shepherds, woe upon you, watch where the flock of the daughter of Abu Dhu'ayb grazes, and graze along with them; and this they would do, their flocks grazing where mine went, but theirs remained hungry, not giving a drop of milk, while mine were satisfied and full. The spectacle continued season upon season before the eyes of the whole neighborhood: the same sky, the same dust, the same dry earth beneath the same dry winds, and one flock in the middle of the country coming home every evening full, for the sake of one small child in its tents.

The word which the scholars of the Ummah have always used for this pattern is barakah: the blessed increase which Allah places in a thing, beyond what its means can yield, as a direct act of His generosity. It is not magic, and it is not mechanism; it is the intrusion of the mercy of the Creator into the economy of creation, and the Qur'an speaks of it in many places: in the blessed olive which is neither of the east nor of the west, in the blessed night in which the Qur'an was sent down, in the blessed land, and in the blessed person. Of the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ himself Allah declared that he was sent as a mercy to the worlds, and the years of Halimah's household are among the earliest documented workings of that mercy in the flesh: the mercy of a nursing child, who could do nothing for anyone, through whom Allah did everything for everyone around him. The Ummah's teachers have always loved this story precisely because its hero is a babe in arms: it teaches that the barakah of Allah is not earned by the strength or the skill of its bearer, but flows from the pleasure of Allah upon whomsoever He chooses, and that the poorest dwelling which shelters one of His beloved ones may become a fountain for all its neighbors.

Allah would later reveal to this child, when he was a grown man and a Messenger, the words in which He recounts His own care for him in these very years: Did He not find you an orphan and give you shelter, and did He not find you in need and enrich you. The commentators of the Qur'an have differed in detail over the immediate application of the last phrase: some took the enrichment of the Prophet ﷺ to refer to the sufficiency Allah later granted him after poverty, as with Khadijah's wealth and the plenty of Madinah; and others read it as well of the increase which Allah placed in everything his hand touched from his earliest days, of which the household of Halimah is the standing example in the Seerah. Both readings are true and meet in one root: Allah does not leave His beloved in the need into which the world puts him; He answers the need with His own enrichment, sometimes in provision, sometimes in contentment, and usually in both; and the believers are commanded in the same Surah to recount these mercies aloud, for the very recital is a nourishment of the soul: So as for the blessing of your Lord, proclaim it.

The pattern which the household experienced is the very one which Allah set as a law in His Book: and whoever is mindful of Allah, He will make for him a way out, and provide for him from where he does not expect. Halimah expected nothing from the orphan: that is the plain text of her own account, for she says, by Allah, I only took him because I could not find anyone else; and her husband had only a hope, perhaps Allah will bless us through him. Out of that hope without expectation, Allah provided from where they did not reckon: not from the estates of Quraysh, whose nurses had refused the boy for his poverty, but from their own dry camel and their own barren pasture, made to overflow in a famine year. The scholars of the heart have always drawn from this the great lesson of reliance: the provision is with Allah, not with the apparent means; and the servant who attaches his hope to Allah rather than to the calculation of this world finds the calculation of this world turned upside down for his sake.

Nor is the pattern confined to one household in one famine; the Scripture is woven with it. When the angels came to the house of Ibrahim (peace be upon him) with the tidings of Ishaq, they greeted his astonished wife with the words: do you marvel at the decree of Allah; the mercy of Allah and His blessings be upon you, people of the house. The house was blessed because of the righteous man within it. And Yusuf (peace be upon him), sold for a few dirhams into the house of Egypt, became the means by which a whole kingdom and region was kept alive through years of famine; the Qur'an itself testifies how the presence of one soul preserved by Allah becomes provision for multitudes. In the Sunnah the pattern is sealed with the Prophet's ﷺ own practice: al-Bukhari relates in his Sahih from Anas ibn Malik (may Allah be pleased with him) that when his mother Umm Sulaym brought the boy to the Messenger of Allah ﷺ and asked him to bless him, he prayed to Allah for the increase of his wealth and his children, and Anas testified in his old age that he had outlived his fellows in wealth and offspring, until his very garden bore its fruit twice in the year; and Anas had himself served the Prophet ﷺ from the age of ten and said he never felt envy for what others were given, so continuous was the blessing of that service. The child of Halimah's tent stood at the head of this whole line of households made rich by the presence of one righteous soul, and his case is the strongest of all, for he was not merely a righteous guest of the house; he was the fountain of every barakah that would ever enter any house of the Ummah.

The record of the event deserves the same honesty the scholars gave the entrusting, and the master chronology of this project marks it rightly as a reported Seerah blessing account. The account comes in Halimah's own voice through Ibn Ishaq's line, which Ibn Kathir transmits and declares one of the best known and most frequently told by the biographers and early historians; its narration in the first person, with its humble detail of the she-ass and the camel and the shepherds, carries the marks of a household memory carried out of the desert, and Lings, following the earliest sources, sets it at the head of his chapter The Desert. The scholars have never doubted the category of the report: it is a transmitted account of the earliest Seerah literature, attested in its outline by several lines, and not a legal text of the law; and the believer receives it as the Sira itself has carried it, with the names of its transmitters attached and its wonder unhidden. This is the adab of the Ummah with its beloved history: neither to inflate the report beyond what its chains bear, nor to shrink from the barakah which the report plainly bears; and the reports of the milk and the she-ass and the flocks have been received and retold by the Ummah from the lifetime of Ibn Ishaq to our own day.

The blessing did not end with the fosterage; it followed the child and the bond all their lives. Lings records, in his chapter on the household of Makkah, that as the years passed there were occasional visits from Halimah, the foster-mother of the Messenger of Allah ﷺ, and that Khadijah (may Allah be pleased with her) was always generous to her; on one of these visits, at a time of severe and widespread drought through which Halimah's flocks had been seriously depleted, Khadijah made her a gift of forty sheep and a howdah camel. The household which had received the Prophet ﷺ as the poorest nurseling of Makkah now stood, in the drought years of his maturity, as the honored poor of the household of the first woman of Quraysh who believed in him; and the believer sees the circle closing with beauty: the woman who fed the orphan without a wage was fed in her own famine from the wealth of the woman who would give all her wealth to the same orphan grown to prophethood. So does Allah honor the debt of the milk, and so did the Prophet ﷺ keep, all his life, the second mother of his infancy.

And the blessing outlived even that generation, returning in the most public manner to the whole tribe of the fosterage. When Hawazin, the parent stock of Banu Sa'd ibn Bakr, stood against the Messenger of Allah ﷺ in the field at Hunayn in the eighth year after the Hijrah and were defeated and taken captive with all their families and flocks, the tie of his milk asserted itself in the hour of victory. Ibn Kathir, closing his account of the suckling years, observes that the blessedness of the Prophet ﷺ came down upon Halimah al-Sa'diyyah and her family when he was young, and then his virtues reverted to the people of Hawazin when he took them prisoners after their battle; they were related to him through his being suckled among them, and he therefore released them, taking pity on them and treating them with kindness. The captives of Hawazin were six thousand souls, men and women together, and the Prophet ﷺ returned them all, and with them gave camels and herds beyond counting, so that one of the later scholars, Abu al-Husayn ibn Faris, valued what he gave them that day at five hundred thousand dirhams; and Ibn Kathir closes the passage with the words which the preachers of the Ummah have never ceased to quote: all this came from his early blessings upon earth; what blessings, then, will he bestow upon those who follow him in the next world. The full account of that release belongs to a later event of the Seerah; here it stands as the seal of the pattern begun in Halimah's famine-year tent: whomsoever the barakah of the Prophet ﷺ once touched, it did not cease to touch.

For the believer today the event holds a law which the heart can live by. The increase of Halimah's household was not won by strategy, by capital, or by the favor of the powerful of Makkah, all of whom had declined her child; it came by the pleasure of Allah upon a deed done for His sake, and it lasted as long as the deed's object was in the house. The servants of Allah who take in the orphan, who host the righteous, who feed the guest for the sake of Allah alone, are dealing with a Lord whose recompense is not of this world's arithmetic; and the believing household which receives a student of the Qur'an, a widow, or a stranger for His sake may rightly hope, without any mechanism to explain it, for a share of the pattern of Banu Sa'd: that the house which shelters one whom Allah loves becomes, for as long as he is in it, a place where the milk does not fail. And the Ummah, remembering this event, remembers also the One who sent it: it was not Halimah who enriched her tent, nor the she-ass who made herself swift, nor the pasture which fed the flock; it was Allah, Glorified and Exalted be He, who has mercy upon the poor of His servants and who, in His wisdom, prepared in that desert infancy the first public proof that the child of Abdullah was no ordinary child. The years of increase had begun, and the boy through whom they came was growing in the tents, gaining the strength of body and the purity of tongue which Makkah had sent him out to gain; what happened to him among the tents belongs to the following chapters of his blessed Seerah, may the peace and blessings of Allah be upon him.