Growing Up Among the Banu Sa'd

The tents which the infant Muhammad ﷺ entered in the arms of Halimah (may Allah be pleased with her) became, for the first years of his life, the whole of his world. Ibn Ishaq, transmitting the account which Ibn Kathir preserves in the chapter on the suckling, names the members of that world for us: the foster-father of the Messenger of Allah ﷺ was al-Harith ibn Abd al-Uzza of Banu Sa'd ibn Bakr; his foster-brother was Abdullah ibn al-Harith; and Unaysah and Khizamah, the daughters of al-Harith, were his foster-sisters, the last named being the one known as al-Shayma, of whom it is said that she would cradle the little Messenger of Allah along with her mother while he was with them. The picture is tender beyond all the centuries which divide us from it: the future Messenger of the Lord of the worlds lying in the lap of a Bedouin girl in a famine-stricken camp, nursed at the breast of one mother and dandled by another, with a foster-brother beside him and the desert for a nursery. The believer sees in the arrangement the humility of Allah's wisdom: He prepared His greatest gift to mankind not in palaces but in a tent of goat-hair, among the poorest of His people, so that no pomp would stand between the Prophet ﷺ and the hearts of the poor of the earth whom he was sent to gather.

The days of that childhood were the days of the desert. Its duties came to him early, as they came to every child of the Badawah: the fetching and the carrying, the minding of the lambs and the kids in the safe grass behind the tents, the learning of the paths to water. Years later, when his companions asked him about the beginnings of his life, the Prophet ﷺ himself described this shepherd-work, as Ibn Ishaq relates on the line of Thawr ibn Yazid, from Khalid ibn Ma'dan, from the Companions: I was suckled by the tribe of Sa'd ibn Bakr, he said, recounting the event of the opening of his chest which befell him while he was a boy among the tents. And in the report which Utbah ibn Abd Allah transmitted and Ibn Kathir carries, he said: my wet-nurse was of the Banu Sa'd ibn Bakr; one day a son of hers and I went off with our flock without taking any food with us, and I said to my brother: go back and fetch us some food from our mother's house. Even this small sentence is a whole education: it shows the two boys alone with the flock, responsible before they were tall, hungry in a hard country and resourceful in their hunger. The scholars of the Seerah have always read the Prophet's ﷺ later shepherding of the flocks of Makkah as a continuation of these first years; and the believers have always read in the divine pedagogy a deliberate order, that the one who would shepherd mankind should first learn, in the silence of the desert, to watch over creatures weaker than himself, patient when they strayed and gentle when they were afraid. And the Prophet ﷺ himself, as al-Bukhari carries from Abu Hurayrah (may Allah be pleased with him), set the seal upon the pattern: Allah never sent a prophet who did not tend sheep; and Musa (peace be upon him) came to his mission from the flocks of Madyan, and the Seal of the Prophets ﷺ from the lambs behind the tents of Banu Sa'd.

The second gift of the desert was the tongue. The Arabs of the towns sent their sons into the desert for many reasons, but the crown of them all was fusahah, the purity and eloquence of speech, for the towns had already begun to soften and mix the language, while the desert kept it whole. The Banu Sa'd ibn Bakr were among the most famed of all tribes for the purity of their dialect; Lings observes that it was there, among the Bani Sa'd, that the spoken language was nearest to poetry, and the elders of Quraysh wanted for their sons what the desert kept: fresh air for the breast, pure Arabic for the tongue, freedom for the soul. Of the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ this purpose was fulfilled to a degree no parent of Quraysh ever imagined for a child; and he himself, in after years, was accustomed to tell his Companions, as Ibn Ishaq relates: I am the most eloquent of you all; I am of Quraysh, and I was suckled among Banu Sa'd ibn Bakr. The report as transmitted by Ibn Ishaq is one whose isnad the later critics found not to be of the strongest, and it must be carried with that honesty; but the Ummah received its meaning with unanimity, for the life itself bore it witness: the Qur'an was sent down in the purest Arabic, and its bearer was prepared for it by a childhood in the purest of camps, and the eloquence of the Prophet ﷺ, unmatched among the masters of speech, was the fruit of the choice Allah made of the desert of Banu Sa'd as his first school.

Here the believer lifts his eyes from the tent to the throne, for Allah Himself has testified to the gift of eloquence. In Surah Ar-Rahman, among the first bounty-verses of the Qur'an, He says: the Most Merciful, He taught the Qur'an, He created man, He taught him al-bayan, articulate speech. The mufassirun explain al-bayan as the power to make meaning plain, the very faculty which distinguishes the speaking creature; and in the economy of Allah's planning, the faculty which would receive His final Book was cultivated in the Prophet ﷺ through the purest dialect of the Arabs, in the years when speech is learned at the breast and at the knee. What the grammarians of later Basra and Kufa would labor decades to codify, the child of Banu Sa'd drank in with his milk; so that when the Qur'an came to him at forty, it found in his tongue an instrument already tuned by two childhoods, the Qurayshi of his blood and the Sa'di of his fosterage, the two purest strains of the language, joined in one mouth by the wisdom of the Lord of the worlds. The believer who loves the Qur'an cannot think of its Arabic without remembering the tents of Halimah, and what believer's heart does not thank Allah for that arrangement.

The reports of the desert years carry, besides the milk and the eloquence, the signs of a protection which was visible to the household. Al-Waqidi transmits, with his chain from Ibn Abbas (may Allah be pleased with them both), that Halimah once went out to seek the boy, and found the animals of the household resting in the heat of the sun, and found him with his foster-sister in the open; and she said to her: why is he outside in this heat; and the girl replied: my brother does not feel the heat, for I saw a cloud shading him, which stopped when he stopped and moved when he moved, until he came to this place. The line, it must be said with the honesty of the Seerah sciences, comes through al-Waqidi, whose transmissions the hadith critics weigh with particular care; but the sign it carries belongs to a family of reports which met the Prophet ﷺ again and again in his later years, when the monk Bahira would see the cloud giving him shade over the caravan, and when his Companions would see the trees and the stones greet him; and the scholars received the childhood cloud as they received the rest, with chains named and wonder unhidden. The image itself abides in the heart: a small boy in a sun-scoured land, and over his head alone, a cloud; the heat of the world kept from him while the shade of heaven followed his steps, a picture of his whole prophethood drawn in advance in the sky above the tents.

The boy grew, and the growth was seen by every eye in the camp. Halimah's own account says of him: he was growing up a very fine boy, not like the other children; I swear that by two years of age he was a sturdy boy; and Lings renders it: he was growing well, and none of the other boys could match him for growth; by the time he was two years old he was a well made child. The Bedouin air, the milk of two mothers, the work and the walking of the shepherd's life, built the body which would one day stand all night in prayer until his feet swelled, and stride the pilgrim roads, and ride at the head of armies, and dig the trench with his Companions until the dust whitened his blessed stomach. The desert gave him his health and his endurance, and the believing reader sees in it the mercy of Allah toward the Ummah which would follow him: the Messenger was given a constitution which could bear the weight of revelation and mission, and he said in after years that the strong believer is more beloved to Allah than the weak believer, though in both is good. Between the famine year of his arrival and the weaning which ended his nursing, the land which had been the most barren upon earth for the flocks of the neighbors had raised up the strongest and the finest of all its children.

Nor was the soul of the desert lost upon him. Lings reflects, in his chapter on The Desert, that the Arabs held nobility and freedom to be inseparable, and that the free life of the tent, the life of the open horizons, was in their eyes the nobler estate from which the town had fallen; and whatever the modern reader makes of that ancient valuation, the Seerah shows what Allah made of it in His Prophet ﷺ. He grew up acquainted with the star-led night and the rain-hoping dawn, with the speech of men who owned nothing but their honor and their camels, with a people whose memory was their library and whose hospitality was their law; and the Ummah has always known that his desert childhood is part of his message. For the Qur'an which came to him would keep the idiom of the open country, and his own speech all his life kept its early plainness: he sat on the ground and ate on the ground, and he said that he was but a servant, and he forbade the exaggeration of his own status; and the simplicity of the tents of Banu Sa'd never left the manner of the Messenger of Allah ﷺ, may the peace and blessings of Allah be upon him, though the thrones of Chosroes and Caesar were brought low before his name.

The milk-kinship which the desert created proved wider than one household, for the suckling of Halimah did not end with the Prophet ﷺ alone. Lings records, in his account of the Prophet's ﷺ household in Makkah, that Muhammad's eldest uncle al-Harith had left many children, and that one of them, his cousin Abu Sufyan ibn al-Harith, was also his foster-brother, having been nursed by Halimah among the Bani Sa'd a few years after himself. The two foster-brothers, cousins by blood and brothers by milk, grew into a likeness which the people of Makkah remarked: it was said that Abu Sufyan was among those who bore the closest family resemblance to the Prophet ﷺ, and that a characteristic they held in common was eloquence; Abu Sufyan was even a gifted poet, whereas the Messenger of Allah ﷺ, though unsurpassed in mastery of the language and in the beauty and power of his speech, never showed any inclination to compose verse, for his speech was truth itself, and the Qur'an would come to him as a recitation, not as poetry. The detail is precious for the believer: the Lord who gave His Prophet ﷺ the eloquence of the poets kept him from the art of the poets, so that no one could ever say of the Qur'an that it was made; and the same nurse's breast fed the two lines of eloquence, one to praise and one to preach, in the same camp of Banu Sa'd.

Then came the years of the tie's flowering, when the milk of Banu Sa'd returned to the tribe in the coin of the Prophet's ﷺ mercy. In the eighth year after the Hijrah, after the conquest of Makkah, Hawazin, the stock of Banu Sa'd ibn Bakr, fought against the Messenger of Allah ﷺ at Hunayn and was defeated, and their families, their flocks, and all that they possessed were taken captive, six thousand souls together with uncounted herds. A delegation of them who had accepted Islam came to him at al-Ji'ranah and said: O Messenger of Allah, we are one family and one tribe; you know well what misfortune has befallen us; have mercy upon us, and may Allah have mercy upon you. Then their spokesman, Zuhayr ibn Surad, arose and said: O Messenger of Allah, those prisoners you hold in the stockades are your aunts and your nurses who looked after you; if we had been suckled by Ibn Abi Shammar or by al-Nu'man ibn al-Mundhir and then suffered from them what we have suffered from you, we would have hoped for their help and their kindness, and yet you are the most honorable of men; and he recited to him the verses: have pity on us, O Messenger of Allah, in kindness, for you are the man we plead with and implore; have pity on a tribe ruined by fate; have pity on women you once suckled, your mouth filled with their pure milk. The Prophet ﷺ had already divided the captives among the tribes when the plea reached him; and there rose before the heart of the victorious Messenger of Allah ﷺ the memory of the tents of Banu Sa'd, and the milk of Halimah outweighed in his noble breast the whole wealth of the spoils. He answered them: the captives are yours, but my share and the share of the family of Abdul-Muttalib belong to you also; and at his word the Muhajirun and the Ansar rose and gave up their shares likewise, and one of the chiefs of the delegation said: and what was ours is for Allah and for His Messenger; and six thousand captives walked free, and with them camels and herds beyond counting, so that the scholar Abu al-Husayn ibn Faris valued what was given that day at five hundred thousand dirhams. Ibn Kathir closes the account with the exclamation the preachers of the Ummah have never ceased to quote: all this came from his early blessings on earth; what blessings, then, will he bestow upon those who follow him in the next world.

Among those captives, the Sira relates, was al-Shayma herself, the foster-sister who had once cradled him. When she was brought before the Messenger of Allah ﷺ she did not hide her kinship, but told him that she was his sister by the milk of his mother Halimah, and he asked her for the sign, and she reminded him of the mark upon her which the children of one house know of one another; and he spread his mantle for her and seated her beside him and spoke to her with the tenderness of a brother, and gave her the choice of remaining with him in honor or returning to her people, and he treated her with generosity and kindness. The detailed account of the meeting, as the later critics have noted, comes in a line whose isnad is not of the strongest; and the believer carries it as the scholars carried it, with its attribution and its grade made plain. Yet the event in which it is set, the release of six thousand for the sake of the milk, is among the mass-transmitted acts of the Prophet's ﷺ generosity; and the two together paint the picture the Ummah has always loved: the boy cradled in the desert became the man who, at the summit of his power, remembered the arms that had held him, and paid the debt of his childhood out of the wealth of two worlds.

What, then, do the desert years mean for the believing heart which walks through the Seerah? They mean that Allah, the Best of planners, does not raise His great ones in the places the world expects, but where He wills; and that the childhood He gave His Messenger ﷺ was itself a message, saying that the heights of the spirit are reached through the simplicity of the tent, that the tongue which speaks for heaven must first be taught by the pure earth, and that the shepherd of men must begin with the lambs. They mean that the bonds of the milk are honored in the sight of Allah beyond what those who make them can know; the Lord arranged for His Prophet a second mother and a second family before he could ask for either, and when the hour came, the tie kept its debt in the coin of mercy. And they mean that the believer may look at the ordinary life of any humble household and know that Allah can be preparing in it, through the very plainness of its bread and the very purity of its speech, an instrument for the guidance of the worlds. The child of the tents of Banu Sa'd was approaching his fifth year; the years of the increase were ending; and upon the pastures where he played with his foster-brother, the heavens were about to bend low, as the following event of the Seerah records, to touch his innocent heart with the first purifying mercy of his Lord.