Weaning & Brief Visit to Makkah

Two years passed in the tents of Banu Sa'd, and the child Muhammad ﷺ, may the peace and blessings of Allah be upon him, reached the age of weaning. The Qur'an, which was not yet to be revealed for some five and thirty years, would one day lay down the norm of the nursing it was completing in him: the mothers shall suckle their children for two whole years for those who desire to complete the nursing; and the mufassirun have always noted with pleasure how the earliest facts of the Prophet's ﷺ life fell upon the pattern which the revelation was later to set for the Ummah. Halimah herself tells of the completion: he reached two years of age, she said, already growing up a very fine boy, not like the other children; I swear that by age two he was a sturdy boy, so we took him to his mother. Lings renders her words: 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, and we weaned him. The milk which had flowed in the famine year by the blessing of his coming had carried him to the strength of his second year, and the time appointed between the two houses had come to its end.

The journey from the Banu Sa'd country to Makkah was taken by the foster family with their nursling, and the road itself had become a familiar one: it was the road Halimah had first ridden in famine and returned upon with the whole troop unable to match her she-ass, the road along which the blessing had traveled with them for two years. Now they came again to the quarter of Banu Hashim, to the house of Aminah bint Wahb (may Allah be pleased with her), the mother who had seen a light issue with her son at his birth and had entrusted him in his infancy to the desert for the sake of his body and his tongue. What passed in that house when the sturdy boy of two came back to the mother who had given him up as a weeks-old infant, the reports carry in action rather than in word: the child was weaned, the term of the first entrusting was fulfilled, and the mother received her son whole and strong, the promise of the desert custom made visible in his frame.

But the hearts which had lived two years of barakah could not easily open their hands. Halimah said: we were very covetous of him, because of having seen the blessings he had brought; and she said to his mother: let us bring back this son of ours some other year; we are concerned he might catch a disease from Makkah. Lings gives her plea in its fuller courtesy: leave my little son with me until he grow stronger, for I fear lest he be stricken with the plague of Makkah; and we importuned her until she gave him once more into our keeping. The reasons offered were the reasons of the custom itself: Makkah sat in its valley, crowded and hot, and its seasons carried the sicknesses which the open desert escaped, and every mother of Quraysh who had sent her son to the tents dreaded the homecoming into the epidemic; the child would be stronger, the desert wisdom held, for another season of the pure air. But the reports let the true motive stand beside the prudent one, and the believer smiles to read them together: the house had tasted what it was to have him, and it could not bear to let the tasting end; and the Lord, who writes tenderness into His servants' motives, did not let the plea fail.

Aminah consented. The mother who had said of her son, when she was pregnant, that a light had gone out from her which lit the castles of Syria, could read the change in her child's bearing and the change in his nurse's face alike; and she gave him once more into the keeping of the woman whose milk he had drunk, whose house had been enriched by him, and whose plea was honest before her. Thus the visit to Makkah proved brief, a few days in which the boy was weaned, seen, and entrusted again, and the household of Halimah and al-Harith ibn Abd al-Uzza (may Allah be pleased with them both) set out once more for the southeast, carrying back with them the greatest treasure the desert of Banu Sa'd would ever hold. Ibn Ishaq's account reckons the first stage of this extended stay in months: and we stayed with him two or three months more, said Halimah, before the event of the opening of his chest came upon him among the tents; so that the arrangement made at this visit was to last until the child was four or five, and the whole fosterage, from entrusting to final return, to cover his first five years, as the master chronology of this project records.

What believer's heart does not pause at the trust which passed between the two women at this visit? Aminah, the mother of the child by blood, opened her hands and let her weaned boy be carried a hundred miles into the wilderness for years more; Halimah, the mother of the child by milk, asked for the extension honestly, not concealing that the blessings were what she coveted. Neither bargained, and neither suspected the other, and the child grew up with two houses, two dialects of love, and one childhood; and the Ummah which reads the scene today, in an age when the world litigates over the custody of its children, sees in it the fruit of taqwa: when both parties fear Allah, the trust holds even across the distance of two countries. The scholars of the Seerah have always read this exchange as one of the quiet mercies of the Prophet's ﷺ infancy: Allah gave him a mother whose generosity matched her visions, and a nurse whose attachment matched her need, and made the two women's agreement the vessel of his safest childhood.

On this journey between the two houses, the reports set one of the earliest signs from the world outside the family, and it belongs precisely to the season of the weaning visit. Ibn Ishaq relates, as Ibn Kathir carries the account, that when Halimah was returning him to his mother after he had been weaned, she passed with him by a caravan of Christians; and they came up to the child, turned him around in their hands, and said: we must take this boy to our king, for he is a person of great importance; and Halimah managed to evade them only after great effort. The scene has echoed through the whole literature of the Sira: the learned of the world's older communities had kept, in whatever fragmentary form, the expectation of a prophet to come, and here, on a desert road, men of the Christians recognized in a two-year-old what the nursing women of Banu Sa'd had seen in a famine year, that this child was not as other children. And the believer reads the sequel with awe at the protecting hand of Allah: they did not take him; the nurse who had taken him when no one else would stood between him and the world's intention, and carried him through; for the Prophet ﷺ was to be given to mankind by his Lord, in the time of his Lord, and not carried off to any king of the earth.

There is another report of the road which must be carried with the honesty of the Seerah sciences, for Ibn Ishaq sets it not on this weaning visit but on the later return, when Halimah brought the boy back to Makkah fearing the harm which had befallen him after the opening of his chest. As she approached Makkah on that later journey, she lost him and could not find him; and she went in alarm to his grandfather Abdul-Muttalib, who took a group of the men of Quraysh and went out to search; and it was Waraqah ibn Nawfal and another man of Quraysh who found the boy and brought him to his grandfather; and Abdul-Muttalib set him upon his shoulders and circumambulated the Holy House, praying to Allah for the boy's protection, and returned him to his mother Aminah. The sequencing matters, and the scholars have kept it exactly: the caravan of the Christians belongs to the weaning journey recorded in this event, and the losing and the finding to the final return recorded afterward; but both belong to the one road which this event made the highway of the Prophet's ﷺ childhood, the road between the milk and the blood, and the believer sees in the second report the same protecting hand as in the first: the boy who could be lost on the road was found by the men of Quraysh and carried to the House of Allah, as if the road itself knew where he belonged.

And the name of Waraqah ibn Nawfal in that report deserves the believer's particular notice. Waraqah, the cousin of Aminah and the old sage of Makkah who had turned from the idols to the search of the scriptures, would be the same man to whom the Prophet ﷺ would come, trembling in the first days of the revelation, and hear from him the name of the angel who had come: this is the Namus whom Allah sent to Musa (peace be upon him). For the finding of a lost child on the road to Makkah, the Lord prepared the man who would be the first to recognize his prophethood in Makkah; and the Sira is woven of such preparations, each small in itself, and each a thread of the same mercy which was planning from before the birth of the child. It is the believer's way to see the wisdom of Allah in the apparent coincidences of life; and in the Seerah the seeing is not speculation but observation, for the coincidence is written in the received account itself.

In the background of these journeys stood a third woman whose devotion held the whole early childhood together: Umm Ayman, whose given name was Barakah, the Abyssinian servant girl bequeathed to the child by his father Abdullah, of whom Ibn Kathir writes in his account of the rearing that she it was who reared him, and that the Prophet ﷺ inherited her from his father, and emancipated her when he grew up, and married her to his freedman Zayd ibn Harithah, the mother of Usamah ibn Zayd (may Allah be pleased with them all). She was of the household in Makkah when the weaned boy came from the desert, and she would be at his side in the later years of travel and loss, until the day she would weep at his grave and say: I weep not for the death of the Prophet ﷺ, but for the end of the revelation coming from heaven. Her presence at this visit is not narrated in detail, but her place in the household is one of the fixed facts of the Seerah, and the child who passed between the arms of Halimah and Aminah passed also through the arms of Barakah, who would outlast them all in his service.

The chronology of the extended stay which this visit opened has its variants, and the Ummah's scholars carried them with their usual openness. The received account of Ibn Ishaq, which the master chronology of this project follows, holds that the boy was weaned at two, kept for the further season granted at this visit, and returned at four or five after the opening of his chest; and it reckons the first part of the extended stay in the two or three months of which Halimah spoke before that event came upon him among the tents. The line which al-Umawi transmitted, from al-Zuhri from Said ibn al-Musayyab, holds instead that the child stayed with Halimah six years, being brought each year to visit his grandfather, until the opening of his chest occurred and she took him back; and Ibn Kathir names the weak transmitter in its isnad and lets it stand as a recorded variant beside the received account. Between the two, the substance is unchanged for the believer: the desert held him through the years of his first speech and his first strength, and Makkah received him back when the hour of his Lord came; and the carrying of both reports without forcing either is itself an act of the religion of truth.

The deeper pattern of the event is one which the Seerah will repeat until its meaning is beyond missing. At the weaning, the child was separated from the breast; at the return which followed the splitting of his chest, he would be separated from the desert; at six, from his mother by death at al-Abwa; at eight, from his grandfather; and in the end, from Makkah itself, the city which he loved, for the sake of the Lord who sent him. Each separation in the early years was an education in the one reliance which his mission would demand: that Allah alone abides, and that every shelter the heart loves is a loan from Him. The Qur'an would later find in such truths the very material of its consolation to him: Did He not find you an orphan and give you shelter, and found you unaware and guided you, and found you in need and enriched you; and the enrichment of his childhood, as this project has recorded, was not the enrichment of possessions, but the enrichment of sheltered, sheltering, and guided years, in which each door that closed was a door that Allah opened wider.

There is, finally, a sweetness in the word weaning itself which the believers of every generation have tasted in this event. The fitam which Halimah performed was the child's first weaning, from the milk of the breast; and the Seerah will know other weanings: from the desert to the town when the fosterage closed, from the town to the solitude of the cave of Hira when the mission drew near, and from the whole of this world when his Lord took him at the last to the Highest Companion. Each was a separation, and each was a completion, and the pattern teaches the servant that the path of the beloved of Allah is a path of transfers, in which nothing loved is lost, because every stage is a vessel of the same mercy. Aminah, opening her hands at this visit, was the first after Halimah to practice the lesson; and her trust was rewarded within the years that followed with a son returned to her strong beyond his age, speaking the purest of Arabic, marked already among the tents of two peoples as a child not as other children. The believing parent who entrusts a child to Allah in any of the transfers of this life inherits the same promise: that what is given to Him is kept, and returned with increase.

The aftermath of the visit was the long extended stay which the consent of Aminah made possible. The boy went back to the tents, to his foster-brother Abdullah ibn al-Harith and the lambs behind the dwellings, to the cloud which his foster-sister saw shading him, to the pure tongue and the strong air of Banu Sa'd; and there, in the space of two or three years more, the childhood which Makkah had sent out to be built would be crowned, as the following event records, with the first and greatest purifying mercy of his Lord: the opening of his blessed chest at the hands of Jibril (peace be upon him), the washing of his heart with the water of Zamzam, and the removal of what no son of Adam is spared. The weaning visit of this event is thus the hinge between the two halves of the fosterage: the years of the increase which the entrusting had opened, and the year of the parting which the splitting would close. And the Ummah, reading it, thanks Allah for the women: for Aminah, who could open her hands; for Halimah, who dared to ask; and for the child between them, the best of creation, whose every transfer in these years was a mercy traveling under another name.