Every stage of the life of the Messenger of Allah, may the peace and blessings of Allah be upon him, was ordered by a wisdom that the heavens watched with longing, and none of those stages was left to chance. For four blessed years the boy Muhammad ﷺ had breathed the desert air of Banu Sa'd ibn Bakr, nursed by Halimah (may Allah be pleased with her) of that tribe, hardened by its sun, and given the purest speech of the Arabs; the parched earth that yielded no milk to any other tent had flowed for his tent with milk and ease. Then, as the previous event of this chronicle has told, the two visitors robed in white came down upon him in the pastures, laid him upon the ground, opened his breast, took from his heart the black clot, the portion of Satan, washed the heart in a golden vessel, and closed him again, and the child returned to the tents pale as a blade. The love that Allah had placed in Halimah's heart was about to be tested by the fear that follows a wonder, and the outcome would be his permanent return to his mother Aminah in Makkah.
The account that has become the standard narration of the return is the account of Halimah herself, preserved by Ibn Ishaq and transmitted by Ibn Kathir in the first volume of Al-Sira al-Nabawiyya. When the foster brother came rushing from the pastures crying that two men dressed in white had laid his Qurayshi brother down and split open his belly, Halimah and her husband al-Harith ibn Abd al-Uzza ran out to the boy and found him standing pale among the animals. The child told them plainly what had happened, and al-Harith gathered him to his breast and asked him what ailed him; then the foster father turned to his wife and spoke the words that decided the matter: he feared that their foster son had been touched by something, and that they should hurry and give him back to his own people before what they feared fully appeared in him. It was not a father giving up a son, but a father terrified of failing a trust; and the believer should read his words with sympathy, for the supernatural had walked into a goatherd's camp, and the goatherd knew that the child in his care was beyond his keeping.
The road from the heights of Hawazin down to Makkah was some days' journey, and upon it occurred the first of the two incidents that Ibn Ishaq relates of this final return. Halimah passed with the boy by a caravan of Christians, and certain men of them came up to the child, turned him about in their hands, and examined him, saying that they must take this boy to their king, for he was a person of great importance. Halimah, as Ibn Ishaq says, managed to evade them only after great effort. The fathers of the desert feared harm for the boy from men who desired him, and the hearts of the believing readers of later ages understand the matter better: the scholars of the earlier scriptures had spoken of a coming prophet, and the learned among their caravans could not look upon this orphan without seeing something of what the books had promised; but Allah, who guards His secret, turned their eyes away and kept His Messenger for His own design.
The second incident happened as Halimah approached the sacred city: she lost him, and could not find him, and dread fell upon her, for she was bringing back the very child whose father and mother had trusted her with his life. Ibn Ishaq relates that she went in distress to Abdul-Muttalib, the boy's grandfather, and that the lord of Quraysh went out himself with a band of his men to search the ravines. It was Waraqah ibn Nawfal, the aged seeker of truth who would one day comfort the Messenger of Allah ﷺ at the coming of revelation, and another man of Quraysh, who found the child and brought him to his grandfather. Then Abdul-Muttalib did a thing that Makkah would never forget: he set the boy upon his shoulders, carried him to the Kaaba, and circumambulated the Ancient House, praying to Allah for the protection of his grandson, and after that he returned him to his mother Aminah. What a sight for the angels and for the sons of Adam: the chief of the house of the pilgrimage bearing upon his own shoulders the future of mankind, and walking around the first house of worship ever raised on earth, begging the Lord of the House to keep him.
Then came the handover, and it is one of the tenderest interviews in the whole of the Seerah. Aminah looked at the son who had been so long in the desert, and she was surprised to see him, for she had sent a lusty boy into the wilds and now received him back with the desert upon him and a wonder behind his eyes. Halimah and al-Harith tried at first to make the return sound like nothing at all: they had, they said, simply discharged their duty and feared some harm or accident might befall him among them. But Aminah was a mother, and mothers do not surrender a nursling of years for a passing word. She pressed them and pressed them, refusing to be put off, until they told her the whole of what had happened in the pastures. Then she spoke words that show how completely Allah had fortified her certainty: are you afraid for him from Satan? Satan shall never reach him. My son has a great future; and should she tell them what had happened with him? When she carried him he was the lightest burden she had ever borne, and she saw in sleep a light issue from her that lit the castles of Syria, and when she bore him he came forth as no child comes, dropping upon his hands and lifting his head to the heavens. Leave him, she told them, and do not worry. Martin Lings, following the same ancient thread, renders her parting word to the desert mother in its bare beauty: leave him with me, and a good journey home. Thus the fosterage that had begun in a famine year with a she-ass that could not keep pace ended with a prophecy from a mother's mouth, and the foster parents went back to their hills, leaving behind the blessing that their tents had known.
The accounts of the return are not one but several, and the believer studies them all, for each carries a portion of the light. There is the report of the two birds preserved through Abu Amr ibn Hamid, from al-Hasan ibn Humayd, from Amr ibn Uthman, from Baqiyyah ibn al-Walid, from Buhayr ibn Said, from Khalid ibn Madan, from Abd al-Rahman ibn Amr as-Salami, from Utbah ibn Abd Allah, which Ibn Ishaq and, after him, Imam Ahmad in his Musnad relate: a man asked the Messenger of Allah ﷺ what was the first thing that had happened to him, and he answered that his wet nurse was of Banu Sa'd ibn Bakr, and told of the two white birds like eagles that questioned one another over him, opened his abdomen, drew from his heart two black clots, washed his inside with ice water and his heart with cold water, sprinkled into it the tranquility that Allah sends down, sewed him and set upon his heart the seal of prophethood, weighed him against a thousand of his people and found that he outweighed them. In that same account the child races in terror to his foster mother, who mounts him upon her ass and rides behind him all the way to Makkah, and standing before his true mother says that she has fulfilled her pact and agreement, and Aminah answers her fear with the light of Syria. Imam Ahmad related this from Baqiyyah ibn al-Walid, and Abd Allah ibn al-Mubarak and others likewise transmitted it from him, and Ibn Asakir carried it by other lines; the critics discuss Baqiyyah for his tendency to leave names unspoken, yet the report stands upright upon its supports and Ibn Kathir transmits it without disapproval.
Beside it stands the report of Thawr ibn Yazid, from Khalid ibn Madan, from a group of the Companions (may Allah be pleased with them), in which the Messenger of Allah ﷺ said: I am the answer to the prayer of my father Ibrahim (peace be upon him), and the glad tidings of my brother Isa son of Maryam (peace be upon him); my mother bore me with the lightest burden, and there came forth with her a light that illuminated the castles of Syria; and I was suckled by Banu Sa'd ibn Bakr. It tells of the golden basin filled with ice, the washing of the heart, and the weighing against ten, then a hundred, then a thousand of his people, whom he outweighed, until the visitor said to leave him, for weighed against his whole nation he would outweigh them. Of this report Ibn Kathir says plainly that it has a fine, strong chain of authorities, and it is related by Imam Ahmad in his Musnad; and it is one of the most beautiful of all the self-tellings of the Messenger of Allah ﷺ, for in one breath it joins the prayer of the Friend of Allah to the milk of a poor tribe, and the vision of a Syrian castle to the clots of a boyish heart.
Not every line of telling is sound, and the believer's honesty requires the record of what the imams rejected. Ibn Ishaq relates that Abu Nuaym al-Falaki transmitted in his Dala'il a much lengthened version of the story by way of Umar ibn Subh, and Ibn Kathir rules over this Umar that he should be ignored, for he was a liar accused of invention, and for that reason, says Ibn Kathir, we will not mention the text of the tradition, for it gives no pleasure. This sentence is the very model of the science of the sirah: a forged splendor is refused, a plain wonder is kept, and the difference between them is not taste but isnad. There is likewise the rigorously authenticated hadith of Sahih Muslim, from Hammad ibn Salamah, from Thabit, from Anas ibn Malik (may Allah be pleased with him), that Gabriel (peace be upon him) came to the Messenger of Allah ﷺ while he was playing with the other boys, took him, laid him down, opened his heart and drew out from it a clot, saying that this was Satan's portion of him, then washed it in a golden basin with the water of Zamzam and restored it; and the boys raced to his nurse crying that Muhammad had been killed, and they met him pale; and Anas said that he used to see the mark of the sewing upon his chest. And Ibn Kathir, surveying the openings of the chest, concludes that there is no denying the probability that it occurred twice, once when he was young in the desert and once on the night of the ascension, when his breast was washed in preparation for his ascent through the heavens to his Lord.
One further report belongs to the season of the return. Al-Waqidi relates, from Masud ibn Muhammad, from Ikrimah, from Ibn Abbas (may Allah be pleased with them both), that Halimah once went out seeking the Prophet ﷺ in the heat of the day and found the flocks sleeping in the sun and the child with his foster sister; and she asked why he was out in such heat, and the girl answered that her brother did not suffer heat, for she had seen a cloud shading him, halting when he halted and moving when he moved. Of this report Ibn Kathir again says that it has a fine, strong chain of authorities. What believer's heart does not soften at the image: the shade of the clouds, which had hidden the boy from the Christians of the caravan and held the sun from his head, going where he went, as it were a banner of the Lord of heaven over a five-year-old.
The dating of the return carries the marks of the transmitted variety that the scholars of the Seerah never conceal. The received chronology kept in this record places the permanent return in about the year 575 of the Christian era, when the boy was five; and it is the most balanced of the reckonings, sitting between the report of al-Umawi, transmitted through Uthman ibn Abd ar-Rahman al-Waqqasi from az-Zuhri from Said ibn al-Musayyab, that the child stayed with Halimah six years and was taken back when his breast was opened, and the shorter spans that arise from Ibn Ishaq's own narration, in which the boy, weaned at two and kept on at his mother's consent, is returned within what seems a breath of the weaning. Al-Umawi's chain is pronounced weak by the critics, and the chain of Halimah's own account is the one the biographers have loved best, as Ibn Kathir says of it that it is one of the best known and most frequently told of the accounts of the early historians. Martin Lings, weaving the same sources, places the boy's happy years with his mother at about three, which would carry the return back toward his third year. The believer does not stumble here, for the differences of the transmitters over spans and seasons have never touched the substance: the child was nursed in Banu Sa'd, a wonder was done to his heart, the desert folk feared for him, and his mother received him home with certainty of his greatness, and Allah was in every hour of it his Keeper.
What the desert had given him, the desert kept the honor of having given. The speech of Banu Sa'd was accounted the purest and most correct of the Arabic tongues, uncontaminated by the pidgin of the caravan towns, and it was the speech that would one day carry the challenge of the Quran to every tribe of the Arabs, so that the Messenger of Allah ﷺ could say of himself, as Ibn Ishaq preserves: I am the most eloquent of the Arabs, for I am of Quraysh, and I was suckled among Banu Sa'd ibn Bakr. His frame was hardened by the wind and the distance; his eye was trained on horizons; his boyhood had known the keeping of flocks, which is the school of patience and watchfulness, and of which his own later years as a shepherd above Makkah were the continuation. The believing imagination loves to see in this a rhyme of providence: the prophets of old had all been keepers of sheep, and the best of the prophets was now formed in the same open air, between the same innocence of sky and earth.
Nor was the debt of the milk ever forgotten by its Holder. Thirty-odd years later, in the eighth year of the Hijrah, after the conquest of Makkah and the battle of Hunayn, the captives of Hawazin, the very stock of his foster tribe, stood in the pens of the Messenger of Allah ﷺ, six thousand souls, men, women and children. There came to him at al-Jirana a deputation of them who had accepted Islam, and their speaker Zuhayr ibn Surad said: Messenger of Allah, we are one family and one stock, and you know what misfortune has befallen us; have mercy on us, may Allah have mercy on you, and reminded him that the prisoners in the stockades were his aunts and his nurses who had cared for him. And the Messenger of Allah ﷺ answered that the share of the spoils which fell to him and to the family of Abdul-Muttalib was theirs, and he released the whole six thousand, and loaded them besides with camels and flocks, until Abu al-Husayn ibn Faris said that the value of what he gave them that day reached five hundred thousand dirhams. Ibn Kathir closes that account with a cry of the heart that every believer echoes: all this came from the early blessings he brought to earth, and what then will be his generosity to those who follow him in the next world.
For the boy himself the return meant a new world: the sound of the Kaaba's pigeons instead of the bleating of the flocks, the alleys of the quarter of Banu Hashim instead of the black tents, the arms of his mother instead of the arms of the desert. Lings describes the three happy years that followed: the boy living in Makkah with his mother, winning the love of his grandfather and his uncles and aunts and the many cousins with whom he played, and closest to him Hamzah and Safiyyah, the children of Abdul-Muttalib's last marriage, who had been born of a twin wedding with his own parents, so that Hamzah was his uncle through his father and his cousin through his mother, and the bond between the three was a power and a joy that lasted all their lives. In that household too moved Barakah, called Umm Ayman (may Allah be pleased with her), the faithful one inherited from his father, who was as a wall of constancy around mother and son.
When the believer stands back from this event, two lights remain. The first is the expansion itself: the surah of the Quran that begins with the oath, Did We not expand for you your breast, and remove from you your burden which weighed upon your back, and raise for you your renown, is read by the exegetes, Ibn Kathir among them, in the light of what was done to the Prophet's ﷺ heart in his childhood; the opening of the chest was not an affliction but a preparation, the removal of a weight before it could press, and the fear of Halimah was the shadow of a mercy she could not see. The second light is the pattern of the whole passage: Allah took His Messenger from his mother's house to give him a second mother in the desert; then He returned him from the desert to the same mother by a road of wonders and of lost-and-found; and He so ordered it that no one who ever cared for that child was ever abandoned, but every nursing was repaid with honor and every love with lasting love. So it is with Allah, and so He teaches His slaves that nothing entrusted to Him is lost; the years with Aminah now given back to him were few, as the next events of this chronicle must tell, but they were full, and they were enough for Allah to write into the heart of His Messenger ﷺ the tenderness of the mother that He would one day bind into the law: as for the orphan, do not oppress him.