Journey to Yathrib with Aminah

A year of happiness had passed in Makkah since the desert gave the boy back to his mother, a year of the quarter of Banu Hashim, of his grandfather's couch, of play with Hamzah and Safiyyah and the cousins of the household. Aminah bint Wahb watched her son grow, and in her heart lived two debts that only a journey could pay. The first was owed to the dead: her husband Abdullah had died a young man of twenty-five on his way back from Syria, and lay buried in Yathrib, in the house of al-Nabighah, among the clan of his maternal kin; no wife of the Arabs forgets such a grave, and she had never seen it. The second was owed to the living: the boy was six, an age when the sons of Quraysh could ride, and he had never seen the town where his father had died nor met the kinsmen who had closed his father's eyes. So Aminah resolved to travel, and the resolution of a mother who has carried a light in her womb is not to be weighed by the ordinary measures of difficulty; she would take her son to Yathrib, to the grave of Abdullah and to the uncles of Banu Adi ibn an-Najjar, and she would come back.

The party was three. There was Aminah herself, still young, a woman of Banu Zuhrah on her father's side and of the house of Abdul-Muttalib by marriage. There was the boy Muhammad ﷺ, six years old, with the desert still in his speech and the wonder of his opened breast behind his eyes. And there was Barakah (may Allah be pleased with her), the maidservant whom Abdullah had left as part of his household and whom his son had inherited, the woman whom Ibn Kathir names at the head of his account of the Prophet's ﷺ rearing: Umm Ayman, whose given name was Baraka, reared him; the Prophet ﷺ had inherited her from his father. Of Abyssinian origin, hers was the constancy that would one day be famous in the stories of the Muslims: she was to outlive both mother and father of this boy, nurse his sorrows, migrate twice for his sake, and be saluted by him as a mother; and in this journey she rode as the guardian of a widow and an orphan on a road she knew. Three riders upon two camels: so Lings transmits the received picture from the earliest sources, that they joined one of the northbound caravans riding on two camels, Aminah upon one of them, and he upon the other with his devoted slave girl Barakah.

The road from Makkah climbs out of the valley and turns north through the volcanic country, joining the great highway of the Hijaz along which the caravans of Quraysh traveled to Syria in summer and to the Yemen in winter. It was the road of the ilaf, the covenant of journeys by which Allah had bound the tribes to the House: for the ilaf of Quraysh, their ilaf of the journey of winter and summer, let them worship the Lord of this House, who fed them against hunger and gave them security from fear. The believing reader of the Quran knows what the caravans of Quraysh did not know in full: that the security of that road was itself a loan from the Lord of the House, spent by every traveler upon it, and repaid by none of them in the coin of gratitude until the son of this very caravan brought the House its true worship. Between mother and son the road ran through the stations that the caravans knew, days of the wilderness; and if the boy had been asked his whole life long which road he first remembered, this one, taken at six upon a camel in the care of his mother, would have had a claim upon his memory that no other journey could dispute.

The destination gave the journey its tenderness. Abdullah ibn Abdul-Muttalib had died before his son's birth, leaving the young widow with nothing but the boy and the household that included Barakah; the uncle al-Harith had found him dead in Yathrib and buried in the house of al-Nabighah; and the clan that had tended his sickness for its month was Banu Adi ibn an-Najjar, the people of his own maternal line, for the mother of Abdul-Muttalib, Salma bint Amr, had been a woman of that clan. So the grave that Aminah intended to visit was also a hearth of kin, and the visit would be at once mourning and homecoming. The Arabs of the Jahiliyyah had their own fierce customs at the graves of the dead, but the mother of the Messenger of Allah ﷺ came as mothers come, to weep quietly and to show the father his son; and the believer is permitted to see in her purpose a prophecy of the Prophet's ﷺ own teaching, years later, when he would permit the graves to be visited and say that the visiting reminds of death; the son who rode beside her at six would himself legislate, under revelation, the very tenderness that now moved her.

The kinship she was honoring deserved its measure of explanation, for it explains half of the history that follows. Hashim ibn Abd Manaf, the great-grandfather of the Prophet ﷺ, lord of the caravans of Makkah, had come through Yathrib on his trading way and lodged with Amr ibn Zayd ibn Labid, the leader of the clan of Adi ibn an-Najjar, and had seen his daughter Salma bint Amr and asked for her in marriage; her father stipulated that she should remain with her people, and it was there, in the houses of the Najjar, that she bore Shayba, who was to be Abdul-Muttalib, the grandfather of the Messenger of Allah ﷺ. The boy Shayba grew among his maternal uncles of Banu Adi ibn an-Najjar for seven years before his uncle al-Muttalib brought him to Makkah, as Ibn Kathir relates. Thus it happened that the chieftains of Quraysh carried in their blood a living bridge to the great Khazrajite clan of the Najjar; and when Abdullah lay dying in Yathrib a generation later, it was to those same houses that the caravan delivered him; and now, a generation after that, his widow was bringing his son over the same bridge, that the boy might know the people who had buried his father and loved his great-grandmother.

And Yathrib itself, what manner of town was it that received the child? It was an oasis of date-palms and wells between two ridges of black rock, an ancient settlement of the Jewish tribes and of the Arab clans of Aws and Khazraj that had entered it after them; and it was, unknown to all but a few of its own scholars, a town living in expectation. The Jews of Yathrib held in their books the descriptions of the prophet who was to come at the end, the one named Ahmad, and they had told their Arab neighbors of him for generations, in part from faith and in part, as the years passed, in boast, for they used to say that when he came they would take him for their own and prevail by him. Ibn Kathir, in his account of the signs of the birth of the Prophet ﷺ, gathers their testimonies: the aged Jew of Makkah who asked the Quraysh on the birth-night what boy had been born among them, and fainted when he saw the mark between the shoulders of the newborn; the Jew of Yathrib who cried out in the morning to his assembled people that the star beneath which Ahmad would be born had risen that night; Yushu, the Jew of the quarters of Abd al-Ashhal, who told his hearers that the time drew near for a prophet named Ahmad to arise from the sanctuary, a man neither short nor tall, and that to this land he would migrate; and the rabbis of Qurayzah and an-Nadir who watched the red star and said that a prophet after whom there would be no other was born that night, and that Yathrib would be his home, though when he truly came they disbelieved in him out of envy.

Among those who heard the cry in Yathrib was a boy of seven or eight years, Hassan ibn Thabit, the son of the clan of an-Najjar itself, later to be the poet of the Messenger of Allah ﷺ, who preserved his own memory of that morning: that a Jew in Yathrib rose on the morning of the birth crying out to his people until they gathered about him, and they asked him what was the matter, and he said: the star of Ahmad, the prophet of this nation, has risen tonight; and Hassan swore that he heard it with his own ears, being a lad of understanding. The chain of this testimony, from Salih ibn Ibrahim ibn Abd ar-Rahman ibn Awf, from Yahya ibn Abd Allah ibn Abd ar-Rahman ibn Sad ibn Zurarah, from trusted men of his family, is set out by Ibn Kathir. What a stillness this casts over the journey of this event: when Aminah came down the slope toward Yathrib with her six-year-old, she was carrying into a town of prophets' watchers the very Ahmad of their watching, the child about whom their own boys had heard the shout six years before; and Hassan, his own clansman and his future poet, may have been among the lads of the quarter who ran to see the son of Abdullah come home to his father's people.

Of the arrival itself the transmissions are brief, as the transmissions of joy usually are. Al-Waqidi relates with his chains of authorities that the Prophet ﷺ was taken by his mother to Madina in the company of Umm Ayman when he was six years old, and that she visited his uncles; and the uncles received the widow of Abdullah as their own, for she came with the fruit of the marriage they had witnessed a lifetime before, when the whole of Abdul-Muttalib's house and the house of Wahb had feasted together in Makkah. The boy was passed from lap to lap in the houses of the clan, the son of Abdullah who had died in their keeping; his mother's eyes rested upon the grave of his father; Barakah kept the camels and the child as a soldier keeps a gate. The believer reads the scene as the angels read it: the last assembly of the Prophet's ﷺ two parents in one town, the father beneath the earth of the Najjar's quarter, the mother among the palms above him, and the son of both standing in the sunlight between them; and over it all, the care that had brought the child safely through the desert, through the Christians of the caravan and the loss at Makkah's approaches, now brought him to the town of his father's grave, the town that Allah had named for him before his grandfathers were born.

The boy's own memory began to gather the town into itself, as a child's memory does, in pictures rather than in names: the black rocks that shoulder the oasis, the wells of the clans, the fortress-houses of the Jewish quarters standing over the groves, the dust of the alleys of the Najjar's quarter, and the sound of the water drawn at evening. The six-year-old could not have known the rivalries that ran beneath the surface of the town, between Aws and Khazraj, between the Arab clans and the tribes of the Book who lived among them in walled compounds; but the Lord who was raising him knew, and the town that would one day be called al-Madinah, the City, was already being written into the tablet of his earliest affections. In the division of the events of the sirah, the journey of this event is the door, and the month of the stay, with its pool and its boys and its two learned visitors, is the room beyond; the reader is led across the threshold with the child, from the camel's saddle into the courtyard of the kinsmen, and from there into the days that the next event of this chronicle will relate.

For Barakah, the journey was one station in a servanthood that the whole of this chronicle will honor. She had come into the household as a maid of Abdullah, and she now stood between the mother and the son as their helper and guard; the road of the Hijaz at the service of the elite, in the world's eyes, counts for nothing, but in the account of Allah the lowly who are faithful are raised above the mighty who are not, and the woman who carried the water-skins of this journey would one day be greeted by the Messenger of Allah ﷺ as a mother of the people of his house. Let the believing heart also mark the caravans of the road itself: the widow and the orphan did not travel alone, for even the Jahiliyyah honored the code of the caravan, that none who rode under its banners was left behind; and Allah, who is never without instruments, used even the caravan-manners of a pagan age to carry His Messenger's ﷺ household to Yathrib in peace.

There is a deeper strand still, that the event itself does not announce but that the whole of the sirah confirms. Every schoolboy of the Muslims knows that the Messenger of Allah ﷺ would one day leave Makkah for Madina, and that in Madina he would find his helpers, his mosque, his state, and his rest; but only the sirah knows that the first thread of that great emigration was sewn here, by a mother's love, in the heart of a six-year-old. The month of play in the quarter of the Najjar, the pool where the boys of the clan taught him to swim, the kinsmen who would twelve years hence protect him from the assassins of Quraysh, all awaited the next event of this record; and the reader who knows the whole story reads this journey as a man reads the first line of a letter whose ending he has long treasured. Years afterward, when the Messenger of Allah ﷺ was himself an emigrant in that town, he prayed to Allah in the words preserved by al-Bukhari from Abd Allah ibn Umar (may Allah be pleased with them both): O Allah, make us love Madinah as we love Makkah, or even more, and make healthy what is in it, and take its fever to al-Juhfah. The love he asked for was not new; it had been planted in him by the days of which this event tells, when Yathrib first sheltered him as a mother shelters a son.

It is the way of the sirah that joy and sorrow travel in the same caravan. Aminah had set out to show her son to the people who had buried his father; she had also, without knowing it, come to the country where her own grave would be dug, a few miles back down the very road by which she had come. But the shadow does not darken this event; it gilds it. For the believer, the journey of Aminah to Yathrib stands complete in itself: a mother's faithfulness to a dead husband, a widow's courage on a hard road, a child's first sight of the city of his destiny, and the beginnings of the love between the best of creation and the people of Madina that would become, in the fullness of time, the very sign of faith itself, as the Prophet ﷺ taught when he said that the sign of the believer is love of the Ansar. The camels came down into the palms; the uncles came out of their houses; the boy Muhammad ﷺ, six years old, entered Yathrib for the first remembered time, riding beside the two women who loved him most; and the Lord of the Kaaba, who had kept him in the womb and the desert and the caravan, kept him now among his father's people, having written for him in that town a month of swimming and play, and beyond it a return whose grief He had already measured with His mercy.