Stay Among Banu al-Najjar in Yathrib

The caravan had come down into the palms, and the kinsmen of Banu Adi ibn an-Najjar received the widow of Abdullah and her boy into the quarter where most of the clan lived, on the eastern side of the oasis. The stay that followed, kept in the received chronology of this record as about a month, was the first long taste that the Messenger of Allah ﷺ, may the peace and blessings of Allah be upon him, ever had of Yathrib: a boy of six among his maternal kinsmen, with his mother's hand over him and Barakah (may Allah be pleased with her) keeping the door. The believing reader should dwell on the ordinary shape of those weeks, because the sirah itself dwells on them: a boy was taken to his father's people, he was passed from lap to lap, he ran with the sons of the clan, he was taught their games and their water, and the town entered his heart through the senses of a child. Of such plain threads the whole of the later history of Madina was woven.

The quarter held a grave, and the grave was the reason for the coming. It was here, in the house of al-Nabighah of the clan of Adi ibn an-Najjar, that Abdullah ibn Abdul-Muttalib had lodged with his maternal kinsmen when the sickness of Syria had halted his caravan; Ibn Kathir transmits from Ibn Sa'd the account of al-Waqidi's chain, from Musa ibn Ubaydah, from Said ibn Abi Zayd, from Ayyub ibn Abd ar-Rahman ibn Abi Sasah, that Abdullah stayed there with them sick for one month while the caravan went on to Makkah, and that Abdul-Muttalib sent his eldest son al-Harith after him, who found that Abdullah had died and been buried in the house of al-Nabighah, being twenty-five years of age. Of this account al-Waqidi himself asserted that it is the most firmly based of the accounts of the death of Abdullah and of his age that we have. Aminah had now brought the son of that grave to stand where his father had stood: the same courtyard, the same clan, the same water, and the believing imagination may see the women of the Najjar pointing out to the six-year-old the place where his father had breathed his last, and the boy storing the place in silence, for he was grave of nature even in play.

Of the games of that month the earliest sources have preserved two, and they are preserved from the Prophet's ﷺ own telling in his later years, which makes them among the most personal of all the boyhood traditions. Martin Lings, upon the earliest material, relates: in later life he recounted how he learned to swim in a pool which belonged to his Khazrajite kinsmen with whom they stayed, and how the boys taught him to fly a kite. The master chronicle of this database keeps the name of the place, the pool of Dar an-Nabighah, the dwelling in which his father had died and was buried; the identification is the received one of the sirah compilations, which place the lodging of the visit in the same Najjari quarter, and the honesty of the scholar keeps the elements distinct: the swimming and the kite are related by the Prophet ﷺ himself, and the naming of the house is the tradition of the compilers. A pool, a courtyard, a cluster of houses, and boys shouting over a game: this is the entire furniture of the scene, and yet the believer feels the weight of it, for the waters in which the best of mankind first learned to swim were the waters of his Ansar, and the hands that steadied him atop them were the hands of the sons of the Najjar.

The pool deserves a moment, because the desert boy had known no such water. In the highlands of Banu Sa'd his bathing had been the rain and the water-skins; here in Yathrib the water stands in courtyards and runs in channels between the palms, and every Najjari boy could swim as a matter of course. The six-year-old, hardened by the desert and fearless, learned as boys learn, by falling and being fished out and trying again, until the water was his. That swimming was one day to carry him, in the imaginations of the exegetes of the verse, into the very picture the Quran draws of the faithful in Paradise, who pass among its rivers as a swimmer passes; but even nearer at hand, it was a token of the man who would be at home in every element of the creation, in the desert and the town, on the camel and the ship, upon the earth that loved him and under the sky that shaded him.

Beside the water stood the games of the air. The boys of the Najjar taught him to fly a kite, the simplest of the toys of the ancient world, a frame of light sticks and a sail of cloth upon a string, that climbs when the wind of the palm-groves is steady and dives when the hand is unskilled; and the reader should not let the plainness of the detail pass unremarked, for the sirah is here showing the Messenger of Allah ﷺ as a learner among learners, a boy taking instruction from his cousins of the oasis with the same docility he would one day bring to the instructions of Gabriel (peace be upon him). The humble learner of childhood grows into the humble bearer of revelation; and the kite that climbed from the courtyard of Dar an-Nabighah was, in its small way, the first thing the boy of Makkah ever sent up into the sky above the town of his refuge, where Allah would one day raise his name higher than any kite of the sons of Adam.

Then occurred the visitation that gave the month its place in the chronicle of destiny. Umm Ayman, the faithful Barakah, is the reporter, and Ibn Kathir transmits her account in the chapter of the death of Aminah: one day two Jews of Madina came to her and said: bring out Ahmad for us to see. They then looked at him and turned him around in their hands; then one of them said to the other: this is the Prophet of this nation, and this shall be the abode of his refuge, where very many will be taken prisoner and many will be killed. And when his mother heard this she was afraid and left; and it was at al-Abwa that she died, on her way home. The words are stark, and each clause deserves the believer's reflection. They called him Ahmad, the name by which the scriptures of the Children of Israel had announced the prophet to come, the name that Isa son of Maryam (peace be upon him) had uttered when he stood among the Children of Israel and said, as the Quran records: I am the Messenger of Allah to you, confirming the Torah that came before me, and giving glad tidings of a Messenger who will come after me, whose name shall be Ahmad.

The two Jews examined the boy as the learned examine a text, turning him in their hands as one turns a scroll to the column in question, and what they sought was the seal and the mark. Their verdict was twofold: the person, this is the Prophet of this nation; and the place, this shall be the abode of his refuge. Both verdicts were true, and both were to be fulfilled to the letter upon the Hijrah, when the Messenger of Allah ﷺ took refuge in Yathrib, and when very many of its people were taken prisoner and many were killed in the wars that the Hijrah brought. And the reader should notice the measure of the terror that now entered a mother's heart: Aminah had already stood against the fear of Halimah with the words that Satan would never reach her son; but this was a different fear, the fear of the watchers who had read the books, for the history of the prophets is old with the murderous jealousy of the learned who see the truth in a child and would rather the child were theirs or none's, and the memory of the swords drawn against the children of promise lay old in the books of the watchers themselves. Aminah rose and made ready to leave, and the month of the stay was closed.

The name by which they called him was not strange to him, for it was his own. It is transmitted in both the Sahihs from Jubayr ibn Mut'im (may Allah be pleased with him) that the Messenger of Allah ﷺ said: I have five names: I am Muhammad, and I am Ahmad, and I am al-Mahi, through whom Allah obliterates disbelief, and I am al-Hashir, at whose feet the people will be gathered, and I am al-Aqib, after whom there is no prophet. Muhammad and Ahmad are two branches of one root, the root of praise, for his Lord praised him and made his very name the echo of the praise: the praiser and the most praised in a single tongue. The Jews of Yathrib who asked for Ahmad were asking by the name their scriptures had kept; the boy who was brought out to them carried it by the gift of the same heaven that had announced him to Isa son of Maryam (peace be upon him), and the bearer of both names stood silent in the courtyard while the watchers spelled out what the heavens had written.

The report of Umm Ayman is not an isolated lamp in the sirah; it stands in a row of lights. Ibn Kathir, in the chapter of the signs of the birth of the Prophet ﷺ, has gathered the expectation that filled Yathrib itself: the Jew who rose in the morning at the birth and cried to his people that the star of Ahmad had risen that night; Yushu of the quarters of Abd al-Ashhal, who described the coming prophet and said that to this land he would migrate; the rabbis of Qurayzah and an-Nadir, who watched the red star and said that his name was Ahmad and that his migration would be to Yathrib, and who disbelieved in him when he came, out of envy, as their own forebears had prophesied they would. And Hassan ibn Thabit, the son of the Najjar, a lad of seven or eight at the birth, kept his own ear-witness of the shout in the streets. The two visitors of this event were of the same learned nation of watchers, and their examination of the six-year-old was the first physical identification of the awaited one in the town of his refuge; that they let him go, and that their knowledge did not become a snare, was the mercy of Allah, who lets the watchers glimpse and yet keeps His Messenger for His own hour.

Every clause of the verdict of the two Jews came to pass in the book of Madina. Very many taken prisoner: and the first great muster of captives in Islam was at Badr, when seventy men of the Quraysh were led bound into the town whose boys had once been examined in a courtyard. Many killed: and the martyrs went on from that day, the seventy of Uhud upon the slope that overlooks the oasis, and the fallen of the wars after them, until the earth of the City became the most honored burial ground among the sons of Adam. The abode of his refuge: and Qaswa knelt at last upon the courtyard of the two orphans of the Najjar, and the heralds cried through the palm-groves that the Messenger of Allah ﷺ had come. What the watchers of Yathrib read in the six-year-old was true, every letter of it; what their own hearts did with the truth when it stood grown before them, the Quran itself recounts, that when that which they recognized came to them they disbelieved in it out of envy. Knowledge without love is a lamp in a ruined house; and Allah is the One who knows, and His slaves know only what He teaches them.

What, then, did the month mean for the clan that hosted it? The believer who knows the whole sirah reads the month as a seedtime. The boys who taught the son of Abdullah to swim and to fly a kite were the cousins of the men who, fifty years later, would defend him with their bodies in the ridges of Uhud and in the lanes of the souks of Madina; the houses that sheltered Aminah were the houses whose sons and grandsons dug, stone by stone, the trench before the battle of the Confederates; the quarter that hosted the motherless soon mothered the Messenger of Allah ﷺ himself, for when he came at the Hijrah his she-camel Qaswa passed, as Lings relates upon the earliest sources, by the very place where he had stayed with his mother as a child, amid the eastern quarter where most of the clan of the Najjar lived, and the kinsmen besought him to alight there, and he blessed them and let the camel go her way, until she knelt in the courtyard of two orphan boys of the Najjar, Sahl and Suhayl, upon whose land the mosque of the Messenger of Allah ﷺ was then raised. Let the reader mark the order of the mercy: the clan that had hosted the orphan son of Abdullah hosted in its own ground the house of Allah that would stand till the end of the world; the pool of the boys of the Najjar lay a few paces from the pulpit of the best of creation.

The honors that would follow were pronounced by the Prophet ﷺ himself. In the rigorously authenticated collections it is transmitted from Abu Usayd al-Ansari (may Allah be pleased with him) that the Messenger of Allah ﷺ said: the best of the Ansar are the people of Banu an-Najjar, then the people of Banu Abd al-Ashhal, then the people of Banu al-Harith ibn al-Khazraj, then the people of Banu Saidah, and in every quarter of the Ansar there is goodness. And Anas ibn Malik (may Allah be pleased with him), who was himself a son of the Najjar and a boy-servant in the houses of that quarter, transmitted from him the sign that never fails: the sign of faith is love of the Ansar, and the sign of hypocrisy is hatred of the Ansar. That love between a people and their prophet was not manufactured at the Hijrah by treaties and oaths alone; it was laid down, by Allah's care, in a month of swimming and kites in the courtyard of Dar an-Nabighah, in the sixth year of the Prophet's ﷺ life, before a single Awsite or Khazrajite had dreamed of Aqabah.

As for the duration of the stay, the record of this chronicle keeps it as about a month, in the received reckoning of the sirah compilations, and the sirah scholars have noted that the details preserved from the Prophet's ﷺ own telling are precisely the details a six-year-old keeps: water, play, boys, houses. The month was now broken by the report of the watchers and by the mother's fear; Aminah, who had come with two purposes, mourning and kindred, had fulfilled both, and she rose to go home while the going was safe. The camels were made ready; the kinsmen loaded the departing widow and her son with the dates and gifts of the oasis; the boys of the clan saw their playfellow to the edge of the palms; and the Prophet ﷺ, six years old, rode out of the quarter of the Najjar for the last time as a child, taking with him the town entire, its pools and its courtyards and the sound of its water, stored where Allah stores the childhoods of His chosen.

There is a lesson in this month that the believer does well to carry all the days of life. Allah does not raise His great ones in a vacuum of affection and then cast them upon a people cold; He gives them a childhood among the people they will serve, so that the service is a homecoming. The Messenger of Allah ﷺ would say in after years, of the Ansar, that they were his family and his trust, and the sirah shows the first why of it: he had been their boy before he was their prophet. The mercy of the month of Dar an-Nabighah was the mercy of a far-seeing Love, that the city of his emigration should first be, in his own flesh, the city of his father's grave and his boyhood's water; so that when he returned to it at fifty-three, heralded by the very books the two Jews had read, he was not entering a strange town, but coming back to the house where the boys had taught him to fly a kite, the pool where he had first swum, and the grave of the father he had gone there to mourn. Thus does Allah, Glorified and Exalted be He, join the ends of a life into a single circle of meaning, and let a child's play become a prophecy's preface.