The month of the kindred was over, and the camels were turned toward Makkah. The kinsmen of Banu Adi ibn an-Najjar loaded the departing widow with the dates and the gifts of the oasis, and the boys of the clan walked their playfellow to the edge of the palms, and the six-year-old Muhammad ﷺ, may the peace and blessings of Allah be upon him, rode out of Yathrib for the last time as a child, with his mother upon her camel and Barakah (may Allah be pleased with her) beside him. The road home ran south and west, retracing the stations of the journey: the long grades of the volcanic country, the wells of the halts, the dust of the caravan track rising into the heat. The party had come north in the security of a caravan; the transmitters do not tell us in what company they returned, only that they returned, and that before they had gone many stages, the journey that began as a homegoing became the saddest passage in all the childhood of the best of creation.
The place was al-Abwa. It lies upon the old caravan road between Makkah and Yathrib, and Ibn Ishaq's notice fixes it exactly: Aminah, the mother of the Messenger of Allah ﷺ, died when he was six at al-Abwa, a place between Makkah and Madina, and she had taken him to visit his uncles of the tribe of Adi ibn an-Najjar and died when she was returning with him to Makkah. Lings, upon the earliest sources, adds the human detail: not long after they had set out on their return journey Aminah fell ill, and they were obliged to halt, letting the caravan go on without them, and after some days she died; it was at al-Abwa, not far from Yathrib, and there she was buried. Let the believing reader slow the pace of reading here, for the sirah itself slows: the widow who had crossed the desert with two camels and a child to keep faith with a dead husband's grave was not to reach her own city; the mother who had defied every fear for her son could not be defended from the one visitor that no mother is defended from; and the boy who had lost his father before his birth was about to lose the second half of his world.
Of her last days the reports preserve no words, and the reverence of the believer leaves the silence its dignity. What the reports do preserve is her whole short life, and it is the finest of epitaphs: she had been the wife whom Abdul-Muttalib chose for his youngest and best-loved son; she had seen in her pregnancy the light that lit the castles of Syria; she had borne the best of mankind and told the midwives of the signs about him; she had given him the name of Muhammad as the visions commanded and as his grandfather confirmed; she had given him to the desert when the custom of Quraysh demanded it, received him back when the wonder demanded it, and answered the fear of his nurse with the words that Satan would never reach her son. Six years she had kept him, at the breast, in the desert's loan, in the quarter of Banu Hashim, and on the road to his father's grave; and now, at al-Abwa, the keeping passed from her hands into the hands of Allah alone, which is the safest of all keepings, though no one on earth has ever been ready for it.
She died and was buried at al-Abwa, and the little grave upon the caravan road closed over the woman who had carried in her body the Light of the worlds. The hands that dug it were the hands of the halt and the household; the boy stood at the edge of the grave as boys stand, silent, not fully able to grasp that the hand that had steadied him on the camel would not steady him again; and Barakah, the Abyssinian maidservant of the house of Abdullah, drew the motherless child to her own breast. Lings transmits the tenderness that the Ummah has never tired of telling: Barakah did what she could to console the boy, now doubly an orphan. It is one of the most quietly heroic sentences in the whole of the sirah literature, for what could a servant-woman do against the death of a mother? Only what she could: stay. She did not leave the boy at the graveside or at the wells of the halt; she gathered him, and the camels, and the mother's few goods, and set her face toward Makkah, and the whole road home she was mother and father and guard in one, an Abyssinian hand upon the shoulder of the orphan of Quraysh.
The believing reader who knows the Quran hears, over this scene, the verses that Allah Himself spoke to this boy when he was grown and revealed His Book upon him: Did He not find you an orphan and give you shelter, and find you astray and guide you, and find you in need and make you free of want? The surah of the morning hours, Ad-Duha, opens with the oath of the Lord that He had not forsaken His Messenger nor taken him into displeasure, and then, as its first proof of His care, Allah names the orphanhood itself: He had found him an orphan and had given him shelter. The exegetes count among His shelterings the suckling of Halimah's household, the house of Abdul-Muttalib, and the arms of Barakah; and the believer should mark the order of the surah's mercies, for the shelter of the orphan stands first in the list, before the guidance and the wealth, as if Allah would say to His slave: the first thing I gave you, after your mother, was a roof. At al-Abwa, where the roof of the mother fell, Allah had other roofs standing ready: the grandfather in Makkah who would set the boy by his side at his couch, and the woman beside him on the road, who would follow him for the rest of her life.
The grave at al-Abwa did not pass out of knowledge, and the most moving proof of this is that the Messenger of Allah ﷺ himself returned to it in the years of his prophethood. In the second year of the Hijrah, when he led the Muslims out in the campaign that the books call the campaign of al-Abwa, or of Waddan, he went apart from the army to the grave of his mother. Imam Ahmad relates, from Husayn ibn Muhammad, from Ayyub ibn Jabir, from Simak, from al-Qasim ibn Abd ar-Rahman, from Ibn Buraydah, from his father Buraydah (may Allah be pleased with him), that they set out with the Messenger of Allah ﷺ and traveled until they reached Waddan, and he told them to wait until he returned, and he went off and came back grave of face, and said: I went to the grave of Muhammad's mother and asked my Lord for intercession for her, and it was not granted me; I had forbidden you to visit graves, so visit them; I had forbidden you the flesh of sacrificial animals after three days, so eat and take as you wish; I had forbidden you to drink from the vessels, so drink. The hadith carries in one breath the son's sorrow and the legislator's authority; and it establishes forever that the grave of Aminah was a known and visited place, that the Prophet ﷺ knew where his mother lay, and that the entire legislation of grave-visitation in Islam was brought to the Ummah from beside this one grave on the road between his two cities.
The weeping at the grave is transmitted by more lines than one, and the sirah keeps them all. Al-Bayhaqi relates in his Dala'il an-Nubuwwah, from Sufyan ath-Thawri, from Alqamah ibn Yazid, from Sulayman ibn Buraydah, from his father, that the Prophet ﷺ went to a grave while the other men sat around, and began to move his head as one addressing someone, and then wept; and Umar (may Allah be pleased with him) went to him and asked what was making him weep, O Messenger of Allah, and he replied: this is the grave of Aminah daughter of Wahb; I asked my Lord's permission to visit her grave and He gave it me, and I asked Him for forgiveness for her, and He refused me it; and compassion for her overcame me, so I wept. And Ibn Kathir adds that Buraydah was corroborated in this by Muharib ibn Dithar, from Ibn Buraydah, from his father, and the narrator said: I never saw an occasion of greater weeping than that. Here is the Messenger of Allah ﷺ, the bearer of the revelation and the best of mankind, standing as any son stands before his mother's dust, and the tears of the best of creation are themselves sunnah: the heart that had carried the sorrow of al-Abwa for over fifty years had never hardened, and the believer learns from it that grief is not weakness nor is it doubt, but love that has lost its object and still honors it.
In the rigorously authenticated collection of Sahih Muslim it is transmitted from Abu Hurayrah (may Allah be pleased with him) that the Prophet ﷺ visited the grave of his mother and wept and caused those around him to weep, and then said: I asked my Lord's permission to visit my mother's grave and He permitted me, and I asked His permission to seek forgiveness for her and He did not permit me; so visit the graves, for they remind of death. The scholars place this hadith in the chapter of the permission to visit graves in the Book of Funerals, and the whole chapter may be read as the child of this one event: the Ummah visits its graves because the Messenger of Allah ﷺ was once a six-year-old standing at al-Abwa, and because Allah, Glorified and Exalted be He, permitted the son of Aminah to return to her grave though the interregnum of the age withheld from her the intercession of her son. In the same chapter Muslim transmits the severity from Anas (may Allah be pleased with him), that a man asked the Messenger of Allah ﷺ where his father was, and he said: in the Fire, and when the man turned away he called him back and said: my father and your father are both in the Fire; and al-Bayhaqi transmits the like from the father of Amir ibn Sad, and Ibn Kathir relates these traditions at this very place of his book, holding nothing back, and Ibn Kathir passes directly from them to the statements of the imams.
For the fate of the Prophet's ﷺ parents is a matter the sirah handles with a care the believer should learn to imitate. Al-Bayhaqi said, after relating these traditions in his Dala'il: and how should the father and grandfather of the Prophet ﷺ not be in such circumstances regarding the hereafter, when they worshiped idols until they died and did not follow the religion of Isa son of Maryam (peace be upon him); yet their having been unbelievers did not impair the lineage of the Prophet ﷺ, because the marriages of the time of ignorance were valid, and many a man and wife entered Islam without needing to renew their contract. And Ibn Kathir follows with the reconciliation that the hadiths of the parents being in the Fire do not contradict the tradition that those who live in the interval between two prophets, and the children and the afflicted, will be tested in the assemblies of the Day of Resurrection, as he set out at length in his Tafsir of the verse: We never punish until We send a messenger. Among those tested there will be some who respond and some who do not. As for the tradition of al-Suhayli from Asma, from Urwah, from Aisha (may Allah be pleased with her), that the Prophet ﷺ asked his Lord to revive his parents and they were revived and believed in him, Ibn Kathir rules it a highly unreliable tradition, and the scholars before and after him have said the same. The believer's manner with all of this is the manner of the salaf: the texts are transmitted as they came, the weak is named weak and the authentic authentic, and the unseen of the Prophet's ﷺ dead rests with Allah, whose justice is beyond question and whose tenderness to His Messenger ﷺ is His own promise; meanwhile, in this world, the honor Allah showed Aminah is beyond dispute: the light in her pregnancy, the son at her grave, the tears of the best of creation for her, and a legislation of mercy for all the graves of mankind flowing from her dust.
What, then, did al-Abwa leave in the boy? The sirah answers with the man he became. The Messenger of Allah ﷺ was the one who said, of the whole of the orphaned: as for the orphan, do not oppress him; the one who joined his fingers and swore by Allah that the one who cares for the orphan has his fingers joined with his in Paradise; the one whose mosque of Madina was built upon the land of two fatherless boys of the Najjar, purchased with his own wealth and with the insistence that their guardian see them paid. Every orphan in the Ummah is a legacy of al-Abwa; every mother honored by her children stands in the light of the son who wept at his mother's grave; every grave visited with the prayer that the living remember death walks in the path the Messenger of Allah ﷺ opened at al-Abwa in the second year of the Hijrah. The six-year-old who rode away from the grave beside Barakah did not know, could not have known, that the wound of that day was becoming in him the most universal tenderness ever given to mankind; but Allah knew, and the believer who has read the surah of the morning hours knows the whole of it in one verse: your Lord has not forsaken you, nor taken you into displeasure.
Al-Abwa itself remained what it had been, a halt upon the road, a scatter of wells and a few houses in the stony country between the two holy cities, and in later ages the pilgrims upon that road would pass it knowing that under its dust lay the mother of the Messenger of Allah ﷺ. It is one of the tender ironies of the sirah that the grave which the boy left behind at six was the very place his armies passed in the year 2 of the Hijrah, as though Allah had written the son's return into the map of his struggles: the first campaign he ever led beyond Madina passed by his mother's grave, and from beside it he brought to the Ummah the mercy of grave-visitation and the justice of a legislation that forbids the seeking of forgiveness for the idolaters and commands the tenderness of sons to mothers. The believer who stands today in imagination at that halt should stand quietly: here the childhood of the Prophet ﷺ lost its last earthly roof; here the first roof of his mother was put on; here was heard, in a boy's silence, the oath of the One who said: Did He not find you an orphan and give you shelter. And the believer should carry away from the halt the certain knowledge that the same Lord who kept the six-year-old keeps every orphan of His slaves, and that the dust of al-Abwa, which received the weeping of the best of creation, is still the most eloquent teacher of mercy that the road between the two holy cities possesses.