Return to Makkah with Umm Ayman

The road from al-Abwa to Makkah is several stages of hard country, and upon it now traveled the smallest and the gravest of caravans: two camels of the household of Abdullah, a servant-woman, and a boy of six who had buried his mother with his own eyes. Barakah, known to the history of Islam as Umm Ayman (may Allah be pleased with her), had taken the boy from the graveside and set her face toward Makkah, and the received record keeps the manner of the going: she brought the grieving child home riding upon the two camels of the household, in the company of travelers upon the road, as Martin Lings transmits, who relates that she did what she could to console the boy, now doubly an orphan, and in the company of some travelers brought him once more to Makkah. The reader should stand still at the picture, for it is one of the great quiet tableaux of the sirah: the woman who had entered that household as a maid of Abdullah now carried out of the desert the whole surviving estate of the best of mankind, a six-year-old and two camels; and the eyes that had watched over his mother's last days were fixed upon the road that led to his grandfather.

Of the days upon that road the transmitters keep no diary, and the believer's reverence should people the silence with restraint. There was a boy's grief, of the kind that does not yet know its own name, that asks at each halt whether they are turning back for her; there was a woman's resource, which was everything she had watched the mother live by: the light of the pregnancy, the certainty that Satan would never touch him, the word that a great future lay before her son; and Barakah, who had stood within earshot of every one of those sayings of Aminah, had a whole treasury of the mother's own faith to spend upon the son. The road itself was the road of the caravans, with its halts and its wells, and the code of the road was that the bereaved are never left to travel alone; the travelers who accompanied the party were, without knowing it, the last of the instruments of the divine keeping that had carried the boy from the desert to the desert and back since his birth. And then, at the last stage, the country breaks, and the valley of Makkah opens before the traveler, and the boy looked down upon the city of his birth for the first time as an orphan: the quarter of Banu Hashim, the well of Zamzam, the roof of the Kaaba rising over the roofs, and, somewhere among the houses, the old man who had once carried him upon his shoulders around that House.

The believer who follows the whole of this childhood sees a pattern in the arrangement of its keepers, and the pattern is itself a doctrine. The keeping of the Messenger of Allah ﷺ was never the monopoly of one hand: it passed from the womb that carried him to the tents of Halimah that nursed him, from the arms of Aminah to the company of the caravan, from the grave at al-Abwa to the guardianship of Barakah, and from her hands at the city's edge into the complete charge of Abdul-Muttalib; each keeper was a mercy with a season, and when the season of one was gathered, the next was already standing at the door. So it is with all the slaves of Allah, and the event of this return teaches the trust that the Quran itself commands: and whoever puts his trust in Allah, He is sufficient for him. The Keeper behind the keepers never changes, and He had said of this boy, in the oath His Messenger ﷺ was one day to recite to the world: Did He not find you an orphan and give you shelter.

Who she was, the sirah has not left to be guessed. Ibn Kathir opens his account of the rearing of the Prophet ﷺ with her notice: Umm Ayman, whose given name was Baraka, reared him; the Prophet ﷺ had inherited her from his father; when he grew up he emancipated her and married her to his mawla, his freedman Zayd ibn Harithah, and she gave birth to Usamah ibn Zayd, may Allah be pleased with them all. Her name in the tongues of the Abyssinians and the Arabs alike met in the one word Barakah, blessing, and her life was to be a commentary upon her name: she had been the maid of Abdullah, and she became by Allah's decree one of the hinges of the Prophet's ﷺ whole biography; she had come into the world a slave girl of Africa, and she stands today in the roll of the noble women of the religion. The believing heart sees the hand of Allah in the casting of such persons into the childhood of His Messenger ﷺ, for the boy who grew up surrounded by the love of the lowly and the faithful was never to forget them when the kings of the earth stood before him.

Her road with him was only beginning at this event, and the whole of it deserves to be told at the head of the account of this return. She had suckled him herself, as Ibn Kathir records in the notice of the grandfather's charge; she kept his household through the years of his boyhood; and when the revelation came she was among the first to respond, as Lings relates upon the earliest sources. On the day of his marriage to Khadijah (may Allah be pleased with her) he set her free, and she was married to a man of Yathrib, to whom she bore a son called Ayman, from whom she took the name Umm Ayman; and in the years of the Message she returned once more to his household, so that he would address her as mother, and would say of her to others: she is all that is left me of the people of my house. Of her worth the Prophet ﷺ gave the word that the compilers have kept: whosoever would marry a woman of the people of Paradise, let him marry Umm Ayman, and the report is transmitted by Ibn Sa'd in his Tabaqat, as Lings cites him; the critics have discussed its chain and it is not of the rigorously authenticated tier, but her rank among the first of the believers is established beyond all discussion. Zayd ibn Harithah (may Allah be pleased with him), who took that word to heart and asked for her, received her in marriage by the Prophet's ﷺ arrangement, and she bore him Usamah (may Allah be pleased with him), the beloved son of the beloved, whom the Messenger of Allah ﷺ loved as a son and set over the armies of the Muslims.

And her service ran to the very end. She was among the women who accompanied the army of the Messenger of Allah ﷺ in the campaigns of the hard years, tending the wounded and keeping up the water behind the lines, as Lings relates; when Ja'far (may Allah be pleased with him) was slain at Mutah, it was in her presence and the presence of Zayd's family that the Prophet ﷺ came weeping to condole; and in the last illness of the Messenger of Allah ﷺ she was in constant attendance, keeping her son Usamah informed, through the days when the whole of Madina held its breath. The woman who carried the orphan home from al-Abwa upon two camels lived to close the eyes of that orphan's followers upon his deathbed, and her grief at his passing was the grief of one who had given him her whole life. So does Allah write the histories of the faithful, that a slave girl of the road might stand, by her constancy, above the nobles of two empires.

The arrival in Makkah must be imagined from the side of the city as well as the road. Word would have gone before: the daughter-in-law of Abdul-Muttalib, come back from visiting her husband's grave, dead upon the road; and the old lord of the house of Hashim, who had buried too many of his own, came out to receive what remained of her journey. Lings transmits the scene of the reception and its aftermath in one of his finest passages: his grandfather now took complete charge of him; it soon became clear that his special love for Abd Allah had been transferred to Abd Allah's son. The family used to spread Abdul-Muttalib a couch every day in the shadow of the Holy House, and out of respect for their father none of his sons, not even Hamzah, would ever venture to sit on it; but his little grandson had no such scruples, and when his uncles told him to sit elsewhere, Abdul-Muttalib said: let my son be, for by Allah, a great future is his; and he would seat him beside him on the couch and stroke his back, and it always pleased him to watch what he was doing. Here the reader should mark that the grandfather swore the same oath that the mother had made: a great future, said Aminah of her son in the tents of Halimah; a great future, said Abdul-Muttalib upon his couch by the Kaaba; and Allah was writing the testimony of His servants into the very furniture of the Prophet's ﷺ childhood.

The grandfather's care had a shape that the sources preserve in two small details which are worth whole volumes. Ibn Kathir relates, upon Ibn Ishaq, that Abdul-Muttalib used never to eat without saying: bring my son; and he would be brought to him. The chief of Quraysh, the digger of Zamzam, the man whose sons were the lords of the clans, could not taste his food unless the orphan of Abdullah sat at his side; and the believing reader understands that the boy who lost his mother at al-Abwa never sat at a table where he was not wanted. And the same notice carries the charge to the keeper of the household: Abdul-Muttalib said to Umm Ayman, O Baraka, do not neglect my son; I found him with some boys close to the lote-tree, and the People of the Book claim that my boy will be the Prophet of this nation. Let the reader hear the echo: the People of the Book again, as at the caravan of the Christians and the two Jews of Yathrib; the watchfulness of the pagan world upon the orphan of Quraysh was itself a testimony that the learned of the earth were tracking him, and the grandfather, whatever he made of the claim, was not a man to leave the boy unguarded. The lote-tree at whose foot the boys of Makkah played was to have other fruits in the Prophet's ﷺ history, for the Quran swears by the lote-tree of the seventh heaven at the boundary of the created world; but here it is simply the shade of Makkah, where a grandfather's eye found his grandson and carried the report home to the woman who kept him.

Upon the woman the charge fell with a weight she carried for the rest of her life: do not neglect my son. The scholar of the sirah will notice that the grandfather's words to Umm Ayman, recorded by Ibn Ishaq, constitute the standing commission of her whole biography, which this event began: the next events of the chronicle will carry the boy through the two remaining years of the grandfather's life, into the house of Abu Talib, and out upon the Syrian roads, and she is present through all of it as the continuity of the household; and when, after the death of Abdul-Muttalib at al-Hajun, the leadership of the boy's care passed by the grandfather's deathbed instruction to Abu Talib, the full brother of his father, the women of the house and its devoted one moved with him from roof to roof. Ibn Kathir transmits the deathbed trust: when death approached Abdul-Muttalib he charged Abu Talib with the care and safekeeping of the Messenger of Allah ﷺ; and Ibn Ishaq counts the years of the grandfather's charge until the boy was eight. For the present event the believer should simply hold the picture: the orphan delivered to the couch in the shadow of the Kaaba, the maidservant standing at the door of the new arrangement, and the old man's love descending upon the boy like the shade of the House itself.

The Quran has a commentary upon the whole of this exchange of losses and keepings, and it is given in the surah of the morning hours, the same surah that named the orphan's shelter. Having sworn by His former mercies, the shelter of the orphan, the guidance of the astray, the wealth of the poor, the Lord turns them into commandments: therefore as for the orphan, do not oppress him, and as for the one who asks, do not repel him, and as for the blessing of your Lord, proclaim it. The exegetes have always read the verses as the Prophet's ﷺ own biography turned into law: he who was the orphan was commanded to be the shield of orphans; he who had been in need was commanded never to repel the asker; he who had received the blessings was commanded to speak of them, which is the very root of the sirah itself, the telling of the story of the blessings of the Lord upon His Messenger ﷺ. This chronicle, and every chronicle of his life ever written, is an obedience to that final verse: and as for the blessing of your Lord, proclaim it.

And there is a hadith, transmitted in both the Sahihs from Anas ibn Malik (may Allah be pleased with him), that gathers the law of the household under which this whole childhood was raised: the Messenger of Allah ﷺ said: whoever would love that his provision be expanded and his term of life prolonged, let him keep the ties of kinship. The boy who was returned to Makkah was returned to kin: to the grandfather who was kin by blood and love, to the household of Hashim, to the uncles, to the circle of Banu Zuhrah his mother's people, and not least to the woman who had suckled him and who was kin by the sacred tie of milk. Allah chose to raise His Messenger ﷺ not in the loneliness of a perfect solitude but in the web of the rahim, the womb-ties that He Himself commands to be kept; and the event of this entry is one of the purest examples in the whole Book of history of the keeping of those ties: a servant keeping faith with a dead mistress, a grandfather keeping faith with a dead son, and the Lord of the worlds keeping faith with them all.

So the stretch of the mother's final journey closes: the journey out with two camels and a mother, the month among the kindred of the Najjar, the grave at al-Abwa, and the return with the two camels and the keeper of the household. The believer who reads the five events together sees a single woven mercy: Allah did not let the boy lose his mother until he had been given a month among the people who would one day be his helpers, nor lose her without a guard upon the road, nor arrive in Makkah without a couch prepared in the shadow of the House. What believer's heart does not soften at the economy of the divine care, that the same woman who received the newborn from his mother's arms received the orphan at the graveside, and that the man who carried him upon his shoulders around the Kaaba when he was lost in childhood received him at the city's edge when he was lost in grief? The Lord who said: Did He not find you an orphan and give you shelter, was Himself the Weaver of every one of these threads; and the boy who rode into Makkah beside Umm Ayman was already, though no one on that road could see it, the shelter of every orphan who would ever be, and the proclamation of every blessing of his Lord, to the end of the world.