Guardianship of Grandfather Abdul-Muttalib

Scarcely had the earth of al-Abwa closed over Aminah bint Wahb when the small caravan of the bereaved turned its camels toward Makkah, and Barakah Umm Ayman (may Allah be pleased with her), the devoted Abyssinian who had served the household of Abdullah since before the boy's birth, led the six-year-old orphan back through the passes into the valley of his fathers. The boy who entered Makkah that season had now lost both a father he had never seen and a mother whose embrace he had just begun to remember, and what believer's heart does not soften at the sight of a child thus stripped of the world's two nearest shelters. Yet the believing eye sees further than the orphan's tears: Allah, Glorified and Exalted be He, had already prepared the next shelter, and it was no ordinary shelter, for it was the house of the master of Makkah, the patriarch whose couch was spread in the shadow of His own Sacred House. The Prophet Muhammad ﷺ, may the peace and blessings of Allah be upon him, was delivered into the arms of Abdul-Muttalib, and with that delivery the third and most luminous chapter of his childhood guardianship began.

Abdul-Muttalib ibn Hashim, whose birth name was Shaibah, was in these years the most venerable figure of Makkah, and his whole biography reads like a preparation for this final office of love. It was he who had dreamed of the buried well and dug out Zamzam against the opposition of Quraysh; it was he who held the siqayah, the watering of the pilgrims, and the rifadah, their feeding; it was he who had stood before Abraha's army with a composure that has become proverbial, telling the Abyssinian king that he was the owner of the camels and that the House had an Owner who would defend it. Eighty years had whitened his beard, and the whole of the Banu Hashim looked to his judgment as the tribes looked toward their central sanctuary. Yet those who knew him observed that the love he had borne his dead son Abdullah, the most beloved of his children, had not died with Abdullah in the caravan that carried him toward Yathrib. That love, the chroniclers say, descended entire upon the orphan of that son, as water descends upon a chosen valley; the old man's heart, trained by loss, opened toward the boy with a tenderness that astonished Makkah.

The world into which this guardianship seated the child was itself a providential schooling. The Kaaba stood at the center of Makkah's life as the sun stands at the center of its sky: around it moved the circuits of the pilgrims, the watering lines at Zamzam, the gatherings of the clans, the oaths of the merchants, the poems of the fairs. The boy who had ridden with his mother to Yathrib and back now lived within sight and sound of the Holy House itself, taken to it almost daily by the grandfather whose office it was to serve the pilgrims of the sanctuary. He watched the rites of the Arabs performed about the House, some fragments of the pure religion of Ibrahim (peace be upon him) clinging to them, and much idolatry overlaying them; he watched the poor and the traveler given water from the family well; he watched the dignity of the Banu Hashim, whose forefather Hashim had instituted the two caravans of winter and summer. Allah was planting His Prophet ﷺ in the very courtyard of the House he would one day purify, so that no corner of the sanctuary's life would be foreign to the man who would restore it to the worship of the One.

The most beloved and most retold emblem of those two years is the couch in the shadow of the Kaaba. Ibn Ishaq relates that when the Messenger of Allah ﷺ came to live with his grandfather after the death of his mother, a spread would be set out for Abdul-Muttalib in the shade of the Holy House. His sons would gather around it and wait for him, but out of reverence for the patriarch none of them, not even Hamzah (may Allah be pleased with him), who was of nearly the Prophet's ﷺ own age, would venture to sit upon it. The little grandson had no such scruples. He would come, as the account says, and seat himself without hesitation upon his grandfather's couch, and when his uncles would move to take him from it, Abdul-Muttalib would open his eyes and say the words that have been repeated in every telling of the sirah since: leave my son alone; he has great things ahead of him. Then the old man would draw the boy to himself upon the spread, seat him beside his own body, rub his back with his hand, and gaze upon him with the pleasure that grandfathers know, watching what he did as though watching a wonder unfold.

Here let the reader pause, for the detail is not decorative. In the court of the Kaaba, before the whole gathering of Quraysh, the most honored seat in Makkah became by public declaration the seat of a fatherless child. The sons of Abdul-Muttalib, grown men and leaders of their lines, stood around the couch in deference while an orphan of six sat upon it at his grandfather's side, and no one in that assembly of diplomat merchants could fail to read the sign. The master chronology of this project preserves the tradition in its received form, that the grandfather placed for him a special couch in the shadow of the Kaaba where no one else was permitted to sit, and the two forms of the report are one truth seen from two angles: the couch was the grandfather's, and by his word it became the boy's, forbidden to every other son of the house. What Allah was writing publicly upon the marble of His sanctuary was the rank of the child who would one day stand at that same Kaaba and call the tribes to the worship of the One who has no partner.

The preferential love of the old man appears in report after report of this chapter. Al-Waqidi, whose chains Ibn Kathir sets down with the observation that the several accounts corroborate one another, relates that Abdul-Muttalib took the boy to himself, treating him with a closeness and kindness he had not shown to his own sons, and that he would allow and encourage him to come near, so that the child would enter upon his grandfather even when the old man was alone or asleep. And the same transmission adds the word that seals the meaning: when the boy sat upon the spread, the grandfather would say, leave my son alone, for he will establish a kingdom. At the time Makkah heard a chief's extravagance of affection; within the century the believing world would read it as the language of discernment, for the kingdom that came was not the empire of a Caesar but the dominion of faith whose foundations were laid in the teaching, the character, and the mercy of the Messenger of Allah ﷺ.

Nor was the affection hidden within the privacy of the house. It was the custom of Abdul-Muttalib, the chroniclers transmit, never to eat without saying, bring my son, and the boy would be sought and brought to the old man's table wherever he was found. In a household of many sons and many dependents this standing summons was itself a throne; the child of Abdullah held at his grandfather's board the place that in other houses belonged to the heir. The family watched this and understood it, as families understand the favor of their elders, and the memory of those meals, where the most powerful man of the valley set the orphan beside his own plate, lived long among the Banu Hashim. The believing reader sees in it the hand of the One who feeds all creatures, arranging for His beloved a seat at the table of love before he would need a table of his own, and who would one day command this Ummah through the same beloved mouth to give the orphan his due and never to repulse the petitioner.

A group of men from Banu Mudlij, a clan of Kinanah famed among the Arabs for the science of lineage, came to Abdul-Muttalib in those days and said: take good care of him, for we have never seen anyone with so noble a lineage as his. Here was the voice of the community's own specialists, the readers of pedigrees whose verdict the Arabs received as jurists receive law, confirming from outside the house what the house itself was feeling within. And the grandfather, who wasted no such testimony, turned to his son Abu Talib and said: listen to what these men are saying. With those words the succession was being prepared a full two years before it was needed; the guardian who could not stay was already binding the next guardian to the charge. Abu Talib, as the event that follows will record, did take care of him, and took him to his heart and his table until death itself would find no seam between the uncle's love and the father's.

The charge to Barakah belongs to the same season of watchfulness. Abdul-Muttalib said to Umm Ayman, who had been the servant of Abdullah and had tended the newborn at his birth: O Baraka, do not neglect my son, for 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. The words are startling in their plainness. An eighty-year-old guardian, chief of a city of idolaters, sets a watch over the company his orphan keeps, and confesses aloud the expectation carried by the Jews and the Christians of his generation, that a prophet was due to arise among the Arabs. The reports of the sirah show the People of the Book circling the childhood of the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ with a recognition that the idolaters of Makkah did not possess: here the grandfather at a lote-tree, later the monk Bahira at his cell in Busra, later still Salman the Persian (may Allah be pleased with him) crossing empires in search of the man whose description he carried. The learned of the earlier scriptures had scriptures and could not but see; the men of Makkah had eyes and did not.

Lings, following the earliest sources, adds the portrait that completes the public side of these two years. Almost every day, he writes, the eighty-year-old and the seven-year-old could be seen together, hand in hand, at the Kaaba or elsewhere in Makkah. And Abdul-Muttalib even took the boy with him to the Assembly, where the chief men of the town, all over forty, met to deliberate the affairs of the sanctuary and the caravans; nor did the old man refrain from asking the child's opinion on this matter or that, and when the dignitaries wondered, he would answer them with the sentence he had made his refrain: a great future is in store for my son. Whatever the elders made of it at the time, the scene has instructed the Ummah ever since, for it shows a grandfather deliberately lifting a fatherless child into the places of honor and counsel, refusing to let orphanhood subtract one cubit from the boy's stature. The council of Quraysh, which in a few years would debate the matter of this same grown man, had already heard his childhood voice in its chamber, seated beside the grandfather who believed in him.

The honorific with which the old man called him deserves its own reflection. My son, said Abdul-Muttalib, of his son's son, and said it before the whole of Quraysh. In the idiom of the Arab elders the phrase was an adoption of rank, a merging of the boy's destiny with the father's memory, and the sirah transmits it repeatedly within a single chapter, at the couch and at the table and before the Assembly, as though the sacred history wished the phrase engraven. The boy was being given, in the flesh of his childhood, the assurance that though his father lay in the earth of Yathrib he had not been left an inheritance of emptiness. Allah, the Lord of the Kaaba, was saying through the mouth of the grandfather what He would say through revelation in after years, that He found him an orphan and gave him shelter, that He found him unaware and guided him, that He found him in need and made him free of need. The couch in the sanctuary's shadow was the shelter's emblem; the words of the old man were the shelter's voice.

The family affections of those years wove other threads as well. Hamzah (may Allah be pleased with him), the uncle of nearly the Prophet's ﷺ own age, was his playmate and companion, and with them was Safiyyah, their sister, a little younger, the children of Abdul-Muttalib's last marriage, which had been contracted on the same day as the marriage of Abdullah with Aminah; uncle and aunt through the father, cousins through the mother, and companions through a providence that bound the three together for life. Around them moved the wide household of the Banu Hashim, uncles and aunts and the boy's many cousins, among whom the orphan of Abdullah was marked out, as all observed, by the favor of the patriarch. The aunts of the Prophet ﷺ, the six daughters of Abdul-Muttalib, Arwa and Umayma and Barra and Safiyyah and Atika and Umm Hakim the White, were part of the circle in which his childhood moved, and their elegies in the days of the old man's dying would show how closely the family's affections had gathered around the patriarch and the boy he loved.

How shall the believer read the words of the grandfather, that a great future lay ahead, that he would establish a kingdom? The Messenger of Allah ﷺ himself settled the ground of all such speech when he said, as Muslim transmits from Abu Hurayrah (may Allah be pleased with him), that he was the master of the children of Adam and that this was no boast but the decree of his Lord. The rank of the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ with Allah was fixed before the creation of his body, and the dignity that flowed from that rank could not be entirely hidden even in a house and a city that did not know its source. The grandfather saw the surface of the river and foretold its reaching the sea; faith sees the spring. This is why the Ummah has never read these reports as the doting of an old man, but as perception granted to a devout guardian, one more of the signs that gathered around the blessed childhood like birds around a blessed tree.

Honesty in transmission is part of the believer's reverence, and so the sources of this beloved material should be weighed as the scholars weigh. The couch account comes from Ibn Ishaq, in the recension of Ibn Hisham, transmitted by Ibn Kathir without a named chain in this narrative section, as is often Ibn Ishaq's way in the story-portions of his work. Following it in the same chapter stands the transmission of al-Waqidi with its bundle of chains, from al-Zuhri and from Mujahid and from the school of Ibn Abbas, which Ibn Kathir sets down with the remark that the accounts of the several transmitters confirm one another, so that the received memory rests upon convergent testimony. Al-Waqidi as a narrator of hadith was criticized by the scholars of isnad, and this is recorded without evasion; yet Ibn Kathir transmits the cluster as the historians do, for its convergence and for the countless small facts that no inventing imagination would trouble to assemble. Lings, centuries later, following the earliest sources, renders the same couch, the same saying, and the same Assembly, and the reader recognizes one story seen through many clean windows.

Two years the shelter lasted, from the boy's sixth to his eighth year, from about 576 to 578 of the Christian calendar, the years the master chronology assigns to this event. They were years in which the orphan of Makkah wanted nothing that love could supply: sitting in the shadow of the Kaaba at his grandfather's side, sleeping in the patriarch's house, fed at the patriarch's summons, taught in the halls where Makkah governed itself. The believer who follows the thread sees the mercy of Allah descending stage by stage, no stage accidental: the womb of Aminah, the milk of Halimah, the heart of the grandfather, and soon, as the following events will tell, the house of the uncle. The revelation itself would one day command the Prophet ﷺ to remember these mercies aloud, for their remembrance is itself worship: did He not find you an orphan and give you shelter, and find you unaware and guide you, and find you in need and make you free of need. The shelter of the couch was Allah's shelter; the hand that rubbed his back was Allah's arrangement; and the eight-year-old who would soon stand weeping at a fresh grave in al-Hajun had already been taught, in the tenderness of these two years, that his true Guardian never dies.