Upbringing in the Household of Abu Talib & Fatimah bint Asad

The door that opened to the orphan of Abdul-Muttalib in the year 578 was a poor door, and it opened upon the richest years of his childhood's formation. The event the master chronology records as his upbringing in the household of Abu Talib and Fatimah bint Asad stretches from his eighth year to his twelfth and beyond, the years from about 578 to 583 of the Christian calendar, and it is the domestic chapter of the sirah, the chapter in which the believer is shown not the public couch of the grandfather but the private kitchen, courtyard, sleeping mat, and food platter of an ordinary Makkahn house. What was acted in that house for some five years was the command of a dying patriarch, the love of an uncle, and the motherliness of an aunt, and beneath all three, the care of Allah, Glorified and Exalted be He, who had said through the ages that He found His Messenger ﷺ an orphan and gave him shelter. The Prophet Muhammad ﷺ, may the peace and blessings of Allah be upon him, was now to learn what a house is, what shared bread is, and what it is to be one child among many and yet none like the rest.

Fatimah bint Asad must be named first among the two, because the sirah itself names her tenderness first. She was the wife of Abu Talib and, as Lings records with the genealogical care of the earliest sources, a granddaughter of Hashim through his son Asad, the half-brother of Abdul-Muttalib, so that she and her husband were cousins within the great house of Hashim, and the boy who entered her door was her kinsman on every side. She had children of her own, Talib and Aqil, and Jafar who would grow to be called in the sirah the possessor of two wings, may Allah be pleased with him; and into the middle of these she received the orphan of Abdullah as a mother receives a son. Ibn Ishaq and the compilers after him record that she did all she could to replace the boy's mother, and Lings renders the household memory in a sentence that has become one of the beloved sentences of the sirah: in after-years Muhammad used to say of her that she would have let her own children go hungry rather than him. There is no nobler epitaph for any woman of the Jahiliyyah, and the believer reads it standing, for it is the remembered testimony of the best of men about the woman who fed him.

The sequel of that sentence belongs to the faith of this Ummah, and it should be told in its place. Fatimah bint Asad lived to see the mission of the boy she had fed: she was among the first to embrace Islam, and she endured with her family the confinement of the valley in the boycott years, and she migrated to Madinah, and died there in the years of the community's strength. Of her death the compilations transmit that the Prophet ﷺ honored her passing with a tenderness that repaid fifty years, saying of her what the reports have kept, and praying over her, and laying her in the earth with his own hands; and her son Ali (may Allah be pleased with him), the fourth of the rightly-guided caliphs and the first of the young men of this Ummah to believe, was her gift to sacred history, so that the woman who mothered the Messenger of Allah's ﷺ childhood became the mother of the man who mothered the Ummah's strength. The believer sees in her the truth that no kindness done to the righteous is lost, and the truth beyond it, that Allah writes the gratitude of His Prophet ﷺ into the record of the Next Life for every servant who earned it on earth.

Of Abu Talib's fathering in these same years the chroniclers preserved the details that a household notices. When Abdul-Muttalib died, the Wahidi transmission relates, Abu Talib took the Messenger of Allah ﷺ to live with him; and Abu Talib was not wealthy; and he loved the boy very much, more so than his children; and the boy slept always by his side and went wherever he did. Ibn Kathir sets this report down with its several chains and the remark that the accounts corroborate one another, and the sentence he cared for him completely, already recorded at the transfer of guardianship, here becomes visible in the furniture of daily life. In an Arab house of the Quraysh, the sleeping mat of the master was the place of his closest: the boy who slept always by his side slept as a son sleeps, and the sons of the house, Talib and Aqil and Jafar (may Allah be pleased with him), grew up knowing that their father's mat and their cousin's mat were one. The believer who was raised by an uncle or an aunt knows what the words mean, and the believer who was not raised so can still read them with a full heart: this was the completeness Abdul-Muttalib had commanded at the hour of his death, and it was not grudged but glad.

Then the sirah opens its hand and shows the family's table, and the believing reader stands with the household at the marvel of the barakah of food. The Wahidi cluster transmits it plainly: Abu Talib had a very great and unusual depth of affection for the boy, and he would give the boy's food special attention; and if his own children ever ate, alone or as a group, without the boy's presence, they would remain unsatisfied, whereas when the Prophet ﷺ would eat with them they would be well satisfied; and when serving his family a daytime meal he would tell them to wait till the boy's arrival; and when the Messenger of Allah would arrive and eat with them, they would get satisfied, and part of the food would remain uneaten; but if he did not eat with them they would remain unsatisfied; and Abu Talib would say: you are clearly blessed. Let the reader count the witnesses: the children themselves, who knew hunger satisfied and hunger unsatisfied around one table; the aunt, who set the food with her own hands; the uncle, who drew from the daily evidence a doctrine of the boy's blessing. The barakah of food for the righteous guest is a sunnah in the very nature of things, as the scholars have always said, and Makkah's poor house kept the proof of it for five years, in the years before anyone in it knew why the food multiplied.

The morning platter shows the other side of the marvel, the child's own perfect adab, which was as much a part of the household's testimony as the blessing itself. Early each morning, the chroniclers relate, Abu Talib would bring the boys their food platter, and they would all sit down and snatch at it, as children snatch who know scarcity. The Messenger of Allah ﷺ, however, would keep his hand away and not grab at the food along with them. When his uncle saw this, he set food aside for him alone. Two lessons live in the small scene. The first is the boy's dignity: even at an age when the hand naturally snatches, the orphan of the house did not scramble with the others, but waited, and the family learned that a portion had to be reserved for him because his courtesy would not let him take. The second is the uncle's wisdom: Abu Talib did not correct the boy to join the scramble, nor shame the other children for it; he simply made room at the table for the manner the boy already had. Between the two, the house of the Banu Hashim was raising, without designing to, the standard of Prophetic table manners that the Sahih collections would one day transmit from his own lips: eat of what is before you, take from the side nearest you, and do not find fault with food.

The mornings yielded another signature of the boy's difference, and this one the family saw before their eyes each day. Al-Hasan ibn A'rfa transmitted, as Ibn Kathir records, an account ending in the school of Ibn Abbas (may Allah be pleased with him): Abu Talib's family would get up in the morning with bleary, dirty eyes, while the Messenger of Allah ﷺ would get up bright-eyed and with his hair neatly groomed. The Wahidi cluster agrees, saying that in the morning the other boys would arise bleary-eyed and dishevelled while he would rise bright-eyed and with his hair in place. It is a domestic detail with a doctrinal echo, for the Book itself would one day swear by the morning brightness as it swore by the night stillness; and the compilers of the sirah always read in these boyhood reports the doctrine of the divine purification, of which Al-Sheha writes in this project's knowledge base that Allah, Exalted be He, purified Muhammad ﷺ from pre-Islamic impurities and misconducts, and bestowed on him every ethical manner, so that his only nickname among his people was the Trustworthy, for his honesty, truthfulness, and integrity of which they had firsthand experience. The purity was Allah's work; the grooming was the boy's habit; the nickname was Makkah's verdict; and the house of Abu Talib was the gallery in which Makkah watched the portrait form.

There is one report of these years that preserves the guardians' protective instinct at its sharpest, and it deserves retelling entire. Ibn Ishaq gives it with a named chain, saying: Yahya ibn Abd Allah ibn al-Zubayr related to me that his father told him that there was a certain man of Lihb who could predict the future, and whenever he came to Makkah the men of Quraysh would take their boys to him to see and predict their fortunes. So Abu Talib brought the Messenger of Allah ﷺ to him when he was still a boy, along with some others. The fortune-teller looked at the Messenger of Allah ﷺ, but then something engaged his attention, and when he was finished with it he said: bring that boy over to me. When Abu Talib saw how interested the man was in him, he took him away. Then the man exclaimed: woe on you, bring back to me that boy I saw earlier; by God, he has a big future ahead of him. But Abu Talib hurried away with him. The scene belongs to the same pattern as the grandfather's watch at the lote-tree, when Abdul-Muttalib had charged Barakah not to neglect the boy, and the same pattern as the monk Bahira's scrutiny which the following years would bring: the guardians of the Prophet's ﷺ childhood read the fascination of strangers as a summons to shield, not to display, and the sirah honors them for the instinct.

The scholars have read the Lihb episode with their usual care, and the believer inherits their care. Ibn Ishaq's naming of the chain here, Yahya from his father Abd Allah ibn al-Zubayr from the circle of the Makkahn report, is part of what gives the account its weight in his book. The soothsayers of the Arabs, the kuhhan, were a real institution of the Jahiliyyah, consulted for lost camels and future fortunes, and the fortune-teller's cry over the boy belongs to that class of pre-Islamic recognitions which the sirah records without granting the kahin's craft any authority: the man saw something true in the boy, as the grandfather had said and the Mudlij experts had said, but the means of his seeing were the means Allah had never sanctioned. Abu Talib's withdrawal of the boy is thus read by the scholars on two levels at once: the natural protectiveness of a guardian who would not have his nephew made a kahin's spectacle, and the providential sparing of the Prophet ﷺ from every apprenticeship in the occult arts of his people, so that his message, when it came, would stand clean of every craft but revelation. The boy was taken home through the streets of Makkah, out of the sight of the fortune-teller, and the reader thanks Allah for the strong hand of the uncle at the small shoulder.

The poverty of the house must be spoken plainly, because the sirah speaks it plainly and because the whole barakah of the years depends on it. The fortunes of Abdul-Muttalib had waned, as Lings records, and what he left at his death amounted to no more than a small legacy for each of his sons; and Abu Talib was poor, and his nephew felt obliged to do what he could to earn his own livelihood. The same Lings, following the earliest sources, then makes the poor house's door open upon the next event of this chronology: the boy earned his keep mostly by pasturing sheep and goats, day after day, alone in the hills above Makkah. Two things are thus held together, and they are held together in the Book itself: the house had little, and yet the table of the house was blessed whenever the boy sat at it. The believing poor may take this as their own doctrine of provision: no creature walks the earth whose provision is not upon Allah, as the Book says, and whoever places his trust in Allah, He is sufficient for him, and Allah accomplishes His purpose. The barakah did not make the house rich; it made the house sufficient, which is the wealth of the Prophets and the righteousness of the poor.

And what shall be said of the guardians' reward? The Book transmits from the tongue of the Prophet ﷺ a promise that stands above every question of creed and answers the question of the deed: Bukhari relates from Sahl ibn Sa'd (may Allah be pleased with him) that the Prophet ﷺ said that he and the caretaker of the orphan are in Paradise like this, and he joined together his index finger and middle finger. The scholars have treasured this hadith in every generation as the charter of those who take orphans into their homes, and the sirah student sets beside it the report of the barakah of food and the report of the bed by the uncle's side, and says: here is the deed the promise was written for. The full sunshine of the promise belongs to those who believe and do good; and the justice of the matter in every case belongs to Allah, the Just who does not let the shade of a kindness go unhoused. Abu Talib and Fatimah bint Asad sheltered the orphan of their house in the years when shelter is a child's whole world, and the Ummah has never read these years without saying: may Allah repay them; and the believer adds what faith adds, that Allah's accounting is perfect, and that the boy they raised was himself, by the testimony of the Sahih, the intercessor whose word is not refused.

The years of this upbringing, from eight to twelve and beyond, were the crucible in which Makkah first watched the character form that it would one day call the Trustworthy. The boy worked at the flocks, as the next event records, and brought his small wages to the common purse of the house; he sat at its platters with the courtesy that made the uncle reserve his portion; he slept beside the master of the house as a son sleeps; he rose each morning bright and groomed; he went with his uncle on the rounds of the clan's life; and in the year 583 or thereabouts, at about twelve years of age, he stood at the edge of the caravan to Syria and would not be left behind, and Abu Talib swore by God to take him and never be parted from him. The household years thus close upon the journey that opens the wider world of the sirah, and the reader sees the seamlessness of the providence: the formation of the home flows into the formation of the road without a break, one continuous rearing by Allah of the soul He loved.

The memory of these years never faded in the Prophet ﷺ, and the Ummah should treasure that memory as he kept it. He remembered Fatimah bint Asad's preferring him to her own children's bread; he remembered his uncle's bed and table and forty years of shielding; and when his own sovereignty came, he honored the house of Abu Talib in its members: Ali and Jafar (may Allah be pleased with them) and their children, and the mother of the one and the father of the other, with a loyalty that Makkah had seen in the boy and Madinah saw in the man. The believer's lesson is gratitude that outlasts circumstance: no one who has been fed, sheltered, or shielded by human hands should forget the debt when their own table is full, and the one who forgets his benefactors has forgotten the Sunnah of the one who never forgot. The boy of the house of Abu Talib carried the names of his guardians in his heart to the pulpit of Madinah, and the House of Islam still speaks those names with love, because he spoke them with love first.

So closes the domestic chapter: a poor house, a motherly aunt, a fatherly uncle, a blessed platter, a reserved portion, a groomed boy at morning, and over it all the settled care of Allah, who does not leave His chosen ones to chance. What the world saw was an orphan lodged in a narrow household; what faith sees is a raising the like of which no palace ever held. And the believing heart, having watched these years from the courtyard of the Banu Hashim, goes on to the hills and the flocks of the next event with the same certainty it brought into this house: that he whom Allah shelters is sheltered indeed, and that the bread of the poor house where he dwells is better than the banquets of the great houses where he does not.