Departure on Trade Expedition to Syria

The boy who had lost every earthly shelter in turn, his father before his birth, his mother at six, his grandfather at eight, had been gathered at last into a house which Allah had prepared for him in the person of his uncle Abu Talib, the full brother of his father Abdullah, both sons of the same mother, Fatimah bint Amr of Makhzum. The dying Abdul-Muttalib had charged Abu Talib with the care and safe-keeping of the Messenger of Allah, may the peace and blessings of Allah be upon him, and the charge was kept as a sacred trust. Ibn Ishaq says plainly that Abu Talib was the one who took charge of him and that he cared for him completely; and the four years between the death of the old chief and the caravan journey of this event were the quiet soil in which the orphanhood of the best of creation was tended by the mercy of Allah, Glorified and Exalted be He, who would one day ask His Messenger ﷺ in His revealed Book: did He not find you an orphan and give you shelter. What believer's heart does not soften at the arithmetic of this childhood: the child stripped of every father was enriched with a devotion that no father could have given, and the poor house of Abu Talib was made the treasury of that devotion.

The reports which Ibn Kathir transmits from al-Waqidi open the door of that house for the believer to enter. Al-Waqidi relates, through Mammar from Ibn Najih, from Mujahid, and through further lines which he records from Ibn Abbas (may Allah be pleased with him), the account of each corresponding with the others, that when Abdul-Muttalib died Abu Talib took the Messenger of Allah to live with him; that Abu Talib was not wealthy, yet he loved the boy more than his own children; that the boy slept always by his side and went wherever he went; that when his own children ate without the boy's presence, alone or as a group, they remained unsatisfied, whereas when he ate with them they were well satisfied and part of the food remained uneaten, so that Abu Talib would say: you are clearly blessed; and that in the morning the other boys of the household would arise bleary-eyed and dishevelled while the Messenger of Allah ﷺ arose bright-eyed and with his hair in place. Ibn Kathir adds the corroborating line transmitted by al-Hasan ibn Arafah, which carries the same report from Ibn Abbas (may Allah be pleased with him). Even the food platter learned the boy's manners: while the other boys would snatch at the food, he would keep his hand away, until his uncle set food aside for him alone. This is the affectionate economy of a poor and noble house, in which the barakah of the child was felt before it was understood.

Nor was the guarding of the boy a matter of bread and blanket alone. Ibn Ishaq, transmitting from Yahya ibn Abd Allah ibn al-Zubayr, from his father, relates that there was a certain man of Lihb who could predict the future, and that whenever he came to Makkah the men of Quraysh would take their boys to him to see and predict their fortunes. Abu Talib brought the Messenger of Allah to him when he was still a boy, along with some others; and the fortune-teller looked at him, but then something engaged his attention; and when he had finished with it he said: bring that boy over to me. But Abu Talib, seeing how interested the man was, took him away; and the man exclaimed: woe on you, bring back to me that boy I saw earlier, for by God he has a big future ahead of him. But Abu Talib hurried away with him. Ibn Kathir places this story immediately before the account of the journey to Syria, and its placement is its own commentary: the family of the boy had begun to move through Makkah as men move who carry a treasure they cannot name, shielding him from every curious eye; and Allah was teaching them, through the very paganism they trusted, that the future of this child was not to be read in omens but guarded from those who would read them.

The world into which the boy now asked to go was the world of the caravan. Makkah lived by the pilgrim road and the trade road, by the Kaaba which fed her honor and the Syrian journey which fed her children; and Allah Himself had joined the two in a short chapter which the Ummah recites to this day, asking Quraysh to consider their ilaf, the accustomed security of their winter and summer journeys, and to worship the Lord of this House who had fed them against hunger and secured them against fear. The Syrian journey was the greater of the two: long weeks of road through the heat and the hard country, past the wells and the way-stations, up the long ascent to the frontier of the Roman empire, where the city of Busra received the hides and the silver of Arabia and paid in the grain and the cloth of Syria. For Quraysh these caravans were the school of their sons: the boy who traveled them learned weights and oaths, the speech of the tribes on the road and the prices of the Syrian markets, the patience of the camel and the discipline of the water-skin. The merchants of Makkah did not scorn to teach their sons the ledger: the youth of the town learned early that a name trusted upon the road was a name among men, and that the honesty which the caravan demanded was itself a wealth which no road could wear away. It was in this school, and not in any palace, that the upbringing of the Messenger of Allah ﷺ had been ordered. When the caravan of Abu Talib was announced, the sons of the rich and the poor alike watched the loading of the goods with the longing of boys who have never yet seen the horizon.

Abdul Rahman al-Sheha, in the summary of the Prophet's early life which opens his book, calls this journey to the Levant the first business enterprise of Muhammad; and Ibn Kathir, at the place where he gathers the reports of the light of prophethood, records the pairing of the two journeys of the Messenger of Allah to Busra: the first with his uncle Abu Talib, a boy of twelve, and the second, years later, with Maysarah, the freedman of Khadijah (may Allah be pleased with her), upon her trading business. The pairing is instructive: the road which the boy now rode out of longing would become, in his manhood, the road of his honest labor, and the name he would make upon it for truthfulness would one day reach the ear of the noble merchant-woman herself. Allah does not waste the early roads of His beloved; He paves with them the longer roads to come.

Ibn Ishaq now relates the departure itself: that Abu Talib left with a trading caravan for Syria; that as he was preparing to depart and assembling the goods, the Messenger of Allah began to miss him badly, or so they claim; and that Abu Talib took pity on him and said words to the effect of: by God, I shall take him away with me and never be parted from him, just as he will not be parted from me. And he did leave with him. The scene is painted with the lightest of strokes, and the lighter the stroke the deeper the record: a boy of the house of Hashim, twelve years old or thereabouts, standing in the yard while the goods of Syria were counted and bound, unable to bear the thought of the weeks of absence, clinging with a child's whole heart to the man who had been father and mother and grandfather to him in one; and an uncle not rich, with a houseful of his own children, yet so moved by the boy's attachment that he bound himself by an oath of companionship. The reader of the sirah bows here before the tenderness of Allah's arrangements: the oath of Abu Talib would carry the orphan of Makkah out of the ring of mountains into the great world, and the great world, though none of it yet knew, was waiting for him.

The student of the sources must pause over the small words with which Ibn Kathir, following Ibn Ishaq, hedges the account: the boy began to miss him badly, or so they claim. Ibn Ishaq related the whole sequence of the journey without a chain of authorities, as Ibn Kathir expressly notes at the close of the narrative: this is how Ibn Ishaq related this sequence of events, but he gave no chain of authorities for it. And yet Ibn Kathir adds that a similar account also came down by way of a musnad marfu tradition, that is, a tradition attributed to the Prophet himself with a complete line of transmission, through the isnad of the hafiz Abu Bakr al-Kharaiti, which the following events of the sirah will weigh in the account of the monk of Busra. Yunus ibn Bukayr recalled, on the authority of Ibn Ishaq, that Abu Talib spoke three odes on the subject of this journey. The believer is not troubled by the hedge; he is honored by it. The scholars of this Ummah carried the story of their Prophet ﷺ the way the carriers of the caravan carried its goods: nothing was loaded without a mark of ownership, nothing was received without inspection, and where the chain of transmission was thin, they said so in the hearing of all; and Allah knows best.

There was one witness upon that road whom no eye could see, and Ibn Kathir has preserved its testimony on the page where he gathers the reports of the light of prophethood. Imam Ibn Ishaq, he relates, stated that Thawr ibn Yazid related to him from Khalid ibn Madan, from the Companions of the Messenger of Allah, that they, the Companions, asked: O Messenger of Allah, tell us about yourself; and he replied: I am the prayer of my father Ibrahim, and the glad tidings of Isa, and my mother saw, when she was pregnant with me, that a light came from inside her that illuminated Busra in Syria. Of this report Ibn Kathir writes that the chain of authorities of this tradition is also excellent; and he adds the reflection which belongs to the very road of this event: that Busra contains good news for the people of our community in the lands of Syria, for it is the first place in Syria to receive the light of the prophethood, and that is why it was the first city of Syria to be conquered, taken peacefully during the caliphate of Abu Bakr (may Allah be pleased with him), and that the Messenger of Allah traveled there in the company of his uncle Abu Talib when he was a boy of twelve. The caravan of Abu Talib was now carrying the light itself, a boy of twelve among the baggage, toward the very city whose castles had been lit by him while he was yet in the womb; the road of trade was about to become a road of testimony.

The chronologers weighed the year of this journey as they weighed every milestone of the sirah. The received account, which the master chronology of this project follows, places it when the Messenger of Allah ﷺ had reached the age of twelve; so al-Waqidi relates it in the line transmitted by Ibn Kathir, and so Ibn Kathir himself concludes his weighing of the traditions of the monk: the incident occurred, as some sources maintain, when the Messenger of God was twelve years old. Yet al-Suhayli stated, on the authority of certain sources, that the age of the Prophet at the time was nine; and Martin Lings renders the tradition with the twin figures preserved, writing that Muhammad was nine, or according to others twelve, when he went with a merchant caravan as far as Syria. Ibn Kathir closes the whole discussion with the words which the scholars of hadith taught the scholars of history: so God knows best. The Ummah has never found in such a range a difficulty; it finds in it a discipline, for the transmitters carried both reports with their names attached, the critics weighed them openly, and the community kept the journey itself as a fixed star of the sirah whatever the arithmetic of its year.

There was a deeper symmetry in the road which the believing reader is permitted to see. His father Abdullah had gone out in trade toward Syria while Aminah carried him, and had turned aside at Yathrib on the return to stay with his maternal uncles, and had died there, leaving in the womb of his wife the light she was bearing; and now the son rode the same northern road which his father had taken before him, having never seen his father's face. The land toward which he journeyed was the land of the earlier prophets: the Syria of the missions of old, the country in which Lut (peace be upon him) had warned his city, the province in which Isa (peace be upon him) had walked and taught, and to which the Christians of the desert looked for their learning. Yaqub (peace be upon him) had once committed his youngest son to the road with the words: Allah is the best guardian, and He is the most merciful of the merciful; the orphan of Makkah now traveled under the same guardianship, though no word of it had yet been said aloud. Allah was writing with the footsteps of a twelve-year-old the first line of a mission which would, in its fullness, be revealed as a mercy to the worlds.

What lessons the believing heart gathers from a departure. The first is the dignity of the child's longing: the boy did not sulk behind the courtyard wall; he asked to belong to the purpose of his house, his request was heard, and the providence of Allah waited inside the answer. The second is the generosity of the guardian: Abu Talib, whose purse was thin and whose table was small, did not calculate the cost of an extra mouth and an extra heart upon the road; he swore an oath of companionship. The third is the wisdom of Allah in the education of His prophets: before the cave of Hira there would be the hills of the shepherds, before the recitation of the Book there would be the weighing of goods, before the silence of revelation there would be the long patience of the caravan; the school of trade, with its oaths and its trusts, was itself a preparation for the man of whom even the idolaters of Makkah would one day say that they had never known him to lie. And the fourth is hidden in the small clause of the account, that the boy began to miss him badly: the love which Allah had fastened between the uncle and the orphan was itself a rope of the divine care, and the believer who traces it learns never to despise the affections of family, for Allah builds His greatest works upon them.

So the caravan went out from Makkah with the Beloved of Allah among its loads, and the city which had lately been defended by birds from the sky did not know what cargo it was sending north. The camels took the grade of the northern pass, and the boy who had watched the goods being bound now rode in the dust of his uncle's string, and the weeks of the road unfolded before him one watering after another. Ahead lay Busra, and in Busra a cell, and in the cell a book, and in the book a description which no one in Makkah could have recited; and beyond all these, unseen, the care of Allah which had never yet let the orphan out of its hand. This event ends with a departure; the next begins with a halt in which the whole of creation will be seen to have been keeping the appointment of its Lord, while the men of the caravan sit down to eat without knowing that the twelve-year-old left beside the baggage is the reason the shade of the tree has moved.