The road of the caravan ended, for that season, at Busra, the frontier city of Rome's eastern realm; and there, near one of the halts where the Meccan caravans always stopped, there stood a cell which had been lived in by a Christian monk for generation after generation. When one died, another took his place and inherited all that was in the cell, including some old manuscripts; and amongst these, as the sources relate, was one which contained the prediction of the coming of a Prophet to the Arabs. Ibn Kathir describes the monk who now kept the cell, named Bahira, as very learned in Christianity, dwelling in an inheritance of learning which the elders had passed down one to the next; and Martin Lings adds the inward history of that inheritance: that Bahira was well versed in the contents of the book, which interested him all the more because, like Waraqah in Makkah, he too felt that the coming of the expected Prophet would be in his own lifetime. The believer who reads this must pause in wonder: while Makkah worshiped its stones and Makkah's merchants counted their profit, there was preserved in a hermit's cell on the edge of the desert a written hope that the boy now riding with the baggage was to fulfill.
Ibn Kathir relates that the caravan had often halted near that cell in years past without the monk's paying them the least attention. But this year there was a difference, and the difference began inside the cell, in the secret which the translation of Ibn Ishaq records with the sober words: this, they claim, was because of a vision he had seen while he was in his cell. Bahira had seen in his vision the Messenger of Allah, may the peace and blessings of Allah be upon him, approaching in the caravan, with a cloud casting its shade only on him. And when the caravan truly came in sight, the outward world confirmed the inward vision: Lings renders the approach as the monk saw it, that a small low-hanging cloud moved slowly above their heads so that it was always between the sun and one or two of the travelers; and that as soon as they halted, the cloud ceased to move, remaining stationary over the tree beneath which they took shelter, while the tree itself lowered its branches over them, so that they were doubly in the shade. The monk knew the portents of his book, and he knew that such signs, though unobtrusive, were of high significance. Only some great spiritual presence could explain a cloud that kept station over one head and a tree that bowed its own shade lower; and immediately, as Lings writes, he thought of the expected Prophet. Could it be that he had at last come, and was amongst these travelers.
Then the monk did what he had never done. The cell had recently been stocked with provisions, and putting together all he had, he sent word over to the travelers, in the words of Ibn Ishaq: O Quraysh, I have prepared food for you and would like you all to come over, great and small, and freemen or slaves. The invitation itself was a sign to the men of the caravan, and they answered it with the amazement of men who knew the customs of that road. One of the Quraysh said to him: by God, Bahira, you have put yourself to much trouble today; you have never done this for us, even though we have passed by you here often before; why today. And Bahira replied with the courtesy of a man keeping a secret: you are right; before it was as you say; but you are my guests, and I wanted to honour you, and so I have prepared food for you; I want all of you to eat of it. So they gathered around him. What the men of Quraysh took for hospitality was, in the economy of Allah, an examination; the feast was the scale on which the whole caravan, great and small, was to be weighed against a description written before they were born.
But the one whom the scale required was not at the table. The Messenger of Allah ﷺ, because of his youth, had been left behind with the baggage, beneath the tree. Lings describes the monk's scanning of the guests as they came to his cell: Bahira looked at their faces one by one, but he could see nothing which corresponded to the description in his book, nor did there seem to be any man amongst them who was adequate to the greatness of the two miracles he had seen. Perhaps, he reasoned, they had not all come; and he spoke again: men of Quraysh, let none of you stay behind. They answered: there is not one that hath been left behind, save only a boy, the youngest of us all. The monk would not accept the answer: do not do this, he insisted, but call him over and let him attend this feast along with you. Then the caravan remembered itself. By al-Lat and al-Uzza, one of the Quraysh exclaimed, it really is a shame on us that Muhammad son of Abdullah son of Abdul-Muttalib be kept back from eating the food among us; and in the rendering of Lings the same moment is heard as the reproach of conscience: we are indeed to blame, that the son of Abdullah should have been left behind and not brought to share this feast with us. So one of them went over to the boy, embraced him, brought him back, and sat him down among the rest.
What believer's heart does not treasure this moment: the last one called, the youngest one summoned, the boy of the baggage seated at last at the table of an old monk who had waited all his life for a single guest. The pride of the caravan had arranged itself by rank and age, as caravans do; and the providence of Allah had reserved the honored place for the one whom no rank yet covered. The Messenger of Allah ﷺ came and sat among the elders of his people, a boy of twelve at the table of his uncle's world; and the scrutiny began which the following event will describe in detail. Lings notes that one glance at the boy's face was enough to explain the miracles to Bahira, and that looking at him attentively throughout the meal, the monk noticed many features of both face and body which corresponded to what was written in his book. The examination of the monk had, in truth, been finished before the first morsel was eaten; the feast was the courtesy of certainty, not the search for it.
The boy himself, it must be remembered, knew nothing of the weighing. He sat at the feast as a well-brought-up son of Quraysh sits among his elders, eating little, speaking little, keeping the manners which his uncle's house had taught him; and the extraordinary fact of this whole Busra episode is precisely this serenity. The cloud had been dispatched, the branches had bowed, the vision had been given to a stranger, and the description in an ancient book had begun to match a twelve-year-old's face; and the one person unaware of the commotion was the person around whom it all revolved. Such is the way of Allah with His chosen ones in the years of their protection: revelation waits, but providence does not. The believer who reads of the boy's calm learns something which no philosophy teaches: that the greatest events of the spirit may surround a life which looks, from inside, entirely ordinary, and that the peace of a trusting heart is itself the shadow of the Hand which arranges all things.
There is a second line of transmission for this encounter, and the student of the sirah must give it its full weight, for Ibn Kathir does. The hafiz Abu Bakr al-Kharaiti, he relates, transmitted through Abbas ibn Muhammad al-Duri, through Qarad Abu Nuh, through Yunus, from Ibn Ishaq, from Abu Bakr ibn Abi Musa, from his father Abu Musa al-Ashari (may Allah be pleased with him), the account which al-Tirmidhi set in his Jami and which al-Hakim, al-Bayhaqi, and Ibn Asakir also related. In this account Abu Talib went off to Syria along with the Messenger of Allah and a number of the elders of Quraysh; and when they reached a point overlooking the monk, they went down and untied their baggage; and the monk came out to them, whereas previously, when they had passed by, he had not come out or even turned toward them. He came down as they were untying the baggage, and walked among them until he came to the Messenger of Allah ﷺ and took him by the hand, and said: this is the Lord of all mankind; and in the wording which al-Bayhaqi transmits, the phrase is longer: this is the Messenger of the Lord of the worlds; God sent him as a mercy to all mankind. And when the elders asked him what it was he knew, he answered: when you came down from the mountain road, every single tree and every rock bowed down in worship, and they would only prostrate themselves before a prophet; and I know him by the mark of prophethood below the cartilage of his shoulder blades. In this same account the boy was tending to the camels when the food was brought, and a cloud was shading him as he approached, and when he came near and sat down while the others had taken the shade of the tree, the shade moved out over him; and the monk said: just look how the tree's shade has moved over him.
The scholars then weighed what they had transmitted, and their weighing is part of the gift. Al-Tirmidhi said of the tradition: it is good, though unusual; we know of it only from this account. Abbas al-Duri said: there is no one in the world who relates it apart from Qarad Abu Nuh, whose name was Abd al-Rahman ibn Ghazwan; and Ahmad ibn Hanbal and Yahya ibn Main heard it from him for its unique and unusual quality. Ibn Kathir testifies that Qarad was vouched for as trustworthy by al-Bukhari himself and declared trustworthy by jurists and huffaz, and that he never knew anyone who impugned him; and yet he sets down, with the candor of the scholars, the strange aspects of the account: that it is attributed back to Abu Musa al-Ashari (may Allah be pleased with him), who only came forward into Islam in the year of Khaybar; that the cloud is not referred to in any account more reliable than this one; and that certain of its closing words raise a question of chronology which the following event must record. His conclusion is the scholar's own: perhaps Abu Musa received it from the Prophet ﷺ himself, in which case it would be very accurate; or from some of the major Companions; or the incident was well known and often mentioned, and the narrator took it from knowledge widely current; so God knows best. The believer loses nothing by this weighing; rather the believer sees in it the twin rails upon which the sirah runs, the mursal line of Ibn Ishaq and the musnad gharib line of al-Kharaiti, each with its own light, converging upon the same halt at the same tree outside the same cell.
The sirah has also preserved the question of the monk's own name and faith, and the honesty of the transmitters must be recorded here too. Ibn Kathir sets a small section with the heading The Story of Bahira, in which al-Suhayli, quoting the biographical writings of al-Zuhri, transmitted that Bahira was a Jewish high priest; Ibn Kathir's own comment is that from the course of the story it appears rather that he was a Christian monk, but God knows best; and from al-Masudi comes the information that he was a man of the Abd al-Qays tribe and that his name was Jirjis. The variants do not touch the substance of the encounter: a man of the Scripture communities, dwelling in an inherited cell, learned in the description of the coming Prophet. What the believer holds firmly is the plot of the story itself, which Ibn Kathir transmits as one seamless account: the monk who knew, the caravan that did not, and the boy in between whom the whole matter concerned.
There is, finally, a voice which the age itself preserved. Ibn Qutayba states in al-Maarif that a voice was heard in the jahiliyyah period, shortly before Islam, calling out the words: O yes, the finest of men on earth are three: Bahira, Riab ibn al-Banna, and the third is still awaited. The third, the one awaited, was the Messenger of Allah ﷺ. Whatever the ear of the historian makes of such a report, the ear of faith hears in it the truth of which the Quran itself speaks in the verse revealed years afterward: and the stars and the trees prostrate. The created order had kept its adab before its master from the beginning; the cloud that would not leave a twelve-year-old alone in the sun and the branches that lowered their shade were not accidents of weather but the etiquette of creation before the Beloved of Allah. And the expectation had been spoken before by the greatest of those who came before him: Isa (peace be upon him) had announced to the Children of Israel a messenger to come after him whose name is Ahmad, as the Quran relates; the book in the cell at Busra was one echo of that announcement among the monks of the frontier, and the scrutiny of Bahira was its final examination. Ibn Kathir, gathering the reports of the light of prophethood, writes that Busra contains good news for the people of this community, for it is the first place in Syria to receive the light of the prophethood; the light which had illuminated the castles of Busra while the Prophet ﷺ was in his mother's womb had now entered Busra walking, riding with the baggage of his uncle's caravan, and the city which had seen his light before he was born would now shelter his person and its history forever.
The two signs deserve to be held apart in the mind, for Lings says that the monk found no one adequate to the greatness of the two miracles, and the believing reader should ask what each of them said. The cloud speaks of covering: in the grammar of the desert, where the sun is the tyrant of every hour, the shade is mercy itself, and a cloud that keeps station over one head is a mercy assigned by name. The tree speaks of reverence: the branches that lowered themselves of their own motion are the created order performing its courtesy, in the very idiom in which the Quran had joined the mountains and the birds to the praise of Dawud (peace be upon him). Mercy above, worship below, and the boy seated between them beneath the tree: the whole event is a picture, painted in cloud and leaf, of the station which the Prophet ﷺ occupies in creation, the one through whom the mercy of Allah descends upon the world, and before whom the world itself is ordered to bow in its own fashion.
The feast ended, the caravan's talk returned to goods and prices, and the monk's heart had already left the table. Before him sat the answer to a lifetime of watching: a boy clean of the idolatry of his people, bright of face, careful of manner, whose coming the cloud had announced and the tree had saluted, whose back carried the mark below the cartilage of the shoulder blades. The encounter had happened; the recognition had happened; and what remained was the verification which honor demanded, question by question, mark by mark, until the description in the book and the boy before the monk agreed in every line, as two halves of one writing agree. To that verification the following event now proceeds; and the believing reader follows it with the awe of men watching the scriptures of the old world rise from their shelves to greet the Prophet ﷺ whom they had been written to await.