Verification of Prophetic Signs & Seal of Prophethood

The feast at the cell of Busra was the outer court of this event; the questioning was its sanctuary. Lings, rendering the earliest sources, writes that one glance at the boy's face had been enough to explain the two 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 verification, then, had begun before a word was spoken; but the book demanded more than glances, and the honor of the matter demanded that every line of the written description be matched in the hearing of witnesses. When all had finished dining and had dispersed, Ibn Kathir relates, following Ibn Ishaq, that Bahira went up to the boy, to the Messenger of Allah, may the peace and blessings of Allah be upon him, and prepared to ask what his lifetime of watching had stored up.

The monk's opening words have been preserved exactly, and the believer should read them slowly, for they frame the whole encounter. Bahira said: boy, by al-Lat and al-Uzza I charge you to answer what I will ask you. Ibn Kathir explains the strange oath with the scholar's care: the monk used these words only because he had heard the boy's people swearing by these two gods; it was the customary lever of his host's language, the strongest binding an Arab ear would recognize. And then the answer came which no book of the monks could have predicted and which every believer now reads with a full heart. They claim, says the transmission, that the Messenger of Allah ﷺ told him: do not ask me anything by al-Lat and al-Uzza, for by God, I hate nothing more than them. A boy of twelve, bred in a city whose wealth and ritual ran through the two idols, refusing in the presence of his elders the very names which his whole people held divine: this is the tawhid of the Prophet ﷺ before revelation, the untaught monotheism which Ibn Kathir would later treat at length when he gathered the reports of how Allah protected His Messenger from the filth of the jahiliyyah. The monk, who had expected to examine a description, found himself corrected in his oath by the one he examined.

So Bahira changed his ground, and swore by the God of the boy himself: by God, would you tell me about what I ask you. And the boy told him to ask whatever he liked. Then, in the words of Ibn Kathir's translation, the monk asked him various questions about his sleep, his habits, his circumstances, and so on; and Lings renders the same sequence as questions about his way of life and about his sleep and about his affairs in general, noting that the man was venerable and the questions courteous and benevolent, so that the boy readily informed him of these things. The questions about his sleep carry a weight which the Ummah was taught to weigh only later, for the Prophet ﷺ himself, as Aisha (may Allah be pleased with her) relates in the Sahih of al-Bukhari, said: the beginning of the revelation was true dreams. The sleep of the Messenger of Allah ﷺ was already, at twelve, a sanctuary which a monk of the frontier thought worth interrogating; and what the boy answered of his nights matched, line for line, what the old book beside the monk had said of the coming Prophet. What Bahira heard, Ibn Kathir concludes, matched the description he expected.

The questions about his sleep deserve a further moment of the believer's attention, for they open upon one of the gentlest mysteries of the sirah. The Prophet ﷺ said, in the hadith of Aisha (may Allah be pleased with her) which opens the Book of Revelation in the Sahih of al-Bukhari, that the first of the wahy was the true dream, so that his nights, in the years of the mission, were the antechamber of the revelation itself; and the later, rigorously authenticated hadiths relate of his manhood that his eyes slept but his heart did not sleep. The boy who answered Bahira of his sleep was therefore describing, without knowing it, the most guarded chamber of his coming prophethood. If the monk's book, as the sources describe it, had said something of the sleep of the expected one, then the boy's answers were the first human testimony to a sanctuary which Allah had already furnished within him; and the believer reflects that the dreams of the righteous are a province of the unseen which Allah had reserved to His Prophet ﷺ long before Gabriel brought him the recitation. The interrogation of Busra touched, in the person of a sleeping boy, the frontier where the waking world meets the world of true vision; and the answers which matched the description were the Allah-given warrant of the revelation which was still twenty-eight years away.

Then came the last mark, the one which the cloth had kept hidden from every eye. So when they had finished eating, Lings writes, the monk went to his youngest guest and asked him questions, and at the end the boy did not hesitate to draw off his cloak when finally the monk asked if he might see his back. And Bahira, who had already felt certain, was now doubly so; for there, between his shoulders, was the very mark he expected to see, the seal of prophethood, even as it was described in his book, in the selfsame place. Ibn Kathir's translation states it with the precision of a notary: then he looked at the boy's back and saw the seal of prophethood between his shoulders, in the very place according to the description he had. And the musnad line transmitted by the hafiz Abu Bakr al-Kharaiti and related by al-Tirmidhi locates the same mark with an anatomist's exactness, below the cartilage of his shoulder blades, the sign by which the monk said: I know him.

What is this seal, that a hermit's whole lifetime should resolve into the seeing of it. The Arabic of the sirah calls it khatam an-nubuwwah, the seal of prophethood, and the word khatam carries the double weight of its age. In the world of documents a seal was the authentication and the closure: the king's ring pressed into the clay of the scroll to prove it genuine and to close it against forgery. On the body of the final Prophet ﷺ the seal between the shoulders was the authentication of the whole line of prophecy, pressed by Allah upon the very spine of the one who would say: my example and the example of the prophets before me is that of a man who built a house. And when the Quran spoke of him it used the same root for his office: Muhammad is not the father of any of your men, but he is the Messenger of Allah and the Seal of the Prophets. The mark on the boy's back and the title in the Book are one truth told twice, and the believer holds both: the physical sign which the monks' book described, and the revealed rank which no book of men could carry.

Nor was the seal the only feature of the boy which answered to a description, for Lings says expressly that the monk noticed, throughout the meal, many features of both face and body which corresponded to what was written in his book. The Ummah would come to know those features through the most rigorously authenticated descriptions in the Sahih collections: the Companions who saw him in his manhood likened the brightness of his face to the full moon, counted his hair and his gait and his voice among the signs of his beauty, and said that they had seen nothing of the children of Adam more beautiful than he; and the description he received in the sight of Allah was itself an element of his prophethood, as the scholar Qadi Iyad gathered in his great book of his virtues. What the monk of Busra possessed was a fragment of the same inheritance, a sketch handed down the generations of his cell, and the boy before him was fitting it, feature upon feature, as a key fits the lock for which it was cut. The believer notes the humility of the instrument: Allah could have announced His Prophet from the sky of Makkah, and instead He spread the announcement through patient books and watching old men, so that the verification itself would become a proof for every age which doubts.

The honesty of the sources must here perform its own work of verification. The Busra account of the seal, in the line of Ibn Ishaq, is mursal, without a complete chain; and in the musnad line of al-Kharaiti it is hasan gharib, known, as al-Tirmidhi said, only from one account, and weighed by Ibn Kathir with the reservations the previous event has recorded. But the seal itself belongs to the most rigorously authenticated material of this Ummah, for the Companions saw it in his manhood and described it in the Sahih collections. In the Sahih of Muslim, Abdullah ibn Sarjis (may Allah be pleased with him) relates that he walked behind the Messenger of Allah ﷺ and saw the Seal of Prophethood between his shoulder blades, like a pigeon's egg, surrounded by moles gathered about it; and the descriptions of the descriptions agree upon the station: between the shoulders, in the place the monk of Busra had read of. Even the night of the birth had carried the same sign to a knowing eye, for Ibn Ishaq, in the account transmitted from Aisha (may Allah be pleased with her) which this project has related at the event of the blessed birth, tells of the Jew of Makkah who asked to see the newborn's back and found there a mark of successive lines of hair like a horse's mane, and fainted. Sirah report and sahih hadith are here distinguished honestly, as the scholars distinguish them, and yet they converge: the same spot, between the shoulders, witnessed at the birth by a Jew, at twelve by a monk, and in the manhood by the Companions whose reports fill the Sahih.

And the convergence is not only in the body of the Prophet ﷺ but in the books of the earlier peoples. The Quran states the principle of this whole Busra examination in the verse which Ibn Kathir himself quotes within this very context of the light of Busra: those who follow the Messenger, the unlettered Prophet, whom they find written with them in the Torah and the Gospel. The inherited book in the cell was, as the sirah presents it, one of the outstations of that written expectation, and the interrogation of the boy was the last reading of the description before the original arrived. What believer can read this without awe: the prophecies of the old world, kept in cells and synagogues against the corrosion of empires, arriving at their fulfillment in the person of a twelve-year-old sitting beside a baggage line at a caravan halt, examined by an old man who had given his life to the keeping of the description.

Nor was Busra a single lamp lit upon an unlit road, for the accounts of the birth which this project has already related show the same expectation burning in other lamps of the age. The Jew of Makkah had read the marks of the newborn and announced that prophethood had left the children of Israel; the Jew of Yathrib had cried out, in the hearing of the boy Hassan ibn Thabit, that the star beneath which Ahmad would be born had arisen; and the learned of the rejected communities had long discussed the description of the coming prophet among themselves. The caravan halt at Busra takes its place, therefore, within a wider geography of watching which Allah had laid across the age: Syria keeping the books of the monks, Yathrib keeping the learning of the Jews, Makkah keeping the House of Ibrahim, and the boy of twelve moving between them all under the guardianship of Allah, witnessed at each station by those whose own scriptures condemned them for refusing what they recognized. The believer who sees this design is prepared for the whole future of the sirah: at every stage of the life of the Prophet ﷺ, there will be men of the earlier communities who know him before his own people do, from the monk of Busra to the king of Abyssinia to the converts of the scripture peoples who would come to him in Madinah and greet him by their books.

There is one more strand which the sources preserve, and it deepens the refusal of the idols which opened the questioning. Ibn Kathir, in the later chapter on the upbringing and protection of the Messenger of Allah, returns deliberately to the Busra scene: we earlier made reference, he writes, to the comment of the Messenger of God when Bahira put a question to him invoking al-Lat and al-Uzza: by God, do not question me by invoking them; I hate nothing so much as them. Around that recollection Ibn Kathir gathers the reports of the youth's preservation from the idolatry of his people. Al-Bayhaqi transmits, through its contested chain, the report of Jabir ibn Abd Allah (may Allah be pleased with him) that the Prophet used to attend the assemblies of the polytheists, but that once he heard two angels behind him, one saying: let us move up and stand right behind the Messenger of Allah, and the other objecting: how can we stand right behind him when he is in the habit of saluting idols; and thereafter he never again attended such ceremonies. Ibn Kathir transmits with equal candor the judgment of the critics upon this report, that several authorities denied its attribution to Uthman ibn Abi Shaybah, and that Imam Ahmad said of the wording: his brother would never speak any such words; and al-Bayhaqi understood the report to mean that he witnessed their assemblies but never venerated their idols, before revelation came. The believer holds the certain principle and grades the reports which carry it: the certain principle is the word of al-Bayhaqi which Ibn Kathir transmits, that the Prophet ﷺ never at any time associated with Allah any other god.

The whole scene at Busra is, in the end, a lesson in verification itself, and the believer should take the lesson. The monk did not embrace a sentiment; he checked a description. He had spent his life with a written account of the coming Prophet, and when the signs presented themselves he did what the mind owes to the truth: he questioned the boy, weighed the answers, examined the mark, and matched each line of the description against the living person before him. This is the very method which the Ummah of the Prophet ﷺ would later raise into a science, the science of isnad, by which every report of his words would be traced through its men and graded honestly; and it is fitting that the first full examination in the sirah should be the examination of the Prophet's own person against the book of an earlier prophet's inheritance. Allah authenticates His final message in the body of His final Messenger, and teaches, in the same scene, the verification which His community would practice upon everything transmitted from that Messenger until the end of the world.

The meal had dispersed; the boy had answered; the mark had been seen; and the description and the boy agreed in every line, as two halves of one writing agree. There remained only the consequence of certainty, and that consequence lay not with the boy but with his uncle; for the book which described the Prophet had described him also as an orphan, and the monk must now learn from Abu Talib the boy's parentage, and having learned it, must speak the warning which the following event records. The twelve-year-old rose from the questioning as the prophets rise from the examination of their Lord: proven, sealed, and sent back into the ordinary world, to carry in his body, unknown to the caravan, the authentication of everything which the ages had written and everything which the heavens would yet send down.