The last proof which the monk of Busra required was not upon the boy's back but upon the uncle's tongue, for the description in his book had written the coming Prophet fatherless, and the parentage of the boy could only be certified by the man who knew it. Ibn Kathir relates, following Ibn Ishaq, that when Bahira had concluded his examination of the boy he went over to his uncle Abu Talib and asked: what relation is he to you. And Abu Talib answered out of the fullness of his love: he is my son. It was the answer of Arab affection, which makes a nephew a son and spends upon him the word which belongs to the nearer kin; but the book in the cell knew otherwise, and the monk replied: he is not your son; this boy cannot have a living father. Then the uncle yielded the letter of the truth while holding its spirit: he is my brother's son. And the monk asked: and what happened to his father. Abu Talib said: he died while the boy's mother was still pregnant with him. And Bahira answered with the words which sealed the whole day: now you are telling the truth.
Lings renders the same exchange in the cadence of the earliest sources: what kinship hath this boy with thee; he is my son; he is not thy son, it cannot be that this boy's father is alive; he is my brother's son; then what of his father; he died when the boy was still in his mother's womb; that is the truth. The believing reader should pause upon the small drama of the sentence. The one fact which the uncle's love had sought to cover was the very fact which the monk's book required: the orphan, the fatherless one, whose father had gone to the grave before the light in his mother's womb had seen the world. Every answer of the boy had matched the description, and now the sorrow of the household, the death of Abdullah on the return from Syria some twelve years before, was itself found written in the old account. The orphanhood which the Quran would one day console in the voice of Allah Himself, did He not find you an orphan and give you shelter, stood at Busra as the last line of the description, certified by the mouth of the man who loved the boy most.
Then Bahira spoke the counsel for which this event is named, and the sources give his words with a fullness which the reader should hear entire. Ibn Kathir's translation transmits the charge: take your brother's son back to his own country and guard him from the Jews; for, by God, if they see him and know what I know, they will do him evil; this nephew of yours has a great future before him; take him back soon to his own country. Lings renders the same warning with the same architecture: take thy brother's son back to his country, and guard him against the Jews, for by God, if they see him and know of him that which I know, they will contrive evil against him; great things are in store for this brother's son of thine. The believer stands in wonder at the man who spoke it. Bahira was of the earlier communities, serving an inheritance which the coming of this boy would close; and yet he spent his certainty not in mourning his own order but in saving the Prophet of the new one, warning, urging, hastening the boy out of the reach of those who might harm him. It is the pattern of the Jew of Makkah at the birth of the Prophet ﷺ, who recognized the mark and bore unwilling witness, but here the recognition is willing and the knowledge is spent in saving: a man of the old book recognizing the new and rejoicing, his own succession ended without bitterness, his learning turned wholly to the service of the truth he had recognized.
The musnad line of the story carries the warning into a second theater. In the account transmitted by the hafiz Abu Bakr al-Kharaiti and related by al-Tirmidhi, Bahira stood urging the men of the caravan not to take the boy into Byzantine territory, saying that when the Romans saw him they would recognize him by his description and would kill him; and while he was speaking, behold, seven Romans arrived at the cell. Bahira greeted them and asked why they had come, and they answered: we have information that there is this prophet who will come forth this month, and so we have been sending men along each route; the news we had of him brought us along this route of yours. The monk asked whether any greater than they were coming behind them, and they said no; it was only the information that had brought them. Then Bahira put to them the question which is the theology of the whole scene: have you ever known any matter which God wished to bring about, that anyone was able to reverse. They said that they had not; and then they pledged him allegiance and stayed with him there at the cell.
The report of the seven Romans must be weighed exactly as the scholars weigh it, for it belongs to the line which al-Tirmidhi graded hasan gharib and which Ibn Kathir scrutinized with the reservations already recorded in the account of the encounter: its attribution back to Abu Musa al-Ashari (may Allah be pleased with him), the uniqueness of its transmitter Qarad Abu Nuh, and its chronological difficulties, which the present event must now set out in full. But within its own frame the report teaches what the whole sirah teaches: the empires of the earth were moving toward the Prophet ﷺ before he knew it, sending riders along the roads of a prophet who was, in that month, a twelve-year-old among the baggage of his uncle's caravan; and their knowledge, like that of the Jews whom Bahira feared, could only end at the door which Allah had closed. The question of the monk, whether any matter God wished to bring about had ever been reversed, is the creed of the event in one sentence, and it is the creed which the Quran would later give the Ummah in its own words about the plots of men against the decree of their Lord.
Ibn Ishaq adds a quieter report which completes the picture of the watching world. They claim, according to what people said, he transmits, that Zurayr, Tamim, and Daris, all of them men who believed in the Scriptures, had also seen what Bahira noticed in the Messenger of Allah, may the peace and blessings of Allah be upon him, on that trip with his uncle Abu Talib. They tried to get him, but Bahira kept them away from him, making reference to God and to the description of him and to the mention of him which they would find in the Holy Scripture, as well as the statement that they would not succeed in getting him; and they recognized the reference he was making to them, and since they believed what he said, they let the boy alone and went away. Here is the whole economy of the event in miniature: the men of the Scriptures saw the same signs, reached for the boy, and were turned aside not by swords but by their own books, read back to them by an old monk in front of a camel line. Allah defended His Prophet ﷺ before revelation by the very learning of those who might have harmed him, and the historians have marked this report with their scruple, according to what people said, without hiding it from the Ummah.
Then the counsel was obeyed, and the obedience was swift. Ibn Kathir relates, in the line of Ibn Ishaq, that Abu Talib left with him for Mecca quickly, as soon as he had finished his business in Syria; and Lings opens the next chapter of the boy's life with the same facts: when he had finished his trading in Syria, Abu Talib returned to Mecca with his nephew. The elders of the caravan, who had entered Busra with a season's goods, went out of it with their ledger balanced at the speed of a man keeping a trust; and the boy rode south with the provision of the monk, for the musnad account adds that Bahira provisioned him with cake and oil, the bread of the road and the lamp of the road, the small wealth of a cell spent without regret upon the guest whom the cloud had chosen. The caravan turned its back on the frontier of the empire which had been sending riders for the prophet of the month, and took the grade southward through the basalt and the heat, toward the valley which Allah had defended with birds in the year of the boy's birth.
Of the boy himself upon that southward road the sources say almost nothing, and their silence is eloquent. He had seen a city of stone and grain beyond anything Makkah could show; he had sat at the table of a foreign scholar; he had answered questions which no boy of Quraysh had ever been asked; and he came home carrying it all as a child carries the day, without the weight which men would one day load upon it. The men of the caravan, for their part, carried their own cargo in silence: the strange day at the cell, the feast without an occasion, the old man's urgency, the unnaturally quick conclusion of the trading; and if Abu Talib spoke of the counsel at all, it would have been in the privacy of his own house, to the woman who mothered the boy, in the tone of men who have been frightened for a treasure. The believer walking beside that caravan in imagination notices what is not there: no escort, no arms, no changed route, only the ordinary prudence of an uncle's watchfulness joined to the extraordinary protection of Allah. The safety of the Prophet ﷺ was never the fruit of human calculation alone; it was the decree traveling under the disguise of ordinary days. Years later the Ummah would learn to call such days by their true name, the protection of Allah which precedes every trial; and the believer who reads the sirah with attention finds these quiet homeward roads to be among its deepest pages, the months in which nothing happened, because Allah had already seen to everything that might have.
The student of the sources must now record the difficult words with which the musnad account closes, for Ibn Kathir did not hide them and the believer should not. The account says: Abu Bakr sent Bilal along with him, and the monk provisioned him with cake and oil. Ibn Kathir weighs the sentence with his characteristic candor: if the age of the Prophet at that time was twelve, then Abu Bakr as-Siddiq (may Allah be pleased with him) would have been nine or ten, and the age of Bilal (may Allah be pleased with him) would have been less than that; and where, he asks, was Abu Bakr at that time, and where was Bilal; both being there would be strange, unless it be said that this occurred when the Messenger of Allah was full grown, which would mean that the trip took place later than it is supposed, or that the statement that he was twelve at the time is inaccurate; and al-Waqidi related the incident contingent upon that; and al-Suhayli stated, on the authority of certain sources, that the age of the Prophet at the time was nine. So God knows best. This is the believers' scholarship at work upon their own inheritance: the same hafiz who transmitted the line is the first to point out what it cannot easily bear, and the Ummah keeps both the report and the critique, loving the story and protecting the truth at the same time.
There is one more line which Ibn Kathir transmits, and it deepens the counsel. Muhammad ibn Sad stated that Khalid ibn Madin told him, from Mutamir ibn Sulayman, from his father, from Abu Mijlaz, that Abdul-Muttalib or Abu Talib, for Khalid was unsure which one, never went away on any trip without taking the boy with him; and that on the way to Syria a monk came to him there and said: you have a man of goodness among you; then he said: where is the father of this boy. The reply was given: I am his guardian, or it was said, he is his guardian. The monk said: take care of this boy; do not take him to Syria, for the Jews are jealous, and I fear for him from them. And he was told: it is not you who are saying that, but God himself; so he did take him back, and said: O God, I place Muhammad in your care. The uncertainty of the transmitters over the guardian's name, Abdul-Muttalib or Abu Talib, is itself recorded; some read the report as a second ray of the same Busra light, others as a separate warning upon the same road; and either way the prayer stands: O God, I place Muhammad in Your care. The house of Abdul-Muttalib did not merely carry the boy; it commended him, journey by journey, to the One who had lent him to them.
The Quran, which came years after this event, gives the believer the framework in which to read it. Allah declared with the emphasis of His own oneness: indeed, it is We who sent down the Reminder, and indeed, We will be its guardian; and the scholars of the Ummah have understood from this that the guarding of the Book includes the guarding of the man through whom the Book would come, before the Book itself existed. And Allah stated: indeed, We will give victory to Our messengers and those who believe, in the life of this world and on the day the witnesses arise; and the victory of this event was won without a sword drawn: the Jews restrained by the fear of Allah which the monk's warning placed in the heart of Abu Talib, the Romans pledged at the door of the cell, the Scripture-men turned away by their own inheritance, the whole apparatus of watching and wanting which the age had aimed at the boy dissolved by the decree which no matter of God's wishing had ever suffered to be reversed. The plots which the monk feared were real, for the description which made the boy recognizable was true; and this is the paradox the believer holds with both hands: the very knowledge which endangered the Prophet ﷺ was the knowledge which the earlier scriptures had preserved at Allah's command, and the same Lord who had caused it to be written caused it to be harmless.
So the caravan came down at last out of the Syrian road into the gorge of Makkah, and the boy who had gone out with the baggage came home with the baggage, and none of the merchants knew what had happened at the halt of the cell: not the cloud, not the tree, not the feast, not the questions, not the seal, not the pledge of the seven riders of the empire, not the counsel which had cut their season short by the speed of a father's fear. Abu Talib paid the duties of the road and brought his brother's son through the streets of the quarter of Banu Hashim to the door of his house, where Fatimah bint Asad (may Allah be pleased with her) received the boy of twelve back into the care which asked no questions and the love which needed no reasons. And the Lord of the Kaaba, who had lent His Prophet ﷺ to Syria for a season and taken him back untouched, now gathered the remaining years of his childhood around him in the valley of the Sanctuary, where the next event of the sirah finds him: a boy growing in wisdom and in favor among the people of Makkah, under a guardianship both human and divine.