Continued Upbringing in the Household of Abu Talib

The caravan came home, and the boy of thirteen came home with it, through the streets of the quarter of Banu Hashim to a door which knew his step. He had gone out with the baggage of his uncle's trade; he returned with the memory of a city of stone, a table of a stranger's bread, and questions which no boy of Quraysh had ever answered; and the household received him back into the discipline of its poverty and the abundance of its love. The two roofs of his childhood had been one roof of one family: the couch of Abdul-Muttalib in the shadow of the Kaaba, and the table of Abu Talib which was satisfied only when he ate of it. Now, in the year after the Syrian journey, the upbringing continued which the master chronology of the sirah assigns to this event: the years of the boy's thirteenth and fourteenth age, lived in Makkah under the guardianship of his uncle, before the great events of his later youth drew the eyes of the tribes upon him.

The mother of that house must be named first among its riches. Lings records what the earliest sources preserved of Fatimah bint Asad (may Allah be pleased with her), the wife of Abu Talib, who was herself a grandchild of Hashim, the daughter of his son Asad, half-brother of Abdul-Muttalib: that Abu Talib prolonged the affection and the kindness which his nephew had received from the old man, so that the boy was as one of his own sons; and that his wife Fatimah did all she could to replace the boy's mother. And the record adds the boy's own testimony, which he bore all his life: that Muhammad used to say of her that she would have let her own children go hungry rather than him. What believer's heart is not moved by that sentence: an aunt choosing the orphan's hunger over her own children's, in a thin household, for a boy who could repay her with nothing but love. The Ummah has always understood that the Prophet ﷺ was formed in the hands of the women who fed him: Aminah who bore him, Halimah who nursed him, Fatimah bint Asad who mothered him in Makkah; and the thirteenth year of his life was passed in the kitchen and courtyard of that last of his mothers, whom he would honor to her grave.

The brothers of the house gave him a childhood of companionship. Talib, the eldest son of Abu Talib, was about his own age; Aqil was thirteen or fourteen; and Jafar (may Allah be pleased with him) was a little boy of four when the Prophet ﷺ was past his twentieth year, so that in these earlier years he was a nursing infant learning to walk in the same courtyard. Lings records that the young Muhammad, fond of children and gentle with them, grew attached to the beautiful child Jafar, whose devotion to his cousin proved lasting; and the house held daughters too, among them Fakhitah, who would be known as Umm Hani. Around the house stood the wider family of Hashim: Hamzah (may Allah be pleased with him), his uncle through his father and cousin through his mother, his own age and his lifelong playmate; Safiyyah his aunt; and Abbas (may Allah be pleased with him), who had kissed him on the day his grandfather presented him. The boy returned from Syria into this web of kinship, and the webs of kinship were the scaffolding which Allah used to raise the greatest building in human history.

His days had their work. Lings writes that Abu Talib was poor, and that his nephew felt obliged to do what he could to earn his own livelihood, which he did mostly by pasturing sheep and goats, spending day after day alone in the hills above Makkah or on the slopes of the valleys beyond. The Prophet ﷺ himself named this labor, and named its wages, in the rigorously authenticated hadith of the Sahih of al-Bukhari: Allah did not send any prophet but that he shepherded sheep. His Companions said: and you? He said: yes, I used to tend them for the people of Makkah for qirats. The qirat was the smallest coin of the town, the wage of a boy's day; and the believer should mark that the Lord of the worlds, who could have rained gold upon His beloved, numbered his boyhood earnings in the smallest denomination of the market. The shepherd's school has its own curriculum, which the scholars of the sirah have always read in this event: solitude, in which the heart learns to speak with its Lord without an interpreter; watchfulness, the eye kept on the flock against the wolf and the wadi; patience, for the sheep teach nothing faster than they teach slowness; and humility, for the master of prophets learned to walk behind dumb creatures and to answer for their weakness. When the Ummah later asked why the prophets were shepherds before they were sent, the sirah of the boy of thirteen above the hills of Makkah was the answer walking in the past.

Yet the boy was not left to the hills alone, for the family saw to the other half of a Makkan boyhood, the half of the weapon and the assembly. Lings relates that his uncles saw to it that he, as also Abbas and Hamzah, had some training in the use of the weapons of war. Hamzah (may Allah be pleased with him) was already a good swordsman and a good wrestler, a man of mighty stature in the making; and the young Muhammad was of average height and average strength, Lings writes, but with a marked aptitude for archery, giving every promise of becoming an excellent bowman, like his great ancestors Ibrahim and Ismail (peace be upon them), a skill grounded in the strength of his eyesight, for he was reputed able to count no fewer than twelve of the stars of the constellation of the Pleiades. The bow of Ibrahim (peace be upon him) and the flocks of Makkah: the training of this boy held both, the eye which could see far and the heart which could keep quiet, and the believer sees in the arrangement of his youth the same balance which his manhood would show, the strength kept in the service of the trust.

The years drew from his people a verdict which has become one of the fixed titles of his story. Al-Waqidi's summary, transmitted by Ibn Kathir, states that the Messenger of Allah lived as a youth with Abu Talib while Allah protected him and preserved him from the evils of the jahiliyya period for the honor He wished for him; and that when he grew up he was consequently the most honorable man of his people, the best in character, the most noble in his relationships, the best neighbor, the most prudent, the most trustworthy and truthful, and the man most removed from immorality or harmfulness, so that his people named him al-Amin, the trustworthy one, because of all the fine qualities Allah had joined together in him; and that Abu Talib protected and cared for him, aided and assisted him, until his death. Ibn Ishaq had written the same verdict in his own words: that he grew up the finest man among his people, the best of them in character and repute, the best of neighbors, the most prudent, the most honest in speech and most trustworthy, and the one most removed from immorality and from those characteristics that corrupt men. And the summary of the later writers carries the same memory: that Allah, Exalted be He, purified him from the pre-Islamic impurities and misconducts, and bestowed upon him every ethical manner, so that his only nickname among his people was the trustworthy one, for his honesty, truthfulness, and integrity of which they had firsthand experience. A verdict spoken by idolaters over an orphan of their city is a verdict without flattery; Makkah did not know it was drafting the certificate of its own prophet.

The Quran itself is the commentary upon these quiet years, and the believing reader should hear its own accounting of them. In the chapter of Ad-Duha, revealed in the years of the mission, Allah said to His Messenger ﷺ: did He not find you an orphan and give you shelter; and He found you wandering, so He guided you; and He found you in need, so He enriched you. Every clause of the passage is a door into this boyhood: the orphan given shelter in the house of Abu Talib; the wandering, which the scholars have read as the not-yet of the untaught way, guided in the course of these years by the preservation of Allah; the need answered, in the immediate sense, by the qirats of the flocks and the barakah of the household, and, in the fuller sense which the passage intends, by the enrichment which was to come. The verse of the pen placed the fruit of the upbringing in a single word: and indeed, you are upon a great moral character. When Makkah called the boy al-Amin, the city was transcribing, without knowing it, the judgment which its Lord had already written upon him.

The sources of these years gather, besides the verdict, the reports of the preservation itself, and Ibn Kathir transmits them with their grades. The boy related, in the account which Ibn Kathir places in the chapter of the upbringing, that once he happened to be among some Quraysh boys carrying stones for the games boys play, each of them exposed, having taken up his shirt and fastened it around his neck to carry the stones in; and that he was running along with them in this way, and having fallen behind, suddenly received a very painful slap from someone who spoke the words: put your shirt on properly. So he took it and put it back on properly, and began carrying the stones around his neck with his shirt on, alone among his friends. Ibn Kathir notes the kinship of this anecdote with the account in the two Sahih collections of the rebuilding of the Kaaba, when al-Abbas (may Allah be pleased with him) said to him: put your shirt over your shoulder for the stones, and he did so, but fell to the ground, his eyes drawn up to heaven, and then got up and said: it was my shirt, and it was put back on him properly; and Ibn Kathir adds his judgment that if the boys' anecdote is not the same event, it certainly precedes it, and is seemingly preparing for it. The believer reads in the pair of reports a single lesson written twice: that the body of the Prophet ﷺ was hedged from the exposure of the jahiliyyah even in its games, by a hand which the boy could not see.

There follows a report which Ibn Kathir transmits with the greatest reserve, and the believer should receive it exactly as the scholars left it. Ibn Ishaq relates, through al-Hasan ibn Muhammad ibn Ali, from his father and from his grandfather Ali ibn Abi Talib (may Allah be pleased with him), the account of the two wedding nights: that the young Muhammad said that he had no interest in the practices with women which the people of the jahiliyyah used to do, except on two nights, in which Allah restrained him; that twice he asked a young companion to watch his sheep while he went into Makkah to see what the young men saw, and twice came upon a wedding with its tambourines and flutes, and sat down to watch, and was struck, in his own words, in his ears by Allah, until the sun awoke him, and he returned having done nothing; and that by God he never tried or returned to anything like that thereafter, right up to when Allah honored him with His prophethood. Ibn Kathir's verdict upon this report is transmitted with it: this is a very strange tradition; it could be about Ali himself, with the final words having been added; but God knows best. The Ummah holds the doctrine which the report serves, that the Prophet ﷺ was preserved from the sins of his youth, upon evidence far stronger than this single strange tradition; and the scholar holds the report with its critique, which is the honest method of this science.

The reports of the idols close the file of the protected youth. Al-Bayhaqi transmits, through Usamah ibn Zayd from his father Zayd ibn Harithah (may Allah be pleased with them), that there was a brass idol called Isaf and Nailah which the polytheists would touch as they performed their circumambulation of the Kaaba; that the Messenger of Allah said: do not touch it; and that Zayd, going round again, said to himself that he would touch it to see what would happen, and when he did so, the Messenger of Allah asked him: were you not forbidden to do that. And in the added line which al-Bayhaqi transmits from another chain, Zayd said: by Him who honored him and revealed to him the Book, he never saluted an idol, right up to when Allah honored him and gave revelation to him. The principle beneath all these reports was stated by al-Bayhaqi in the words Ibn Kathir transmits: that the Prophet ﷺ never at any time associated with Allah any other god, and that the assemblies he attended before revelation were upon the remnants of the heritage of Ibrahim and Ismail (peace be upon them), the religion of his forefathers which the Kaaba itself remembered even in its captivity. Jubayr ibn Mutim (may Allah be pleased with him) testified that he saw the Messenger of Allah, before he received revelation, stationed on a camel among his people at Arafat, in the rites which Makkah still kept from the religion of Ibrahim, a blessing from Allah, as the tradition itself concludes.

Of Fatimah bint Asad, the mother of the house of this event, the sirah keeps a last word which the believer should carry to the end of the account. She lived to see the mission of the boy she had fed: she was among the early Muslims, and she bore the hardship of the boycott and the years of the siege of the quarter of Hashim, and she migrated to Madinah; and Ibn Sad relates in his Tabaqat that when she died, in the city of the Prophet ﷺ, the Prophet gave his own garment to shroud her, and went down into her grave, and prayed over her, honoring in death the woman who had let her own children go hungry rather than him. The repayment of the Ummah's debts began with the Prophet ﷺ himself, and it began in this event's own household: the boy who was fed was the man who clothed, the boy who was sheltered was the man who shrouded, and the love spent upon him in the poverty of Makkah returned multiplied in the years of his honor.

So the boy of thirteen folded back into the life of the hills and the streets: the flocks above the town, the assembly of the elders at the Kaaba, the courtyards of the quarter of Banu Hashim, the training of the bow beside Hamzah and Abbas, and under it all the hidden custody of Allah which the Syrian journey had only made visible for a day. The years ahead of him, which later events of this sirah will tell, would bring the clash of the sacrilegious war and the oath of the pact of chivalry at the Kaaba; but those chapters wait their appointed telling. For the present, Makkah kept a boy of its own blood in its bosom, growing toward the fullness of the character which Allah had called great, and no one in the city, from the keeper of the idols to the keeper of the weights, knew that the stillness above their hills, where a shepherd of thirteen watched his flocks against the wolves, was the quiet in which Allah was preparing the last of His messengers, the mercy to the worlds, the Trustworthy One of Quraysh.