Shepherding Flocks of Makkah for Wages

The caravan of Abu Talib came down out of the north in the aftermath of wonders. A monk in a cell at Busra had questioned a boy of twelve and found in him the description written in an ancient book; a cloud had kept station over his head; the branches of a tree had bowed. And then the road bent south, the hills of Syria gave way to the familiar passes above Makkah, and the boy who had been recognized by a stranger of the frontier returned to the anonymity of the Valley, taking up, in the words Lings uses, his solitary life as before. Here is a pattern the believer should hold with both hands: Allah, Glorified and Exalted be He, had permitted His beloved's rank to be declared in a foreign land, and then returned him to the lowest employment of his own city, as if to teach every generation of this Ummah that confirmation from heaven does not exempt a soul from the day's work. The God of wonders is also the God of weekdays; and the years between the Prophet's ﷺ fourteenth and seventeenth birthdays, roughly 584 to 588 of the Christian calendar, were spent among the least regarded workers of Makkah, the hired shepherds of the hills.

The solitary life as before means the flocks. The Sahih collections carry the Prophet's ﷺ own testimony, already set down in this chronology at the event of his boyhood hire, that Allah never sent a prophet who did not tend sheep, and that he himself had tended them for the people of Makkah for qirats, the little coins of the market. What the present event records is the continuation of that employment through his adolescence: the boyhood hire that had begun beside the slopes of Ajyad did not end with the journey to Syria; it deepened and lengthened into the settled occupation of his middle teens. The Most High, who could have eased the household's need by any means He willed, chose for His Messenger ﷺ the long apprenticeship of the staff and the water-skin. There was no palace in these years, no seat among the merchants of the great caravans, no apprenticeship in the courts of kings; there was a hillside, a flock that did not know its keeper's rank, and a sky that did. The believer bows before the choice: the Master of humanity in the train of the Prophets was formed among the hired.

The master record of this project names the pasture-ground of those years the qararit, and the word deserves a paragraph of its own, for it carries the whole humility of the era in its letters. The country around Makkah is hard country: the rains fall in patches, the grass comes thin and briefly, and the shepherd's year is a pilgrimage from one small tract of green to the next. The low ground, where the water settles and lingers, is called the qarara, and the little pastures that clothe it in the good weeks are the qararit, patches a flock can graze in a morning and must then leave for the next. The adolescent Muhammad ﷺ walked that economy of smallness for years, moving sheep and goats from one little grass-tract to another, learning the land the way the poor learn it, intimately and by foot. The commentators on the Sahih, as this event's narrations record, weighed the same word in another register, reading his qararit as the little coins of his wage; and the believer need not choose between the two readings, for the word bears both humilities at once, the little grass and the little coin, the smallness of the pasture and the smallness of the pay, each mirrored in the other as the whole truth of those years.

Consider what the adolescent years added to the boyhood hire. A child of eight or nine keeps the flock near home, within the cry of the settlement; a young man of fifteen or sixteen can be trusted with the long ranges, the farther wadis, the season in the higher country where the grass holds after the low ground has burned. The employers of Makkah who had once dropped a qirat into a small boy's hand now hired a youth of increasing height and grave manner, and the trust grew with the stature: the flocks were his sole charge from the first light to the last, in country where the wolf, the steep drop, the scorpion and the sudden storm all take their annual share of the careless shepherd's account. Trustworthiness, once proven, compounds like a fund. The young man who brought every flock home counted was building, day by unremarked day, the credit that Makkah would one day summarize in a single word, al-Amin, the Trustworthy; and the believing reader sees that reputations are not made in the moment of crisis but banked in the years no one is watching, on the hills, where the only witness of the count was the One who made the sheep.

The wages of those years went where the orphan's wages go, into the common purse of the uncle's house. Abu Talib's poverty was not a passing season but the standing condition of a chief's household with a chief's obligations and a small chief's means, and Fatimah bint Asad (may Allah be pleased with her) fed the family from a kitchen that needed help. In the same passage of Lings that marks the end of this era, the house is described with its three sons: Talib, about the age of his cousin the shepherd; Aqil a few years behind; and Ja'far, as the years closed, a little boy of four. More mouths came to that table while the Prophet ﷺ was on the hills, and the qirats he carried down at dusk were the orphan's answer to the love that had carried him: he who had been fed by the labor of others since Halimah's flocks first flowed with milk now fed others by his own labor. What believer's heart is not moved by the arithmetic of it, the future intercessor of humanity easing a poor aunt's kitchen by the price of a day's watching over goats.

And in those same years the Quran was already, in the hiddenness of Allah's decree, writing the parallel that would console every working believer until the end of time. For the Book relates of Musa (peace be upon him) that when he fled Egypt and came to the water of Madyan, he found a crowd of people watering, and apart from them two women holding back their flock; and when he asked them their case, they said that they could not water until the shepherds had driven away, and that their father was a very old man. So he watered for them, and then turned into the shade and prayed the prayer of the working stranger: my Lord, I am in need of whatever good You send down to me. A prophet of Allah, tall of rank, chosen before his birth, standing in the dust of a well-yard doing the errand of two shepherd girls, and calling his poverty by its name before his Lord. The adolescent of Makkah, watering his flocks at the troughs and pools of the Hijaz, stood in the same school; and the Lord who heard Musa's (peace be upon him) prayer in the shade heard also the quiet of His final Messenger's ﷺ heart on the hills, storing up for him, in exchange for years of little wages, a richness of soul that no wealth could buy.

The Book carries the parallel further, into the contract itself. The old man of Madyan said to Musa (peace be upon him): I wish to marry to you one of these two daughters of mine, on condition that you hire yourself to me for eight years. Eight years of hired service, agreed by contract, sealed by a marriage: the messenger of Allah entering years of employment as a wage-worker, and the Quran narrating it without a shadow of embarrassment, for the labor of the chosen is not a misfortune to be explained but a dignity to be recorded. Here the event of the Prophet's ﷺ adolescence finds its deepest frame: the Most High does not train His carriers of revelation in courts and treasuries but in flocks and wages, so that when they come to power they will know the weight of the day's labor in their own bodies, and never despise the hand that carries the staff. The qirats of the Makkahn hills and the eight years of Madyan stand in one lineage of divine pedagogy; and the believer who works for a wage, year upon year under contract, walks in the train of two prophets at once.

What did the years teach? Patience first, sabr, the discipline the flock administers without fee. Sheep will not be hurried, will not be argued with, will scatter at a wind and stand obstinately where the grass is gone; the shepherd who loses his temper loses his flock. The young man on the hills learned the long patience of moving at the pace of the weakest, of seeking the strayed one at dusk, of bearing with creatures who cannot say where they hurt and cannot understand why they are kept. The Ummah would one day hear the fruit of this training from his own blessed mouth, in the teaching this project has already recorded at the events of his guardianship, that each of you is a shepherd and each of you is answerable for his flock; but the hills taught it before the revelation declared it, and taught it in the body, as a habit of the hands before it became a law of the tongue.

Solitude second, and the contemplation that solitude ripens into. The adolescent shepherd's day is largely silence: the mouth is little used, and the eye and the heart are fed with the pageants of creation, the light changing on the granite, the weather building over the plain, the ordered procession of the stars through the watches of the night. In that silence the heart of the Prophet ﷺ conversed with its Maker, long before the cave of Hira gave the habit a home and a name. Tafakkur, contemplation, is the harvest of such hours, and the believer should mark the sequence heaven appointed: first the solitude of the flock, then the solitude of the cave, then the weight of the Book; the heart was enlarged in the empty places before it was filled with the Word. What believer's heart does not yearn, reading of it, for a share of those hours, and what working soul does not learn here that the hours the world calls wasted with the sheep may be the hours in which a soul is being prepared for its life's whole work.

And leadership third, the contemplative leadership the master record names: for the flock is the first ummah in miniature. The keeper must know each animal by face, since one size of vigilance does not fit all; must notice the one that lags before it is lost, and go after the one that strays before the wolf does; must set the day's pace by the weakest member and choose the route by what the weakest can bear. Every one of these is a rule of the Messenger's ﷺ later government of souls. He knew his companions one by one, their names, their burdens and their histories; he noticed the one who lagged in faith before his lag became a fall; he left the ninety-nine to seek the one; he ordered the march of his community by what the weak could endure, rebuking those who drove the pace hard with their mounts. The believer sees in all of it the hills keeping their appointment: the Shepherd of humanity was first the shepherd of sheep, and the two vocations were one vocation, learned in one school, under the one Teacher.

Nor did the dignity of labor ever leave him. Aisha (may Allah be pleased with her), asked in his maturity what the Messenger of Allah ﷺ did in his house, answered: he was in the service of his family, and when the prayer came he went out to pray. The Arabic word she chose, mihnah, is the plain word for service and labor, and she used it of the Master of the worlds mending, carrying, milking and sweeping at home. And in the year of the Trench, when Madinah's very existence hung on the speed of the spade, it was he, the Leader of humanity, who was found with a stone of hunger bound about his blessed belly, digging alongside his companions and reciting upon the wall the words every laborer may borrow: O Allah, were it not for You we would not have been guided, nor given charity, nor prayed. The hands that had gathered the flock at dusk on the hills of Makkah were digging the trench at fifty and more; the qirats of the one employment and the hunger-stone of the other are the two ends of one rope, the lifelong refusal of the Best of creation to let any work beneath his people be beneath himself.

The chronology of the transition deserves the honest pen. Lings writes that when Muhammad ﷺ had passed his twentieth year he received more and more invitations to join one or another of his kinsmen on their travels abroad, until the day came when he was asked to take charge of the goods of a merchant who was unable to travel himself, and his success in that capacity led to other engagements; he was thus able to earn a better livelihood, and marriage became a possibility. The Sealed Nectar compresses the same arc: he had no fixed trade in his early youth, but worked as a shepherd, and at the age of twenty-five went to Syria as a merchant for Khadijah. The received reading of this project holds the years of the present event, his fourteenth to seventeenth, as the long middle chapter of one working life that runs from the boyhood hire through the qararit years to the caravan commissions, one continuous providence of the Most High, which the scholars of the sirah classed under a single heading, the employment of the Messenger of Allah ﷺ before his marriage to Khadijah, as this chronology has already recorded. The hills did not fail and give way to the caravans; the hills completed their work and handed him on, as a school hands its finished student to the road.

The road itself would soon test him in other elements: a war would break out that would take his people into the field, and a scandal of injustice would stir the city, and a league of chivalry would be sworn in a rich man's hall; and in all of it the young man formed on the hills would be found ready, patient in the saddle, watchful under arrows, and unboughtable in the matter of the wronged. But those stations belong to the events that follow. Here let the believer rest with the picture the sources give: a youth of Makkah, orphaned and yet never orphaned in the deepest sense, walking home at dusk with the flock before him and a few small coins in his keeping, watched by no one but the One who was preparing through him the rescue of the worlds. The hills of the qararit have long since gone the way of all ground that greatness once made famous; but the lesson of them is written where the grass cannot be cut, in the Book of the Ummah's memory: that Allah raises His beloved through the humblest faithful work, that no young worker on the face of the earth is beneath the Sunnah of the Best of creation, and that the wages of the hills, counted coin by coin, were counted by heaven as the first entries in the treasury of a life that would enrich all mankind.