Every city inducts its young into the worship of its own age, and the Makkah into which the young Muhammad ﷺ was growing was a master of induction. The idols stood about the Kaaba and filled the valley: around the House of Allah, three hundred and sixty of them at the coming of Islam, and in every house its gods; the feast days of the idols were the calendar of the year; the wine of the grape and of the date was the pride of every banquet; and when night fell upon the quarters, the gatherings of the young men assembled with their tambourines and their flutes and their immorality, and the fathers of Quraysh did not call these things sins but pleasures. Into this air the orphan of Abdullah walked for a quarter of a century, from his boyhood to his fortieth year, and came out of it without a single stain, so that Makkah itself, the least sentimental of witnesses, gave him the name al-Amin before any revelation had come. This is the event the master chronology records as the divine protection of his adolescence and youth, and it is not a small thing in the believer's eyes, for it is the visible half of a heavenly work: the preparing, without blemish, of the vessel that would carry the Book of Allah to mankind.
The protection was not left as an inference for later generations to draw; it is stated in the sources as a doctrine of the sirah. Ibn Kathir, in his section on the early upbringing of the Messenger of Allah ﷺ and how Allah cared for him and protected him, transmits from Ibn Ishaq the words: the Messenger of Allah became a youth under the care and protection of Allah, who saved him from the evils of the jahiliyya because of the honor and mission He wished for him. When he grew up he was 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, which he avoided because of his nobility. And in the same pages Ibn Kathir records, in his own rendering, that the Messenger of Allah ﷺ 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. Let the believer read those words slowly, for they teach the theology of this whole event: it was not accident, and it was not mere temperament; it was the guardianship of the Lord of the Worlds, active and deliberate, over the boy He had chosen.
The clearest window into that guardianship is the report the chronology preserves of the two nights. Ibn Kathir transmits it from al-Bayhaqi, by way of Yunus ibn Bukayr from Muhammad ibn Ishaq, from Muhammad ibn Abdullah ibn Qays ibn Makhrama, from al-Hasan ibn Muhammad ibn Ali ibn Abi Talib, from his father and from his grandfather Ali ibn Abi Talib (may Allah be pleased with him), who said that he heard the Messenger of Allah ﷺ say that he had no interest in those practices with women that the people of the jahiliyya used to perform, except on two nights in which Allah, Almighty and Glorious is He, restrained him. One evening, the report runs, I and a young man of Makkah were watching some sheep belonging to some people there, and I said to him: would you keep an eye on my sheep so I can go into Makkah and spend an evening there like other lads? He agreed, so I went into town and stopped at the first house where I heard the music of tambourines and flutes. I asked what was going on and was told that a man and a woman had married. So I sat down to watch; but Allah struck my ears, and I swear that the next thing I knew I was being awakened by the sun's touch. I went back to my friend, who asked what I had done, and I replied that I had not done a thing, and told him what I had seen. Then one other night I asked him to watch my sheep so I could go to a party, and the same thing happened: the marriage, the music, the sleep that sealed his ears until the morning sun. And by Allah, the report concludes, I never tried or returned to anything like that thereafter, right up to when Allah Almighty and Glorious honored me with His prophethood.
What a scene the report unfolds for the believer's meditation. Here is the future Messenger of Allah ﷺ as a young man of the hills, shepherding for others, curious about the wedding songs of his own city, asking a friend for an hour's cover as young men have always done; and here is the mercy of Allah descending upon his curiosity in the form of a sleep so total that the night passed over him like a train in the dark. Not a rebuke, not an angel with a drawn sword, but sleep, gentle and absolute; and twice, so that no reading of chance could survive. The sirah has preserved the honesty of this report with a care that should increase, not diminish, the believer's trust: Ibn Kathir transmits it and then comments, this is a very strange tradition; it could be about Ali himself, with the final words about prophethood having been added, but Allah knows best. The scholars of the sirah received the report with this grading openly attached, and this project follows them: the two nights stand as the remembered evidence of the divine restraint, carried by a channel whose unusual character Ibn Kathir himself flagged, which is the way of honesty in the sciences of prophetic biography. The seed of the event is the sleep; the grading of the report is the framework within which the believer holds it; and both are recorded here exactly as the tradition transmits them.
The protection of his youth ran into small corners that reveal its thoroughness. Ibn Ishaq relates that the Prophet ﷺ used to tell of the practices of the age of ignorance from which Allah had protected him in his youth: once I happened to be amongst some Quraysh boys carrying stones for those games boys play, each of us exposed, having taken up his shirt and fastened it around his neck to carry stones in; I was running along with them in this way and, having fallen behind, I suddenly received a very painful slap from someone who spoke the words: put your shirt on properly. So I took it and put it back on properly and began carrying the stones around my neck with my shirt on, alone among my friends. Even in the games of children, the modesty of the future Messenger was guarded by a hand no boy could see; and the believers have ever read in that slap the honor in which Allah holds the covering of His servants, a lesson the whole Ummah would one day receive in the Book. Ibn Kathir sets the anecdote beside the account in the Sahih collections and observes that if it is not the same event, it precedes it and seems to prepare for it.
The event it prepares for is the report of the shirt at the rebuilding of the Kaaba, which the two Sahihs have made one of the best-known narrations of the Prophet's ﷺ youth. Ibn Kathir transmits it through Abd al-Razzaq, from Ibn Jurayj, from Amr ibn Dinar, from Jabir ibn Abdullah (may Allah be pleased with him): when the Kaaba was being built, the Messenger of Allah ﷺ went off to transport stones, and al-Abbas said to him: put your shirt over your shoulder for the stones. He did so, but fell to the ground and his eyes were drawn up to heaven; then he got up and said: it was my shirt, and it was put back on him properly. The same event is transmitted from Ibn Abbas, from his father al-Abbas (may Allah be pleased with them both), who was walking with his nephew among the builders with their shirts bound around their necks as the laborers did: while I was walking along with Muhammad in front of me, he fell down and stretched out flat on his face, and I hurried along and threw down my rocks, and he was looking up to heaven. I asked him what was wrong, and he got up and took his shirt, saying: I was forbidden from walking uncovered. Ibn Abbas added: I hid this from the others for fear they would say he was mad. Here is the protection of Allah operating at the very threshold of adulthood, when the young men of the work-site had bared themselves to the labor, and the beloved of Allah was not permitted to remain uncovered even among them, even for stones that would build the House of the Lord.
As for the idols themselves, the record of his avoidance is emphatic and multiply transmitted. The reader of the earlier events of this chronology has already heard him, at the cell of the monk Bahira, refuse to answer by al-Lat and al-Uzza, saying that he hated nothing so much as them. To that testimony the years of youth add the report of Zayd ibn Harithah (may Allah be pleased with him), transmitted by al-Bayhaqi: there was a brass idol called Isaf and Naila which the polytheists would touch as they performed their circumambulation, and the Messenger of Allah ﷺ said: do not touch it; and when Zayd, out of the curiosity of a new Muslim, touched it anyway, the Prophet ﷺ asked him: were you not forbidden to do that? And the chain adds the oath: by Him who honored him and revealed to him the Holy Book, he never saluted an idol right up to when Allah Almighty honored him as He did and gave revelation to him. Never once, from his boyhood to his fortieth year, in a city whose calendar and commerce and kinship all bent toward the idols, did the tongue of the chosen one of Allah speak a word of devotion to any of them.
The sources preserve, beside this, two reports that show the scholars weighing every word of the tradition. The first is the report of the two angels, transmitted from Jabir (may Allah be pleased with him): the Prophet ﷺ used to attend the ceremonies of the polytheists along with them, until he heard two angels behind him, one saying to the other: 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 with the polytheists. Ibn Kathir records that several authorities deny the attribution of this report to Uthman ibn Abi Shaybah, and that Imam Ahmad commented upon it: his brother would never speak any such words. Al-Bayhaqi then relates from various sources the reconciliation: the meaning is that he witnessed those who saluted idols, and that was before Allah made revelation to him. The second is the account of Jubayr ibn Mut'im (may Allah be pleased with him), who said: I saw the Messenger of Allah ﷺ while he was a member of his people's religion; he would station himself on a camel of his at Arafat among his people, so that he would move forward with them, Allah the Almighty and Glorious giving him blessing thereby. And al-Bayhaqi explains the strange phrase with the words the Ummah has received ever since: the meaning of his being of his people's religion refers to the remnants of the heritage of Ibrahim and Ismail, peace be upon them both; the Prophet ﷺ never at any time associated with Allah any other god. The young man who stood at Arafat was standing in the rite of the two prophets, not in the innovation of the hums of Quraysh, who kept back from the station; and Jubayr, searching for a lost camel, was astonished to find him there.
The natural question of the youth's companionship with his age is thus answered by the sources with exactness: he lived among his people, traded with them, pastured for them, stood at their pilgrim stations and attended their public life, but he did not bow to their gods, did not feast at their sacrifices to the idols, did not drink their wine, and did not follow their young men into the night. The scholars of the sirah have transmitted in agreement that no cup of wine ever reached him, and that no nocturnal gathering of the age of ignorance ever counted him twice. In the place of those pleasures, the sources show what filled his youth: the solitary life of the hills above Makkah, as the earlier events of this chronology have recorded, and, as Lings adds, the training his uncles saw to it that he received with his cousins Abbas and Hamzah in the use of the weapons of the day. He was of average height and average strength, with a marked aptitude for archery, and he gave every promise of being an excellent bowman, like his great ancestors Ibrahim and Ismail (peace be upon them both); and the strength of his eyesight was proverbial, for he was reputed to be able to count no less than twelve of the stars of the Pleiades. What wholesome thing his age offered, he took; what was foul, he was kept from; and the difference between the two lists is the very line that the Book of Allah would one day draw between the excellent and the abominable.
Upon this protected youth the Quran set its seal long after, in words revealed from above seven heavens. Your companion has neither strayed nor erred, the Lord of the Worlds declared of His Messenger ﷺ, nor does he speak out of desire; it is but a revelation revealed. The verse was revealed of the Messenger in his prophethood, yet the believers have always heard in it the verdict of Allah upon the whole life of the man, for the Companion of the revelation who neither strayed nor erred had not strayed or erred in his youth either, when no revelation held him but only the preserving hand of his Lord. And the Book teaches the general law under which his protection falls: the one who said of the rejected Satan that he has no authority over those who believe and who place their reliance upon their Lord. The young Muhammad ﷺ was the perfect case of that authority refused, before belief was even named; and the Book itself, in the Surah of the Morning Hours, recalled his condition before guidance found its fullness in him: did He not find you, and guide you. What the soul lacks before guidance, the Lord supplied; what the age pushed upon him, the Lord turned away; and the two operations together are the divine upbringing of the Best of creation.
The scholars call this guarding of the prophets ismah, the protection from disbelief and from the abominations that would disgrace a message. It is not the removal of the human will, for the report of the two nights shows a young man who intended, and was prevented; it is the surrounding of the will with a mercy that does not permit the chosen vessel to be cracked before the wine of revelation is poured into it. Nor was the protection unique to him among the messengers: Yusuf (peace be upon him) was hemmed in on every side by the design of the governor's wife, and the proof of his Lord arrived at the hinge of the moment; Musa (peace be upon him) struck the Egyptian and fled into a guarding providence that fed him at Madyan until his commission; and Dawud (peace be upon him) kept his kingship from consuming his worship. Allah, Glorified and Exalted be He, prepares His messengers in the workshops of the world and then keeps the workshop's dust from settling upon what He has polished; and the youth of Makkah saw the purest specimen of that art, a man forty years in the market of idols and untouched by the merchandise.
To the believer who reads this event in the age of screens and invitations, the lesson arrives with unusual force. The young man of Makkah did not inherit a sheltered suburb; he inherited the most entertaining city of Arabia, and the protection he enjoyed was a protection within reach of every tambourine in town. The report of the two nights teaches the way of escape for every young believer who has stood at the door of a gathering and felt its pull: resolve upon purity, and the One who sealed the ears of His Messenger with sleep is able to close for you the door you have not the strength to close yourself. And it teaches the parents and the elders of this Ummah the value of the years: the character that carries a lifetime is guarded in its teens, and the companion of the protected youth is the prayer of a household more than the policing of a street. Purity is possible, the youth of the Prophet ﷺ declares to every generation; and it is possible not because the world was easier then, but because the Lord is the same now.
When the fortieth year arrived, the vessel that had been kept spotless through boyhood, adolescence, and manhood was carried to the cave of Hira, and there the revelation descended upon a heart that no idol had touched, no cup had clouded, and no night of the age of ignorance had ever claimed. The protection of the youth was the last preparation of the Messenger; and the Book that came to him would speak forever in his own person of the one who had been found and guided, who was neither astray nor erring, who spoke not from desire. The believer closes this event with the prayer the scene itself suggests: O Allah, guard our youth as You guarded the youth of Your Beloved ﷺ, and let the nights of our weakness become, by Your mercy, the mornings of our strength.