Growing Reputation for Honesty and Trustworthiness

The earning of a name and the growing of a reputation are two different events, and the chronology of the Best of creation honors the difference. The titles al-Sadiq and al-Amin had been given to the young Muhammad ﷺ in the years of his early youth, as the previous event has recorded; but in the trade years of his early twenties, between the pact of chivalry and the caravan of Khadijah, the title underwent a change that no orator could have commanded: it stopped being the finding of the neighbors who knew him and became the common knowledge of the whole city. This is the event the master record calls the growing reputation for honesty and trustworthiness, and its historian must attend to the peculiar miracle of it, for reputations in Makkah were fragile things, minted in the morning and debased by noon; and this one, through four years of daily commerce, only rose and rose, until the day came when a stranger from the far clans could be told of a transaction and ask in reply nothing but whether al-Amin had witnessed it.

The clearest certificate of the growth is the sentence of Lings, which deserves to be quoted whole from this project's knowledge base: now Muhammad ﷺ had come to be known throughout Makkah as al-Amin, the Reliable, the Trustworthy, the Honest, and this was initially owing to the reports of those who had entrusted their merchandise to him on various occasions. Each clause of the sentence is a measurement. Throughout Makkah: the name had crossed the boundaries of clan and quarter, always the hardest crossing in that jealous city, so that the houses of Abd Shams and Nawfal, who shared nothing with the house of Hashim but the valley, spoke of him by the title with which his own quarter had first honored him. The Reliable, the Trustworthy, the Honest: three English words carrying the layers of the one Arabic surname, the man you may lean upon, the man who holds your goods, the man whose word is fact. And initially owing to the reports of those who had entrusted their merchandise to him: the sources of the reputation are named, and they are the market itself, buyer after buyer and principal after principal, each returned caravan a fresh audit and each fresh audit a new circulation of the finding. Lings adds that Khadijah had also heard much good of him from family sources; the reputation had by now many tributaries, but the river began in the ledgers.

How does such a verdict travel in a city without newspapers? By the oldest of engines, the speech of satisfied men. The merchant of Makkah who had sent goods to Bostra or sold in the fairs came home and was asked by his fellows how the road had used him, and the answer moved from assembly to assembly along the chains of the market: the goods were sold as he said, the account was rendered as it stood, nothing was missing and nothing was late. In the economy of the jahiliyya, where no court enforced a contract and no sheriff served a claim, reputation was the only legal system, and the caravan city ran on the mutual credit of names; and into that system the young Hashimite's name entered like gold into a market of clipped coins. The companions of the caravans, the hostlers and the water-carriers, the women who sold and the boys who ran, all of them carried the title out of the valley and up the roads, so that the reputation grew geographically as well as socially; the Syrian dealers would know of him before he ever came again with Khadijah's goods, and the tale of the youth whose accounts never erred was told at wells where his face had never been seen. The believer sees the providence in the circulation: the Lord of the Worlds was publishing His Messenger's character across the trade routes of Arabia for years before He published His Messenger's message.

A reputation for trustworthiness in a city like Makkah was more than praise; it was a public office. The Makkans had no vaults but their houses and no banks but their friends, and the practice of the deposit, the wadi'ah, ran through every level of the town: the traveler's goods left with a neighbor, the merchant's silver left with a kinsman, the family treasure left with a chief when a feud made houses unsafe. The man whose custody was certain became the city's treasury, and the growing reputation of the young al-Amin meant that in these years more and more of the town's quiet wealth came to sleep in his keeping. The sources do not give the deposit-lists of the trade years, but the fruit of the practice is one of the most famous facts of the sirah: on the eve of the Hijrah, when the chiefs of Quraysh had resolved upon his murder and he was to slip from Makkah with the hunters at the door, he left behind him in the city the deposits of the very men who were plotting his death, and the accounts were rendered back to their owners through his custodian. What a biography the Ummah holds in that fact: the city that would not believe him about heaven still trusted him with its gold on earth; the enemies who called him a liar and a sorcerer sent, by the irony of their own knowledge, for their deposits and knew they would not be cheated. The Hijrah belongs to a distant page of the chronology, but the habit it reveals was grown in these years, deposit by deposit, trust by trust, in the Makkah of his early twenties.

The Sunnah itself defines how total this fidelity to trusts was, by drawing the negative image of it. In the Sahih of al-Bukhari, from Abu Hurayrah (may Allah be pleased with him), the Messenger of Allah ﷺ taught that the sign of the hypocrite is three: when he speaks he lies, when he promises he breaks his promise, and when he is entrusted he betrays the trust. The hadith was revelation's doctrine in the Madinan years; but the Makkah of the trade years had already run the test upon the young Hashimite in reverse, and could report that in him none of the three signs had ever once been found. His speech never lied, so the elders said of him that they had never known him to utter a falsehood; his promises never broke, so his engagements led to further engagements; his trusts never failed, so the deposits multiplied. The believer should feel the force of the definition: hypocrisy, in the anatomy of the hadith, is precisely the failure of the three stations the youth of Makkah had perfected, as if the Sunnah had drawn the portrait of his opposers by inverting the portrait the city had drawn of him.

The growth of the reputation in these years is caught in a single report of al-Zuhri, transmitted through Ibn Kathir. In his account of the rebuilding of the Kaaba, Ibn Wahb related from Yunus from Ibn Shihab al-Zuhri that when the Messenger of Allah ﷺ was a youth he arbitrated the placing of the Black Stone, and al-Zuhri continued: as he increased in age he became only more pleasing, and so they gave him the sobriquet al-Amin, the trustworthy, even before revelation came down to him; and they adopted the practice of never slaughtering a camel for sacrifice without seeking him, and he would say a prayer over it for them. Ibn Kathir sets the report down with the remark that its context is good, being from the biographical writings of al-Zuhri, while noting openly the strange wording in its opening about the timing, since the rebuilding of the Kaaba is established as occurring when the Prophet ﷺ was thirty-five. The believer receives both halves of Ibn Kathir's judgment: the good context and the flagged anomaly, for that is how the sirah handles its reports. And the content of the report lights the very years of this event, for it records that his pleasingness grew with his age, that the sobriquet preceded the revelation by years, and that the religious life of the city had begun to route itself through him: a people who sacrificed to their idols would not slaughter a camel without calling for the blessing of the young man who had never bowed to one. The title was becoming liturgy.

The reputation then did what reputations exist to do: it opened doors. Khadijah bint Khuwaylid (may Allah be pleased with her), the wealthy businesswoman of the clan of Asad, who had already been twice widowed and had made it her custom to hire men to trade on her behalf, heard of the truthfulness, trustworthy nature, and fine character of the Messenger of Allah ﷺ, as Ibn Kathir transmits from Ibn Ishaq, and sent for him, proposing that he take some of her goods on a trading venture to Syria, and offering him better terms than she gave other merchants. The chronology assigns the commission and the journey to the events of his twenty-fifth year; here the record notes only the mechanism, that the greatest commercial door of the young man's life was opened to him not by kinship, for she was only a distant cousin, and not by wealth, for he had little, but by the reputation itself, which had crossed the market and the assemblies and entered the reckoning of the sharpest business mind in Makkah. The reports that had carried his name through the caravan routes now carried it into a house that would become the first home of Islam; and the woman who trusted the reports would become the first of the believers. What the market of Makkah had audited for years, the future of the faith would build upon.

And the reputation held its value to the very edge of the pre-prophetic years. Ibn Kathir transmits the account of the Black Stone in the tradition of Ibn Ishaq: when Quraysh rebuilt the Kaaba in the Prophet's ﷺ thirty-fifth year and fell into a dispute over which clan should lift the stone into its place, until the clans were on the edge of a battle of alliances, they resolved that the first man to enter by the door of the mosque should arbitrate between them, and the first man to enter was the Messenger of Allah ﷺ, and when they saw him they said: this is al-Amin; we are satisfied; this is Muhammad. A parallel channel, from Mujahid, from his mawla al-Sa'ib ibn Abdullah who had himself worked among the builders, reaches the same cry in the idiom of the workmen: well, it is the trustworthy who has come. The fuller telling of that arbitration belongs to the event of those years in the master chronology; it is recalled here only for the verdict it preserves, because it shows the reputation at its full height on the eve of revelation: a city at daggers drawn, every clan armed with its pride, able to agree upon one thing only, that the man walking through the door could be trusted by all of them at once. Fifteen years of deposits and accounts and kept words stand behind that unanimous cry; and the same voice that satisfied the clans in the hour of the stone would, five years later, begin the recitation that would satisfy the souls of whoever Allah willed from among them.

The Book of Allah, revealed through the tongue of the trustworthy one, commands the very virtues his reputation had announced. O you who believe, the Lord says in the Surah of Women, Allah commands you to render the trusts to those to whom they are due, and when you judge between people, to judge with justice. The two halves of the command were the two halves of his Meccan name: the trusts restored, and the arbitration that satisfied every clan; and the mufassirun have noted that the verse gathers the whole duty of the Ummah's public life into the two offices the young al-Amin had held without title. And the Surah of the Ascending Stairways paints the portrait of the successful believers in the same colors: successful indeed are the believers, and among their marks, that they are of their trusts and their covenants true. The believer reads such passages and remembers that they came down upon the man of whom the whole city had said the same thing for decades; the Quran's portrait of the faithful is, at its center, the portrait of their Prophet ﷺ, and his portrait had been drawn first, in the marketplace, by men who did not yet know what they were drawing.

Here lies the wisdom of the growing reputation in the design of prophethood, and the scholars of the sirah have paused upon it in every century. Allah, Glorified and Exalted be He, could have made the first believers out of signs and wonders alone; instead He built the first decade of Islam upon the credibility of a name. When the revelation came and the Messenger of Allah ﷺ said that the Trust of the heavens had been placed in his keeping, the city was not asked to gamble on a stranger: it was asked whether the man who had never lied to them about a dirham could be lying to them about the Lord of the Worlds. Abu Bakr (may Allah be pleased with him) believed without hesitation, and the scholars have always read his swiftness as the fruit of a lifetime of knowing the man; the first believers came overwhelmingly from those who had traded with him, neighbored him, traveled with him, and deposited with him; and the earliest argument of the Quraysh, for all their rejection, was never about the messenger's character but only about his message. Even Abu Lahab and Abu Jahl, who fought him to the end, never once dared to tell Makkah that Muhammad ﷺ had ever cheated a scale or broken a word. The reputation grown in these four years was the floor of the first mosque of the heart; upon it the faith of the first community stood, and upon that community the Ummah stands today.

The believer who traces the growth of that name learns the sober arithmetic of reputation as a trust in itself. It is earned at the speed of conduct, a coin a day, and it is spent at the speed of scandal, a fortune in an hour; nothing else in the moral life so exactly rewards patience and punishes shortcut. The young man of Makkah never campaigned for his title; he never corrected a market rumor in his own favor; he simply conducted ten thousand transactions as though the Auditor of the scales were standing at the stall, which He was. And the believer learns also what the title finally weighs: it made no one a prophet, for many trustworthy men have lived and died without revelation; but when prophethood came to the trustworthy one, the world could hear him without first having to learn his name. So the Ummah should ask, each for their own account, what their street and their market and their trade have concluded from their ledger, for the Muslim carries the name of the al-Amin of Makkah, and the world still audits the heirs.

The event closes where it began, with the verdict of a watching city. Makkah said of the young Muhammad ﷺ that he was the most truthful of speakers and the safest of hands, and said it before heaven had said a word; and heaven, when it spoke, took the city's word into its own vocabulary, calling the Messenger trustworthy in the assembly of the Throne. The reputation that grew through the trade years outlived the market that grew it, and the caravan roads that published it are dust, and the title stands: al-Sadiq, al-Amin, the Truthful, the Trustworthy, the biography Allah wrote in a city's memory before He wrote His Book. What believer would not pray, at the close of such an event, for a share of that inheritance: to be believed when absent, entrusted when tested, and named, in whatever small market the Lord has appointed, by the beautiful names of an honest life; for such was the youth of the Best of creation, and such is the inheritance of his Way.