Khadijah Seeks a Reliable Commercial Agent

The roads had made Makkah, and Makkah had made her merchants. Between the Yemeni highlands in the winter and the Syrian plain in the summer the caravans of Quraysh ran their appointed rounds, and the city at the center of the desert had grown rich upon the toll of transit and the profit of exchange. Allah Himself had hallowed this rhythm in the Book He would one day send down in that very city, commanding Quraysh to consider the accustomed security of their winter and summer journeys and to worship the Lord of the House who had fed them against hunger and secured them against fear. Into this economy of roads the young Muhammad ﷺ had now entered as a man grown. The shepherd boy of the hills above Makkah, the orphan of Abdullah, the companion of his uncle's caravan at twelve years of age, stood now in his twenty-fifth year, and the city had long since given him its two great names: al-Sidiq, the Truthful, and al-Amin, the Trustworthy. The previous pages of this sirah have told how those names were earned; this event tells of the first fruit they were to bear in the wider world.

For on the other side of Makkah's merchant quarter there lived a woman whose affairs had grown too large for her own two hands. Khadijah bint Khuwaylid (may Allah be pleased with her) was a daughter of the clan of Asad of Quraysh, her line ascending through Khuwaylid ibn Asad ibn Abd al-Uzza ibn Qusayy to the very root of the Quraysh tree, Qusayy ibn Kilab, the builder of the city's fortunes. She was first cousin to Waraqah ibn Nawfal, the Christian scholar of the scriptures, and through the old marriages of the houses she stood a distant cousin to the sons of Hashim. She had already been married twice, and since the death of her second husband she had kept the management of her wealth entirely in her own hands. Ibn Ishaq, as transmitted by Ibn Kathir, describes her in words the Ummah has never needed to amend: Khadijah daughter of Khuwaylid was a merchant woman of stature and wealth, and Ibn Ishaq adds, in the same breath, the statement which is the foundation of this whole event: she would employ men to trade her goods on a profit-sharing basis. Elsewhere in the same passage the classical line rises higher still: Khadijah was the highest-born, most respected, and wealthiest woman in Quraysh, and all her people were covetous of her standing and her fortune and would have attained it if they could.

The arrangement she used was the ancient and honorable institution the jurists of Islam would later codify as the qirad, and which the Iraqis called the mudarabah: the owner of capital entrusts it to a traveling agent, the agent carries it to the distant markets, trades with his skill and his labor, and the two divide the profit upon terms agreed beforehand. It is a covenant of trust in its purest commercial form. The principal never sees the foreign market; the agent holds her silver and her goods for weeks beyond her sight, among strangers whose scales he could short and whose prices he could shade, and no bailiff of the desert rides after him to compel an honest account. The whole institution therefore rests, as the merchants of Makkah knew well, upon one thing only: the character of the man. The caravan road is a furnace in which reputations are either annealed or burnt, and Quraysh had watched a hundred able men come back from Syria rich in goods and poor in trust. A wealthy woman who wished her capital to survive the journey therefore shopped first of all, not for cleverness, nor for lineage, nor even for experience, but for integrity. Safiur Rahman al-Mubarakpuri, in his digest of the classical account, renders the practical core of it: she used to employ men to do her business for a certain percentage of the profits, and the Quraysh were mostly a people of trade.

The reputation to which her inquiries now turned had been built quietly, over years, in the markets and houses of Makkah. Martin Lings, following the earliest sources, records how it spread: Muhammad had come to be known throughout Mecca 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. Here is the economy of a good name laid bare: no herald announced him, no patron sponsored him; men simply gave him their goods, received back their due, and told their neighbors. Lings adds the second channel which the believing reader will not miss: Khadijah had also heard much good of him from family sources. The houses were kin; the aunt of one household was the grandmother of another; the news of a Hashimite youth of flawless dealing crossed the valley of Makkah as easily as the evening wind. Abdul Rahman al-Sheha, in his summary of the Prophet's early life, sets the divine preparation beneath it all: Allah, Exalted be He, purified Muhammad from the impurities of the pre-Islamic ways and endowed him with every noble manner, until his only nickname among his people was the trustworthy, the honest, on account of the truthfulness and integrity of which they had firsthand experience.

The Messenger of Allah ﷺ himself would later teach the Ummah the law which his own youth had already illustrated. Truthfulness, he said, in the hadith of Abdullah ibn Masud (may Allah be pleased with him) carried in both Sahih collections, leads to righteousness, and righteousness leads to Paradise, and a man keeps speaking the truth until he is written before Allah as a siddiq, a truthful one. What believer's heart does not pause at the correspondence: the city of the idols had already written him al-Sadiq, and al-Amin beside it, decades before the Book of Allah would descend upon his heart. Allah, Glorified and Exalted be He, does not train His prophets in hiddenness only to disclose them unannounced; He causes their characters to go before them like a lamp carried through the streets at dusk, so that when the appointed meeting comes, the world is already half-prepared to trust. So it was in the courts of kings, and so, first of all, it was in the counting houses of Makkah.

His own fortunes at this point deserve the reader's honest attention, for they measure the mercy of what was about to happen. Lings has described the twenties of the Messenger of Allah ﷺ with the sobriety of the sources: having passed his twentieth year he received more and more invitations to join one or another of his kinsmen on their travels, until the day came when he was asked to take charge of the goods of a merchant unable to travel himself, and his success in that capacity led to other similar engagements; thus he was able to earn a better livelihood, and marriage became a possibility. The house of Abu Talib was noble and beloved and poor; the nephew who had been pasturing sheep for the meager wage the Makkans paid had shouldered his own keep since boyhood. He was, at twenty-five, a man of upright standing and slender means, whose entire capital was his name. It is one of the quiet splendors of this event that the woman who now sent for him held more wealth than any in Quraysh, and that what she sought from him was precisely the one possession he had in abundance.

For she did seek him. Ibn Ishaq's sentence, as Ibn Kathir transmits it, is the hinge upon which the whole Khadijah chapter turns: when she heard of the truthfulness, the trustworthy nature, and the fine character of the Messenger of Allah ﷺ, she sent for him and proposed that he should take some of her goods on a trading venture to Syria. The believing reader marks the order of the qualities: truthfulness first, trustworthiness second, fineness of character third, and lineage nowhere in the list. Other employers in Makkah weighed the clan of the applicant; the daughter of Khuwaylid weighed his word. Other merchants would have preferred a man of forty campaigns to Syria over a man of twenty-five with one boyhood journey behind him; she preferred the one of whom no ill report had ever crossed the valley. Al-Mubarakpuri renders her deliberation in the idiom of commerce itself: when Khadijah was informed of Muhammad's truthful words, his great honesty, and his kind manners, she sent for him. Ibn Kathir's later portrait of her confirms the discernment implied: she was a decisive, noble, and intelligent lady, possessed of all the fine qualities Allah had endowed her with. The reader of the sirah knows what those qualities were shortly to encounter; here, at the threshold, they appear simply as the wisdom of a merchant princess who knew the difference between a bargain and a trust.

There is a divine grammar in the Quran's treatment of earning which this event fulfills to the letter. Allah revealed, in the verse the Ummah recites on the station of women and men alike: for men a share of what they have earned, and for women a share of what they have earned; so ask Allah of His bounty. And He revealed of His servants' labor: I waste not the work of any worker among you, male or female. Before those verses came down, Makkah already contained their illustration: a woman whose fortune was her own earning, and a man whose living was his own labor, meeting lawfully in the marketplace of a common enterprise. Khadijah the tajirah, the merchant woman, is not an anomaly of the pre-Islamic economy; she is a proof of the pattern Allah affirms in His Book, that the bounty of the Lord is sought by the hand of women as by the hand of men, and that neither the seeker nor the sought-for amount is dishonored by the asking. Her caravan was her asking; his agency would be his.

The ethics of the hiring itself belong to the Lord of the hire no less than to the two parties. Al-Sheha records among the market teachings of the Prophet ﷺ the word which the Sunan carry: give the hired man his wage before his sweat dries. And he records the greater word of the Lord of the market: Allah says, I am the third of two partners, unless one of them betrays the other; if he betrays him, I depart. Khadijah's practice of profit-sharing was already woven of such law, centuries before it was revealed: she did not send a slave to be squeezed and discarded, she sent a free covenant in which the agent's gain was written into the gain of the house, and the blessing of the enterprise stood or fell upon the honesty of both. That she was a woman of this disposition the sequel of the sirah will abundantly prove; the event at hand establishes that the enterprise she now planned was, from its first conception, a covenant of mutual benefit under the eye of Allah.

The believer may also read in her practice the outline of the law which revelation would later set in permanent letters. The Quran, when it came, would draw its famous line between the sale and the usury, permitting the one because it is exchange by consent and forbidding the other because it is growth without labor or risk, and the jurists of the Ummah would build upon that line the entire architecture of lawful partnership. Khadijah's profit-sharing stood from the beginning upon the permitted side of that line: her silver traveled, her agent toiled, the risk of the road was shared between them, and neither devoured the increase of the other's substance in idleness. The fitrah of the honest merchant, before the Book named its boundaries, already walked within them; and the house which Allah was preparing for His Messenger ﷺ was a house whose very ledgers were a kind of unconscious prophecy.

The student of the sources must also record, with the honesty the sirah sciences demand, the form of the report upon which this event rests. Ibn Ishaq related the Khadijah sequence as part of his continuous narrative of the Messenger's life, without resting it upon a named chain of transmitters to the Prophet ﷺ, and Ibn Kathir transmits it in that form under his section on the marriage of the Prophet to Khadijah daughter of Khuwaylid. It is, in the technical language of the scholars, of the mursal material of the maghazi, like the Bahira account which an earlier event of this sirah has already weighed. Yet the historians of the Ummah received it with acceptance across every line: Ibn Sa'd carries the same sequence with the servant Maysarah and the monk named in his own transmission; al-Mubarakpuri's digest follows Ibn Hisham; Lings renders it from Ibn Ishaq and Ibn Sa'd with his sources named upon the page. And upon the frame of the event Ibn Kathir sets, from al-Bayhaqi's Dala'il an-Nubuwwah, a chapter heading which is itself a classical verdict: the employment the Messenger of Allah ﷺ had before he married Khadijah. The scholars did not doubt the stage; they built a chapter for it.

Ibn Kathir himself gives this venture its place in the geography of the Prophet's ﷺ life. In the passage where he gathers the reports of the light of prophethood he records that the Messenger of Allah traveled to Busra twice: the first time in the company of his uncle Abu Talib when he was a boy of twelve, where the story of the monk Bahira was set, and the second time with Maysarah, the freed man of Khadijah, while on a trading expedition on her behalf. The employments of the Messenger of Allah ﷺ were thus always few and always providential: the hills of the shepherds, and this one road to Syria, trodden first as a boy carried by love and now again as a man carried by trust. That Busra was the first place in Syria to receive the light of prophethood, as Ibn Kathir remarks in the same passage, the following pages of this sirah will have occasion to remember.

One further remembrance belongs to the portrait of the woman herself. The biographical tradition relates that before Islam she was known among Quraysh as al-Tahira, the pure, a name the Makkans gave her for the blamelessness of her life, so that even the city of the idols had already testified to the chastity of the character of the house into which the Messenger of Allah ﷺ was now to enter by way of commerce. The highest-born, most respected, and wealthiest woman of Quraysh, twice widowed and unrivaled in fortune, was at the same time a woman of guarded purity and decisive mind; and the reader who has followed this sirah from the light of the mother of the Prophet ﷺ will recognize in this portrait the same divine fastidiousness which chose every other vessel of the story: the womb of Aminah, the milk of Halimah, and now, at the gate of manhood, the board and the purse of Khadijah.

What Allah was writing beneath the ledger, no merchant of Makkah could yet read. A caravan to Syria is, in the arithmetic of men, a matter of costs and prices; in the arithmetic of the Lord of the worlds it was to be the road on which two inheritors of the promise of Ibrahim (peace be upon him) should be brought together, the widow of the house of Asad and the orphan of the house of Hashim, the woman whose wealth would shelter the mission and the man whose truthfulness would justify her shelter. He who taught the ants their storehouses and the birds their seasons was teaching His beloved ﷺ the weights of the market, the patience of the road, and the care of another's goods, and was teaching Khadijah, without her knowing it, to invest her fortune in the one account upon which heaven itself would pay dividends. The believer who reads this event stands where Makkah stood, watching a messenger being sent for, and knowing what Makkah did not: that the sending-for was the first drawing-back of a curtain.

So the word went out from the house of Khuwaylid's daughter to the lane of Abu Talib's house, and the young man of the two names was called to the appointment of his life. That he would decline or bargain was never in question; the question was upon what terms the trust would be set, and those terms, with the double commission which the master record transmits, and the consultation of the uncle whose counsel governed the house, belong to the next event of this sirah. Enough for this page that the seeking itself was accomplished: the wealthiest woman of Quraysh had searched her city for a man to carry her goods to Syria, and had found, in the estimation of the entire valley, only one name fit to bear them. Praise belongs to Allah, who raises the trustworthy before they are needed, and whose bounty, sought of Him alone, was already traveling toward both these servants of His along a road they had not yet mounted.