Acceptance of Khadijah's Trading Commission

The seeking being accomplished, the offer itself was now set before him. Khadijah bint Khuwaylid (may Allah be pleased with her) had heard, from the merchants and the family channels alike, of the truthfulness, the trustworthy nature, and the fine character of Muhammad ﷺ, and she had sent for him and spoken her purpose: that he should take some of her goods on a trading venture to Syria. An offer of agency in Makkah was no small document. It was a covenant of capital and labor in which the principal surrendered her silver and her merchandise to the agent's keeping for the length of the journey, and the agent surrendered his skill, his strength, and his name to the increase of her house. Upon its terms the whole venture would stand: what share of the gain should be his, what duties should bind him, what accompaniment should be provided for him. The sources lift a corner of the negotiation which followed, and what the reader sees beneath it is the economy of a reputation.

For the terms she offered were not the ordinary terms. Ibn Ishaq, as Ibn Kathir transmits, records that she offered him better terms than she did other merchants, and the received chronology which this project follows renders the offer in its fuller form: double the customary commission. Martin Lings gives the phrase in the idiom of the counting house: his fee would be the double of the highest she had ever paid to a man of Quraysh. Safiur Rahman al-Mubarakpuri, digesting Ibn Hisham, writes that she offered him money to go to Syria and do her business, and would give him a higher rate than the others. The student of the sources should hold the three renderings together, as the believing scholar holds every transmission: the classical core is that she distinguished him above all her agents; the received record and Lings' rendering carry the distinction as a doubling of the customary rate. There is no contradiction to resolve, only a measurement to reverence. The wealthiest woman of Quraysh was paying a premium, and she was paying it for the one commodity which never loses its value on any road: certainty of custodianship. What believer's heart does not see in that premium the beginning of the recompense promised to the trustworthy, whose wage Allah Himself undertakes to multiply?

The man who received the offer measured it against circumstances which the sirah has not permitted the reader to forget. He was twenty-five years old, the orphan of Abdullah and Aminah, the ward of a house noble in lineage and thin in purse. He had pastured the flocks of Makkah for the qirats, the small coins, which the owners of sheep paid their shepherd; the Sahih collections would one day carry his own word for it, that no prophet was ever sent who had not shepherded sheep, and that he had shepherded them for the people of Makkah for qirats. In his twenties the invitations of his kinsmen had multiplied, until, as Lings records, 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 engagements, so that he was able to earn a better livelihood. But between that better livelihood and the independence of a household of his own there still lay a distance; the house of Abu Talib fed many mouths upon a chieftain's dignity and a poet's income. A commission at double terms, from the richest merchant in Quraysh, upon goods bound for the greatest market of the north, was therefore in the plain arithmetic of Makkah the opening of a door which no labor of his own could have opened so soon. Allah, Glorified and Exalted be He, feeds His servants by ways they do not compute; the ledger of this event was one of His quietest.

Before the acceptance, the record preserves a step whose omission would have been unnatural to the house of Abdul-Muttalib: he consulted his uncle Abu Talib. The master chronology of this project sets the consultation before the binding of the agreement, in keeping with the protocol the sirah had already shown in operation: that the young man of the house of Hashim took no weighty step alone, for the charge which the dying Abdul-Muttalib had laid upon Abu Talib had never been a charge of bread and shelter only, but of counsel and standing. The reader has already seen the uncle's hand in the disposition of marriages within his own family, and the gentle refusal he once gave his nephew in the matter of a bride, with the courteous economy of a guardian who shields a poor kinsman from the humiliation of a direct refusal. To such a house the proposal of Khadijah came as an affair of consequence, and the counsel of the uncle as its natural gate. The earliest line of the account, it must be said with the honesty the sirah sciences demand, compresses the exchange into a single clause: Ibn Ishaq relates that the Messenger of Allah ﷺ accepted this offer, and set off with her goods. The fuller protocol of the consultation is carried by the received tradition of the sirah, which this record follows; and the reader who weighs the two will find no collision, only a difference of scale, the historians' habit of naming the summit of a mountain without mapping every path up its side.

What did the acceptance mean, weighed as the men of Makkah would have weighed it? It meant weeks upon the northern road, the same long grade out of the valley which he had traveled as a boy of twelve beside this very uncle, the wells and the way-stations, the territories of tribes whose peace must be kept, the frontier of the empire of Rome, and at the end of it the great market where the goods of Arabia are sold and the goods of Syria bought. It meant the custody, waking and sleeping, of the property of another, a woman of the highest standing in Quraysh, whose fortune fed dependents and whose name was upon every tongue. It meant an accounting at the return, item against item, before a principal who had traded with a hundred men and been served by the best of them. To any other man of twenty-five such a charge would have been a burden of anxiety; to the man whom Makkah called al-Amin it was simply his element. The city had spent years writing his title into its ledgers; now the greatest of its commercial houses had countersigned it.

The lawfulness of what was agreed belongs to the pattern of the Book which this man would one day recite to that same city. When the revelation came, it would draw in permanent letters the boundary within which every such covenant must stand: O you who believe, do not consume your wealth among yourselves unjustly, but only through trade by mutual consent among you. And it would declare the twin principle in the verse the Ummah never tires of quoting: Allah has permitted trade and forbidden usury. The agreement struck in Makkah that day fulfilled both before either was revealed. There was no unjust consumption, for the terms were offered and accepted freely, and generously; there was no usury, for the increase of the venture was to be earned by carriage, labor, and risk upon the road, not extorted from need by a lender at rest. The fitrah of the truthful merchant and the pattern of the final Book ran in one channel; and the believer who notes how the pre-revelation life of the Prophet ﷺ kept anticipating the soon-to-be-revealed law will not call it coincidence, but the consistency of the Lord who authored both the man and the Book.

Between this acceptance and the caravan of his boyhood the difference was total, though the road was one. Then, a boy of twelve had ridden beside Abu Talib out of a child's longing, carried by the oath of a loving guardian; now a man of twenty-five stood vested with the venture itself, its goods his charge, its bargains his word, its profit his commission. Then he had watched the loading of the Syrian goods from the yard of his uncle's house; now his own hand would be upon the bales. The sequence of Allah's training is unmistakable to the believing eye: first the shepherd's solitary years upon the hills, which school patience and the care of what cannot speak; then the custody of merchants' goods at home, which school fidelity in small trusts; and now the great commission abroad, which schools the steward in the wide world of men. Allah does not entrust His greatest servants with the weightiest trusts until He has proven them in the lighter ones, and the Ummah should mark well that the final proof of the Messenger of Allah ﷺ, before the Cave of Hira itself, was a ledger.

Over every honest partnership, the Prophet ﷺ would later declare, there stands a Third. Al-Sheha records among the teachings of the marketplace the report carried by the Sunan: Allah, Exalted be He, says, I am the third of two partners, unless one of them betrays the other; if he betrays him, I depart. The covenant of Makkah was thus never a covenant of two only. The blessing of the venture hung upon the honesty of both parties, and both parties were honorable; and the believing reader knows, from the sequel of this sirah, that the Third who watched over this particular partnership had purposes in it far exceeding the price of Syrian cloth. The wage itself has a further remembrance in the classical corpus. Ibn Kathir transmits from al-Bayhaqi, in the chapter on the employments of the Messenger of Allah ﷺ before his marriage, the report of Jabir (may Allah be pleased with him): the Messenger of Allah said, my wage from Khadijah for two expeditions was a young she-camel. The chain of that report, Ibn Kathir records with his customary candor, runs by way of al-Rabi' ibn Badr, a weak link; it is retained, as the scholars retain such reports, for its corroboration of a stage the stronger lines have already fixed, not as a binding proof in itself. Its detail is precious all the same: the wage of the desert's most trusted agent was counted in camels, the currency of nobility, and the phrase two expeditions has been read by the scholars as a reminder that the employments of the Messenger of Allah ﷺ for the house of Khadijah may have numbered more ventures than the one the sirah narrates at length. The master record follows the single great journey whose signs the following pages must carry; the report of Jabir stands beside it as the honest variant it is.

With the agent the principal appointed her own man. Ibn Ishaq names him with the offer itself: she suggested he be accompanied by a youth in her employment whose name was Maysara. The received record describes him as her trusted servant, sent to assist with the logistics of the road and to observe the journey; al-Mubarakpuri calls him her hireling, and Abdul Rahman al-Sheha her bondman, for such he was, a servant and freedman of her household. Let the reader understand the arrangement as Makkah understood it, without the suspicion of the spy and without the naivety of the dreamer. A wealthy woman sends her fortune to a foreign market under a man of twenty-five however spotless his name, and with the goods she sends a servant of her own house, seasoned in her service, to ease the agent's burdens, to witness the transactions, and to carry home to her the first report of what the road held. It was prudence, not doubt; it was also, though neither party could yet know it, providence of the most precise kind. For Maysarah, traveling as the eyes of his mistress, was about to become one of the small number of human witnesses upon whom the earliest pages of the sirah would lean, the man who saw the conduct of the Messenger of Allah ﷺ upon the road and the word of the monk at the tree, and who told Khadijah all of it, exactly and without embellishment, upon the return. The servant sent to watch became, by the purity of what he saw, a witness sent by Allah.

The other side of the covenant carried its own duties, and the record of the Prophet's ﷺ teaching shows how the Lord of the market binds the payer no less than the paid. Give the hired man his wage, he would one day command, before his sweat dries. In the economy of revelation the wage is not a favor of the employer but a right which falls due at the instant of the labor, and the delay of it is counted among the oppressions. The house which the Messenger of Allah ﷺ was now to serve had already given proof of the temperament that such a law requires: the sequel of the sirah records that Khadijah, in a year of drought, made a gift of forty sheep and a howdah camel to Halimah, the foster mother of the Prophet ﷺ, whose flocks had been stricken. Generosity, in the house of Khuwaylid's daughter, was not an accident of mood but a principle of management; the agent who served her was entering no grinding service, but a partnership of the generous with the truthful. The believers should not wonder, then, at the increase which heaven afterwards wrote upon her goods.

There remains a quieter reading of the acceptance which the believing heart may keep. The two houses which the covenant now joined were already joined in the older covenants of Quraysh: the house of Asad, rich and established, and the house of Hashim, honored and straitened, both of them children of Qusayy, both of them keepers of the sanctuary's prestige. Contract by contract, the Lord of the houses was narrowing the distance between them, until the distance should vanish altogether in the marriage which the following events of this sirah will relate. What He begins in ledgers He completes in love; what He opens with a commission He crowns with a companionship. The man who accepted the goods of Khadijah that day believed he was accepting a journey; the One who had written the acceptance believed otherwise, or rather, believed in both at once, for His decree does not choose between the bread of His servants and the blessedness of their homes, but provides the one as the stair to the other.

So the agreement stood complete: the offer honored, the uncle consulted, the acceptance given, the terms double the customary rate, the servant appointed, the goods of the house of Khuwaylid set apart for the journey. The preparations of the caravan now began in the lanes of Makkah, and they belong with the departure itself to the next page of this record. Enough stands written here for the believer to pause over: the Messenger of Allah ﷺ, may the peace and blessings of Allah be upon him, binding himself in his twenty-fifth year to carry the wealth of a widow of Quraysh across the desert, upon terms freely offered and freely accepted, with the blessing of the guardian whom his dying grandfather had appointed, under the eye of the Lord who had promised, in words not yet sent down, to waste no particle of the work of any worker, male or female. The road was long, the markets were far, and the accounting would be exact; but the man of the two names had never yet rendered to any owner an account which shamed his title, and he never would. What neither principal nor agent yet knew was that the greatest increase of this venture would be counted neither in dirhams nor in cloth, and that the ledger of this acceptance would be balanced, in the fullness of Allah's design, by a marriage, a consolation, and fifteen years of the most honored companionship in the history of the Ummah.