Departure for the Syrian Trading Region

There is an hour, in every caravan city, when the loading ends and the ropes are drawn tight and the drivers stand up from their haunches and look at the sun. Makkah knew that hour as intimately as she knew the dawn: the hour when the bells of the loaded camels begin to speak, when the women of the merchants come to the doors of the lanes, when the water-skins are counted and recounted, and when the great northern procession begins to wind out from under the shadow of the mountains toward the long ascent that leads to Syria. On such a morning, in the days when Quraysh counted their years by the caravans, the merchandise of Khadijah bint Khuwaylid (may Allah be pleased with her) went out from the city under the charge of Muhammad ﷺ. He was twenty-five years old. The city which watched him ride out did not need to be told his name, for his name was the very reason the caravan existed: the al-Amin had taken the widow's goods to Syria, and the valley knew of no safer arrangement that wealth could purchase.

The road itself deserves the reader's reverence, for it was one of the arteries of the world. From Makkah the caravan road ran north through the Hijaz, from well to well and station to station, past the territories of the tribes whose peace must be kept and whose guides must be hired, along the flank of the great desert, until the land began to rise and green, and the frontier of the empire of Rome approached, and the first great market of Syria received the traveler: Busra of the Hawran, the gateway where the hides and the silver of Arabia were exchanged for the cloth and the grain of the north. The two annual journeys of Quraysh, the winter journey to the Yemen and the summer journey to Syria, were the twin lungs of the city's commerce, and Allah Himself would hallow the institution in a chapter of the Book revealed in that city, joining His worship to the security of those very caravan roads. This caravan was of the summer kind, the greater and the longer, and its going out under the agent of the house of Asad was an ordinary event of the Makkah calendar; but the believing reader, who has followed this sirah from its first light, knows by now that no event which carries the beloved of Allah ﷺ is ever ordinary in heaven's ledger.

The provisioning of such a caravan was itself a discipline of weeks. Water for the first stages was drawn and skinned at the wells of the valley; the beasts were culled and rested; the goods of the principal were weighed, wrapped, and bound in the loads which the drivers knew by heart; guides were secured who could read the road by the stars and the bones of the land; and the safe-conduct of the tribes along the way was arranged in the idiom of the desert, by compact and by gift, so that the caravan might pass where no writ of any king ran. The summer journey was the longer of the two annual ventures, and the merchants of Makkah reckoned its weeks as farmers reckon a season. All of this the servant of the house of Khuwaylid managed in the agent's name, and over all of it stood the agent's word, for upon the road the caravan is a small commonwealth whose law is the character of the man who leads it. Makkah had long since learned to read the fortunes of a venture by the countenance of its master; the face which rode out that morning gave the city leave to sleep.

For this was the same road upon which he had traveled once before, a boy of twelve holding to the stirrup of love, when his uncle Abu Talib swore to take him to Syria and never be parted from him. The reader has already walked that earlier journey in its own pages: the longing of the child, the oath of the guardian, the halt at Busra, and the monk Bahira who saw the cloud above the tree. Thirteen years and more had passed since then, and the difference between the two departures measures all that Allah had worked in the interval. The boy had ridden as a charge to be protected; the man rode as a protector of charges. The boy's provisions had been his uncle's poverty; the man's commission was the wealth of the richest house in Quraysh. The boy had been taken to Syria; the man was sent. And the road had other memories for this traveler than the boyhood journey alone: his father Abdullah had gone out by this same northern way in trade, while his mother carried him beneath her heart, and the light which she saw issuing from her had illuminated the castles of Busra before her son had ever drawn breath. The road of this event was thus his father's road, his mother's light's road, and his own boyhood road, and the One who had lit it from the womb was now sending him upon it in the strength of his manhood.

Consider what the venture trusted to a single name. The goods of Khadijah were not trinkets; she was a merchant woman of stature and wealth whose caravans were a byword among Quraysh, and the venture now bound for Syria represented the substance of a great fortune. For weeks together that fortune would lie beyond the reach of every court and every writ of Makkah, in the saddlebags of the road, subject to the tribes' goodwill, the weather's mercy, and the markets' honesty. The desert has no bailiffs; the only law that runs with the caravan is the law of reputation, and the whole economy of the Hijaz rested upon that unwritten code. To send one's goods with a man was to wager one's fortune upon his fear of Allah and of shame, and there was not in Makkah, on the record of the whole city, a surer name to wager upon than this one. The caravan which rode out that morning was, in the plain speech of the merchants, insured by the character of its agent; and the believer may say it more deeply: it was carried in the keeping of the Lord who had never yet let the al-Amin's hand be caught in anything unclean.

The believer may also stand a while with the inward side of the going out. The young man who rode at the head of the venture was the same orphan whom the valley had once watched trailing after his grandfather's couch, the same boy whom the fortune-teller of Lihb had cried after, the same child whose mother had died on a journey of her own upon the southern road. Now the journeying was his office and the road was his ledger, and those who had once carried him were represented in his escort by a servant and in his fortunes by the trust of a stranger's house. There is a quiet justice in the providence which reverses a life so gently: the carried becomes the carrier, the sheltered becomes the shelter of goods and men, and no trumpet sounds over the reversal, only the bells of the camels. So does Allah right the fortunes of the righteous: not by miracle upon the public stage, but by the slow promotion of the trustworthy through trusts, until the day comes when the promotion itself is seen to have been the miracle.

Beside the agent rode the servant. Maysarah, the youth of Khadijah's household, her trusted man, mounted with the caravan to assist with the logistics of the journey and to observe it, for such was the discretion of his mistress: not to spy upon the agent, but to serve him and to see. He would manage the needs of the road as the servant of the house, the counting of the loads, the errands of the market, the small diplomacy of the wells; and he would carry home, in his faithful memory, the account of what the journey held. The sources give him his four names in four idioms: Ibn Ishaq calls him a youth in her employment; Lings calls him a lad of hers; al-Mubarakpuri calls her hireling; al-Sheha calls her bondman. Behind the four idioms stands one figure, the servant-escort of a great venture, riding day upon day at the side of the Messenger of Allah ﷺ, and learning, with a servant's unblinded eye, what manner of man it was that his mistress had sent forth. The following events of this sirah will weigh his testimony; this event has only to note that he rode, and that the arrangement of the road had placed him exactly where heaven wished its witness.

Of the manner of the agent toward his servant-escort upon the long days, the sources of this particular journey say little; but the manner of the man was already the property of the city, and the Sunnah which he would establish in his house reveals the temperament which Maysarah now encountered upon the road. His wife Aisha (may Allah be pleased with her), asked what the Messenger of Allah ﷺ did within his house, answered that he was in the service of his own family, and when the call to prayer came he went out to pray. The master of the mission of mercy did not reckon service beneath him, neither the mending of a sandal nor the stitching of a garment nor the tending of his own camel; and the servant of Khadijah, riding weeks beside such a man, was learning by daily experience that the al-Amin's trustworthiness was no commercial mask but the very texture of his hours. The road has a way of stripping travelers of their city manners; upon this road nothing was stripped, because nothing had been put on.

The Quran has its own words for the mounting of such a journey, and they are among the tenderest which the Book speaks over the life of travel. Allah, revealing to His servants the manner of their gratitude for the beasts and ships He subjected to them, says: and it is He who created all the pairs, and made for you of the ships and the cattle that which you ride, that you may settle upon their backs and then remember the favor of your Lord when you have settled upon them, and say: glory to Him who subjected this to us, and we could never have accomplished it of ourselves; and indeed to our Lord we are returning. Every mounting of every caravan in every age is gathered into those verses: the beast subjected by a mercy it cannot comprehend, the favor remembered at the moment of comfort, the tasbih upon the saddle, and over the whole road the final clause which turns all journeying into theology, for the traveler's true destination is named at the mounting itself: to our Lord we are returning. The caravans of Quraysh rode without knowing that their road was so written; but the One who wrote it had set upon this particular caravan the rider who would one day teach the Ummah its mounting-prayer and its journey-manners, and who already, by the fitrah of his unschooled perfection, lived the verses before they were revealed.

What did the days of that road hold, in their order and their discipline? The caravan of the Hijaz kept the customs of the desert as the sea keeps its tides. The loading was done before the sun gained its heat; the morning march ran cool and long; at the fierce middle of the day the camels were halted and the shade spread, and men and beasts breathed through the burning hours; the evening march ran again into the dusk, and the night was halved between sleep and the watch. Water was the road's currency, and the wells were its stations, and near them the wayfarers of different tribes met, and bargained, and parted, each caravan a small moving city with its own laws of precedence, its own allocation of burdens, its own settled etiquette of the common fire. Into this discipline the Messenger of Allah ﷺ entered not as a passenger but as the man of the venture, and the road became for him what the hills of the shepherds had been before it: a school. Here were the tongues of the tribes, the temperaments of men under thirst and fatigue, the weights of distant markets, the patience which the desert exacts from every pride. Allah, Glorified and Exalted be He, was completing the education of His Messenger before the mission, and He chose for His classroom not the cloisters of the philosophers but the common road of common men.

The road also carried its covenant of rights, which the believer should not pass unmarked. A caravan is a web of hirings: drivers hired, guides hired, guards hired, the servant of the principal hired, and the agent himself the hired of the owner of the goods. The Prophet ﷺ would one day lay the axe of revelation to every oppression of the hired hand: give the hired man his wage, he commanded, before his sweat dries. The venture of Khadijah was woven of the opposite spirit: terms freely offered and freely accepted, a share of the profit written to the agent, a servant of the house dispatched for his ease, and a principal whose household generosity was already a proverb, as the sequel of her story in this sirah has shown and will show again. The believer reads the arrangement as a rehearsal of the Sunnah before the Sunnah: the employer honoring the employed, the employed guarding the employer's trust, and the whole web of hirings under the eye of the Third of two partners, who departs only at betrayal.

The student of the sources must record, with the honesty that is this project's discipline, how much the classical lines compress. Ibn Ishaq gives the departure a single clause: the Messenger of Allah ﷺ accepted this offer and set off with her goods, in the company of Maysara, and when they reached Syria the narrative resumes. Lings renders the same economy: he accepted what she proposed, and accompanied by the lad he set off with her goods for the north. Neither line tells us the month, nor the size of the caravan, nor the number of the camels, nor the wells at which they watered; and this record will not invent what the sources did not say. What the sources do fix is sturdier than itinerary: the agent, the servant, the goods, the road, the destination; and the dating of the venture in the twenty-fifth year, which al-Mubarakpuri renders with the received chronology, at the age of twenty-five he went to Syria as a merchant for Khadijah. Ibn Kathir, gathering the reports of the light of prophethood, adds the frame which this event has already pondered: that the Messenger of Allah traveled to Busra twice, once as the boy of twelve with his uncle, and once with Maysarah the freed man of Khadijah upon her trading business. The two departures on the one road are thus a paired testimony in the structure of the sirah itself, and the student who holds them together sees the whole design of the preparation: love first, then labor; the guardian's side, then the trust; the child, then the man.

There is a last reflection which the road itself offers, and it belongs to the legacy of this event in the fullness of the mission. Some thirty-five years after this caravan went out, the Messenger of Allah ﷺ, now the Prophet of the Ummah and the master of Arabia, would send his letters to the kings beyond its borders; and the record of those letters shows that the envoy Dihyah ibn Khalifah al-Kalbi was ordered to carry the letter to Caesar by the way of the governor of Busra, who would in turn forward it to the emperor. The trade road of the young agent thus became the diplomatic road of the aged Prophet ﷺ: the same highway which had carried the goods of Khadijah to the markets of the north carried at last the summons of her Lord to the throne of Rome. The believer who traces the two journeys sees that no road ridden for Allah's sake is ever wasted: He who subjected the beast beneath the twenty-five-year-old had already written, in the same decree, the mounting of the same road by His message; and the caravans of Quraysh, all unknowing, had spent their centuries preparing the highways of the Ummah.

So the caravan wound northward out of the basin of Makkah, and the city closed its accounts for the day and let it go. The merchants of Quraysh saw what they had seen a hundred times: a caravan of the summer journey, the goods of a rich woman, a servant riding beside the agent, the dust rising by the wells, the slow dependable arithmetic of the trade. The angels saw what the city could not: the beloved of their Lord ﷺ riding out once more upon the road of the light, toward the city which his mother's womb had illuminated and the first of whose monks had already, years before, examined him and found the description true. Ahead of him lay weeks of desert and the markets of Syria, the halts under the trees, the bargains of Busra, and the return with the increase; and beyond the increase, though no ledger of Makkah held the column for it, the providence which had dispatched this caravan was drawing toward the marriage, the revelation, and the history of the Ummah. Glory to Him who subjected this to us; and indeed to our Lord we are returning: the tasbih of the mounting belongs to every rider upon every road, but upon this rider, that morning, the words of the Book-to-come lay waiting like a saddle-cloth, and the Lord of the road rode unseen beside the man who had never once failed a trust.