The road from Makkah to Syria does not end in sand; it ends in a city. Week upon week the caravan had climbed from well to well and station to station, and then, in the last stages, the land itself began to confess the nearness of the north: the dust gave way to soil, the soil to cultivation, the cultivation to the ordered green of the Hawran, and at last the traveler lifted his eyes to walls and roofs and rising smoke, the unmistakable breath of a living market town. So it was that the caravan of Khadijah bint Khuwaylid (may Allah be pleased with her), which had gone out from Makkah under the charge of Muhammad ﷺ, came down at last toward Busra, the goal of the Syrian venture. He was twenty-five years old, the entrusted agent of the wealthiest woman of Quraysh, and beside him rode Maysarah, the trusted servant of her house, sent with the venture for the logistics of the road and for the seeing of it. The city toward which they descended was no stranger to the story of this man, though the market did not know it: the light his mother had seen issuing from her womb while she carried him had illuminated the castles of Busra before his birth; his boyhood feet had trodden its halts at the age of twelve beside Abu Talib; and now he came in the strength of his manhood, a third time and the greatest, bearing the fortune of the house of Khuwaylid. What believer's heart does not quicken at the design of it, that the Lord of the road should so order His beloved's steps that no city of the north should receive him so often, before the revelation, as this gateway of Syria.
What manner of city was this into which the merchandise now entered? Busra stood, as al-Mubarakpuri notes in passing in the account of the boyhood journey, in the vicinity of the Hawran under the dominion of Rome; and to the Arabs of the Hijaz it was the threshold of the whole Syrian world. It had been old already when the empire took it in: a town of the Nabataean Arabs upon the ancient road of the caravan trade, it became under Rome the great market city of the frontier, and the country round about it was reckoned among the richest grain lands of the east. To its market came the surplus of the settled lands and the wares of the distant sea, and to its gates came the caravans of Arabia with what the desert and the sanctuary city gathered: the hides and leather for which the Arabs were famous, the silver, the resins and perfumes of the south, and the goods of the Indian Ocean trade of which Makkah's position had made her the carrier between the Yemen and the Rome of the north. The tongues of the market were three at least: the Arabic of the caravan men and of the Arab peasantry of the Hawran, the Syriac of the countryside and its many monasteries, and the Greek of the officials and the great merchants of the empire. Ibn Kathir, gathering the reports of the light of prophethood, pauses over the city in words this chronicle has already weighed in an earlier event: it contains good news for the people of this Ummah in the lands of Syria, for it is the first place in Syria to receive the light of the prophethood. Into this concourse of tongues and scales and silver the al-Amin of Makkah now entered with his principal's goods, and the believer may see the whole scene as heaven saw it: the market of the empire receiving, in an ordinary trading season, the final Messenger of the Lord of every market.
The reader has already walked, in the earlier pages of this chronicle, the boyhood halt at this same city: the caravan of Abu Talib, the small cloud that had moved above the company shading one boy alone, the unprecedented feast of the monk Bahira, the scanning of the faces and the finding of the description true of the son of Abdullah. Thirteen years and more had passed since that scrutiny. The city, as the caravan unloaded that season, did not know that the boy of the cloud had come back as the man of the commission; and it is one of the quiet mercies of Allah upon His beloved ﷺ that between the two comings He gave the city a new manner of weighing him: not a sign in the sky this time, but a manner at the scales. The halt beneath the tree near a monk's cell, which the following event of this chronicle sets down in its own place, had already given the arrival its sign; the market days that now unfolded would give it its proof, for the market is the one court in which no reputation, however certified at home, can escape the test of a far city and a foreign buyer.
The trade of such a market ran by customs older than any of the empires that had taxed it. The caravan unloaded at the halts and the lodgings near the gates; brokers came out to the bales; the weighing was public before the eyes of rivals and idlers and the tax men of the empire; the haggling was long, courteous, and merciless; and over everything stood the unwritten law of the road, that a caravan's name is its fortress. A merchant of the Hijaz in Busra was a stranger twice over, by tongue and by law; his protection was his company, his credit was his name, and his profit was whatever his discernment could make of the difference between two markets a thousand furlongs apart. Into this theater stepped the agent of Khadijah, and the sources of the sirah, which follow his steps with a lover's attention, record the substance of his market days with a brevity that itself instructs. Ibn Ishaq's account, as Ibn Kathir transmits it, says that the Messenger of Allah ﷺ then sold his wares, the goods that he had brought, and bought those things he wanted, and that thereafter he set off in a caravan for Makkah, Maysarah accompanying him. Not a price is preserved, nor the name of a single buyer, nor the inventory of one bale. The silence is not poverty but verdict: to the first generations of this Ummah the wonder of those days was not the arithmetic of the trade but the character of the trader, and the record kept the character and let the arithmetic go.
Consider, then, what the sources do fix, beginning with the selling. The goods which the caravan had carried from Makkah were now to be turned into the silver of Syria, and the turning of them was wholly in the agent's hands. Every market of every age knows the temptations of an agent in a far city: the padding of prices, the concealment of defects, the convenient diminution of an absent principal's margin, the little collusions with brokers that no principal will ever hear of across a month of road. Nothing of this was in the man, and the difference traveled. The buyer at Busra who dealt with the young Meccan found the description of the goods exactly what the goods were, the blemish acknowledged before it could be discovered, the scale neither hurried when the haste favored him nor slowed when it did not, and the bargain closed with a courtesy that left the counterparty richer in dignity than the price alone could account for. The whole city of Makkah had spent years certifying precisely this, and now the certification was being examined in the only court that could examine it, the market itself; and the market found the certificate true. Khadijah's terms, as the chronicle has already recorded, had been better than she gave any other merchant; the agent's dealing was better than her terms, for it spent on her behalf a wealth of honesty that no commission could purchase and no distance diminish.
The manner of the man in the market deserves its own remembrance. In the received picture of the sirah it holds steady: the gentleness with the buyers, the refusal to profit by another's ignorance of the market, the patience in the long bargaining that the Syrian trade demanded, and the scrupulous accounting kept of every piece of silver in the servant's hearing. It is the temperament that the Sunnah of his prophethood would one day legislate for the merchants of the Ummah, and the believer may hear in the market days of Busra the future voice of the Messenger of Allah ﷺ teaching the golden rule of the scale: none of you truly believes until he loves for his brother what he loves for himself, a rule that turns every measure into a mirror, so that the seller weighs for the buyer as he would be weighed for, and describes the goods to the stranger as he would have his own goods described. The agents of the jahiliyyah had no such rule; the agent of Khadijah was the rule before it was revealed, written not on tablets but in transactions, and witnessed not by scribes but by a servant of the house who would carry the report of it home.
The Quran had not yet come down; but the standard it would reveal was already his conduct, for the standard is the Lord's, and the Lord was with His beloved ﷺ in every scale of the journey. In Surat ash-Shu'ara, Allah transmits through His prophet Shu'ayb (peace be upon him) the eternal law of the measure: give full measure, and do not be of those who cause loss; and weigh with the even balance; and do not deprive people of their due, and do not commit abuse upon the earth, spreading corruption. The choice of Shu'ayb as the speaker of these verses is itself teaching: of the ancient line of prophets he is the one whose mission stood in a marketplace, sent to a city of merchants whose fraud had become their ruin, and the Quran makes his counsel the standing address of Allah to every market of the world. The market days of Busra are that address lived: the full measure given where the fraud of Midian had withheld it, the even balance kept where the scales of any empire can be rigged by any thumb, the due of the people rendered where the whole economy of the road ran on the undetected shortcoming. Years after Busra, when the revelation had come down, the Messenger of Allah ﷺ would enforce exactly this law in exactly this spirit, passing by the pile of food in the market of Madinah, sinking his blessed hand into it, finding the dampness concealed beneath the dry surface, and pronouncing the word every merchant of the Ummah has since both feared and loved: whoever deceives us is not one of us. The man who said it had first lived it, at Makkah and at Busra and at every scale his hands had ever governed; the hadith was not new law but old character made public.
And then the buying. Ibn Ishaq's clause is precise in its artlessness: he bought those things he wanted. Behind the plain words lies the whole craft of the purchasing agent, for the profit of such a venture is made twice, once at the selling and once at the buying, and the second making is the harder. To buy well for Makkah a man had to read two markets at once, the one before his eyes and the one a month of road away: to know what the Syrian trade offered this season, what the caravan rates would bear, what the wealth of Makkah would desire in the year to come, and what price left a margin on both sides of the journey without injustice to either side of it. The markets of Syria offered what the Hijaz could not easily grow or make: the woven stuffs and garments of the north, the grain and oil of the Hawran's rich lands, the metalwork and the other manufactures of the settled world, wares for the use of life and the ornament of it. Out of all that plenty the agent chose, and the master record of this chronicle names his choosing with two qualities: desirable commodities, and market insight, the purchases of Syria made with an understanding beyond his years. Lings renders the outcome with the same economy as his master text: the travelers returned with the goods they had bought in the markets of Syria for the price of what they had sold. Behind that quiet sentence stands the doubled return which the event of the homecoming must record in its own place, and of which al-Mubarakpuri notes that Khadijah found in her money more profits and blessings than she was used to; and the believer traces the second member of that pair, the blessings, to the purity of the first member's earning: the trade kept clean at both ends of the road.
Through all these days the servant of the house stood near, and the believing reader should pause over the arrangement, for it was not accidental in the decrees of Allah: heaven was composing a testimony. Maysarah, whom his mistress had sent for the logistics of the road and for the seeing of it, was now the audience of the market days. He carried the loads and ran the errands, counted the silver and kept the tally of the bales, and between the errands he watched: the courteousness of the agent with the brokers of the market, the exactness at the scales, the patience in the long bargaining, the quickness of his reading of two markets at once, the scruple of the accounts. Al-Mubarakpuri transmits the upshot: the hireling came home and told his mistress of the good manners, the honesty, the deep thought, the sincerity and the faith of the man. Lings adds the inward side: the words of the monk, of whom the following event must speak, sank deep into the soul of Maysarah, but they did not greatly surprise him, for he had become aware throughout the journey that he was in the company of a man unlike any other he had ever met; and there was more for the servant to see upon the road home, which the event of his report will tell in its own place. The market days of Busra were thus also the collecting days of a witness: every honest scale and clean bargain and courteous word was being written into a servant's memory, to be read aloud one evening in the house of the daughter of Khuwaylid, before whom, unknown to all the household, the whole future of the Ummah was standing.
The city itself was to keep his traces and to follow his fortunes. Ibn Kathir, in the gathering of the light reports already cited, sets down that Busra has the spot where the camel known as the camel of the Messenger of Allah knelt, and that its remains were still shown, so they say, until they were gathered together and a mosque famous to that day was built over them; and in the same passage he binds the city's whole destiny to the man: Busra was the first city of Syria to be conquered, and it was taken peacefully, in the caliphate of Abu Bakr (may Allah be pleased with him), the city which had first received the light being also the first to open its gates to the faith that light foretold. The same gathering preserves the Prophet's ﷺ word, in Ibn Kathir's citation, that a fire would go out from the Hijaz whose light would be seen upon the necks of the camels at Busra, a sign of the latter days; so thoroughly did this city enter the prophecies of the man whose caravan once unloaded at its gates. And the road kept faith too: the highway that carried the goods of Khadijah under her young agent would carry, in the fullness of the mission, the letter of the Messenger of Allah ﷺ toward Caesar by way of the governor of Busra, as this chronicle has noted at the departure. What the believer's eye sees in all of it is one design: the Lord of the caravan road was preparing the road for the message, and the market of Busra was one of His workshops.
So the market days ran their course, the season turned, the goods of the south were sold, the goods of the north were bound for the return, and the caravan made ready for the long road home. The ledgers of that season have perished with the empire that kept them, the silver is long dispersed into the dust of the centuries, and the one account of Busra that heaven preserved is the account of a manner: that a young man dealt in the greatest market of Rome's Syrian frontier with a fairness the market could not account for, and that the explanation of the fairness was resting, at the halts of that same city, in the shade of a tree beside a monk's cell, waiting to be spoken. That explanation belongs to the event which follows, the reported encounter with the monk Nestora, whose single sentence has outlived every transaction of that season. The lesson of these market days abides for every merchant of the Ummah: that the scale is a sanctuary, that the buyer is a trust, that the far city is nearer to Allah than the agent supposes, and that the man heaven was preparing to receive the Book was found, when the markets of the world examined his trade, to have been living the Book before it came down. Glory to Allah, Lord of the worlds and of their marketplaces, who made even the caravan trade a preparation of prophethood, and who let His blessing rest upon honest dealing, that this Ummah might learn from its own Prophet ﷺ that nothing is so profitable as purity.