Maysarah Reports on Muhammad's Conduct

There are hours in sacred history when heaven appoints a witness long before the world is ready to hear what he has seen. The caravan that had left Makkah weeks earlier bearing the merchandise of Khadijah now turned its face south from the market plain of Busra, and with it rode two figures whom Allah had joined for reasons far greater than commerce: the young man of Banu Hashim whom his people called al-Amin, the Trustworthy, and the youth Maysarah, a servant in the household of Khadijah (may Allah be pleased with her), whose eyes in the weeks to come would behold what kings and scripture-readers had longed through generations to behold. The Prophet Muhammad ﷺ, then twenty-five years of age, rode at the head of the enterprise, concerned as any honest agent would be with the price of leather and the quality of oil; yet above that ordinary concern the care of Allah was spread like a canopy, and a servant was quietly set in place to record what the merchants of Makkah could not yet understand.

The road itself was a theatre fitted for such testimony. From Busra the caravan took the long way south by stages that merchants of Quraysh had ridden for generations, down through the marches of Syria, across the black wastes of the harrah, by the wells and the ruined stations of older kingdoms, until the escarpments of the Hijaz rose to meet it. Every stage of that road had its perils, the raider, the guides who could not be trusted, the water that failed, and the sun above all, which in those latitudes kills the unwary as surely as any lance. The Meccan caravans moved in company for this cause, and hired the desert's protection with coin and kinship; yet no hireling eye watched over the son of Abdullah as the eyes that Maysarah could not help but notice, and no patron's power went with him so visibly as the power that tempered the noon. The merchants of the company bartered and joked and quarrelled by turns, as men do upon long roads, and from all of it the young man of Quraysh stood apart without aloofness: present to every company, serving in every halt, belonging to every man and to none of their vices.

Maysarah was, in the description of Ibn Ishaq, a youth in Khadijah's employment; Martin Lings calls him a lad of hers, and later chroniclers speak of him as her hireling and her servant. His commission was twofold, though only the first part was written into the terms of trade. Openly he was to attend upon the goods, assist at the transactions, watch the loading of the purchases, and safeguard the interests of his mistress in the Syrian markets. But a mistress of Khadijah's discernment did not send her merchandise across the desert with a stranger; she had heard, from family sources and from the talk of Quraysh, of the truthfulness, the trustworthy nature, and the fine character of the young man of Banu Hashim, and she had engaged him on terms better than she offered to any other merchant. Maysarah, who served in her house and knew her standards, was by his very presence a watching eye, and what he witnessed he kept, weighing it in his heart day after day, against the day when he should stand before his mistress and render an account not only of goods and coin but of the man himself.

What he saw, first and constantly, was gentleness. The Beloved Prophet ﷺ, may the peace and blessings of Allah be upon him, dealt with every class of man upon the road with a courtesy that made no calculation of rank. To the drivers of the camels and the porters at the halts he spoke without harshness, and the animals themselves seemed to learn his voice, for the beasts of burden under his eye were neither driven cruelly nor overloaded, in an age when the ill-treatment of a beast troubled few merchants at all. When the caravan halted at noon, Maysarah observed that the young agent of Quraysh did not claim the choicest shade or the first water, but yielded precedence to the older men, and shared what he had with the younger ones. Ibn Ishaq records the settled judgment of those years, that when he grew to manhood he was the finest of his people in character and repute, the best of neighbours, the most prudent, the most honest in speech and the most trustworthy, and that the name by which he was known among Quraysh was none other than al-Amin, because of the line of virtues Allah had joined together in him. Maysarah was now watching that testimony written out in the dust of the Syrian road, in living form, from dawn to dusk.

In the markets he saw truthfulness turned into method. The Prophet ﷺ never magnified his goods, never concealed a flaw, never took an oath to drive a bargain, and never pressed a poor buyer past his means. In an age when the oath of the merchant was a common instrument of fraud, when men swore freely by al-Lat and al-Uzza to sanctify a lie, his lips pronounced no deity at all as they priced the goods, and his word needed no oath to prop it. He bought and sold with a transparent exactness that startled those who dealt with him, stating the worth of a thing as it was, taking what was fair, giving what was fair, and closing each transaction with a plainness that left neither party guessing. It was this, as much as any single report, that had carried his name through Makkah until it reached the ears of Khadijah; for the reputation of al-Amin had first arisen, as Lings notes, from the reports of those who had entrusted their merchandise to him on various occasions, each one returning with his trust not only intact but increased, and with a testimony of the man on his tongue.

Then there were the things that lay outside the reach of ordinary accounting. Maysarah noticed, as the long miles unrolled, that the heat of the desert was strangely unoppressive; the days that should have scorched the caravan seemed to breathe a tempered air upon their company, and neither man nor beast fainted under skies that in other years had killed the careless. And at midday, when the sun stood fierce and vertical over the waste, it was given to Maysarah to see the cause with his own eyes. Ibn Ishaq relates, with the careful qualification of the earliest compiler, that at midday when it was fiercely hot, Maysarah would see, so they say, two angels shading the Messenger of Allah from the sun as he rode forward upon his camel. Martin Lings, following the transmission of Ibn Sa'd, describes the same moment as a brief but clear vision of two Angels shading him from the sun's rays. And when Imam Ibn Kathir came to summarize, centuries later, what Khadijah reported to her cousin Waraqah, he wrote of the cloud that had been sheltering him in the extreme heat; so that the classical tradition as a whole transmits both images together, the angelic shade beheld at noon and the overshadowing cloud, as one sign described by two tongues. What believer's heart does not pause at this, that before a single verse of revelation had come down, the heaven itself was already standing guard over the head of the future Messenger ﷺ, and the furnace of the desert was made mild around him?

The words spoken at Busra by the monk, recorded in the previous event of this chronicle, sank deep into the soul of Maysarah as the caravan went on further into Syria and then turned toward home; yet, as Lings beautifully observes, 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. Here lies one of the quiet splendours of this event: the servant had outstripped the scholar. The monk had inherited manuscripts and read of a prophet to come; Maysarah possessed no manuscripts, but he had walked beside the reality for weeks, and the reality had printed itself upon him more deeply than any writing. The shade at noon, the gentleness at the halts, the truthfulness at the scales, the strange temperance of the heat: all these he gathered and kept, committing every observation to the faithful treasury of his memory, for he knew that his mistress would ask, and he intended that no detail should be lost.

Nor was he mistaken. When the caravan came safely home to Makkah and the goods were carried to the house of Khadijah, the reckoning began, and it was not only of dirhams. Ibn Ishaq states plainly that Maysara related to her what the monk had said, and how he had seen the angels giving him shade. Lings, following the longer transmission, tells how Maysarah came to his mistress and told her about the two Angels and what the monk had said, answering, one may be sure, question upon question from a woman whose intelligence Ibn Ishaq praises directly in this very chapter, calling Khadijah a decisive, noble and intelligent lady, possessed of all the fine qualities Allah had endowed her with. She was a merchant of stature who had heard a lifetime of men's reports and weighed them against the touchstone of fact; and the report of Maysarah, her own trusted servant, delivered with the sober exactness of one who has guarded his words across a desert, bore to her listening heart the ring of a coin that cannot be counterfeited.

The Sealed Nectar, condensing the account of Ibn Hisham, preserves a phrase of this scene that deserves to be held up to the light: her hireling, it says, told her of Muhammad's good manners, honesty, deep thought, sincerity and faith. Five words of qualities, each of which Maysarah must have been made to unfold with instances, the manner of his selling, the temper of his speech, the way he bore the noon, the way he treated the small and the poor upon the road. A household servant's testimony in that society was not a light thing: the master's eye upon a caravan was the servant himself, and a mistress as shrewd as Khadijah knew well how to sift the flatterer from the faithful, the man who inflates his report from the man who measures it. That she carried Maysarah's words at once to Waraqah, and that Waraqah found in them the very description he had read in the old books, is the strongest indication of the sobriety with which the report was both given and received; and the chroniclers' agreement that this testimony was among the weights that turned her heart toward marriage is the measure of its worth.

But the report did not end at her ear. Ibn Kathir transmits, in a section set apart from the main narrative, that Khadijah carried what her young employee had told her to the one man in Makkah most capable of judging it: Waraqah ibn Nawfal, her cousin, who had embraced Christianity, studied the Scriptures and the knowledge of former generations, and grown old in the expectation of a prophet. To him she repeated what the monk had said and how Maysarah had seen the two angels shading him. And Waraqah answered her with words that the family would remember for the rest of their days: if this is true, Khadijah, then Muhammad is the Prophet of this nation; I learned that a prophet was expected for this nation, and this is his time. Ibn Kathir notes that these were approximately the words he used, and then transmits the verses in which Waraqah poured out his hope and his willingness to share in the trials of the coming messenger, aspiring, through him whom Quraysh would one day hate, to reach the Enthroned One. In a second poem, transmitted from Ibn Ishaq by Yunus ibn Bukayr, the old man returned to the same theme: he had received, he said, true information related about Muhammad, told about him by an honest man returning from the markets of Busra, who tells of things good through his knowledge, for truth has doors for which keys exist; and he ended his longing with the prayer that if he lived until the era of this messenger reached the people, he would be the bearer of glad tidings, and if he did not, then the wide earth would hold him far from Makkah, still hoping. The old man had waited all his life for this hour, and now the testimony of a servant and the discernment of a noblewoman had brought the promise to his own family's threshold.

For the believing reader, the architecture of these days displays the perfection of Allah's planning. Years before the first revelation descended in the cave of Hira, before the angel could say the word Read, the evidences were being assembled: a monk at a tree, two angels at noon, a servant's careful eyes, a woman's listening heart, an old reader's sealed hope. Allah Most High has said that He will show them His signs in the horizons and within themselves until it becomes clear to them that it is the truth, and that it suffices that their Lord is a witness over all things; and here, before there was a community to be shown, the signs were already flowing outward from the person of His chosen one, into the horizon of the desert sky and into the souls of those who travelled with him. Revelation was not an afterthought attached to a life; the life itself was already luminous, and heaven was already testifying to what it would one day announce.

Yet the greatest of Maysarah's reports, when he stood before his mistress, was not the angels. The angelic shade is the sign that arrests the eye; the character is the sign that convinces the heart. Aisha (may Allah be pleased with her), asked in after years about the character of the Messenger of Allah ﷺ, answered with words that have become one of the most beloved definitions in Islam: his character was the Quran. Before the Quran was revealed, that character already stood complete in the world, walking the roads of Syria, honest at the scales, gentle with the servants, pure in speech; and it was this, reported by Maysarah and confirmed by every dealing, that opened the heart of Khadijah. Miracles authenticate; character persuades. Allah could have caused the report of the angels alone to turn the whole of Makkah; He chose instead to prepare His Prophet's ﷺ marriage, and the first believing home of Islam, upon the foundation of witnessed virtue, that the ummah to come might learn forever by what criterion a house is built.

The fruit of the testimony was immediate, and the following events of this chronicle will unfold it: the merchandise sold at nearly double its cost, the heart of the noblest woman of Quraysh turning toward her agent, the discreet approach of her friend, and the blessed marriage that would shelter the Prophet ﷺ through the years of revelation and grief. All of that harvest lay sleeping in the seed of Maysarah's honest report. Let no servant of Allah despise the smallness of his station: a hireling set over bags and ledgers became, by fidelity to what he saw, a hinge of sacred history. And let no believer treat his own tongue lightly: the Prophet ﷺ taught that faith bears witness to what the heart has truly seen, and Maysarah's report is a standing portrait of that duty, kept with exactness, delivered with courage, and set by Allah's grace among the causes of the best of marriages. The cloud passed on from the desert road, the vision closed, the caravan dissolved into the streets of Makkah; but the testimony remained, ascending from mouth to mouth until it reached the ear of Waraqah, and through him entered the expectation of the People of the Book, and through Khadijah entered the very future of the faith. So Allah honours the truthful witness, and so He taught His slaves, long before the verse was revealed, that He Himself is the witness over all things.