Khadijah Develops an Interest in Marriage

When the caravan had gone from her courtyard and the Syrian goods stood stacked in her keeping, Khadijah bint Khuwaylid (may Allah be pleased with her) found that the truest thing the journey had brought home was not in the bales at all. The profit was doubled, the blessing was manifest, and her young agent had laid his account before her to the last coin; yet Martin Lings, reading the earliest sources, sets down the sentence that opens this event: such considerations were far from her thoughts, for all her attention was concentrated on the speaker himself. In that single turn of a merchant woman's attention, the history of the world quietly changed its course. What follows in this event is the story of a heart weighing what it had seen and heard, and turning, deliberately and with the dignity that marked her whole life, toward marriage to Muhammad ﷺ, then twenty-five years of age, whom Makkah called al-Amin.

She was, by every account, the first woman of Quraysh. Ibn Ishaq, transmitting through Ibn Kathir, states it without qualification: Khadijah was the highest-born, most respected and wealthiest woman in Quraysh, and all her people were covetous of all that and would have attained it if they could. She was of the clan of Asad ibn Abd al-Uzza ibn Qusayy, the blood of Qusayy himself, the builder of Quraysh's standing around the Kaaba; she was first cousin to Waraqah ibn Nawfal, the Christian reader of the Scriptures, and to his sister Qutaylah; and she was a distant cousin to the sons of Hashim, so that the young man she had engaged as her agent was her own kin. Twice she had been married, and twice widowed, and since the death of her second husband it had been her custom to hire men to trade on her behalf, administering with her own clear eye a fortune that her prudence had not merely kept but grown. The Arabs of Makkah, who knew her chastity and her noble bearing, had long before given her a byname of honour: they called her the pure one, at-Tahirah, in an age not given to calling women pure.

To understand the gravity of what now stirred in her, one must first understand what she had declined. The Sealed Nectar preserves the fact in a sentence: many prominent men had asked for her hand in marriage, but she always spurned their advances. The chieftains and notables of Quraysh, the men of rank and substance who could have offered any woman of Makkah the security of a great house, had sought this woman, for her wealth, her lineage and her beauty were no secret in the city; and she had refused them all. She had her own means, her own standing, her own house, and her own judgment, and she had judged, season upon season, that none of these suitors was worth the giving of her life to. It was not pride; it was discernment. She had built a widow's fortune into the greatest commercial enterprise of her city by knowing exactly when to close a bargain and when to walk away, and she had applied the same clear-sightedness to the marriage market of Quraysh and found its wares, however gilded, to be without the one thing she would not trade: nobility of soul.

Her house, it should be remembered, was itself a commonwealth of trust. A widow administering the greatest fortune of Quraysh could not do all with her own hands; she governed through agents upon the roads and servants within the walls, and the whole structure stood upon her judgment of character, for an agent false in Syria or a steward false in Makkah could bleed the enterprise white in a single season. Khadijah's fortune was, in this sense, a monument to discernment: every year it survived proved again that she could pick the loyal eye and the honest hand. Into that trained faculty of judgment now came the most consequential evaluation of her life, and it is one of the quiet harmonies of the sirah that the woman who knew better than anyone in Makkah how to weigh a man's trustworthiness turned that faculty, deliberately and completely, upon the young man of Banu Hashim, and found in him what no amount of scrutinizing could exhaust.

Against that history of refusals, the gathering weight of what she now perceived becomes the more remarkable. There was, first, the evidence of the profit: more profits and blessings, as the Sealed Nectar has it, than she used to, a yield outside the band of her long experience, which her merchant's mind could not assign to skill alone and which her heart, unbeknown to itself, was already assigning to the barakah of the man. There was, second, the settled public testimony: Muhammad ﷺ had come to be known throughout Makkah as al-Amin, the Reliable, the Trustworthy, and Lings notes that this reputation arose first from the reports of those who had entrusted their merchandise to him on various occasions, each returning with his trust increased and a testimony on his tongue; and she had heard much good of him besides from family sources, the intimate knowledge of kin. There was, third, the report of Maysarah, her own trusted servant, who had seen the two angels shading him at noon and had heard the monk beneath the tree, and who told her of good manners, honesty, deep thought, sincerity and faith. And there was, fourth, the confirmation of Waraqah, her own cousin, the old reader of the former scriptures, who upon hearing what Maysarah had reported had answered: if this is true, Khadijah, then Muhammad is the Prophet of this nation. Evidence upon evidence, from market and household and scripture, converged upon a single conclusion.

And there was her own observation, which no report could replace. She had sat before him in her own house and listened as he described the journey and the transactions; and the sources bid us understand that in that hour she saw the man himself, not merely the agent. Lings, drawing on the earliest descriptions, gives the portrait her eyes would have taken in: twenty-five years old, of medium stature and inclined to slimness, with a large head, broad shoulders, and the body perfectly proportioned; thick black hair reaching midway between the lobes of his ears and his shoulders, and a beard to match; a noble breadth of forehead, large wide eyes with long lashes, an aquiline nose and a wide, finely shaped mouth; skin white but tanned by the sun; and over and above the natural beauty, a light on his face, the same light that had shone from his father Abdullah, but in the son more powerful, apparent especially upon his broad forehead and in his remarkably luminous eyes. Khadijah knew that she herself was still beautiful; and she knew, as the whole city knew, that she was years his elder, Lings reckoning the distance at fifteen years. So the question that Lings writes of her is a question of humility as much as hope: would he none the less be prepared to marry her?

Here the believing reader must pause, for the question touches the mystery of this woman's greatness. She was not a girl flattered into fancy; she was a woman of forty or thereabouts, by the reckoning of the later chronicles, twice widowed, mistress of the greatest fortune of Quraysh, who had refused the chiefs of her city for years. What moved her was not need, for she needed nothing; and it was not loneliness alone, for she had her household and her kin. It was the convergence of everything true she knew about one man: the doubled profit that bore the signature of blessing, the public name of al-Amin, the servant's testimony of angels at noon, the scripture-reader's cry that the prophet of the nation stood in her own courtyard, and the light upon a face she had herself seen at close audience. Her heart, in a word, had recognized excellence, and having recognized it, her character refused to let the recognition die of embarrassment. Ibn Ishaq names the quality that governed the moment: Khadijah was a decisive, noble and intelligent lady. Decisiveness, nobility and intelligence, joined in one breast, do not stare out of windows; they weigh, they resolve, and they move.

On her age at this turning, the sources speak with several voices, and honesty requires the several voices to be heard. Ibn Kathir, transmitting from al-Bayhaqi, states that the Prophet ﷺ was twenty-five at the marriage and that she was then thirty-five, adding that it is also said that she was twenty-five. The later chronicles, however, broadly follow another line: the Sealed Nectar sets her at forty years old, and calls her the best woman of her folk in lineage, fortune and wisdom; Lings reckons her fifteen years his elder, which is the same figure; and Al-Sheha likewise transmits the forty. The scholars of the sirah have long lived with this range, and nothing of the event turns upon its resolution; what every version agrees upon is the essential proportion, that she was a woman of settled judgment and dignity, older than the young man whose character had so moved her, and that neither the difference of years nor the difference of fortunes deterred her in the least. Allah knows best where the exact figure lies, and the believing heart loses nothing by leaving it so.

Nor was the weighing light, for a woman of her standing had as much to lose in the eyes of the city as in the court of her own conscience. Makkah was a town of tongues, and the tongues would ask why the first woman of Quraysh, who had refused chieftains, would take a young man with no fortune but his name; the disparity of their purses would be counted in every gathering at the Kaaba; her own kin of Banu Asad, covetous of her standing as Ibn Ishaq says, would have their opinions; and the proposal itself, in the custom of the Arabs, could expose a woman's dignity if it were handled clumsily or refused. She weighed all of it, one may be sure, with the same clearness she gave to a caravan's manifest, and over against every risk she set the one fact that no tongue could argue away: that this man's truthfulness was the most established thing in Makkah, that blessing attended whatever he touched, and that her own cousin, the reader of the scriptures, had identified him as the awaited prophet of the nation. When the weighing ended, the scales did not merely tip; they fell from her hand. She would disclose her wish, and she would disclose it in the manner of her people's honour, discreetly and through a wise friend.

For the eye of faith, there is a longer pattern still in these days, and it is the pattern of Allah's timing. A quarter of a century earlier He had joined two houses in the marriage of Abdullah and Aminah, and taken the groom to his grave before the child was born; He had given the boy a desert childhood, a mother's loss at al-Abwa, a grandfather's couch and a grandfather's grave, and the shelter of Abu Talib's crowded roof; He had taught him the flocks and the road, and given him a name for truthfulness that ran before him through the city; and now, at the appointed hour, He placed in the heart of the wealthiest and most discerning woman of Quraysh the desire to be the wife of His orphan. The man who had lost every roof of his childhood one by one was approaching, though none knew it, the most stable and loving roof of his life; and the woman who had guarded her hand from every chieftain of Quraysh was about to give it to the man whom heaven had already chosen to guard. So the Lord of the worlds mends with one marriage what years of bereavement had broken, and the believer who has followed this chronicle from the Year of the Elephant sees, in Khadijah's quiet turning, the same Patient Wisdom that never once let the orphan of Abdullah go unsheltered.

What her heart had discerned, revelation itself would afterward attest. Years later, in Madinah, the Quran would declare that in the Messenger of Allah the believers have an excellent example, in the one who hopes for Allah and the Last Day and remembers Allah much; and every criterion by which Khadijah had judged this man, his truthfulness, his trustworthiness, the beauty of his character, his constant remembrance of his Lord, is contained in that verse as in a treasury. She did not have the verse; she had the man, and she read him rightly. Here is one of the quiet proofs of her greatness, and one of the most practical teachings of this event for every generation since: the choice of a spouse is an act of spiritual discernment, and the qualities to seek are precisely the qualities Allah praised. Beauty passes, fortunes turn, and rank is a loan of the tribe; character is what stands in the dark years, and character is what she chose.

Nor did heaven leave her choice unwitnessed, though the witness was yet years away. The books of hadith preserve what Gabriel himself later said to the Prophet ﷺ when Khadijah came to him with food: this is Khadijah, who has brought you a vessel of food; when she comes to you, greet her from her Lord and from me, and give her tidings of a house in Paradise made of pearl shell, in which there is neither discord nor distress. Al-Suhayli, commenting upon this tradition as Ibn Kathir transmits it, found in the pearl shell a wordplay upon the first prize of the race: she had won the first prize to faith, for she was the first of all this ummah, man or woman, to believe. And Aisha (may Allah be pleased with her), who never saw her and yet was jealous of her all her married life because of how constantly the Prophet ﷺ spoke of her, transmitted from him the words that are Khadijah's everlasting diploma: she believed in me when the people disbelieved, and she trusted me when they distrusted; she shared her wealth with me when others denied me; and Allah endowed me with children from her. All of that lay folded, like a letter not yet opened, inside the interest in marriage that formed in her heart in these very days; the seed of the first islam of a woman was this quiet turning toward the best of men.

The manner of her turning was as dignified as its matter. She did not send an impulsive message; she did not put her honour at the mercy of the market's talk. Ibn Ishaq's account has her sending for the Prophet ﷺ and speaking to him directly, with the words of kinship and reputation and trustworthiness that the following events of this chronicle will place upon the page. The fuller tradition, carried by Ibn Sa'd and followed by the later chronicles, adds the office of a wise intermediary: she took her wish to a woman friend of hers, a confidante named Nafisah bint Manyah, who offered to approach the young man on her behalf and, if possible, to arrange the marriage between them. Between the two accounts there is no contradiction that harms the story; the directness of Ibn Ishaq and the discretion of Ibn Sa'd are two halves of one resolve, and both agree that the initiative, in the sight of Allah and of history, was hers. Let the age not mistake itself for wiser than Khadijah: the woman who could read a caravan's account to the last coin read the character of Muhammad ﷺ more truly than any soul in Makkah, and having read it, she acted, through the proper channels of her people's honour, with a decisiveness that would be crowned by Gabriel's greeting.

For the believing reader, the lessons of this event settle into the soul like seed into good ground. Khadijah teaches the woman of substance that a spouse is to be chosen for the excellence that endures, and that refusal of the gilded is not pride but the guardianship of one's own soul. She teaches the merchant that the eye which reads a ledger can also read a heart, and that Allah gives such discernment to whom He wills. She teaches every believer that initiative within the bounds of honour is no sin, and that the first believer after the Prophet ﷺ was a woman who took the first step. And she teaches the whole ummah, before the ummah existed, the meaning of that Quranic pattern by which the best of men was matched with the best of women: a marriage founded not upon the calculations of the market but upon witnessed character, confirmed from heaven, and destined to shelter the revelation itself. In the economy of Allah's wisdom, the doubled profit of a caravan was but the dowry's first instalment of a union whose wealth no account could hold; and Khadijah, highest-born and wealthiest of the women of Quraysh, was about to spend her standing and her substance upon the man whom the age did not yet know to be the Messenger of Allah ﷺ, and to be spent upon him willingly, and to be paid back, as the following events and the whole of sacred history would show, with a house of pearl shell in Paradise.