The tidings Nafisah carried home were the answer to the question Khadijah had not dared to put directly, and now that the consent was won, the matter moved to the face-to-face word that honour required. Lings preserves the step in a single line: Khadijah sent word to Muhammad, asking him to come to her. Into the house of the first woman of Quraysh, therefore, came the young man of Banu Hashim, twenty-five years old, her own agent, her kinsman through the ancient blood of Qusayy, and the man whom heaven had already marked with a shade at noon; and before her household the proposal that had travelled by the friend's discreet road was now spoken in the presence of both parties, to be confirmed, weighed, and answered for keeps.
What Khadijah said to him on that audience has come down in two transmissions, and both deserve to be heard. Ibn Ishaq, carried through Ibn Kathir, gives it thus: Cousin, I am interested in you because of your being related to me, because of your high reputation among your people, and because of your trustworthiness, fine character and truthfulness; and then, as the tradition continues, she offered herself to him in marriage. Lings renders the same speech in the fuller form of his source: Son of mine uncle, I love thee for thy kinship with me, and for that thou art ever in the centre, not being a partisan amongst the people for this or for that; and I love thee for thy trustworthiness and for the beauty of thy character and the truth of thy speech. Read the two together, for they are one speech through two channels: she named kinship, reputation, and character, and she named them as reasons of love and honour, not as terms of a contract.
In her naming of the reasons lay the confirmation his heart required, and the master record of this event has preserved that quality in its title: after confirming Khadijah's noble intentions, Muhammad ﷺ gave his firm consent. What intentions were laid before him? Not the calculations of a merchant adding a useful young man to her enterprise, though he was useful indeed; not the passing fondness of a wealthy woman for a beautiful face, though his face carried light. She had spoken, of her own free mouth, of kinship honoured and character loved; she had sent by her friend an account that hid nothing, an alliance where there was beauty and property and nobility and abundance, all four named in the open; and she had risked, in a city of tongues, the dignity of the first woman of Quraysh upon the seriousness of a young man's plain yes. Every element of the transaction was noble, and every element was transparent. He found in her intention neither concealment, nor compulsion, nor advantage sought over him; he found a woman of rank and wisdom who had weighed him through every faculty of judgment she possessed, and chosen him still.
What such speech does to the soul that receives it should not be passed over, for it is part of the meaning of the day. To be valued for fortune is the common lot of the wealthy, and to be valued for strength is the lot of the strong, but to hear from the first woman of one's city that she loves one for kinship honoured, for character, and for the truth of one's speech, is to be loved in the very place where a truthful man keeps his selfhood, and no flattery in the world can counterfeit it. The young man of Banu Hashim had spent his whole life in other people's households, the widow's son beneath the crowded roof, valued by all, owned by none; and here, for the first time in his adult life, a woman of rank and wisdom was choosing him for the thing he most truly was. The believer may well believe that the steadiness of his later years, the unshakeable dignity with which he would face rejection, war, and grief, drew strength from springs such as this, and that Allah, who orders all things, planted in Khadijah's honest declaration the first of the many consolations by which He would keep His Prophet's ﷺ heart whole.
His consent, therefore, was not the small thing that consent often is. To Nafisah he had said that for his part he was willing; now he said it to Khadijah herself, in the full presence of what she had spoken, and the word that he gave was final, free, and binding upon his honour: he accepted her offer of marriage. It is worth marking, as the jurists of the community have marked across the centuries, the form of what passed between them: an offer from a woman of full capacity and noble standing, and an acceptance from a man of full capacity and known truthfulness, both parties consenting, nothing concealed, no third will imposed. Years before the Prophet ﷺ would teach that marriage rests upon the consent of the parties, his own betrothal had been built upon that very stone; and the first home of Islam began, as the whole of his Sunnah would afterwards begin, with truth standing in the open, witnessed by the household, awaiting only the blessing of the families and the sealing of the contract.
For the Arab custom, and for every custom worthy of the name, consent between two persons is the beginning of marriage, not its completion; and so the sources record the pair of errands on which the engagement now set out. Lings tells it plainly: they agreed that he should speak to his uncles, and she would speak to her uncle Amr, the son of Asad, for Khuwaylid her father had died. The division of the labour honoured the structure of the two houses: the groom's side of Hashim would bring the formal suit, as the men of the family must; the bride's side of Asad would receive it, through the guardian whom her father's death had left her; and between the two houses the friend's mediation and the principals' consent would now be transmuted into covenant, dower, and feast. The formal proceedings, the delegation of the Hashimites, the visit to the guardian, and the settlement of the dower, belong to the next event of this chronicle; what the present event seals is the double foundation on which they would proceed, his firm consent, and the families' right to conduct.
Of the errand to his own kin, Ibn Ishaq's account is explicit and brief: when she had said this to the Messenger of Allah, he reported it to his uncles. Consider what that sentence contains. A young man of twenty-five, himself the object of the most advantageous proposal his city could imagine, wealth without limit, rank without question, a bride of the first standing, did not say yes on his own authority and inform his family afterward; he carried the matter to the heads of his house before he allowed the matter to stand. His uncles were the sons of Abdul-Muttalib, and first among them for him was Abu Talib, who had taken him in as a boy of eight, fed him from a brother's portion, and loved him with a father's love through the years of the crowded roof; and it was this same uncle, as Lings records, who had some years earlier, for reasons of the family's economy and alliance, declined the young man's own request for the hand of his daughter Umm Hani', giving her instead to a husband of the clan of Makhzum. To this guardian of his boyhood the nephew now brought a proposal that any house of Quraysh would have counted an honour beyond price, and the house that had known nothing but loss since the Year of the Elephant heard, at last, news that was wholly good.
What the house of Hashim made of the report may be read in the plain fact that the affair went forward at once. Here was a clan whose honour was beyond question and whose purse was beyond help, offered an alliance with the one house in Makkah that could supply what it lacked without subtracting from what it held: Khadijah's fortune was her own, held in her own right, joined to her own free consent, so that the match threatened nothing and crowned everything. Al-Abbas, the uncle of the merchant's turn, could read the joining of the two enterprises as plainly as a ledger; Hamzah, the uncle of the lion's heart, could relish an alliance that asked no man's condescension; Abu Talib, who had kept the boy through poverty without once letting him feel it, could see in the bride of the first rank the provision of the Lord of the Kaaba for the orphan he had raised; and in the courtyard the household that had loved him longest, Fatimah bint Asad and the young Talib and Aqil and little Jafar, together with Barakah Umm Ayman who had carried him home from al-Abwa, had the joy of the poor when good news costs nothing to share. The formal blessings and the deputation belong to the next event of this chronicle; the acceptance of the house belongs to this one.
Here the believer sees, in the first great decision of the Prophet's ﷺ adult life, the pattern that would mark his way to the end of his days: counsel before commitment, consultation before covenant. Decades later, in the Quran, Allah would join his forgiveness of his companions to the command that he consult them in the affair, saying that by the mercy of Allah he was gentle with them, and that had he been harsh and hard of heart they would have scattered from around him; so pardon them, and seek forgiveness for them, and consult them in the matter. The verse would come down upon a practice already old in him. The nursling of Halimah's tents had not been consulted about his fosterage, nor the boy of eight about his transfer to Abu Talib's roof, being then too young to be asked; but every adult step of consequence that the chronicle has recorded, the acceptance of Khadijah's commission itself, undertaken with the counsel of Abu Talib, and now the acceptance of Khadijah herself, was taken with the family's knowledge and blessing. And the years after prophethood would show the same way: at Uhud he took the counsel of his companions and followed it against his own first judgment; at Hudaybiyyah he took the counsel and the counsel erred, and he bore its cost without recrimination; for shura, as his life teaches it, is not a technique for finding the right answer but an honouring of the believers' partnership in the affair, and it builds the house of the community as it built the house of his marriage. The man who would be commanded to consult began by consulting, and the marriage of Khadijah was the first stone of that lifelong building.
Upon the manner of his acceptance, the tradition carries more than one account, and the believer's honesty requires the more than one to be set down. In the transmission of al-Bayhaqi, carried by Ibn Kathir from Ya'qub ibn Sufyan and others from Ibrahim ibn al-Mundhir and Umar ibn Abi Bakr al-Mu'ammili, from Muqsam ibn Abi al-Qasim, from Abdullah ibn al-Harith, from Ammar ibn Yasir, the beginning of the affair runs differently in its circumstances while agreeing in its essence: Ammar, the close companion of those years, relates that he was once walking with the Messenger of Allah at al-Hazura when they passed Khadijah's sister, seated upon a camel she had for sale; she called Ammar aside and asked him whether that friend of his would like to marry Khadijah; and when Ammar carried the question to him, he answered: indeed, I certainly would. Thereafter the account continues into the arrangements and the marriage feast; but its opening exchange belongs to this event, for it is another transmission of the very moment this chapter records, the moment of his yes. The scholars have weighed the account and its continuation, and the preference of the majority, as the following events of this chronicle will show, follows al-Suhayli and al-Mu'ammili in holding that it was Khadijah's uncle Amr ibn Asad who gave her in marriage; the value of Ammar's report here is its witness to the freedom and the promptness of the Prophet's ﷺ consent, which no version of the story ever places in doubt.
Around the acceptance of these two souls, the believing reader should also set the frame of the houses that were being joined. On one side stood Banu Hashim, the house of the Kaaba's watering and feeding, of Abdul-Muttalib's memory and Abu Talib's steadfastness, honourable beyond estimation and poor beyond remedy, its strength in men rather than in means. On the other stood Khadijah of Banu Asad, the wealthiest purse and the most stainless name among the women of Quraysh, a house that every chieftain of the city had courted in vain. That the two should be joined through the free consent of their principal parties, blessed by the elders of both, was in the economy of Allah the answer to a quarter-century of losses: the orphan of Abdullah, who had been passed from mother to grandfather to uncle, each in turn taken by death, was now standing at the door of a marriage that would give him, for five and twenty years, the most stable, the most tender, and the most steadfast home a prophet has ever had; and the light that had shone from his father's face and from his own was about to enter the house of the woman who would be the first of all this ummah to believe. What the tongue of Waraqah had already declared in private, the arrangement of the marriage was now preparing in fact: the prophet of this nation was being established, and no part of his establishing was left to chance.
And in both houses the days that followed the consent must have had the brightness that follows the settling of a great matter. In the quarter of Banu Asad, the woman who had refused the chiefs of Quraysh prepared, with the composure of one who has counted the cost, to give her hand and her house to a bridegroom of no fortune; in the quarter of Banu Hashim, the elders whose roof had sheltered him began to bestir themselves for the suit that honour required; and through the streets between them walked the friend whose office was now complete, the first matchmaker of Islam, carrying no more messages but a name that the ummah would bless as long as it lasts. The city did not yet know; the market talked only of the doubled caravan; heaven alone, which had set its shade over one traveller at noon, knew that the foundation of the first home of the faith was laid, and it waited, as the believer must learn to wait, upon the appointed forms: the suit, the guardian, the dower, the witnesses, and the feast, each in its order, each in its season.
So the consent stood, given freely by both, confirmed before the household, and reported at once to the elders whose blessing the custom of Quraysh required. Nothing remained but the proceedings: the suit of the Hashimites to the guardian of the bride, the settlement of the dower, the gathering of the witnesses, and the feast, all of which the following events of this chronicle will narrate in their place. For the present, the believer may stand where the chroniclers themselves stand, at the still point of a decision both momentous and quiet: a truthful man of twenty-five saying yes to the woman who had seen his truth and loved it, a noble woman of forty saying yes to the poverty of the finest man of her city, both of them moving within the customs of their people toward a covenant that would carry the weight of revelation. Let every believer who faces a great decision learn from this day the way of the best of men: weigh the intention until it is proven, give the word when it is proven, and then take the matter to the counsel of those who love you, that the blessing of the elders may rest upon what the hearts have chosen. For the homes built in that manner, Allah's blessing descends, as it descended upon the house that was now to be made; and of that house the rest of this chronicle, and the rest of sacred history, must tell.