Marriage Ceremony of Muhammad and Khadijah

The arrangements had been made in the council chambers of two great houses, and now the day came when what was privately agreed had to be publicly sealed. In Makkah a marriage of consequence was an affair of the tribe as much as of the two spouses: the covenant bound kinships, exchanged honors, and set the tongues of the marketplaces talking, and the marriage of the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ to Khadijah bint Khuwaylid (may Allah be pleased with her) was a marriage of the highest consequence. The master record of this event has kept the picture whole: the marriage contract was solemnized in Makkah with Abu Talib delivering a celebrated sermon of marriage, a dower of twenty young camels was presented, and a celebratory wedding feast followed. To these bare and luminous facts the sources add their textures, and the believer walks among them now as among the courts of a remembered house.

It is worth pausing to see the day as Makkah saw it, for the believer honors the event by honoring its setting. The city of the Sanctuary lived by the rhythms of the Kaaba: the pilgrims who came to the House, the caravans that came and went with the pilgrim seasons, the assemblies of the precincts where news traveled faster than any rider. A marriage between two great houses did not remain private for an hour; the servants carried it from quarter to quarter, the market talk took it up between the weighing of goods, and by the time the parties assembled for the contract the whole of the town knew that the house of Asad was giving Khadijah bint Khuwaylid, whom the chiefs of Quraysh had sought in vain, to the young al-Amin of the house of Hashim. There was matter for wonder on every side: that the wealthiest merchant-woman of the Sanctuary city had chosen a man of modest estate; that she had passed over the proud suitors of Makhzum and the other great clans; and that the house whose fortunes had waned was about to receive, in covenant, the daughter of one of the richest lines of Quraysh. The believer who walks the streets of that remembered Makkah can hear the astonishment and the pleasure in the same breath, for the news carried its own verdict: here at last was a union that nobody could call a bargain, because both parties had plainly chosen what money cannot buy.

The assembly gathered in the dwelling of the bride's family, where the deputation of Banu Hashim had been received when the hand of Khadijah was sought. The compiler al-Mubarakpuri has preserved the fullest notice of the company: the marriage contract was witnessed by Banu Hashim and the heads of Mudar, that great northern stem of the Arab nation from which Quraysh drew its noblest lineage claims. To stand with Banu Hashim was the groom's own house, the sons of Abdul-Muttalib and their kin, come in their full dignity around the nephew who was the beloved of their hearts; to stand for the bride was her uncle Amr ibn Asad, the guardian whom the learned agreed had given her in marriage, with her clan of Banu Asad around him and her own formidable reputation standing at the door like a guard of honor. The variance of the sources on the guardian's identity, her uncle Amr, her brother Amr, or the memory of her father Khuwaylid in Ibn Ishaq's main line, has been weighed in the chronicle of the arrangements; it may rest here, for whichever worthy kinsman pronounced the acceptance, the learned have settled upon the uncle Amr ibn Asad as the generally agreed view, and Allah knows best.

What each house brought to the covenant the genealogists of Quraysh could recite like a ledger of honor. From the house of Hashim came the purest descent in all the tribe, the line of Ibrahim and Ismail, the custody of the keys and rights of the Sanctuary that had descended from Qusayy through Hashim to the grandsons of Abdul-Muttalib; there was not a chief in Makkah who did not concede them precedence of lineage, even those who had outstripped them in wealth and men. From the house of Asad came the greatest fortune accumulated by any single line of the tribe, the caravans and trade of a woman who had doubled her inheritance by her own discernment, and the alliance of a clan whose tents and warehouses stretched from Makkah to the Syrian markets. Between the two, the contract joined what the age called the two halves of nobility: the nobility of blood and Sanctuary, and the nobility of enterprise and means. Yet the believing reader knows that the true ledger of this marriage was not written in the records of the genealogists at all, but in the knowledge of Allah, Glorified and Exalted be He, who was joining into one household everything the coming faith would need in its hidden years: the name that the Arabs would follow, and the wealth that would feed the hungry and ransom the enslaved when the followers of that name were poor.

Then Abu Talib stood to speak, and the words he spoke have been celebrated through all the centuries of Islam as the khutbah of the marriage of the Prophet ﷺ. As the later compilations transmit it, he praised Allah, Glorified and Exalted be He, who had made the House of Hashim the descendants of Ibrahim and the seed of Ismail and had appointed them the guardians of His Sanctuary and the keepers of His House; he extolled the nobility of his nephew Muhammad ﷺ, declaring that no youth of Quraysh could stand beside him in excellence, in character, in gravity, or in lineage; he acknowledged, with the frankness of a proud uncle, that the groom's fortune did not match his rank, and then dismissed the objection with the sentence that rings through the ages: wealth is a passing shadow and a loan soon reclaimed, and what abides is the man. He then pledged the dower on his nephew's behalf and called for the blessed covenant to be concluded. Here the chronicler must render an account of transmission as the tradition itself demands: this khutbah is not carried in the concise account of Ibn Ishaq as Ibn Kathir transmits it in his Sira, and its full text belongs to the later compilatory tradition, to al-Halabi's Insan al-Uyun, to the commentaries on al-Qastallani's al-Mawahib al-Laduniyyah, and to Ibn Kathir's own greater work, al-Bidayah wa'l-Nihayah. The scholars have quoted it across the generations with love; its chain of transmission is not of the rigor of the Sahihayn, and the believer holds its celebrated phrases as a treasured inheritance of the sirah, sound in meaning beyond doubt, for who that knew the eloquence of Quraysh could doubt that the chief of Banu Hashim rose that day and spoke nobly of his nephew?

The contract itself was concluded with the forms the Arabs held sacred: the declaration of the guardian and the acceptance of the suitor's side, spoken before the assembled witnesses, binding in honor long before any court of record. The ages of the couple are fixed by the reports with a rare consensus on the groom: the Messenger of Allah ﷺ was twenty-five years of age when he married Khadijah, according to the account of several scholars, among them Abu Amr al-Madani, as Ibn Hisham states; and Ya'qub ibn Sufyan, writing from Ibrahim ibn al-Mundhir, records that Amr ibn Asad married Khadijah to the Messenger of Allah ﷺ when he was twenty-five, adding a phrase that has exercised the chronologists, that Quraysh were then building the Kaaba, a detail that sits uneasily beside the mass-transmitted account of the great rebuilding in his thirty-fifth year, and which the sources leave as one of the small puzzles of the timeline. Of the bride's age the reports speak variously: most of the later compilations give forty, and with forty Lings, al-Mubarakpuri, and al-Sheha have all written her story; while the transmission of al-Bayhaqi, cited by Ibn Kathir, sets her at thirty-five, with yet another report speaking differently again. Fifteen years at least divided them, and nothing at all divided them; for what the two houses witnessed that day was not a joining of incongruous fortunes but a covenant of two souls whom Allah had prepared for each other, the man of the noblest character in Makkah and the woman of the noblest standing.

Then the dower was presented, and its form was remembered to the letter through all the generations: twenty young camels, as Ibn Hisham states with the precision of the genealogists, young female camels, the flower of the herds, led to the house of the bride. Here again honesty is the believer's method, and the variance of the reports is part of the inheritance: alongside the famous account of the twenty young camels, a variant transmission in the sources, one that Ibn Kathir discusses in his greater work al-Bidayah wa'l-Nihayah, gives the dower as twelve uqiyahs, a substantial weight of silver by the measure of the day. The twenty young camels, however, are what the mass of the tradition transmits and what the master record of this event canonizes, and it is they that the Muslim memory has carried through the centuries: modest for a woman of Khadijah's immense wealth, weighty for a man of the Prophet's ﷺ slender means, and precisely sufficient to crown the bride with the honor that was her right. In the law that would be revealed through her husband, the dower would be named sadaqah, the woman's due, to be given with a good heart and never taken back; and the believing eye sees in these twenty camels a prefiguring, as it were, of the Quran's own commandment concerning the marriage gift.

The day itself, as the tradition transmits it, was marked by an act of liberality that the Muslim heart should never pass over: the freeing of slaves. On the day of his marriage, as Lings relates following the earliest sources, the Prophet ﷺ set free Barakah, the faithful Abyssinian bondwoman he had inherited from his father Abdullah, the woman who had loved him through every sorrow of his childhood and who would be known forever after as Umm Ayman (may Allah be pleased with her); and on the same day Khadijah made him a gift of a youth of fifteen from her own household, Zayd ibn Harithah (may Allah be pleased with him), whom her nephew Hakim ibn Hizam had lately bought at the great fair of Ukaz. What manner of wedding is this, the believer asks, in which the bridegroom emancipates and the bride endows? It is the wedding of a man whose whole life would be the ransom of captives and the freeing of necks, beginning at the threshold of his own married life; and it is the first signature, written in the ink of freedom, of the household that was now founded. The story of Zayd, his griefs and his adoption into the new family, belongs to the years that follow in this chronicle; here the believer marks only the wedding-day deed itself, and sees in it the mercy of Allah foreshadowed even before His Book commanded it.

The wedding feast followed the contract, for the Arabs of Quraysh did not let such a covenant pass without hospitality, and the feast of a marriage, the walimah, was the public joy of the two houses. The memory of what was eaten and drunk at the marriage of the Prophet ﷺ and Khadijah is carried in the tradition in the form of the variants that gather around it: the narrative of Ammar ibn Yasir, preserved by Ibn Kathir, recalls a slaughtered cow and a family dressed in their ceremonial best, whatever the difficulties of that report's details; and the essence of the day is beyond dispute, that the marriage was celebrated openly before the people with the generosity of the house of Asad and the dignity of the house of Hashim. In later years, when revelation had come, the Messenger of Allah ﷺ would make the wedding feast itself a sunnah of his community, enjoining that a marriage be marked with hospitality even if the host possesses nothing more than a single sheep to slaughter; and who that reads of the feast at Makkah can doubt that the ordinance was a memorial of what Allah had joined in his own blessed house? The food of a walimah is never merely food; it is the house saying to the people: this union is lawful, it is open, it is joyous, and it carries your witness.

And what of the bride at her own wedding feast? The chronicler owes her a backward glance before the covenant closes. Khadijah bint Khuwaylid had reached this day by a road that few women of any age have walked with such dignity. Twice widowed, mistress of a fortune she had multiplied by her own judgment in a market of hard men, she had refused, through all the years of her widowhood, the suit of the chiefs of Makkah who came for her wealth as much as for her person, and had kept her house in the dignity her fathers had given it. Now, moved by what she had heard from Maysarah of the monk beneath the tree and the two angels in the noon sky, and by what her own eyes had seen of the truthfulness of the man, she had opened her heart and directed her own marriage with the quiet authority that belonged to her; and on the day of the feast she gave herself to a husband younger than herself, whose whole fortune was a herd of young camels and whose whole treasure was his character. The reports differ upon her age, as the chronicle has honestly recorded, whether forty or thirty-five or other numbers beside; but every report agrees upon what age could not touch, that she was a woman of majesty and judgment, and that the light she had perceived in her agent's face she was now taking beneath the canopy of her own house, to guard and to cherish until death should part them.

Two facts close the account of this day, and they are the two facts that Ibn Hisham set down with the economy of a master: she was the first woman he married, and he married no other woman until she died. The believing heart should pause upon them. In the Makkah of that age the chiefs of the great houses took wives in plurality as a mark of their standing, and a man of the Prophet's ﷺ rank, married now to the wealthiest woman of Quraysh, might have followed the custom of his peers; instead, for twenty-five years, until death parted them, Khadijah alone was his wife, and the Prophet ﷺ kept her memory so lovingly afterward that Aisha (may Allah be pleased with her), who never saw her, confessed: I never felt jealous of any of the wives of the Prophet ﷺ as I felt of Khadijah, though I never saw her, for he would mention her often, and would slaughter a sheep and send portions of it to Khadijah's friends. The hadith, agreed upon in the Sahih collections, closes the circle of this day's meaning: the feast that began in Makkah was still, decades later, being extended to the friends of the bride.

And what was it that Allah, Glorified and Exalted be He, was establishing in this assembly of the two houses? The Quran, revealed years afterward, has set the eternal description of marriage over this union as a canopy of light: and of His signs is that He created for you, from yourselves, mates that you may find tranquility in them, and He placed between you affection and mercy. Every word of the verse found its habitation in this house: the tranquility, the sakan, that the soul of the contemplative young merchant needed; the mawaddah, the devoted love, that was to bind the pair through prosperity and bereavement and persecution alike; the rahmah, the mercy, that would make the older wife and the younger husband a single refuge of gentleness. The Prophet ﷺ entered this marriage at twenty-five, and the world does not exaggerate in saying that every subsequent chapter of the sacred history stands upon it: the wealth that fed the poor slaves of the coming faith, the children who carried his blood, the counsel that steadied him when revelation descended, the single-hearted devotion that no wealth could buy. Makkah saw a wedding feast that day; the angels, as the believer may reverently say, saw the foundations of the House of Islam being laid, and the mercy of Allah descending upon a covenant made in His name.