The feast ended, the guests dispersed, the lamps of the wedding day burned low, and there began in Makkah the life that Allah, Glorified and Exalted be He, had arranged through all the years of preparation: the household of the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ and Khadijah bint Khuwaylid (may Allah be pleased with her). It is Lings who has caught the detail the believer should ponder first: the bridegroom left his uncle's house and went to live in the house of his bride. In the custom of the Arabs, as in the custom of most nations, it was the bride who crossed the threshold into the house of the groom's family; here the order was reversed, for the groom was a man of honored name and slender estate, and the bride was the mistress of one of the greatest fortunes in the city. Makkah noted the reversal and found nothing to mock in it, and this too was a quiet sign: so entirely did the young al-Amin carry the respect of his people that no shadow of dependence could touch his dignity. He brought with him into that house nothing but his character, his prayerful gravity, and the blessing of Allah that had followed him since his birth; and what he found there was not a household to be served but a companion in the truest sense, a woman who had chosen him with her eyes open and her heart assured.
The house itself deserves the believer's attention, for it was the stage upon which the coming years would be played. Khadijah's dwelling was the seat of a commercial empire: storerooms for the goods of the Syrian trade, quarters for the household servants and the agents of the caravans, the lodging of Maysarah and the other trusted men of her affairs, and the hospitality that a great lady of Quraysh owed to the chiefs and allies who frequented her gate. It was, in the manner of the merchant mansions of the Sanctuary city, spacious by the standard of the crowded quarter of Banu Hashim, where Abu Talib's household had long known the economy of a man with many children and narrow means. Into this ample house the Prophet ﷺ brought a spirit that wealth had never sheltered before: he had been the orphan of the desert, the shepherd of the Makkah slopes, the youth who shunned the idols of his people, the man whose word was a bond in every market of the Hijaz. The tranquil order that descended upon the household was noticed by all who entered it, and the believer recognizes it at once as the sakan, the abiding tranquility of which the Book of Allah was one day to speak in describing the estate of marriage itself.
The rhythm of the early married days may be traced in the duties that remained his. The Prophet ﷺ did not cease to be a man of the market: there were ventures yet to manage, partners to satisfy, accounts to render, and the round of a merchant's day in a city that lived by trade; and there was the evening return to a house that had become a refuge. Of his manner within doors the ummah was later to receive the most tender of testimonies, for Aisha (may Allah be pleased with her), asked what the Messenger of Allah ﷺ did in his house, answered that he was in the service of his family, and when the prayer came he went out to pray; and though the report belongs to the years of his mission, its pattern was set in these first years in Khadijah's house. He did not carry the market into his home, nor the throne of a rich man's idleness; he mended, he served, he sat with his household, he was gentle with Barakah and the youthful Zayd, and the servants of the house learned what all who served him ever learned, that to serve this man was to be served. The believer notes it well: the greatest of mankind in the walls of his own house was the helper of his family, and the tranquility that the sources remember over this household was not the peace of leisure but the peace of a rightly ordered love.
Two members of the new household must be presented here, for both entered upon the very wedding day. The first is Barakah, the Abyssinian bondwoman whom Abdullah had left his unborn son, the woman who had nursed him through his mother's death at al-Abwa and watched over his childhood through every hardship, loving him with a mother's love; on the day of his marriage the Prophet ﷺ set her free, and she was married to a man of Yathrib to whom she bore a son named Ayman, and from that day she was known to all the worlds as Umm Ayman (may Allah be pleased with her). The second is the youth Zayd ibn Harithah (may Allah be pleased with him), fifteen years old, whom Khadijah presented to her husband as a wedding gift from her own household. Zayd was of noble blood, the son of Harithah of the great northern tribe of Kalb and of a woman of the no less illustrious tribe of Tayy; he had been carried off as a child by raiding horsemen of the Bani Qayn, sold into slavery, and bought for his aunt's house at the great fair of Ukaz by Hakim ibn Hizam, Khadijah's nephew, who had invited her to choose one of his newly acquired slaves for herself, and Zayd was her choice. What became of this youth in the new household, the choosing and the adoption that made him for years the son of the Prophet ﷺ, belongs to a later page of this chronicle; here the believer marks only that the marriage was founded on the very day of its making by an emancipation and a gift, as though the house were declaring from its threshold the two laws of its future: freedom for the enslaved and bounty for the dependent.
Of the inner life of the marriage the sources speak in a sentence of Lings that generations of readers have paused over: as well as being a wife, Khadijah was also a friend to her husband, the sharer of his inclinations and ideals to a remarkable degree. Let the believer weigh each word. A friend: one to whom the thoughts may be spoken that are spoken nowhere else, whose presence is rest and not performance. A sharer of his inclinations: for he inclined, even then, away from the idols of the Sanctuary toward the religion of the hanif, the upright faith of Ibrahim, and toward contemplation, and truth, and mercy to the poor, and she, the mature mistress of a great house, met him there as an equal soul. His ideals: the standards of truthfulness and trust that had made his name a proverb in the markets, and the unformed longing for the coming of something pure to his people; these she honored as her own. The fifteen years between their ages, which the world counts so heavily, weighed nothing between two souls joined in their deepest purposes; and the marriage was wondrously blessed, as the tradition bears witness, and fraught with great happiness, though not without sorrows of bereavement. In the Quran's primal picture of marriage, Allah describes the fashioning of a mate from the single soul, that the one might find tranquility with the other; and the believing reader of the sirah sees in the house of Khadijah a renewal of that first pattern, a dwelling in which a man and a woman completed one another's souls under the mercy of their Lord.
What this marriage gave to the Prophet ﷺ in the quiet of its first years, the later events of his life declare by contrast and by testimony. It gave him provision without anxiety, for the wealth of Khadijah removed from his shoulders the whole burden that had once made marriage seem beyond him, and left his days free for the work of his hands and the thought of his heart. It gave him the freedom to withdraw, for the solitude that had begun to be sweet to him required a household that did not resent his absences; in the years that followed, his custom grew of taking provisions and retiring alone to the hills, and of returning to his family and going out again, a rhythm that only a house of perfect understanding could sustain. And it gave him counsel, for Khadijah was a woman of judgment proven in the hardest school of all, the market of Makkah, and her counsel would one day be the first earthly consolation of revelation itself. Aisha (may Allah be pleased with her), who came after her and honored her with a jealousy that was itself a tribute, was to say of her: she believed in me when the people disbelieved in me, she attested to my truthfulness when the people called me a liar, she aided me with her wealth when the people withheld from me, and Allah granted me children by her and by no one else. Four clauses, and each of them a wall of that house: faith, attestation, aid, and progeny.
The generosity of the household was proverbial from the beginning. The wealth of Khadijah, which had been accumulated in the ordinary course of trade, now flowed through the hands of the most generous of men and the most discerning of women toward every claimant upon mercy. The needy of Makkah knew the gate; the pilgrim and the traveler found rest; the slaves of the quarter, those who would one day be the first believers, had reason to bless the name of the young master of the house long before they knew why his name would matter. The Prophet's ﷺ upbringing among the poor of Banu Sa'd and in the narrow house of Abu Talib had taught him the worth of bread given without reminder of the gift; and Khadijah's discernment had taught her the worth of a man who enriched everyone he touched. The believing historian notes also what the tradition records of the blessing upon her substance: that when the Syrian venture had returned, her money had shown more profit and more blessing than it had ever shown, as al-Mubarakpuri transmits; the blessing did not cease with the wedding but entered the marriage as its dowry from Allah, and abode in the house through all the years of its plenty.
To the poor of Makkah the house stood as the believers have ever wished the houses of the great to stand. The city of the Sanctuary knew wealth beside poverty in the harshest juxtaposition: the caravans of the great houses brought silver and silk to the valleys, while at the edges of the same valleys the dispossessed of the wars and famines of Arabia gathered, the freed and the unfreed, the widow and the orphan, the client clans who clung to the great for protection and bread. Against the whole temper of the mercantile aristocracy, which honored the hoard and the high lineage and little else, the new household set a different economy: the wealth of Khadijah's house answered the claim of need before it answered the claim of increase. It is the way of the sirah that it does not preserve the ledger of these years, the names of the fed and the ransomed; the sources speak rather in fixed and general images, of a man who enriched the poor and bore the burdens of the weak, phrases that Khadijah herself was one day to use of him, in the very hour when heaven needed a human voice to still his fear. And that is the justice of the record: the generosity of this house was not chronicled by reporters because it was continuous, the very air of its rooms, and it was remembered where all continuous goodness is remembered, in the knowledge of Allah, who does not let the smallest of it perish.
Of the standing of this household in heaven, the believer has a testimony that stands among the treasures of the Sahih, and honesty requires that it be set in its right place in the chronology. Years after this event, when revelation had already begun and the Prophet ﷺ was in the anguish of his mission, Khadijah came to him with food; and Jibril, peace be upon him, appeared to the Prophet ﷺ and said to him: O Messenger of Allah, this is Khadijah, who has come to you with a vessel; when she comes to you, convey to her the greeting of peace from her Lord and from me, and give her glad tidings of a house in Paradise, a house of qasab, in which there is neither clamour nor toil. And the Prophet ﷺ conveyed the greeting, and Khadijah answered: Allah is as-Salam, and upon Jibril be peace. The scholars have loved this hadith beyond most others of the virtues of the wives, for in it the Lord of the worlds sends the greeting of peace through His greatest messenger-angel to a woman of Makkah; and the believing heart reads it back over all the years of the household, as one reads the blessing upon a house in the light of its foundation. No clamour, no toil: the words are the Quran's own words for the reward, and they describe in heaven the very quality the house on earth had made its law, a dwelling without strife.
Ibn Ishaq, at the end of her story, set down in a single sentence the office she held through all these years, an office this event founded: she had been his trusted adviser in all his troubles, and he would seek reassurance from her. When the Verse came upon him in the cave, it was to this house he descended trembling, and it was this wife who wrapped him in a garment and spoke the words that steadied the world: Allah will never disgrace you, for you keep the ties of kinship, and you bear the burdens of the weak, and you enrich the poor, and you honor the guest. The tradition of her virtues gathers many hadiths, which Ibn Kathir transmits in his second volume with their chains: that the best of the women of the worlds were Maryam daughter of Imran and Khadijah daughter of Khuwaylid; that of perfect women there were only three, Maryam, Asiyah the wife of Pharaoh, and Khadijah, of whom the scholars wrote that each of them vouched for a prophet of Allah and believed in him when he was given his mission. The believer is not surprised to learn these things of the woman who founded this household; the believer rather learns from them that Allah does not choose His prophets' houses at random, but prepares for them the companions whom His knowledge has already approved.
Nor was the house closed upon itself, for a household of blessing draws the pure-hearted of a family around its hearth. Among the most frequent visitors was Safiyyah, the youngest of the Prophet's ﷺ aunts, younger even than himself, whose marriage to Khadijah's brother Awwam had made her, in the webs of kinship, a sister of the house twice over; with her she would bring her little son Zubayr, named after her elder brother, so that the child grew up from his earliest years among the daughters of the house as among his own cousins. With Safiyyah came also her faithful retainer Salma, who had delivered Khadijah of all her children and who considered herself one of the household; and the aged Waraqah ibn Nawfal, Khadijah's cousin, was near enough in blood and expectation to be counted among those who watched the young couple with the hope of the scriptures in their hearts. What the believer sees in this circle is the providence of Allah preparing, within the wide kindred of the two houses, the first natural congregation of the coming faith: an aunt who would be among the earliest martyrs of Islam, a cousin who would be its first Khalifah's son, a midwife and a freedwoman and a noble youth, all gathered by kinship and affection around the man and woman whom the decree of Allah had joined.
So there stood in Makkah, in the closing years of the sixth Christian century, a house unlike any other house in the city: a husband who did not yet know what was coming upon him, a wife who had already been told in effect what he would be, a freed woman who was as a second mother, a noble youth who was as a son, and gates that opened to the poor before they opened to the rich. The children who would fill it with laughter and then with grief are the subject of another page of this chronicle, and the trade that sustained it and the retreats that sanctified it have pages of their own; but all of them stand upon this one: the establishment of the household. What Allah joins is joined, and what He blesses is blessed; and the believer who seeks the secret of the great years of Islam to come may find it here in seed, a tranquil house, a faithful wife, a pure heart, and a gate open to the seeker, in a city that did not yet know what had come to dwell within its walls.