Continued Commercial Activities in Makkah

The wedding lamps of Makkah had hardly cooled before the ordinary duties of a man's life resumed their round, and it is one of the quiet glories of the sirah that the years from about 596 to 600 of the Christian calendar, the years of the Prophet's ﷺ twenty-sixth to thirtieth birthdays, were spent by the greatest of mankind in the counting of goods and the weighing of accounts. Marriage had changed the meaning of his labor entirely. The earnings of a bachelor serve a man's own hand; the earnings of a husband serve a house, and the house he now maintained was the most consequential household in the history of the children of Adam, though not a soul in Makkah knew it. Khadijah bint Khuwaylid (may Allah be pleased with her) had wealth enough for a hundred lifetimes, but the Prophet ﷺ did not therefore fold his hands; he continued in the commerce he had been raised to, now with a wife's estate and a household's honor bound up in his diligence, and the believing reader marks the pattern for every married man who comes after him: the dignity of labor does not cease when need does, for the hand that provides is itself an act of worship.

His trade moved within the system that Quraysh had built upon the House of Allah, and the believer must see that system whole to see his place in it. The year of Makkah was ruled by the caravan seasons, the winter journey to the Yemen and the summer journey to Syria of which the Quran itself was one day to speak; between the seasons, the great fairs of the Hijaz, Ukaz and Majannah and Dhu al-Majaz, drew the tribes to the truce months, and the city of the Sanctuary lived from market day to market day under the eyes of the pilgrims. In this world the customary instrument of the man of standing was the mudarabah, the profit-sharing venture in which one party supplies capital and another undertakes the journey and the labor, dividing the increase by agreement; it was on such terms that Khadijah had first employed him, and it was through such partnerships that his trade continued. Lings has preserved the exact trajectory of these years in his sentence on the period before the marriage, that Muhammad ﷺ received more and more invitations to join one or another of his kinsmen on their travels abroad, until the day came when he was asked to take charge of the goods of a merchant unable to travel himself, and his success in that capacity led to other similar engagements. The invitations did not cease at the wedding; they multiplied, for a man known to double the value of entrusted goods is not left idle by any market on earth.

The persons with whom he dealt were the standing merchants of the city, and the believing reader should see them around him. There were the caravan masters of the great houses, men grown grey in the calculation of the trade winds and the moods of the Syrian customs stations; the moneyed elders who supplied capital and took their share, and watched the young men of the market as landlords watch tenants; the brokers and the weighers of the suq; and the young traders of his own generation, the sons of the chiefs, who were being formed in these same years for the day when the present chiefs should die. In such company his manner was a lesson before it was a reputation: he did not swear oaths to move his goods, for the truthful man needs no oath; he did not bid against his partner after the venture was agreed; he did not delay a settlement beyond its day; and he listened to the old merchants with the courtesy of a son. Of his own house there was his uncle al-Abbas ibn Abdul-Muttalib, the successful merchant of the family, whose caravans were of the same cloth as his own and whose counsel stood behind the household's undertakings; and there were the agents of Khadijah's estate, Maysarah before the marriage and the men of her storerooms after it, who handled her goods under his eye. Partnership with a man whose ledgers never erred was not an opportunity that the merchants of Makkah let pass, and the invitations Lings records were the market's own tribute to his name.

In the local markets of Makkah his conduct was the same discipline the caravans had proven. The Prophet ﷺ sold what he had and bought what he needed in the open suq of the Sanctuary city, where the merchants of the great houses kept their benches and the coins of the tribes passed from hand to hand, and every dealing of his bore the mark that had made his name: the truth in describing the wares, for he would not commend what was flawed nor conceal what was known; the exactness in the measure and the weight, for his scale never favored the seller nor cheated the buyer; the clarity in the account, for the partner who dealt with him found the ledger as clean as the day of the contract; and the patience in the settlement, for he did not wrangle over what the venture brought, nor dispute the increase, nor press the debtor beyond his capacity. Years afterward, when revelation had come, he was to teach his community in words that read like the autobiography of these market days: that the two parties to a sale retain the option so long as they have not separated, and that if they are truthful and clear, their transaction is blessed, but if they conceal and lie, the blessing of their sale is erased. The hadith is Sahih al-Bukhari's, and its narrator is Hakim ibn Hizam (may Allah be pleased with him), the nephew of Khadijah, son of the house of her brother Hizam, the same kinsman who had bought Zayd at the fair of Ukaz; a man of that very merchant kinship heard the Prophet ﷺ define the blessed transaction, and the believer smiles at the fitness of the chain, for no house in Makkah had seen the barakah of truthful dealing more intimately than the house of Asad.

The goods themselves belonged to the great streams of the Hijaz trade, and their names carry the whole geography of Arabia. Northward to Syria went the leather and the aromatics of the peninsula, and from Syria returned the textiles and dyes, the oils and the luxury wares that the elites of Makkah prized; southward to the Yemen went the goods of the north, and from the Yemen came the leatherwork and the incense and the products of the Indian Ocean trade that had made the frankincense routes famous since the ages of the earlier prophets. The caravans moved to the two seasons, with the pilgrim months between them for the fairs, and the year of a merchant of standing was a wheel that turned through Syria and Yemen and the home market in one circuit. In these years the Prophet ﷺ rode the wheel as his fathers had done: seasons of journey under the desert stars, seasons of buying and selling in the Makkah suq, seasons of settlement and stock-taking in the houses of the two clans whose fortunes he served. The tradition has not preserved the itineraries of these particular years, and the chronicler does well to say so plainly; what it has preserved is the manner that rode with him on every road, the fairness that the markets remembered long after they had forgotten the cargoes, for silk and dye are consumed by the years, but a truthful man's scale is a monument.

Blessing, barakah, is indeed the word the sources set over his commerce, and the believer should understand what the word meant in the mouths of the Makkans. It did not mean merely profit, for profit comes to the liar and the cheat; it meant increase without taint, substance that carried no wronged man's claim in its weight, goods that did not rot or stray or gather dispute. So it had been in the Syrian venture, when Khadijah saw in her money more profit and more blessing than she had ever known; and so it continued through the married years, when his undertakings prospered in a manner that the partners who shared them could only call providential, though none of them yet knew the reason heaven favored the young al-Amin. In the teaching of Islam that his Lord would reveal through him, the principle was to stand for all ages: that the profit of a transaction partakes of the truth of its parties, and that a single dirham earned with a clean tongue and an honest scale may outweigh a fortune whose blessing has been lied away. Makkah counted its silver in these years without understanding what it witnessed; the believing merchant of any age who wants his trade blessed goes to school at these benches.

His standing in these years the tradition has fixed with a sentence of Lings that deserves to be read slowly: the praise of al-Amin was continually upon men's lips, and he had come to be considered by the chiefs of Quraysh as one of the most capable men of the generation which would succeed them, and which would have, after the present chiefs, the task of maintaining the honor and the power of the tribe throughout Arabia. Let the believer weigh what is compressed there. The titles of his youth, as-Sadiq and al-Amin, the Truthful and the Trustworthy, had ripened from a boy's reputation into the settled judgment of the rulers of the merchant city; the hopes of his own clans of Hashim and Muttalib, whose influence had waned while Makhzum rose, were set upon him for their recovery, so that even before prophethood his name was a political fact of Makkah; and the chiefs who would one day be the bitterest enemies of his mission had already, in these quiet years, handed down upon him the verdict of capability that they would spend their fortunes trying to unsay. It cost the Quraysh nothing to trust him with goods; it would cost them everything that he was trustworthy, for a man who cannot be corrupted in the market cannot be corrupted at all, and such a man, when Allah speaks to him, is immovable.

Against the practices of the age his commerce stood out as a clean thing among stained things, and the believer must see the contrast to measure the man. The market of the Jahiliyyah had perfected every art that the later revelation would name and curse: the false oath sworn lightly upon the idols to move a flawed beast or a dampened heap of grain; the concealment of defects, as the history of trade has known it in every nation; the usury of the pre-Islamic age, in which the unpaid debt was doubled and redoubled at each postponement until the debtor was devoured; and the tampering with weights and measures that the prophets of old, peace be upon them, had thundered against in the markets of their own peoples. In such a market the young master of the house of Khadijah dealt as a law unto himself, for there was no law above the market but the custom of the strong; he needed none, for the fear of Allah that would one day be revealed in his Book was already in his breast, implanted there by the hand that had guarded his orphanhood in the desert of Banu Sa'd. The merchants who dealt with him understood, each in his own way, that they stood before something uncommon; the believing reader understands what they could not, that the market of Makkah was being taught by degrees, transaction by transaction, the manners of the market of the Quran, by the very man who would one day carry the Book that ratified them.

The economics of the household in these years are the economics of stewardship, and the believer should read them as such. The wealth that flowed through the house of the Prophet ﷺ and Khadijah was never its own; it was a trust with claimants, and the claimants were fed. The tradition does not preserve the ledgers of these five years, for the sirah does not chronicle what was continuous; but it does preserve the principle in the fixed phrases that Khadijah was to speak in the first hour of revelation, that he bore the burdens of the weak and enriched the poor and honored the guest, phrases that describe the settled habit of a decade, not the improvisation of a moment. His own needs remained those of the man of the desert school: he was, as the whole tenor of his life attests, the furthest of men from avarice, content with little when little was the portion, giving when much was the portion, and teaching by his silence amid wealth what he would one day teach in words, that the seeker of increase and the keeper of trusts are two different men, and that only the second is safe. The believer who surveys these years sees a paradox that is really a plan: the man who least loved wealth was given the greatest wealth of his city to steward, because Allah prepares His instruments in the matter they will least hoard.

And through these years, beneath the market rhythm, ran another rhythm that the chronicle must name with care, for the sources set it in its own season. The tradition relates that in the years that followed, as his fortieth year drew near, solitude became dear to the Prophet ﷺ, and he would take provisions to a cave in Mount Hira and consecrate nights to the worship of Allah, returning to his family and going out again; the famous retreats belong chiefly to the closing years before the prophethood, after the rebuilding of the Kaaba in his thirty-fifth year, but the heart that sought the mountain was the same heart through all the market days, and the alternate seasons of buying and of withdrawal were already one life. Khadijah's house held both without strain, which is itself her glory: a wife of lesser understanding would have read the mountain's pull as an unkindness to her bed and board; Khadijah read it as the truth of her husband's soul, provisioned it, and asked no man's leave. The believing reader sees in this household economy the whole doctrine of the Quranic verse that was later to descend, in which Allah Himself describes the community of His worshipers as those who humble themselves to their Lord by night and, beside them, others traveling through the land seeking of His bounty: devotion and enterprise, prayer and caravan, one people before one Lord, and no contradiction between the ledger and the lamp.

This sanctifying of lawful commerce is among the enduring legacies of these years, and the chronicle should name it plainly. The Prophet ﷺ did not enter trade as a detour on the road to prophethood; he entered it as a man, and he practiced it as an act of religion before religion was formally his to preach, and when his Lord at last spoke to him, the Speaker had lived the life He would regulate. The revelations and the teachings that came afterward bear the grain of these market years: the commands to give full measure and weigh with the even scale; the warning against consuming the wealth of one another in vanity; the prohibition of deceit in sale, whoever deceives us is not one of us, spoken over a heap of grain whose dampness the seller had concealed; and the promise, recorded in the chronicle of his Syrian journey, that the truthful, trustworthy merchant stands with the prophets, the truthful ones, and the martyrs. The hadith of the truthful merchant is transmitted by at-Tirmidhi with a chain the scholars have discussed, and its companions in the collections are authentic beyond dispute; and whether graded hasan or discussed in its isnad, its meaning was lived in Makkah for these five years before it was spoken, by the merchant of the house of Asad who never once, in any market of the Hijaz, sold a man anything but truth.

So the five years closed as they had passed, without chronicle-worthy event and without a single day wasted. No poet sang them, for they gave the poets nothing to sing; no clan chronicler marked them, for no alliance was made nor broken in them; and the believer who has learned to read the wisdom of Allah in His silences understands that these were the years of the foundations, in which the future Messenger of the worlds did what most men do, earned bread, kept trust, honored a wife, gave to the poor, and walked home at evening through the streets of a city that did not know him. When the summons comes in a later page of this chronicle, it will find him neither idle nor inflated, neither starved nor enslaved to his stores, but exactly the man that five years of honest trade and one household of mercy had made: capable in the world, free of the world, and wholly the property of Allah, Glorified and Exalted be He. That is what the merchant years of a prophet are for, and the believer who keeps a shop or manages an account in any century may take from them his lifetime's ambition: to trade so that heaven would not blush to be seen at his bench.