Establishment of Family Life with Khadijah

The decade that stretches from the marriage to the rebuilding of the Kaaba, from about 596 to 605 of the Christian calendar, from the Prophet's ﷺ twenty-sixth year to his thirty-fifth, is the least chronicled stretch of the sacred biography and, by the witness of everything the sources do carry, the most quietly happy. These are the middle years, the years of the full table and the crowded house, when the most consequential man in the history of the children of Adam was known to Makkah only as a merchant of scrupulous dealings, a husband of singular devotion, and a father of growing children; and the believer who has followed the orphanhood, the shepherd slopes, and the hard apprenticeship of the caravan roads feels, as he enters these years, the gentleness of the providence of Allah, who gives His beloved servants their seasons of rest between the burdens He prepares them to carry. The master record of this event names what the decade was: a peaceful, harmonious, and supportive domestic foundation, characterized by deep mutual love, trust, and ethical integrity; and every strand of the tradition, read together, fills that outline with living color.

The children came, and with them the house filled. First came a son, al-Qasim, born within the first years of the marriage, and the father took from his name the kunya by which the Arabs would call him all his days: Abul-Qasim, the father of al-Qasim, for it was the custom of the Arabs that a man becomes known by his firstborn, and the naming was a public joy, the announcement that the orphan of Abdullah was now the root of a family of his own. Then came the daughters, Zaynab and Ruqayyah and Umm Kulthum and Fatimah, each the light of a successive year of the house; and last, in the closing years of the decade, another son, Abdullah, whom the tradition surnames at-Tayyib and at-Tahir, the Good and the Pure. The count is agreed upon by all the reports that Ibn Kathir transmits: two boys and four girls, every child of the Prophet ﷺ born of Khadijah, and no child of his by any other wife save Ibrahim, who was to come long afterward. The order of the births the sources preserve differently, and honesty is the believer's method here as everywhere: Ibn Hisham places the girls as Ruqayyah, then Zaynab, then Umm Kulthum, then Fatimah; the report of Mus'ab ibn Abdullah al-Zubayri, transmitted by al-Bayhaqi, places Zaynab second after al-Qasim; and the report of Ibn Abbas through Yunus ibn Bukayr lists the six without ranking. The variance disturbs nothing that matters; the six names stand, and the house that held them stood.

The kunya of Abul-Qasim deserves its own moment, for in it the Arab world's affection for this household is stored. A kunya was not a mere address but a dignity: to name a man father of his son was to affirm his standing, his continuity, his rootedness in the life of the tribe; and the orphan who had grown up without father or mother was now, before he was thirty, the father of Qasim, and would be called so to his face by the chiefs of Quraysh, and after the prophethood by the whole world of Islam. The tenderness of the Prophet ﷺ with his children became in these years one of the wonders of Makkah, in a hard society that prided itself on hard rearing: he carried them, he played with them, he let the prayer stand long with a granddaughter on his shoulder, as the later years would show; and the little community of the house learned before any others what the coming revelation would command of fathers, that they are shepherds of their households, and that the strongest man in Makkah was the gentlest in his own door.

But the household's happiness was, as Lings wrote, fraught with great happiness, though not without sorrows of bereavement, and the chronicle must follow the sorrow too. The boys died young. Of al-Qasim the reports differ: Lings, following the early material, writes that the boy died before his second birthday, a flower cropped in first bloom; other reports gathered by Ibn Kathir state that he attained an age when he could ride, even upon light and swift camels, and died after the call to prophethood; and the compiler transmits both without forcing them into one. Of Abdullah the reports likewise part ways, for al-Zubayr ibn Bakkar relates that it was Abdullah who was called at-Tayyib and at-Tahir because he was born after the call to prophethood, while Lings places his birth in the famine years before it, as the last child of the marriage. On one report the tradition fixes a luminous word: it is related that the Messenger of Allah ﷺ said of a child of his who died unweaned that in heaven there is a place for him where he completes his suckling; and Ibn Kathir, with the scrupulousness that makes his work a trust, adds the correction of the scholars, that it is well known this statement applied to his son Ibrahim, who was born in Madinah long after. What is not in variance is the meaning of the bereavements: the father who buried his sons in Makkah was the same father who would one day say, with the tears upon his blessed face, that the eye weeps and the heart grieves, but we say only what pleases our Lord; and the house of this decade learned, in the cradle and at the small grave, the whole curriculum of patience that the years of loss in Madinah would demand.

The daughters grew, and the tradition has kept them whole. Zaynab, the eldest by most accounts, grave and motherly; Ruqayyah and Umm Kulthum, the two whom the House of Abdul-Muttalib would one day bind by marriage to the House of Abu Lahab, and whom that house would one day return; Fatimah, the youngest, born in the last years of the decade, the father's own portion, of whom he was to say in after years that she was part of him and what pained her pained him. In the years this event covers they were the laughter and the labor of the house, learning from their mother the management of a great estate and from their father the speech of truth and the fear of Allah; and when the call came at the decade's end and after, they believed, every one of them, for they had lived closest to the source: as al-Mubarakpuri records, all his daughters witnessed Islam and embraced it. The believing reader passes through these nursery years with reverence, for this was the first Islamic education in history, conducted in the very house where the revelation would descend, by the parents whom Allah had chosen for it.

Behind the mother of these six children lay a woman seasoned by a lifetime of nurture, and the household bore her mark. Khadijah had already been twice married before her union with the Prophet ﷺ, and the tradition preserves the memory of her children from those former marriages, among them her son Hind ibn Abi Halah, who was reared in his mother's house and lived to become one of the transmitters of the celebrated description of the Prophet's ﷺ person; so the daughters of the house grew up amid brothers of the half-blood and of adoption alike, and the walls of the estate held a wider childhood than the six cradles alone. Through all the births it was Salma, the faithful retainer, who delivered Khadijah of her children and who considered herself one of the household; and through all the years it was Khadijah herself who governed the domestic economy of a great establishment, directing the storerooms and the servants, the accounts and the hospitality, with the same judgment that had doubled her fortune in the markets. What the daughters absorbed at her side was therefore no small curriculum: the management of wealth without ostentation, the dignity of the mistress who serves her own guests, the gravity of the mother whose house is ordered for worship and for mercy; and the believer should mark that the first Muslim women of history were formed in this school before ever Islam was proclaimed, for the mothers of the believers to come were trained by the mother who believed first of all.

To the children of the house must be added the son who was given rather than born, Zayd ibn Harithah (may Allah be pleased with him), whose story belongs to these years. He had been in the household some years, the wedding-day gift grown into the household's own beloved youth, when word of him reached his father Harithah of Kalb through the pilgrims of the holy season, and the boy, knowing his family grieved for him, sent them verses telling them he dwelt amid the Holy House in the best of noble families. Harithah and his brother Ka'b came to Makkah bearing a rich ransom, and the Prophet ﷺ answered them with the sentence that shows his whole character: let the boy choose, and if he chooses you, he is yours without ransom, and if he chooses me, I am not the man to set another above him who chooses me. And Zayd, with his father and his uncle standing before him, chose Muhammad ﷺ: I would not choose any man in preference to you, for I have seen from you such things that I could never choose another above you. Then the Prophet ﷺ took them to the Kaaba and stood in the Hijr and said in a loud voice: all you who are present, bear witness that Zayd is my son; I am his heir and he is mine. So the boy became known in Makkah as Zayd ibn Muhammad, by the adoption custom of the age, which the Quran was later to regulate; and the father and uncle of Kalb returned home reconciled, for they had seen their son free, honored, and established at the very center of the Sanctuary's life. No episode of the decade more purely shows the quality of the house: a master who would not keep by force what could be kept by love, and a bondsman who preferred that love to freedom and kin.

The decade knew its public hardship as well, in the drought that Lings records, which produced something like famine in the Hijaz and weighed most heavily upon the house least able to bear it, the crowded household of Abu Talib. The events of those years belong to the family's larger story, but their mark upon this household must be told. Halimah the foster-mother came to Makkah in the drought, her flocks depleted, and found the door of Khadijah open as ever: she was sent home with a gift of forty sheep and a howdah camel, the measure of the house's remembrance of the desert that had raised its master. And when the poverty of Abu Talib's children could no longer be ignored, it was this household that moved: the Prophet ﷺ went to his uncle al-Abbas, the merchant of the family, and proposed that each of their two houses take charge of one of Abu Talib's sons until circumstances improved; al-Abbas took Ja'far, and the Prophet ﷺ took Ali, the youngest, then a small boy of perhaps five or six, whose upbringing in the house of Khadijah would place him among the children as a brother to the four girls. About that same time, Lings relates, Khadijah bore her last child, Abdullah, who died even earlier than Qasim; and in a sense, the writer adds, the little one was replaced by Ali. So the immediate family stood complete: the four girls, Zayd, and Ali, under the two parents, with Umm Ayman (may Allah be pleased with her), who had returned to the household in these years after her marriage in Yathrib, completing the circle as its eldest and most loving member; and the Prophet ﷺ would say of her to others: she is all that is left me of the people of my house.

The texture of those family days the believer may gather from the small, certain things. There was Salma, the faithful retainer of Khadijah, who had delivered her of all her children and considered herself one of the household; there was Safiyyah, the youngest of the Prophet's ﷺ aunts, sister of the house twice over, arriving with her little son Zubayr, who grew up among his cousins the daughters of the house; there were the births and the namings, the seventh-day customs, the first steps of the girls upon the stones of the court; and through it all there was the father himself, who was in the service of his family when he was among them, as Aisha was later to marvel, sewing, milking, mending, and serving himself, and going out to the prayer when the prayer came. The ethical integrity the master record names was the house's atmosphere: no lie was ever heard in it, no trust betrayed, no servant wronged, no claimant turned away; and the mutual trust of the parents was the children's first curriculum, for they saw every day that the greatest lady of Quraysh honored her husband as the best of men, and that the best of men sought his wife's counsel before all others upon the earth.

And in the closing years of the decade, over the fullness of the family life, there began to gather the hush that precedes the speech of heaven. The tradition relates that after the rebuilding of the Kaaba in his thirty-fifth year, an event the following pages of this chronicle will set forth, the Prophet ﷺ began to experience true visions in his sleep, which came, as he described them, like the breaking of the light of dawn; that solitude became dear to him, and he would take provisions to a cave in Mount Hira and consecrate nights to the worship of Allah, then return to his family, and sometimes return again to the mountain; and that as he walked out toward his hermitage he would hear the words, peace be upon thee, O Messenger of Allah, from trees and stones, and turn to find no one. The household is the silent partner of every one of these sentences: the provisions were Khadijah's house's provisions; the family he returned to was her family; the solitude he was free to seek was held open by her understanding; and when the visions and the voices would at last resolve into the first words of revelation in the cave, the descent would be to this house, and into the arms of this wife, whose word of consolation, Allah will never disgrace you, would be the first human utterance to steady the trembling messenger of Allah. Ibn Ishaq has preserved her office for all time: she had been his trusted adviser in all his troubles, and he would seek reassurance from her.

There is a prayer in the Quran, placed upon the lips of the servants of the All-Merciful, that asks for exactly what this decade possessed: our Lord, grant us from our wives and offspring the comfort of our eyes, and make us leaders of the righteous. The household of the Prophet ﷺ and Khadijah is the prayer's first and most complete answer: a house of wives and children who were coolness of eyes to their parents, and parents who became, by the decree of Allah, the leaders and exemplars of all the righteous who would ever come after them. The believer who surveys the decade sees the pattern of every blessed Muslim home within it: lawful marriage, devoted spouses, children cherished and disciplined in the fear of Allah, the poor remembered, the relatives gathered in, the bondsman honored, the foster-mother repaid a hundredfold, and the whole domestic order kept so clean that heaven itself could descend into it without shame. From this house came, in the fullness of time, the community of the believers; and the believer who would build the future of the faith may well begin where the future of the faith itself began, in the family life of Muhammad ﷺ and Khadijah bint Khuwaylid, upon whom be the pleasure of Allah, in the city of the Sanctuary, in the years before the world knew what had come to dwell within its walls.