Birth of Qasim ibn Muhammad

In the third year of the marriage, in about the year 598 of the Christian calendar, when the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ was about twenty-eight years of age, the house of Khadijah bint Khuwaylid (may Allah be pleased with her) waited upon a mercy that every married house knows and that none had ever awaited with such weight of destiny hanging upon it. The young husband was already the most trusted merchant of Makkah, the al-Amin upon whose word the caravan folk rested; the wife who had chosen him was the most honored lady of Quraysh, the mistress of a great establishment; and between them the marriage had been, as Lings wrote of it, wondrously blessed. Now the blessing was to take flesh and cry in a cradle. The believer who follows the sacred biography into these quiet years feels the tenderness of the providence of Allah, who willed that the Seal of the Prophets ﷺ should know fatherhood in its full sweetness before he knew any other title, and that the first voice to waken beside his sleeping mat should be the voice of his own child.

The child was a son, and he was named al-Qasim. The name is of the root that means to divide and to distribute, and the Arabs of the Sanctuary knew it as a name of generous meaning, the sharer, the one who portions out; and what a name for a boy whose father would be sent to distribute guidance to all the nations of the earth. It was Khadijah (may Allah be pleased with her) who bore him, as she bore every child of the Prophet ﷺ save one, and it was Salma, the faithful retainer of her household, who had delivered her and who considered herself one of the family, that stood at the birth. Around the mother and the babe moved the small circle of the house: Barakah Umm Ayman (may Allah be pleased with her), whom the Prophet ﷺ had freed on his wedding day and who had returned to the household, and the youth Zayd ibn Harithah (may Allah be pleased with him), the wedding-day gift grown into the household's own beloved son. Into this circle al-Qasim was born, the firstborn of the most consequential man in the history of the children of Adam, and the delivery of the midwife Salma upon this occasion was one more thread in the long service of that faithful woman to the house that Allah had chosen.

With the birth the customs of the Arabs found their full observance. The seventh day was marked as the days of Quraysh marked such days, with the sacrifice that the desert knew and the naming that gave the child his place among his people; and what the practice of the age was in outline, the Sunnah of the Prophet ﷺ would later seal in law, for he taught that every child is held in pledge for its aqiqah, sacrificed on its behalf on the seventh day, upon which it is named and its head is shaved. The biographers of the pre-prophetic years record no word-for-word account of the firstborn's seventh day, and honesty forbids the inventing of one; but the certainty of the custom itself is complete, and the believer may see the young father, whose every act was weighed and measured, ordering the day around his son with the same exactness he brought to a caravan ledger. Nor did the care of the newborn stop at custom. The Prophet ﷺ in later years would seek protection for his little ones with the words his father in faith had used before him, saying of Hasan and Husayn that he commended them to the perfect words of Allah, from every devil and every harmful thing, even as Ibrahim (peace be upon him) had commended Ismail and Ishaq (peace be upon them) in their infancy; and the spirit of that protection cannot but have watched over the first cradle of the house.

Through the son the father received a new name, and the name became his for all time. It was the custom of the Arabs that a man is honored with a kunya, an address that names him the father of his child, and the firstborn son was the child of the kunya. So the orphan of Abdullah, who had grown up without father or mother, was now, before he was thirty, Abul-Qasim, the father of al-Qasim; and the chiefs of Quraysh would call him so to his face, and after the prophethood the whole world of Islam would call him so still. The kunya was a dignity in the Arab reckoning, an affirmation of standing, of continuity, of rootedness in the life of the tribe; and there was a whole quiet eloquence in the fact that the man who had entered the world the poorest of the poor in kinsmen, fatherless and motherless, was to receive the proudest of Arab dignities from a babe in a cradle. The naming of his children was ever the father's own act, not the work of others: years afterward in Madinah, when a son was born to him there, he said in the words the two Sahihs preserve, a son was born to me tonight and I have named him after my father Ibrahim; and the believer may be certain that the name of the firstborn of Makkah was likewise chosen by the father's own blessed tongue. In after years, when false claimants multiplied, the Prophet ﷺ set the seal of his own authority upon the uniqueness of the address: name yourselves with my name, he said, but do not take my kunya; and the community understood that Abul-Qasim was his alone, the memorial of his firstborn.

The sources that carry the birth are the great compilations themselves, and they carry it with the sober reverence of certain fact. Ibn Ishaq, as Ibn Kathir transmits him, states plainly that it was Khadijah who bore all the children of the Messenger of Allah ﷺ except Ibrahim, and that his sons from her were al-Qasim, by whose name he was known as Abul-Qasim, with al-Tayyib and al-Tahir, and his daughters Zaynab, Ruqayyah, Umm Kulthum and Fatimah. Ibn Hisham confirms that the firstborn of the boys was al-Qasim. Al-Bayhaqi transmits, by the hand of Abu Bakr ibn Abi Khaythama, the report of Mus'ab ibn Abdullah al-Zubayri, that the eldest of his sons was al-Qasim, and that after him came Zaynab. Yunus ibn Bukayr transmits from Ibn Abbas the count entire: Khadijah bore the Messenger of Allah ﷺ two boys and four girls. The master record of this chronicle, following the arrangement it has fixed, places the firstborn son in about the year 598 of the Christian calendar, in the Prophet's ﷺ twenty-eighth year; and the sources differ only in the ordering of the children who followed, never in the paternity, never in the maternity, never in the count.

For the order of the later children varies in the reports, and the believer's method is to set the variance down honestly where it lies. Ibn Hisham's list runs al-Qasim, then al-Tayyib, then al-Tahir among the boys, and among the girls Ruqayyah first, then Zaynab, Umm Kulthum and Fatimah; the report of Mus'ab places Zaynab immediately after al-Qasim; the fuller sections of Ibn Kathir gather lists in which the daughters appear in nearly every sequence, Ibn Abbas in one transmission naming al-Qasim first and then Zaynab, Abdullah, Umm Kulthum, Fatimah and Ruqayyah in succession. The variance is a variance of sequence only; the six names stand fixed in every chain, and the eldest son stands first in them all. On no report does the rank of al-Qasim as firstborn waver, and it is by the firstborn that the kunya was given. The tradition preserved the disagreement without alarm because nothing of faith rested upon it; and the reader of today may take from the unanimity of the essentials what the scholars of the sirah have always taken, a renewed trust in a transmitted record scrupulous enough to keep even its own small uncertainties.

The house into which the boy was born was already, in these years, a house of order and of mercy. Khadijah governed a great establishment with the judgment that had doubled her fortune; her storerooms and her hospitality, her accounts and her dependants, moved to the rhythm of a wisdom that Makkah acknowledged; and the child was born into a home where no lie was heard, no trust betrayed, and no claimant turned away. The husband's fatherhood showed from the first the temper that would later astonish a hard society. In an age that prided itself on hard rearing, the father of al-Qasim was tender; he carried his children, he played with them, he was in the service of his family when he was among them, as Aisha (may Allah be pleased with her) would later marvel, sewing and mending and serving himself, and going out to his affairs when the hour came. Aisha's testimony was given of the later years, but character does not begin late; the father who in Madinah let the prayer stand long with a granddaughter upon his blessed shoulder was the same father who had lifted his firstborn son in the court of the house in Makkah while the caravan bells still sounded in the valley below.

The scholars of the later generations, reading these years, saw in them more than domestic happiness; they saw a preparation. Al-Buti, in his jurisprudence of the sacred biography, writes of this union that it was a blessing for both of the spouses, and that there is no doubt that the house was touched by the spirit of its master, the spirit of purification from the filth of the Jahiliyyah and contempt for the worship of idols; and the birth of al-Qasim is the first event of that touched house recorded in its own right. Into what was the boy born but a home already ordered against the whole drift of his age: a father who had never prostrated to an idol, never touched the wine assemblies, never bowed to the idols of the Sanctuary; a mother whose purity of character had earned her, even among the pagans, the surname of the Pure One. The first Muslim child in the world's history to be born, before Islam was proclaimed, of a father and mother both walking the way of the hanif was this firstborn son; and the believer may see the hand of Allah choosing for the cradle of the prophetic household a nursery already swept clean of the age.

What the birth meant in the theology of the Quran, later revelation itself would teach. To Allah belongs the dominion of the heavens and the earth; He creates what He wills; He bestows upon whom He wills daughters, and He bestows upon whom He wills sons; or He pairs them, males and females, and He makes whom He wills barren. The verses of Ash-Shura were sent down long after this year, but they illuminate it as a lamp set above a doorway illuminates all who enter: children are a grant, and the grant belongs to Allah alone, and the distribution of it follows a wisdom higher than the wishes of men. The Prophet ﷺ had been granted a son, and he received him as a trust with gratitude; in the years to come he would be granted daughters, and he would receive them with a joy that shamed his whole age; and in the end he would stand at the small graves of his sons and say only what pleases his Lord. Between the grant and the taking away the father's heart held its balance by the certainty that the Giver and the Taker are one, and the believer who watches that balance in the years of this chronicle is watching the practical theology of the Quran before the Quran was revealed.

There was, too, in the birth of a son to the house of Hashim a public meaning that Makkah would have read at a glance. In the Arabia of that day a man's continuance was his progeny; his name lived in his sons; the tribesman without male issue was spoken of with a cold pity and, in the sharper tongue of the age, taunted as cut off. The orphan who had married the wealthiest woman of Quraysh and now held a son in his arms was, in the world's reckoning, made whole; nothing any longer was wanting to his standing. The irony of providence would later reverse the reckoning entirely, for the sons of the Prophet ﷺ would not remain, and his continuance among mankind would run, by the decree of Allah, through his daughter Fatimah, so that the men who taunted him as cut off would be answered from heaven by a surah; but that reversal belongs to the later pages of this chronicle. Here, at the birth, the believer pauses simply upon the joy: the joy of the mother who had prayed, the joy of the father who was yet only a merchant of Makkah, and the joy of the household that had no way of knowing what the child's small hand had begun.

For the son himself the years appointed in this world were few, and his passing, which belongs to the record of a later event in this chronicle, is touched here only to be honored: the father who lost him carried the kunya of his name all his days, and carried it, by his own word, into the love of his Lord. The son's brief life became in the economy of Allah the occasion of the address by which the Beloved Prophet ﷺ is named among his people to this hour; and every tongue that says Abul-Qasim speaks, whether it knows it or not, the name of the firstborn of Khadijah. The believers of every century have taken up the kunya with reverence precisely because it was his; and in the marketplaces of Makkah, in the first community of Madinah, and in every city where the shahadah is witnessed from that day to this, the fatherhood of the Prophet ﷺ has remained living speech.

The birth of al-Qasim stands therefore at the head of the births that fill the following pages, the first of the six children of the most blessed household. It teaches the believer that the greatest of mankind was given first to be a father, that tenderness in a man's own doorway is no impediment to greatness but its preparation, and that the grants of Allah arrive in His own order, sons and daughters both, each a trust, each a loan for a term appointed. The young father could not know the term; no father can. What he could do, and did, was to receive the trust with gratitude, to order the seventh day with devotion, to hold the child with the hands that would one day be raised for the whole ummah, and to say over him, as his father in faith had said over his sons, the perfect words of Allah. Upon that gratitude the house stood; and the believer who builds a house today builds best who builds upon the same foundation, receiving the children Allah grants, sons and daughters alike, as the first father of this chronicle received his firstborn son, with praise upon the tongue and the Giver before the eyes of the heart.