Birth of Ruqayyah bint Muhammad

Two years or so after the birth of Zaynab, in about the year 601 of the Christian calendar, when the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ was about thirty-one years of age, the house of Khadijah bint Khuwaylid (may Allah be pleased with her) received its third child, and she was a second daughter, and they named her Ruqayyah. The birth came in the full summer of the marriage's blessedness, when the household had settled into its deep and quiet prosperity: the father's name stood higher than ever in the markets of Makkah, the mother's estate had grown under a management that the whole tribe acknowledged, the firstborn son al-Qasim was running about the court, and the eldest daughter Zaynab, still herself a small child, had become the little mother of the house. Into this fullness the third child was born; and the believer who follows the record of these years from birth to birth sees what the people of Makkah could not see, that the household of the future revelation was being gathered child by child, in the years of quiet before the quiet broke.

Her name is of the beloved diminutive forms in which the Arabic tongue holds its tenderness, and the girl who bore it was so held. The Arabs delighted in such endearment-names for their daughters, names that keep the sound of childhood about a person all her days; and Ruqayyah was among the most cherished of them. The scholars of the language trace the name to the root of rising and increase, so that a child so named is called, in the compressed courtesy of the Arabic naming, a little rising, a small increase, a gentle blessing on the house; and a gentle blessing upon the house she proved to be. It was Salma, the faithful retainer of Khadijah, who had delivered the mother of all her children and who considered herself one of the household, that stood over this birth as over the others; it was Khadijah (may Allah be pleased with her), the Pure One, who tended her infancy and taught her first words; and it was the father, the future Messenger of Allah ﷺ, who received her as he had received every child of his house, with a joy that asked nothing of the child but that she had come.

The sources preserve for this daughter a distinction she alone among the sisters carries in the strongest chain of the lists: the report that makes her the firstborn of the girls. Ibn Hisham, whose recension of Ibn Ishaq is the spine of the sirah, states that the firstborn of the boys was al-Qasim, and that the firstborn of the girls was Ruqayyah, followed by Zaynab, Umm Kulthum and Fatimah, in that order. Against this stand the reports already set down in this chronicle: the transmission of Mus'ab ibn Abdullah al-Zubayri placing Zaynab directly after al-Qasim, the testimony gathered from Ibn Jurayj that Zaynab was the oldest of the daughters, and the sustained voice of the received retellings, which have always spoken of Zaynab as the eldest sister. Nor is the variance exhausted there, for Ibn Abbas, in the transmission Ibn Kathir gathers from the great compilations, names al-Qasim first and then Zaynab, Abdullah, Umm Kulthum, Fatimah and Ruqayyah, so that Ruqayyah stands last; and the biographical collections preserve the report that Ruqayyah and Umm Kulthum were born together as twins after Zaynab, a report which, if it stood alone, would set the two middle sisters in a single year. The master record of this chronicle follows its fixed arrangement, Ruqayyah born in about 601 as the second daughter, third child of the house; and the variance is written here in full because it is the believer's honesty to keep it, and because nothing of faith rests upon the sequence of six names whose count, paternity and maternity no report has ever disputed.

The twins report deserves its own moment of attention, for it is one of the places where the believing reader sees the sirah science at its most careful. The report that Ruqayyah and Umm Kulthum came into the world together is carried by the biographical compilations, and it has recommended itself to many of the scholars by the economy it brings to the chronology: two daughters born in one year, and the six children comfortably spaced across the decade of the marriage. Yet the arrangement of the master record of this chronicle, keeping the two births in their separate years, honors the alternative that the received chronology has long followed; and the wise course, which the scholars of the sirah have taught by example, is to carry both possibilities without forcing either, since the essential truth of the record is untouched by the spacing of the births. What the report does establish beyond all argument, whichever way it is dated, is the intimacy of the two middle sisters, who came to the house within a breath of one another, and who would be bound to each other, in life and in the story of the faith, more closely than any other two of the six: betrothed in the same season, returned in the same season, and given in marriage, one after the other, to the same noble husband. The bond that the cradle planted, history harvested; and the believing reader may see in it the kindness of the divine ordering, which gave the girl of this event a sister-companion for the whole of her short and burdened life.

Between the second and third daughters, if the twins report be set aside for the arrangement of the master record, the interval was the ordinary interval of the marriage's fruitfulness; and in that interval the father of the house passed through his thirtieth year. Of those months the biographers preserve, as for so much of this decade, the frame rather than the furniture: the caravan seasons kept their rhythm, the market days their exact scales, the reputation of al-Amin its climb; and at the center of it all the house kept its own quieter calendar of births and namings, weanings and first steps. There is a mercy in the silence of the sources here that the believing reader learns to taste: the years in which nothing happened were the years in which everything was being prepared, and the little daughter whose birth this record marks was one of the preparations, though no eye in Makkah could have told for what.

What every child is, at the moment of its entering the world, the Prophet ﷺ himself would later teach in words preserved by his Companions: every newborn comes into the world upon the fitrah, the native constitution with which Allah creates the children of Adam; and it is the parents who make of the child a Jew or a Christian or a Magian, as the beasts of the field bring forth their young whole. The teaching, transmitted in the Sahih collections from Abu Hurayrah (may Allah be pleased with him), was given long after this year; but it throws its light back upon every cradle of this household. Ruqayyah was born upon the fitrah, as every child is born, a creature unspoiled, oriented by her very creation toward her Maker; and she was born into the one house of Makkah where the fitrah would suffer nothing to bend it, no idol in the court, no falsehood in the accounts, no cruelty in the training. The raising of a child upon the fitrah is the whole work of believing parenthood, the preservation of a purity already given; and the parents of this event performed that work before it was commanded, in the years when the command had not yet come down from heaven. The believer who reads of this birth may rightly ask himself what his own house would make of a child delivered to it whole upon the fitrah; and in the asking he measures the distance between his nursery and the nursery of Ruqayyah bint Muhammad.

The mercy of children, in the speech of the revelation that was yet to come, is bound to the forgiveness of Allah in a manner that startles the worldly reckoning. In the surah that carries the name of Nuh (peace be upon him), the Quran places upon the tongue of that ancient prophet the counsel he gave his people: I told them, seek the forgiveness of your Lord, for He is ever ready to forgive; He will send down upon you rain in abundance, and He will increase you in wealth and children, and He will give you gardens and give you rivers. The order of the promises belongs to the eloquence of the Book: forgiveness first, and then, in the train of forgiveness, the increase of children. The passage was sent down long after this year; yet the believer sees its truth enacted in the years of this chronicle, for the house of the man who had been kept clean from the idols of his people, and who in his purity turned continually to his Lord seeking His pleasure, was a house that filled and filled with children, until six had been granted in the span of a single decade. The worldly reckoning calls children an expense; the revealed speech calls them an increase; and the difference between the two reckonings is the difference between the ledger of Makkah and the providence of Allah, which chose for His final Messenger a house of children, and made the first years of his manhood an apprenticeship in fatherhood before He made them an apprenticeship in prophethood.

Of the daughter herself the record keeps a portrait drawn across the whole of her life, and its earliest lines belong to these years. Ruqayyah grew as the second of the sisters, close in age to the eldest and, on the arrangement most of the reports favor, close in age to Umm Kulthum after her, so that the middle two girls grew almost as companions; Lings, reading the early material, marks that when Ali ibn Abu Talib (may Allah be pleased with him) was taken into the household in the famine years, he was about the same age as Ruqayyah and Umm Kulthum, somewhat younger than Zaynab and somewhat older than Fatimah, and was brought up as a brother to the four girls. The sisters' childhood, as this chronicle has already described it, was the childhood of a working and worshipful house: the mother's school of management and dignity, the father's tenderness, Umm Ayman's (may Allah be pleased with her) fidelity, Zayd ibn Harithah's (may Allah be pleased with him) elder brotherhood. Ruqayyah was of this circle, the gentle second daughter, named a little blessing, and rearing her was the father's glad labor in the years this record covers.

Of the four sisters as a company the modern compilations also bear a witness that belongs to the years of this event, for al-Mubarakpuri, summarizing the received material, records that all the daughters of the Prophet ﷺ witnessed the coming of Islam, embraced it, and emigrated to Madinah. The sentence stands as the harvest of the childhood this chapter chronicles: daughters reared in the one house of Makkah that feared Allah became, every one of them, women who believed at the first sound of the revelation, and left their city and their kin for the sake of the faith of their father. No household in the Jahiliyyah ever produced such a fruit; and the believer who would understand why the daughters believed at the first call need only read backward from their belief to their nursery, where the girls were taught by a father whose truthfulness the whole city attested, and by a mother whose purity the whole city had surnamed. The seed of the daughters' Islam was sown in the years of this record, in the daily bread of a house that ordered all its doings as in the sight of Allah; and of that seed the birth of Ruqayyah was the third sowing.

The whole of her later story is a matter for the events of the prophethood and the Hijrah, and is touched here only in a line: she believed when her father ﷺ was called, she was given in marriage by him, her betrothal in the pre-prophetic years to a son of Abu Lahab being later annulled when that house broke with her father's, and she was then married by him to Uthman ibn Affan (may Allah be pleased with him), with whom she emigrated to Abyssinia, the first woman of the household of Islam to set out upon the road of hijrah, and with whom she emigrated again to Madinah, where she died in the year of Badr with the soil of her grave still fresh upon it when the news of the victory arrived. Her life thus became the pattern of the whole first generation of Muslim womanhood: faith, exile, endurance, and an early homegoing; and the pattern was cut in the years of this event, when a girl was born in Makkah to a father not yet a prophet, and was loved without any suspicion of what her life would be asked to carry. The believer who knows the ending reads the beginning more tenderly, as one reads the early pages of a martyr knowing the last page; and the father who held her at this event held, without knowing it, one of the first flowers of a faith not yet revealed.

The birth of Ruqayyah bint Muhammad stands in the record between two of her sisters, and its lessons are its own. It teaches that the tenderness of the Prophet ﷺ was not the tenderness of a man selecting among his children, bestowing his love where the age approved, but an even, overflowing fatherhood that received every daughter as a trust and every trust as an honor. It teaches that the fitrah of a child is a deposit of paradise in the hands of the parents, kept or corrupted by the house that receives it; and the house that received this child had, by the protecting mercy of Allah, nothing in it to corrupt her. It teaches the believer to see children not as the world sees them, an expense and a burden, but as the revelation later named them, an increase from the hand of the Forgiving, who adds rain and wealth and children and gardens and rivers to the people of His forgiveness; and it invites the thankful heart to read its own family's story in that grammar of gift. And it teaches, most quietly of all, that the years of preparation for great service are spent in small services: the years in which the final Messenger of Allah ﷺ was being made ready to carry a world's weight were the years in which he carried little daughters about his court, and named them with endearment-names, and was to their childhood the door of mercy. Upon such a foundation of unnoticed faithfulness the houses of the great are built; and the believer who serves his own small household today serves upon the same foundation, in the company of the best of fathers ﷺ, whose second daughter was born in about the year 601, and was called Ruqayyah, a little blessing, and was beloved.