Birth of Umm Kulthum bint Muhammad

Two years or so after Ruqayyah, in about the year 603 of the Christian calendar, when the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ was about thirty-three years of age, the house of Khadijah bint Khuwaylid (may Allah be pleased with her) received its fourth child, and she was a third daughter, and they called her Umm Kulthum. The naming of this child carries a feature the believer should pause upon, for the Arabs gave their daughters, in their cradles, names of the form that names a mother: Umm Kulthum means, in the letter, the mother of Kulthum, and Kulthum is a name the lexicon of the Arabs glosses as fullness of face and beauty of countenance. The custom was no oddity of one house but an honorific of the tongue itself, by which a little girl was dignified with the address of maturity before her maturity came; and the name chosen for this daughter was one already honored among the women of the Arabs. Into the court where Zaynab mothered her little sisters and Ruqayyah, born two years before, was passing out of her toddling years, the third daughter was born; and the house of the future revelation now held a son and three daughters under its roof, with two more children still to come in the years that remained of the decade.

Her birth is fixed in the master record of this chronicle in about the year 603, in the Prophet's ﷺ thirty-third year; and around that fixing the reports of the classical compilations stand in their small differing orders, as they have stood through every birth this chapter has recorded. The transmission that Ibn Kathir gathers from Muhammad ibn Sa'd, by the chain of Hisham ibn al-Kalbi from his father from Abu Salih from Ibn Abbas (may Allah be pleased with him), names the first son al-Qasim, and then, in succession, Zaynab, Abdullah, Umm Kulthum, Fatimah and Ruqayyah, so that Umm Kulthum stands second among the daughters; another of the gathered lists places her among the last, and al-Zubayr ibn Bakkar transmits an order in which, after the sons, the daughters came as Umm Kulthum, Fatimah and Ruqayyah. The report, already set down at the birth of her sister, that Ruqayyah and Umm Kulthum were born together as twins, would set this birth in the same year as the last; and against it the master record keeps the arrangement long received, the third daughter in her own year, the fourth child of the house. On no count does anything of substance vary: two boys and four girls, all born of Khadijah, all named, all remembered; and the reader who has followed the variance through the births of this decade knows by now that it is the seam of honest transmission, kept open by scholars who refused to mend what they could not verify.

The years of Umm Kulthum's infancy were, upon the witness of the sources, years of gathering hardship in the land. The drought that Lings records, which produced something like famine in the Hijaz and weighed most heavily upon the crowded house of Abu Talib, belongs to the neighborhood of these very years; and it was that drought that brought the two households of the family to their famous arrangement, al-Abbas taking charge of Ja'far and the Prophet ﷺ taking charge of the young Ali (may Allah be pleased with him), who entered the house as a brother to the four girls, about the same age as Ruqayyah and Umm Kulthum, somewhat younger than Zaynab and somewhat older than Fatimah. The believing reader should mark the providence: in the lean years, when the estate's abundance was tested, the house did not close its doors but opened them wider, receiving the young cousin of the father's line while the daughters were still small; and Umm Kulthum grew from her cradle in a house that practiced, before revelation commanded it, the feeding of the near kin in the day of their need. The drought years taught Makkah hunger; they taught the chosen house largeness.

Of grief's nearness the house had, by these same years, already been instructed, and the record must own it though its full telling belongs to another page of this chronicle. The firstborn son's time in the world was brief upon the received chronology, and whether his taking away had come before this daughter's birth or remained a few years off, the reports differ; what is certain is that the household of this decade was not a stranger to the small grave, and that the joy with which the third daughter was received was a joy kept upon a heart that knew its fragility. Al-Buti, reading these years, has written the reflection that the believing parent carries away from them: it was as if Allah willed that a sad tenderness be a part of the Prophet's ﷺ being, for the men who rule are nurtured into haughtiness by hearts that have known nothing but ease, while those who have tasted pain are the quickest to sympathize with the sorrowing. The father who held Umm Kulthum in the year of this event held her with the whole of that tenderness; and the daughters who grew under it were formed, every one, in the mold of mercy.

Outside the walls of the house, the city's regard for its master was climbing to its pre-prophetic height. Lings, gathering the early material, records that the hopes of the clans of Hashim and al-Muttalib were set upon Muhammad ﷺ for the recovery of their waning influence, and that beyond all question of clan he had come to be considered by the chiefs of Quraysh as one of the most capable men of the generation that would succeed them. The believer reads that sentence in the light of what this house contained, and smiles at the littleness of what Makkah could imagine for him: the chiefs of the city, watching the trustworthy merchant and reckoning the recovery of a clan's prestige, while within his walls the women and children who would carry the first century of Islam were being fed, taught, and sung to. The reputation was just, and he had earned it in their markets; but the children were the truer account of these years. The surah of the age had not yet come down to tell him that he was sent as a mercy to the worlds; the mercy was nevertheless already in his arms, and it was called Zaynab and Ruqayyah and Umm Kulthum.

Of the mother of these children in these years the record has already spoken at length, and each birth of the decade is a new page of her praise. Khadijah (may Allah be pleased with her) was now past her mid-forties by the received reckoning, bearing and rearing through the very years when her fortune was tested by drought and her husband's absences by the caravan seasons; and the sources that count her children are, without one dissenting voice, counting her strength. Salma, the midwife who delivered her of all her children and who considered herself one of the household, stood at this birth as at every other; Umm Ayman (may Allah be pleased with her), the freedwoman who had returned to the family, held the growing company of children as her own charge; and the house moved through its hardest years with a discipline that made room, at once, for economy and for mercy. The father of the house, whose tenderness has been the constant witness of this chapter, named the daughter with the mother-name of the Arabs, received her at his breast, and gave thanks; and the record of the pre-prophetic years, silent as it is upon so much, is eloquent upon this: the children kept coming, and they kept being received with joy.

What children are in the sight of Allah, the revelation that was yet to come would teach in two registers at once. In one, the Quran speaks of children as the adornment of the life of this world: wealth and sons, it says, are the embellishment of the present life, while the enduring righteous deeds are better with your Lord for reward and better for hope. In the other, the Quran teaches the believer to ask for children outright, as Zakariyya (peace be upon him) asked in the sanctuary: my Lord, grant me from Yourself good offspring, for You hear the prayer. Both registers illuminate the house of this event. Its children were its adornment and its joy, the fullness of its court and the music of its evenings; and yet the house did not live for its children but for the righteousness that outlasts them, the truthfulness of the father and the purity of the mother being the enduring deeds of which the daughters and sons were, in the Quran's reckoning, only the ornament. And the birth itself was an answer to the old prayer of the saints, the grant of offspring to a household that walked in the way of the prophets before the final prophet came; for Allah had willed that the Seal of the Prophets ﷺ should be granted his children young, and should spend upon them the years other men spend upon ambition, and should stand in his thirty-third year not a chief of his people but a father among his daughters.

How the best of men comported himself inside that fatherhood, the preserved teaching seals in a sentence the whole ummah has taken as its household rule. The best of you, said the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ, is the best of you to his family, and I am the best of you to my family; and the words are preserved in the Jami' of at-Tirmidhi from Aisha (may Allah be pleased with her), who knew the household's interior as only the wife of his later years could know it, and who found in him, when he was among his family, the servant of them all. The saying was uttered after the prophethood, in Madinah, over a household she shared; but its truth was cut in Makkah in the years of this event, in the court where the third daughter was being carried and sung to, in the decade when the al-Amin of the markets was proving himself the amin of the cradles. Aisha's testimony and the event of this record are one witness in two parts; and the believer who would be ranked among the best is pointed by both to the same door, the door of his own house.

There is a last meditation upon this daughter's name that the believing reader may keep. The child was called by a mother's title before she was anything at all; and the providence of Allah, which writes meanings across the lives it appoints, gave the name a double fulfillment. In the event of her later years she became, by the father's arrangement, the wife of the man the Muslims would one day choose as their third caliph, Uthman (may Allah be pleased with him); and the compilations record that she bore no children, so that the mother-name was fulfilled in her rather by the mothering of the household and the ummah's remembrance than by the cradle. And the name itself did not die with her, for when her youngest sister bore children of her own in the years after the Hijrah, one of the daughters of that house was called Umm Kulthum after the beloved sister, and the name of the third daughter of the Makkah household passed into the generations of the Ahl al-Bayt and so into the whole family of Islam, where it is borne to this hour. What the father named in a Makkah court in about the year 603 has become one of the standing names of the believing women; and no father can tell, at the naming of a daughter, through what channels of blessing the name will run.

Of the daughter's own later life the record must say here only what a line may say, for its full telling belongs to the events after the revelation: Umm Kulthum grew up in Makkah, believed when her father was called, had been betrothed in the pre-prophetic years to Utaybah ibn Abu Lahab alongside her sister Ruqayyah's betrothal to his brother, and was put away by that house when the surah of Abu Lahab's ruin came down; and she was afterward married by her father to Uthman ibn Affan (may Allah be pleased with him) upon the death of Ruqayyah, so that Uthman was called Dhun-Nurayn, the possessor of the two lights; she died in his keeping in the ninth year after the Hijrah. The compilations carry, in Ibn Kathir's gathering, the father's word upon that marriage: had I ten daughters, I would have married them all to Uthman; and the word, whatever its number in its several tellings, is the portrait of a father's trust. Thus the whole of her days was lived in the orbit of the faith's first wounds and first victories; and the quiet endurance the tradition remembers in her was learned in the house whose fourth birth this record sets down, where the lessons were patience, tenderness, and the fear of Allah.

The birth of Umm Kulthum bint Muhammad completes, in the arrangement of the master record, the middle age of the household's childhood years; one daughter yet remained to come, and one son. The believer who reads the five births in sequence, Qasim and Zaynab and Ruqayyah and Umm Kulthum and Fatimah, is reading the slow filling of a vessel that Allah was preparing to hold the first community of Islam; for when the revelation came, the house that had been built by these births answered at once, the wife believed, the daughters believed, the adopted son believed, the young cousin believed, and the freedwoman believed, until the whole family stood within the faith upon the first day of its proclaiming. That instant ripeness was not an accident of the moment; it was the harvest of two decades of the life this chapter has recorded, of a fatherhood that had as its object not the pleasure of the daughters merely but the pleasure of Allah in the daughters. And the harvest is the proof of the planting: a man who has prayed over every cradle, and kept his scales honest in every market, and carried his children about a city that buried its daughters, may expect of his Lord that the children will answer when the call comes, for the call itself will sound to them like their father's own voice.

The names of the six children entered history; and among them, set between the sisters on either side, stands the name of the mother-named girl, Umm Kulthum, the third daughter of the most blessed household, born in about the year 603 in Makkah, and cradled by the best of fathers ﷺ. Her life afterward, with its betrothal and its breaking, its marriage of two lights, and its early homegoing, is told at its own stations in this chronicle; here the record keeps only the birth, and the joy that received her, and the years of drought and mercy in which she first drew breath. The believer who wishes to honor her may honor her best where she would have wished it, in the imitation of the house she was born into; for of that house the final word is gratitude, that Allah should have gathered into one roof, in one decade, the whole first family of the faith of His final Messenger ﷺ.