Birth of Fatimah bint Muhammad

In about the year 605 of the Christian calendar, when the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ was about thirty-five years of age, in the very season in which Quraysh would take in hand the rebuilding of the Kaaba, the house of Khadijah bint Khuwaylid (may Allah be pleased with her) received the last of its daughters, and they named her Fatimah. Four children had come before her, and one more child was yet to come after her in the years that closed the decade; but of the daughters she was the seal, the youngest of the four, and the beloved. The believer who has followed this chronicle from the marriage at twenty-five, through the births of al-Qasim and Zaynab and Ruqayyah and Umm Kulthum, arrives at this birth with the sense of a symphony resolving into its final key: the household that Allah had chosen for the cradle of revelation was now complete in its childhood, and the youngest of the children asleep in that house was the one through whom the blood of the Prophet ﷺ would run until the end of the world.

Her name is from the root that means to wean and to sever, and the lexicons of the Arabs gloss Fatimah as the weaned one, the one kept apart and withheld; and the tradition of the scholars received the name with a special reverence, understanding in it, as the generations retold it, the sense of one withheld from the Fire and severed from every blemish. The honorific that the Muslims fastened upon her in her own lifetime, and that the master record of this chronicle carries in her styling, is al-Zahra, the Radiant; and the name the household gave her that outranks them all is Umm Abiha, the mother of her father, the endearment by which the tradition remembers how the little girl mothered her own father, keeping his house when her mother was dead, bringing him water and comfort in the years when the world weighed upon him. All of this was still hid in the future at the birth this record marks; but names in the providence of Allah are prophecies, and the name given to this child in Makkah in about the year 605 was to become, after Maryam the mother of Isa (peace be upon them), the most honored woman's name in the speech of the believers.

The year of her birth the reports preserve with more variance than for any other child of the household, and the variance must be carried honestly. The master record of this chronicle fixes her birth in about 605, in the Prophet's ﷺ thirty-fifth year, the year of the rebuilding of the Kaaba, and this is the arrangement long received in the telling of the sacred biography, supported among the classical reports by the notices that place her birth in the season of that rebuilding. Other reports differ widely: a report transmitted by Ibn Kathir in his universal chronicle places her birth in the Prophet's ﷺ forty-first year, after the call to prophethood had begun; others again carry her birth down to his forty-fifth year; and still others reckon her age at her death in ways that imply a later birth than the master record's. What no report anywhere disputes, and what the believer holds with certainty, is that she was the youngest of the six children of Khadijah, the last of the daughters, and that she was born in Makkah of the mother who bore all the children of the Messenger of Allah ﷺ save Ibrahim. Upon the youngest rank every list is at one: Ibn Jurayj's authorities testify that Fatimah was the youngest of the daughters and the one he most favored; the transmission from Ibn Abbas names her last, the youngest of them; and the received retellings have never known any other arrangement.

Of the circumstances of her infancy the compilations preserve one detail of such tenderness that it deserves to stand alone: when Khadijah had a child, so the transmission runs, she would give the little one to a wet nurse to be nursed, as was the custom of the mothers of Quraysh; but Fatimah her mother nursed herself, and no nurse received her. The report belongs to a list whose ordering of the children differs from the arrangement of this chronicle, and honesty records that; but the detail itself the scholars received without dissent, and it needs no ordering to be understood. The mother who was now, by the received reckoning, near her fiftieth year, who gave all her other children to nurses as the custom of Quraysh's mothers ran, gathered the last daughter to her own breast and did not let her go; and the child who was to be the mother of the continuing generations of the Prophet's ﷺ house drank, alone among the six, from the wellspring of the first believer. The believer sees in it the kindness of the divine economy: for the one of the children who would stand longest at the side of her father, and bear the griefs she was to bear, a double portion of the mother was given at the beginning.

The house into which she was born was in its fullest and hardest season at once. The drought that had brought the young Ali (may Allah be pleased with him) into the household was in these years or just past them, and the famine it bred in the Hijaz had tested every estate in Makkah; the rebuilding of the Kaaba was in prospect or in hand, and the whole energy of the city was bent upon it; and through it all the household stood as this chronicle has painted it: the father's reputation at its summit, the mother's management equal to every season, the daughters of the house now three with the new arrival their fourth, and the foster-son Zayd and the cousin Ali reared among them as brothers, Umm Ayman (may Allah be pleased with her) at the door, Salma the midwife who had delivered them all now in her fifth season of service to the family. Fatimah was born a child of the lean years and the great years together, and grew, as Lings reckons her place among the sisters, somewhat younger than Ali who was reared as her brother, the youngest of the company, the little one of the house. Of the mother who bore her the sources keep, in this season of her life, the picture of a woman at the height of her powers and the edge of her change: at-Tahira, the first of the believers in the order that was coming, though she knew it not, pouring out her last decade upon the daughters and the estate alike, and giving to the youngest of her children the whole of a love that the next fifteen years would transfigure into the first confession of the faith, when she would comfort her husband in the trembling of the first revelation with the words that heaven has preserved: Allah will never disgrace you.

The year of the birth deserves its own remembering, for it was a year of the city's remembrance too. In the thirty-fifth year of the Prophet's ﷺ age, upon the received chronology, the flood came down upon the Sanctuary and Quraysh resolved to rebuild the Kaaba, and the events of that rebuilding, the dismantling of the ancient walls, the lawful funds, the Roman ship's timbers, and the arbitration of the Black Stone by which the tribes were kept from bloodshed, stand recorded at their own stations in this chronicle. It is enough here to mark the concurrence: in the year when Makkah saw the wisdom of the man at its sharpest crisis, the man himself was holding a newborn daughter. The city that would crown that wisdom with the cloak of the al-Amin knew nothing of the crown the year had already put on in the nursery; and the believer may take the lesson that the public triumphs of the great are dated by heaven alongside humbler grants, and that the quietest of the two may prove the greater. For the arbitration of the Black Stone served a season and passed into story, while the child of the same year carries the blessing of the Prophet's ﷺ house through every season since.

It belongs to the illumination of this birth that the Quran itself was afterward made to answer a taunt that touched the very matter of the Prophet's ﷺ progeny. The compilations relate, in the reports of the occasion of the sending down of the surah of abundance, that among the chiefs of Quraysh who reviled the Messenger of Allah ﷺ after the call was al-As ibn Wa'il, who, when the Prophet's ﷺ son had died and no son remained to him, said of him: his line is severed, he is al-abtar, the man cut off; for among the Arabs the man without male issue was called cut off, as a palm whose roots are broken. And Allah, Glorified and Exalted be He, sent down in answer the compact and mighty surah: We have given you al-Kawthar, the Abundance; so pray to your Lord and sacrifice; surely it is your antagonist who is cut off. The scholars of the Book, across all the schools of the ummah, have read in that answer a double verdict: that the abundance was the river and the goodness of the Hereafter, and that it was likewise the abundance of progeny and praise, for the man taunted as cut off has been given, in the way of Allah, a continuance through his daughter that no chief of Quraysh ever possessed, and his name is pronounced upon the earth five times a day beside the name of Allah while the names of his taunters are remembered only in their shame. The surah belongs to the years after the prophethood; but its verdict reaches back to the year of this event, and stands above the cradle of the youngest daughter: it is she, Fatimah, who is the standing answer of heaven to the taunt of the cut off.

How the father loved her, his own preserved words have told every generation. Fatimah is a part of me, said the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ, and whoever angers her angers me; and the words are preserved in the Sahih of al-Bukhari from Miswar ibn Makhramah (may Allah be pleased with him), with Muslim transmitting the like. Aisha (may Allah be pleased with her), who watched the household of his later years, testified that when Fatimah came to him he would rise to meet her, and take her hand and kiss her and seat her in his own place; and it is from Aisha that the ummah received the account of the cloak, the day the Prophet ﷺ gathered beneath his garment the people of his house, Ali and Fatimah and Hasan and Husayn, and named them the people of his house, and asked of his Lord their purification, reciting over them the verse that Allah would reveal concerning them: Allah only desires to remove the impurity from you, O people of the household, and to purify you thoroughly. These words and acts belong to the years after the revelation; but they are the flower of a root that was planted in the year of this event and the years between, in the Makkah court where the youngest daughter grew up her father's own portion, the part of him, and was loved as no child of the Jahiliyyah was ever loved.

And yet the love of that father held, from the first, the exactness of a prophet's justice, and this too the record has preserved. In his later teaching he would say to her, in words the compilations carry: O Fatimah, daughter of Muhammad, ask of me what you will of my wealth, but I cannot avail you against Allah; and the sentence, spoken to the most beloved of his children, is the standing correction of every fatherly favoritism that ever bent the truth. He loved her utterly; he would not love her into illusion. The child of the year of this event was reared to know that nearness of blood is a door of honor and of responsibility, never a substitute for faith, and that the people of the Prophet's ﷺ house stand nearest to him who is nearest to Allah in works. That severity joined to tenderness, the whole nest of the daughters was built upon; and Fatimah, who would one day be called the Radiant, was formed in it from her Makkah infancy into the woman whose poverty was voluntary and whose prayer in the nights was long.

Of the life that followed the birth the record here may give only a line, for its events stand at their own stations in this chronicle: Fatimah believed with the first of her house, endured beside her father the boycott and the loss of her mother, emigrated to Madinah, and was given in marriage by him to Ali ibn Abi Talib (may Allah be pleased with him) in the second year after the Hijrah, bearing him Hasan and Husayn, through whom the blessed lineage of the Prophet ﷺ has continued among mankind, and daughters whom she named for the sisters she loved; and she died, upon the most widely accepted accounts, six months after her father, the first of his family to follow him. The master record names her the matriarch of the Prophet's continuing lineage, and the naming is exact: every sayyid and every sharif of the family of the Prophet ﷺ, in every land of Islam, across more than fourteen centuries, descends from the youngest daughter born in Makkah in about the year 605; and the ummah's love for her, wedded to the love of her father, has streamed through the whole of Muslim history like water through the courses of a garden.

The birth of Fatimah bint Muhammad closes the births of the daughters of the most blessed household, and the believer stands at it as at a mercy's fullness. It teaches that the reckoning of loss is not as the world reckons: the man the Arabs called cut off was made, by the grant of a daughter, the most continuous of men, and the believer learns to withhold his judgment upon what seems deficiency, for the Giver sees the end from the beginning. It teaches the worth of the youngest and the least regarded, for the least of that cradle's company outranked them all. It teaches the tenderness that the strongest of men may keep, for the Prophet ﷺ, in the years of his greatest burdens, never once was too burdened to rise when his daughter entered. And it teaches the believer to see, in the arrangement of Allah, that the final mercy of a house may sleep in its smallest room: the last child of the marriage, born in the lean years before the call, was the vessel of the whole continuing blessing of the Seal of the Prophets ﷺ; and the believing heart that receives this truth receives with it a reverence for every daughter, and a trust in the wisdom of the Giver, who grants the daughters first and the abundance after, and whose verdict upon the taunts of the age is written, short and shining, in the surah of the Abundance.