Birth of Abdullah ibn Muhammad

Every household has its last cradle, and the years of the full house of Muhammad ﷺ and Khadijah bint Khuwaylid (may Allah be pleased with her) closed with the birth of their sixth and last child, a son named Abdullah, in Makkah in the years the master chronology assigns to about 606 through 610 of the Christian calendar, when the Prophet ﷺ was in his late thirties. The event this file records is a birth, and only a birth: the final addition to the most consequential family in the history of the children of Adam, the child whose coming completed the count of six, two boys and four girls, all born of the one blessed mother. Around that cradle stood everything the coming decades would consecrate: the mother who would be the first believer, the sisters who would be among the first of the believers after her, and the father whom the city already called by the name of his firstborn, Abul-Qasim. The believer who follows this chronicle from the marriage at event fifty-two through the establishment of the household at event fifty-five arrives here at the last of the births, and should receive it as the age received it, with the gratitude of a house that counted every child a trust from Allah.

The birth itself the sources carry in the manner of the whole quiet decade, briefly and by implication, and the honesty of the sirah is to say so. The mother was Khadijah (may Allah be pleased with her), now past her middle years, who had borne five children to the Prophet ﷺ through the previous decade and whose strength of body and soul the tradition never ceases to honor. It was Salma, the faithful midwife of the family's women, who had delivered Khadijah of all her children and who considered herself one of the household, as the account of these years records; and the believer may trust that the same experienced hands received this last child as they had received the five before him. The house into which he was born stood in the prosperous quarter of Makkah that the wealth of Khadijah and the honest commerce of the Prophet ﷺ sustained, a house already loud with the voices of four girls, Zaynab the eldest of them grave and motherly, then Ruqayyah and Umm Kulthum close in age, and Fatimah the youngest, born in the last years before this son. The firstborn boy, al-Qasim, had been taken from the house some years before, as the chronicle records in its own entry for his death; and the coming of another son therefore carried, for the mother and the father alike, a peculiar weight of consolation, the hope of the line renewed written on a small red face.

The name given to the child deserves the reader's pause, for it was the name of the Prophet's ﷺ own blessed father: Abdullah, the slave of Allah. Consider what such a naming meant in the Makkah of that age. The city stood thick with the names of servitude to everything besides Allah, men called the servants of al-Uzza and the clients of Hubal and the votaries of the host of idols that ringed the Ancient House; and into that onomastic darkness the house of Abdul-Muttalib had, two generations running, set the pure name, Abdullah the father who died before the birth of his son, and now Abdullah the son born to that son. The Arabs named by aspiration, and a name is a theology; the grandfather Abdul-Muttalib, whatever compromises his age made with the idols, had named his own boy a slave of Allah alone, and the Prophet ﷺ now set the same confession upon his last child, in the same city, before the revelation had come to teach him that the name was a creed. The naming was accompanied, as the custom of the city and the practice of the house required, by the rites of the seventh day which this chronicle has set down in its account of the naming ceremonies of the Prophet's ﷺ own infancy: the sacrifice offered, the head shaved, the name pronounced over the child. What the sources do not record for this birth they do not record for most of the private pieties of the decade, and silence is not denial; but neither will this chronicle invent what the tradition has not kept, for honesty is the believer's method in the small matters as in the great.

The tradition has, however, preserved for this child something rarer than a birth story, and that is a double epithet: the boy was called at-Tahir, the Pure, and at-Tayyib, the Good. The reports concerning these names the reader must be given whole, for they are the scholarly heart of this event. Ibn Ishaq, in the catalogue of the children transmitted by Ibn Kathir, lists the sons of the Prophet ﷺ by Khadijah as al-Qasim, by whose name he was known as Abu al-Qasim, and then al-Tayyib and al-Tahir; Ibn Hisham's recension reads the same way, placing al-Qasim first among the boys, then al-Tayyib, then al-Tahir, as though the two were names of distinct children. But al-Zubayr ibn Bakkar, a descendant of the house of Abu Bakr and a master of the genealogies of Quraysh, resolved the matter in the report Ibn Kathir transmits from him: it was Abdullah who was known as al-Tayyib and al-Tahir, one child bearing both epithets, and he was given them, in al-Zubayr's account, because he was born after the call to prophethood. Here the sources part ways in their chronology, and the parting must be shown, not hidden. The master record of this project places the birth between about 606 and 610 of the Christian calendar, a range whose final year touches the very summer of the first revelation; al-Zubayr's report would set the birth at the edge of that range or just beyond it; while Martin Lings, following the early material, sets the birth in the famine years before the call, about the time the young Ali was taken into the household, as the last child of the marriage. The chronology of this chronicle keeps the master record's span and presents both readings within it, for the believer's confidence does not require the forcing of reports that the tradition itself has left in variance.

What no report disputes is the meaning of the names, and the meaning is a sermon in two words. At-Tahir, the Pure: the child was named for purity in the very house whose spirit, as a later scholar of the sirah has written, was purification itself, a house touched by the spirit of its master, the spirit of cleansing from the filth of the jahiliyyah and contempt for the worship of idols. At-Tayyib, the Good: the child was named for goodness in the house of the man of whom the whole city already testified that no one had ever known him to utter a falsehood or to touch what was not his. The naming of children is a prophecy parents are licensed to make, and in this case the names read like the household's own creed translated into cradle language: whatever else the years would bring, this house stood for purity and for good, and it stamped them on its last-born's brow. The believer should also mark the gentleness of the epithets against the harshness of the age, for these were not the names of warriors or of vengeance, such as the jahiliyyah loved, but the names of the quiet virtues which the coming revelation would command and crown.

The order of the six children the reports preserve differently, and the variance is itself part of the record. Ibn Hisham states that the firstborn of the boys was al-Qasim, then al-Tayyib, then al-Tahir, and that the firstborn of the girls was Ruqayyah, then Zaynab, then Umm Kulthum, then Fatimah. Mus'ab ibn Abdullah al-Zubayri, in the channel al-Bayhaqi transmits, gives another order: the eldest of the sons al-Qasim, then Zaynab, then Abdullah, then Umm Kulthum, Fatimah, and Ruqayyah; and the same report adds two facts this chronicle has already weighed in its account of the decade, that the first of the children to die was al-Qasim, followed by Abdullah, and that Khadijah died either at sixty-five or at fifty years of age, the latter being more likely in the reporter's judgment. Ibn Abbas, through the channel of Yunus ibn Bukayr, counts without ranking: Khadijah gave birth to two boys and four girls, al-Qasim, Abdullah, Fatimah, Umm Kulthum, Zaynab, and Ruqayyah. The count is fixed by the agreement of every channel, two sons and four daughters, all of Khadijah, no child of the Prophet ﷺ by any other wife until Ibrahim long after; the sequence of the births is not fixed, and the believer receives it as the scholars of the sirah have always received such variance, with candor and without alarm, for the truth of a family is not in its calendar but in its souls.

This last son was born, then, into a house of sisters, and the reader who knows the age must pause upon what that means. The Makkah into which Abdullah was born was a city in which the birth of a daughter was received by many fathers with a darkened face, a city in which girls were buried alive in the sand and the shame of their survival was reckoned a blot upon a house, as the later scholars of the sirah wrote in sorrow of those years. Against that whole order the household of the Prophet ﷺ stood as a standing rebuke: four daughters welcomed, named, cherished, and educated; a father never once reported to have wished any of them a boy instead; a home in which the coming of a girl was celebrated. And now, at the last, a son was added, not as the correction of the daughters, as the age would have counted a son, but as the completion of a circle in which sons and daughters stood equally as the gifts of Allah. The daughters would all live to witness Islam, embrace it, and emigrate with their father, as the received account records; the son would not remain long in the house, and this entry does not chronicle his going, leaving it to the years that followed; but the theology of the household stands complete in the six of them, and it is the theology the Quran itself would teach when it set the giving of daughters before the giving of sons.

For the Quran, when it came, speaks of children exactly as this household had received them, and the believer sees in the event before us the pattern before the precept. To Allah belongs the dominion of the heavens and the earth; He creates what He wills; He bestows females upon whom He wills, and bestows males upon whom He wills, or He pairs them together, males and females, and He makes whom He wills barren; indeed He is Knowing, Able. The verse, revealed years after this birth through the tongue of the child's own father, sets the whole arithmetic of the cradle under the sovereignty of Allah: the daughters and the sons alike are grants from the hand that does not err, and the barrenness of any womb is as much His decree as the fullness of any other. And again the Book says that Allah has made for you mates of your own selves, and has made of your mates sons and daughters and grandchildren, and provided you of the good things: the household of Makkah had lived the verse before it was revealed, one wife, six children, provision lawful and sweet. The believer who mourns the modern impatience with the birth of daughters should carry this event in the heart against it: the most blessed parents in history were given, in the order of the age's own despising, four girls and then a boy, and the girl born before this son was Fatimah, through whom alone the Prophet's ﷺ line would continue to the end of days.

The years of the birth, whatever their exact place in the span, were lean years, and the record has kept their color. The Hijaz was passing through the drought that had brought Halimah the foster-mother again to Makkah's door, where Khadijah's generosity met her with forty sheep and a howdah camel, and that had laid its weight most heavily upon the crowded house of Abu Talib. It was in those same years that the Prophet ﷺ, seeing his uncle's hardship, consulted with al-Abbas and Umm al-Fadl and arranged that each of the two wealthier houses should take charge of one of Abu Talib's sons, so that Ja'far went to the house of al-Abbas and the young Ali came to be reared in the house of the Prophet ﷺ himself, as a brother to the four girls. Lings, in whose account these years are gathered, sets the birth of the last child about this time, and adds the sentence the reader must hear with tenderness: in a sense, the little one was replaced by Ali, who was brought up as a brother to his four girl cousins. The chronicle has set down the drought and the household's enlargements in their own entries; it recalls them here only to show the cradle of Abdullah standing in the midst of a family that was growing wider at the very moment it was completed, the son of the house and the son of the uncle reared together, the future father of the Ahl al-Bayt and the future standard-bearer of Islam cradled in one nursery.

What manner of father received this child, the reader of the chronicle already knows, but the event allows the saying of it again. The man who took Abdullah into his arms was he of whom the city testified, through all these years, that he was the most truthful in speech and the most trustworthy in keeping, the man whose tenderness with children was one of the wonders of Makkah in a society that prided itself on hardness. He was never above the service of his family, sewing and milking and mending in his own house, as the Mother of the Believers would marvel in after years; and in the years that followed the revelation he would say, in the words the books have kept, that the best of a people is the one best to his family, adding that he himself was the best of his people to his family. The statement is his own measure of manhood, and the last child of his house was born to the man who could make it. Let every father who reads this event hold the standard up against his own door: the Prophet ﷺ in his late thirties, honored through the city, entrusted with the wealth of his neighbors, busy with the trade of two houses, and still the first at the cradle and the last to put the household to bed.

The birth of Abdullah stands in the chronology as the last of the births and the closing of a book: after him no child was born in the house of Khadijah, and when the years had brought their harvests and their griefs, the family stood as the six had made it, the two sons returned early to Allah and the four daughters standing with their father into the age of Islam. The babe's own sojourn in the world would be brief, briefer even than his brother's, and the sorrow of his going belongs to the years that follow this entry and is not narrated here; this event keeps to the joy it was given to keep, the joy of the last cradle. The believer closes it with the gratitude the Quran itself commands for such days, the praise of the servants who say, when their Lord's announcement comes to them, that they have heard and obeyed; for children are announcings of the Lord's favor, and the first response to a favor is thanks. In the name of Abdullah, the slave of Allah, the household made its confession; in the names at-Tahir and at-Tayyib it made its aspiration; and in the six children together Allah wrote the first outline of the Ummah that would descend from that house, an Ummah of sons and daughters both, of purity and good, called by the name of the slave of Allah. What believer's heart does not soften at the design: the last child of the first family of Islam bore on his brow, before the revelation came, the name that every believer in the world would one day strive to deserve, the name of servanthood itself, Abdullah, the bondslave of Allah.