Between his twenty-sixth and thirty-fifth years, in the span the master chronology marks from about 596 to 605 of the Christian calendar, the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ lived the civic middle years of his blessed life in Makkah, and this entry records the manner of them: a respected member of the clan of Banu Hashim, engaged constructively in the social, economic, and civic affairs of his city, upholding justice and maintaining peace among the tribes. The chronicle has already set down the foundations of that standing, the pact of chivalry he joined at twenty, the reputation for truthfulness and trustworthiness that grew through his early twenties, the marriage that made him master of a great household; and it has set down the decade of the family's fullness in its own entry. What remains is the public texture of those years, the day-by-day presence of al-Amin in the councils and the streets of the most demanding civic society Arabia ever produced. The sources carry these years more quietly than they carry the wonders of his childhood or the thunder of the revelation to come, but what they do carry is enough for the believer to see the whole pattern: the Messenger of Allah ﷺ did not come to the work of building a community as a novice; Allah had schooled him for it in the guilds of Quraysh themselves, in the market, in the assembly, and in the intricate diplomacy of the clans.
Let the reader first see the society into which he was placed, for its harshness is the measure of his excellence. A later summary of the age, in the tradition of Al-Sheha, records that prior to the divine assignment of Muhammad ﷺ the Arabs were but scattered tribes killing and enslaving each other, and that the prevailing law was tribal despotism: people were not equal, masters held all rights while slaves held none, women were deprived and passed from father to husband to heirs as property, and robbery, plunder, the slave trade, the burial of living infant girls, and paganism prevailed. This is the dark backdrop against which every verse of the Prophet's ﷺ civic conduct must be read. Makkah itself stood above the tribes as the sanctuary city, the seat of the Ancient House and the host of the pilgrimage; but its own public order rested on the balance of powerful clans rather than on any court or king. The houses of Abd Manaf and Abd Shams, of Makhzum and Sahm and Jumah and Adi, of Abd ad-Dar and Zuhrah and Taym and Asad, held the valley in an equilibrium of pride, each jealous of its honor, each watching the others for advantage; and the formal institutions of the city, the assemblies of the elders and the customs of the sanctuary and the market, were the machinery by which that equilibrium was kept from tipping into blood.
Into this machinery the young Hashimite was received, and received with a particular weight of expectation that the sources preserve. Lings, gathering the early material of these years, writes that the hopes of Hashim and Muttalib, the two clans counted politically as one, were set upon Muhammad ﷺ for the recovery of their waning influence; the house that had once led the city through the greatness of Qusayy and Hashim had seen the primacy pass to the houses of Abd Shams, and its elders looked to the nephew of Abdul-Muttalib to win back, by his qualities, what his house had lost by the turning of fortune. And Lings records a larger estimate than the clan's own: beyond all question of clan, he writes, the Prophet ﷺ had come to be considered by the chiefs of Quraysh as one of the most capable men of the generation which would succeed them, the generation that would have, after the chiefs, the task of maintaining the honor and the power of the tribe throughout Arabia. The believer should mark what such a sentence means: the shrewdest heads in the hardest political school in Arabia, men who measured everyone, had measured this merchant of the house of Hashim and marked him for leadership; and they marked him not for his wealth, which was modest, nor for his clan's power, which was waning, but for the qualities they had watched in the assemblies and the caravans for fifteen years.
The manner of his participation the sources describe with a sentence from the rapid review of the pre-prophetic years in the Sealed Nectar that deserves to stand whole: he shunned superstitious practices, it records, but took an active part in constructive and useful dealings, and otherwise had recourse to his self-consecrated solitude. Each clause of that sentence is a chapter of his character. He was present in his city's life, at the market and the assemblies and the sanctuaries of the pilgrimage season, giving and taking counsel, transacting, receiving guests, settling affairs; but his presence was selective with a perfect selectivity, for the same summary records that he kept himself aloof from drinking wine, from meat slaughtered on the stone altars, and from the idolatrous festivals, holding the idols in extreme aversion. The chronicle has set down the protecting hand of Allah over his youth in its own entry; here the point is the civic shape of the maturity: a man in the city but never of its corruptions, at every table where good was done and at none where evil was done, and the city, in a judgment the modern mind finds hard to credit, honored him the more for the refusal. The unanimity of the admiration the master record mentions was the admiration of a whole society for a man who declined its vices and excelled in its virtues; the Makkans did not conclude that his abstinence made him useless, for they had watched him in their councils, and they knew better.
How he carried himself in the assemblies the believer may trace from the portrait the sources converge upon, and from the one full case study the record preserves entire. He was by nature a man of listening; his long silences, which the Sealed Nectar's review names among the helps of his meditation, meant that when he spoke in council he had understood the matter better than the eager talkers around him; and his speech had the quality his whole reputation was built upon, that it could be relied upon as an image of the thing itself. In the assemblies of Quraysh, where influence was won by eloquence but trust was won only by truth, the young Hashimite possessed the one currency the elders could not counterfeit; and so his counsel came to be sought in the affairs where a man's word must be banked upon. The case study is the story of the famine years, which the chronicle has touched in its account of the household, but which must be read here in its civic aspect as a complete exercise of what the later revelation would call shura, consultation. The drought that produced something like famine in the Hijaz weighed most heavily upon the crowded house of Abu Talib. Muhammad ﷺ noticed the hardship, and felt that something should be done; this is the first element, the noticing, the civic conscience awake to a public need that touched his own kin. Then came the deliberation: he preferred to ask the help of al-Abbas, the successful merchant, and of Umm al-Fadl, who loved him dearly and always made him welcome, rather than of the wealthier but more remote Abu Lahab; the choice of partners in counsel is itself statesmanship, for he chose those who could give and would give gladly. Then the proposal: that each of their two households should take charge of one of Abu Talib's sons until his circumstances improved. Then the consent of the governed: the two men went to Abu Talib, who heard the proposal and answered with his own reservation, do what ye will, but leave me Aqil and Talib; and his reservation was honored. Then the execution: al-Abbas took charge of Ja'far, whereupon Muhammad ﷺ agreed to do the same for Ali. Perception, consultation, proposal, consent, execution: the whole cycle of a wise public initiative, carried out not by an official but by a kinsman, and resolving by agreement a burden that the pride of the Arabs would have sooner borne in silence than confessed. This is what the Quran would later command when it praised the believers whose affair is consultation among them, and the believer sees in the famine initiative the Sunnah of shura practiced in Makkah before the verse of shura came down in Madinah.
The civic virtues themselves, the standing content of this man's public life, were catalogued by the witness who knew him best, and the words have been preserved in the two Sahihs. In the black hours after the first revelation, when Khadijah (may Allah be pleased with her) steadied her trembling husband, she named his virtues as her argument that Allah would never disgrace him: you join the ties of kinship, she said, and you carry the burden of the weak, and you earn for the destitute, and you honor the guest, and you help against the afflictions of the truth. Every clause is a civic office. The joining of kinship, silat ar-rahim, was the maintenance of the very sinews of Makkan society, for the clan system lived or died on the visiting of kin and the answering of their claims; and the man whom the whole city saw faithful in this owed duty to blood could be trusted faithful in everything. The carrying of the weak's burden, al-kall, meant standing surety and advocate for those who could not speak or pay for themselves, the unprotected stranger and the orphan and the widow. The earning for the destitute, al-ma'dum, meant making the poor one's economic project, bringing into being by honest trade the livelihoods that others would have begged for. The honoring of the guest was an economic institution of the sanctuary city, whose pilgrims and traders had to be housed and fed, and at which no house of Quraysh excelled the house of al-Amin and his wife. And the helping against the afflictions of the truth, the nawa'ib, meant the answering of every emergency that fell upon the community, the flood, the drought, the vendetta, the fire, with hand and wealth and word. These five Khadijah did not invent on the night of the revelation; she had watched them for fifteen years of marriage and for years before it, and she deployed them, in the first crisis of Islam, as the known evidence that the character receiving the revelation was a character Allah had already built.
Of his work as a peacemaker among the tribes, the years of this entry give the training rather than the famous proofs, but the training is documented and the pattern runs straight. The reader of the earlier entries knows the young man at fifteen, present at his uncles' side in the sacrilegious war and confining his part to the gathering of the enemy's arrows for them, refusing to raise a weapon even in a war his clan was fighting; and at twenty, standing in the house of Abdullah ibn Jud'an to give his hand to the pact of chivalry whose single article was that no wronged person in Makkah, Qurayshite or stranger, should cry out unanswered. Those commitments were not adolescent enthusiasms to be outgrown; they were the settled policy of the man, and the years of this entry are the years in which they were proven to be settled, for the peacemaker's trade is learned in the ordinary disputes of ordinary years, in the quarrels of the market and the water-rights and the boundaries, and in the standing practice of the clans of referring such matters to men whose word all sides would accept. A city runs on arbitration as a desert runs on wells; and the reports of the years immediately after this entry show the city's habit had fixed upon him already, for when the clans stood at the edge of bloodshed over the Black Stone, the device they agreed upon was to make the first man through the sanctuary gate their judge, and the whole city cried satisfaction when the first man proved to be al-Amin. That arbitration, and the peace it preserved, the chronicle sets down in the entries of the thirty-fifth year; here it is cited only as the harvest of a standing the present entry has watched being grown, the standing of the man to whom disputes could be referred.
The household of the Prophet ﷺ must itself be counted among the civic institutions of Makkah in these years, for in a city without ministries the great houses were the ministries, and the sources show his house functioning as one. Lings, in the same passage of these years, preserves a working description of the Makkan alliance system: it was possible, he writes, for a man who lived among a tribe not his own to become, by mutual alliance, the confederate of a member of that tribe, into which he thus became partly integrated, sharing up to a point its responsibilities and its privileges; and he shows the system in operation around the Prophet's ﷺ own family, in the confederation of Jahsh of the tribe of Asad to Harb of the clan of Abd Shams, a tie of protection and mutual aid as binding as blood in the city's law. The understanding of that system, and the keeping of its duties, was the diplomacy of the age; and the house of Muhammad ﷺ and Khadijah was a recognized node of it, a house, as the same account says, whose circle of radiance included many of Khadijah's own relations and went far beyond either family. Khadijah was continually sought after for help and advice; when her sister Halah wished a wife found for her son Abu al-As, the choice came through the counsel of the Prophet's ﷺ own house, which proposed and arranged the match with their daughter Zaynab; and the betrothal of two of the daughters into the house of Abu Lahab, which the same years brought, shows the chiefs of the city seeking their ties through the standing of the al-Amin's door. The family that received the pilgrim, matched the bride, answered the kinsman's letter, and kept the confederate's claim was performing, in the idiom of the age, what the embassies and welfare offices of a later age would perform; and the believer learns from it that the Ummah's first foreign office and first social service were the fireside of Khadijah.
Upon these quiet years the later revelation casts its light, and the light shows the pattern was intended. When the Book praised the believers, it named among their marks that they established the prayer and that their affair was consultation among them; and when it weighed the speech of assemblies, it taught that no good is in much of the private converse of men save his who enjoins charity, or kindness, or reconciliation between men. Consultation and reconciliation, the two pillars of the verse, are precisely the two pillars of this entry's record: the shura of the famine initiative, and the peaceable arbitration the city would soon demand of him. The Quran did not descend to introduce these arts as novelties; it found them being practiced, in their human measure, by the man it had chosen, and it took them up into law for all mankind. So the believer should read the civic middle years of the Prophet ﷺ: the curriculum of the prophethood was being written in Makkah's assemblies before it was revealed, by the hand that had written his character before it wrote his Book.
The lessons of this entry gather easily, for they are the man himself. First, that the believer is forbidden the cowardice of withdrawal from society: the Prophet ﷺ lived in the most corrupt city of his age, at the very center of its idolatry, and did not flee to a desert of private purity, but took an active part in all its constructive dealings, purifying them by his presence rather than abandoning them to their corruption. Second, that participation without compromise is possible, for his selectivity cost him nothing of standing: the city that could not drink with him and could not feast with him still called him to its councils, because its deep interests of trust and justice were safer in his keeping than in the keeping of the men who shared its vices. Third, that justice is wider than kinship: his civic eye fell upon Abu Talib's need because Abu Talib was kin, but his city-wide reputation was built on dealing even-handedly with strangers and clients, and the revelation would later complete the lesson by measuring honor by nothing but Allah-consciousness. Fourth, that the great public deeds grow out of small faithful ones: the man who would arbitrate between all the clans at the Kaaba was made the arbitrator by fifteen years of minor arbitrations, faithfully kept; and the statesman of Madinah, whose constitution and treaties the world still studies, learned the trade in the famine consultation over the sons of Abu Talib. Let the Muslim who despairs of working good in a corrupt environment take these years as proof: no society is so hard that a truthful, trustworthy, patient man cannot be given a place in it, and no place is so small that faithfulness in it does not enlarge the place, until, in the fullness of the design of Allah, the man whom no office had been given becomes the man the whole city begs to hold its highest office, the judge of them all.