Growing Reputation for Honesty and Trustworthiness

The reputation of the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ in Makkah was not one event but a biography of its own, and this chronicle has followed it through its chapters: the earning of the twin titles al-Sadiq and al-Amin in the years of his youth, when the neighbors first named what his conduct had proven; and the growing of the name through the trade years of his early twenties, when the verdict of the quarter became the common knowledge of the city and crossed the caravan roads of Arabia. The present entry, set in the decade from about 596 to 605 of the Christian calendar, from his twenty-sixth year to his thirty-fifth, records the third and settled chapter: the consolidation, the years in which the titles stopped being a rising report and became the city's shorthand, the settled designation under which all Makkah filed its knowledge of him. A reputation that grows is news; a reputation that has finished growing is an institution; and the believer should learn to tell the difference, for the man of this decade was no longer being discovered by Makkah. He had been discovered, weighed, certified, and filed; and what remained, through ten quiet years, was the daily, unremarked, total reliance of a whole city upon a single character.

The clearest certificate of the consolidated standing is a sentence of Martin Lings from the years this entry covers, and it deserves to be read entire: the powerful attraction which centred on al-Amin, as he was so often called, went far beyond his own family; and Khadijah was with him at that centre, loved and honoured by all who came within the wide circle of their radiance. Every phrase is a measurement of consolidation. As he was so often called: the grammar itself is the finding, for Lings is explaining to the reader that al-Amin had become the man's ordinary designation, the name that needed no gloss and no context, the way the city referred to him when it had no reason to be formal; a title that has become a pronoun has finished growing. The powerful attraction: the standing had passed from respect into drawing power, so that people came toward the man and toward his house, and the circle of his association had to be described as radiance, a light others warmed in. Went far beyond his own family: the certification had crossed every boundary of clan and quarter and interest that the jealous city could raise, and had made of the Hashimite's house a center for Quraysh entire. And Khadijah was with him at that centre: the consolidation was household-deep, a standing shared between husband and wife, the wealthiest woman of the city choosing to stand in the reflected light of her husband's character and being loved for it; which is itself the final audit of the title, for the person who can measure a man's honesty at midnight and at the account book, in prosperity and in the years of mourning, had measured this one and built her whole life upon the finding.

Lings records further the two estimates which show the standing at its full height. Of the clans he writes that the hopes of Hashim and Muttalib, the two houses counted politically as one, were set upon Muhammad ﷺ for the recovery of their waning influence: the elders of his own house had come to regard him as their future, the one man of the rising generation whose weight could restore the balance of the city. And beyond all question of clan, the chiefs of Quraysh themselves, the great men whose word was the city's constitution, had come to consider him one of the most capable men of the generation which would succeed them, the generation that would carry, after the chiefs were gone, the honor and the power of the tribe throughout Arabia. The believer should let the fullness of that judgment sink in: the chiefs of Quraysh, the most clear-eyed political assembly of the age, had headhunted the merchant of the house of Hashim for the future leadership of the whole tribe, and this in a city where leadership was the most contested of all commodities. They had not chosen him for his wealth, which was his wife's and modest beside the great fortunes; nor for his lineage's power, which was waning; they had chosen him for the qualities they had now audited for two full decades, and the reader of the earlier entries knows those qualities by name: truthfulness in speech, fidelity in trust, and judgment in affairs. The world has never produced a better character reference than the one Makkah gave, without intending it, to the man who would be its Prophet.

And the praise was not an occasional thing but the city's atmosphere. The praise of al-Amin, Lings writes of these same years, was continually upon men's lips. Continually, and upon lips plural: the title was in daily circulation through the assemblies of the valley, spoken by clients and chiefs, by the women of the market and the men of the caravans, until the very name became one of the fixed sounds of the city, like the calling at the well or the caravans bell. The believer who knows how reputations die in the mouths of cities, how a name rises for a season and is worn out in a winter, should measure ten years of continual praise as the political miracle it was; Makkah entertained itself with scandals the way other cities ate, and it could find nothing on this man to feed the appetite, decade after decade. The one report the tradition preserves from these years says it in the idiom of the biographies: as he increased in age, he became only more pleasing. Consolidation of this kind cannot be manufactured; it can only be kept, and kept it was, coin by coin, through every day of the ten years this entry covers.

The standing then bore the social fruit which standings exist to bear, and the sources preserve one whole instance of it in the affairs of his own house. It was in these years, Lings records, that Abu Lahab came to his nephew with the proposal that Ruqayyah and Umm Kulthum should be betrothed to his sons Utbah and Utaybah; and Lings sets down the connection with the reputation in so many words: it was perhaps because of this, because the praise of al-Amin was continually upon men's lips, that the proposal came. The reader must understand what a betrothal between the houses of Hashim and Abd Shams-Umayyah meant in the currency of Makkah: marriage among the Quraysh was diplomacy, the sealing of alliances between powerful houses, the engineering of the next generation's balance of power. Abu Lahab, the son of Abdul-Muttalib and the brother of the Prophet's ﷺ father, stood at the intersection of both houses, and he came to the al-Amin's door to ask for his daughters for his own sons; the Prophet ﷺ agreed, for he thought well of the two young cousins, and the betrothals were made. The event is recalled here not for its outcome, which belongs to a later and sadder chapter of the chronicle when the coming of Islam dissolved it, but for its evidentiary value: the standing of the man had reached the point where the houses of the city sought alliance through him, where his daughters' hands were a prize petitioned for at his door, and where the city's chiefs wished their names bound to his before the world had yet heard the name the angels would announce. Consolidated trust always issues in sought alliance, and the believer may see the same law running through the world's affairs today: let a man's word become iron, and the powerful will court him.

The second fruit of the consolidated standing was the city's money, and here the sources are explicit that the office of al-Amin had become, in these settled years, one of the standing institutions of Makkah. A later summary in the tradition of Al-Sheha states it in a sentence that gathers the whole history: the Prophet ﷺ used to be known among his people as the honest and the trustworthy; and Muhammad was honest enough for the Qurayshites, though disbelieving him, to deposit their moneys with him. The deposits, the wada'i, were the banking system of a city that had no vaults and no banks; property was entrusted to the man whose custody was certain, and the summary records the astonishing equilibrium of the last Makkah years, when the very men who had begun to call him a sorcerer and a liar still lodged their gold with him, and were right to do so; and that at the migration he left behind, as custodian, Ali (may Allah be pleased with him), to pay back every deposit to its owner, and took from the money of his enemies not a coin in compensation. The chronicle has set down, in its account of the growth years, how the deposit office began; the point of the present entry is that the office had consolidated: by the decade of his thirties it was simply part of the structure of Makkah, an unremarked assumption of the city's life, that valuables slept safe under the roof of the man the caravan songs called al-Amin. When the history of the world's banks is written in full, the longest-lived institution of deposit in its first century will be found to be the house of a certain Makkan merchant whose reserve was his character.

The biographical tradition adds to these the attestation which carries the standing to the very threshold of the prophethood. In the account of the rebuilding of the Kaaba, set in the thirty-fifth year, Ibn Kathir transmits the report of the builders and the dispute over the Black Stone, and sets down in his own voice, as a fact needing no proof, the sentence: Quraysh used to refer to the Messenger of Allah ﷺ as the trustworthy. The context is the city at daggers drawn, every clan armed with its pride, unable to agree upon anything except the man who should decide between them; and the biographer's unguarded remark shows what the crisis relied upon, that the usage of the title was so constant that even amid the quarrel the city reached for it by reflex. The full story of that arbitration belongs to the following entries of the chronicle, and is only signaled here as the boundary of this one: the consolidated standing of the decade was about to be drawn upon by the whole city at once, in the single most dangerous hour of its civic history, and it proved equal to the hour. What bank, what ministry, what crown has ever been tested with so much and found solvent?

One further element the master record names for this event, and it must be given its full weight: the consolidation took place in a man who refused, through every one of these years, the pagan vices of his people. The rapid review of the pre-prophetic years records that he kept himself aloof from drinking wine, from meat slaughtered on the stone altars, and from the idolatrous festivals, and that he held the idols in extreme aversion; and the chronicle has shown how Allah's providence guarded him from the very beginnings of his youth. Here the civic fact is the astonishing one: the abstinence cost him nothing of the admiration. Makkah's assemblies were lubricated with wine and its calendar with idol feasts, and the man who touched neither was not marginalized but magnified; the unanimous admiration the record speaks of was the admiration of a whole society for a man who declined its pleasures and excelled in its duties, and who proved, by a decade of unstained public life, that his otherness was not austerity's disguise but holiness itself. The unbelieving city has left the believers a paradox to study: it will not follow a man's religion, but it cannot refute his character, and in the economy of the da'wah the second fact has carried the first into every generation, for the character is the argument that cannot be answered.

The Book of Allah, when it came, weighed reputations with two sentences that this entry takes as its measuring lines. To Him, the Lord says in the Surah of the Originator, ascends the good word, and the righteous work He raises: the praise continually upon men's lips in Makkah was, in the ledger of heaven, only the shadow of what was ascending; and the man whose word and work were daily rising to Allah needed no certificate from the city, and sought none, for his standing was kept where no market could devalue it. And in the Surah of the Chambers, the Lord sets the honors of men beside the one honor that outlasts them: O mankind, He says, We have created you from a male and a female and made you peoples and tribes that you may know one another; indeed, the most honorable of you in the sight of Allah is the most Allah-conscious of you. The chiefs of Quraysh had ranked him among the most capable of his generation; the verse reveals the ranking that mattered, the honor measured not by capability but by taqwa; and the man whom the city honored for his competence was already, in the hidden sight of Allah, the most Allah-fearing soul in it, which was the secret of all the rest. The believer learns from the two verses the right use of a good name: to hold it as a trust, to measure it by Allah's scale, and to spend it, when the hour comes, in the service of the message; never to hoard it, for words ascend, and never to believe it, for honor is only real at the foot of the Throne.

The Sunnah supplied, in the same years it would soon begin to explain, the very definition of the character this event has watched consolidate. From Abdullah ibn Amr (may Allah be pleased with them both), the two Sahihs transmit the Messenger's ﷺ standard: the Muslim is the one from whose tongue and hand the Muslims are safe. The definition was revelation's doctrine; but the city of Makkah had, through these ten years, been certifying the definition in advance, for from this man's tongue and hand all of them had long been safe, believer and idolater, kinsman and stranger, friend and future enemy. And a further saying, transmitted in the collections and preserved in the tradition of Al-Sheha, warns what the loss of such a character costs an age: when honesty is lost, wait for the Hour; and how will it be lost? when authority is entrusted to those unfit for it. Honesty, in the Messenger's ﷺ economics, is not a private virtue but the load-bearing pillar of the public order; and the Ummah may read the converse of the proverb in its own condition whenever it finds its trusts in the hands of the dishonest, that a society which no longer banks its character has already begun to bank its hours.

The purpose of so great a consolidation, the believer perceives, was never the man's comfort; it was the message's foundation. Allah, Glorified and Exalted be He, was giving His final revelation into the custody of a man whose certificate of custody had already been signed by the whole world he was sent to; and when, in the fortieth year, the Recitation began and the Messenger stood upon Safa and said that he was the warner sent before a dreadful punishment, the city was not asked to gamble on a stranger's honesty. The era of consolidation had made the wager impossible to lose on that front; the chiefs could deny his message, and they would, but they could not deny the man, and they never did, from that day to this. Let the believer then take the lesson of the settled name: build character before the hour that needs it, for the hour will not wait for building; keep the name as a trust and not as a trophy; and when the summons comes, spend the name gladly, as its Owner intended, in the service of the Word that never passes away. For the al-Amin of Makkah spent his at the door of the Kaaba in his thirty-fifth year, and the city that trusted him with its gold discovered, at the crisis of the Black Stone, that it had trusted him, without knowing, with the custody of far greater things: its peace, its unity, and, in the design of Allah, the final guidance of all the worlds.