The assembly in the precinct had talked itself into silence, and into that silence the oldest man of Quraysh spoke the word that saved the city. Who he was, the sources record with a precision the believer should honor. Ibn Kathir transmits that some scholars of the traditions claim that the proposal came from Abu Umayyah ibn al-Mughirah ibn Abdullah ibn Umar ibn Makhzum, who was at that time the oldest man in all Quraysh; al-Mubarakpuri names him plainly in his Sealed Nectar, the oldest among the chiefs, Abu Umayyah ibn al-Mughirah al-Makhzumi; while Lings, following the earliest sources, preserves the proposal without the name, attributing it to the oldest man present. The concord of the three accounts is complete in the substance: an elder, carrying by his years an authority that outranked the claims of every clan, found the formula upon which no faction could dissent. The proposal, in Lings' rendering of the received account, ran thus: O men of Quraysh, take as arbiter between you, about that wherein ye differ, the first man who shall enter in through the gate of this Mosque. Al-Mubarakpuri gives the same counsel in plainer words: let him who enters the Sanctuary first of all decide on the point; and Ibn Kathir's transmitted form has the elder say: O tribe of Quraysh, resolve your dispute by agreeing that the first man who enters by the door of this mosque will decide the issue.
Consider for a moment the genius hid in that simple rule, for the elders of Makkah had reached it by the weariness of wisdom and the goodness of Allah's mercy together. Every arbiter they might have named would have been a clansman of one side or the other, and his verdict a fresh grievance; but the first man through the gate was chosen by no man's will at all. Chance was the only court in Makkah whose jurisdiction all the clans acknowledged; and the precinct itself, the masjid, the place of prostration that had known the worship of Ibrahim and Ismail (peace be upon them both), was hallowed ground upon which even the bitterest rivals could stand and await a sign. The proposal would have been understood by every chief in the assembly for what it was: a surrender of the quarrel to the city's oldest and most innocent form of trust. And so, as Ibn Kathir records, they agreed; and Lings sets down the agreement in the words of the sources: they agreed to follow the old man's counsel. Then the whole assembly turned its face to the gate, and Makkah, holding its breath, waited to see who would walk in.
It was the Will of Allah, as al-Mubarakpuri writes, that the first to enter the Mosque was the Messenger of Allah ﷺ, who had only just returned to Makkah after an absence. Lings preserves the detail of the return; and the believer may dwell upon it as upon a sign, for the whole city's crisis had been arranged, by the disposal of events whose ordering no Qurashite controlled, to come to its head at the hour in which the one man fit to solve it was walking unsuspecting toward the gate. What the assembly saw, when they lifted their eyes, was a man of thirty-five years, of the clan of Hashim, of the house of Abd Manaf, known to every soul in the valley; and what happened next is among the most moving passages in all the received sirah. Ibn Kathir, transmitting the account of Ibn Ishaq, preserves the cry of the assembly in the words the earliest sources give: when they saw him they said, This is al-Amin, the Trustworthy; we are satisfied. This is Muhammad. Lings hears the same moment in two voices: It is al-Amin, said some; We accept his judgement, said others; it is Muhammad. And al-Mubarakpuri renders the city's acclamation as it broke from every side at once: Al-Ameen, the trustworthy, has come; we are content to abide by his decision.
Let the believer pause here, for the acclamation is a greater thing than a politeness. Nothing in the cry was scripted; no clan had moved it; the recognition, as Lings says, was immediate and spontaneous. The chiefs who for four or five nights had been unable to agree upon the lifting of a stone agreed in a single breath upon the man. Here was the harvest of thirty-five years of his walking among them: the truthful tongue that had never lied, the hand that had never taken what was not its own, the scales that had never cheated, the deposits returned in full to every depositor; here was the meaning of the sobriquet which Ibn Kathir notes was already the city's common name for him, for Quraysh used to refer to him as the Trustworthy; and here, too, was the testimony which the account of al-Zuhri preserves, that as he increased in age he became only more pleasing, and so they gave him the sobriquet al-Amin, even before revelation came down to him. The reputation that Khadijah's caravan had proven in Syria, that the markets of Makkah had proven at home, that the pact of chivalry had proven in the house of Ibn Jud'an, was now, at the gate of the mosque, proven upon the single most dangerous question the city had faced in a generation. The reader of this chronology has watched that reputation being built, event by event, since the boyhood years; this day it saved the sanctuary from the blood of its own custodians.
The matter was laid before him. Ibn Kathir's transmitted account says it plainly: when he reached them and they told him of the problem, the Messenger of Allah ﷺ heard the whole of it, the claims and the counterclaims, the bowl of blood, the alliances, the four or five nights of the standoff. And al-Mubarakpuri's sentence describes him as the sources describe him at the moment of every crisis of his life: calm and self-possessed, he received the commission and at once resolved upon an expedient which was to conciliate them all. Mark the words, conciliate them all; the task he set himself was not to find which clan was right, for no clan was right, but to devise a form in which no clan would be wronged, a peace that asked no chief to eat the bitterness of another's triumph. The wisdom that spoke in him that day was the wisdom that would one day be named in the Book itself: whoever is given wisdom has been given much good; and it was not the wisdom of the assemblies, which weighs claims, but the wisdom of the prophets, which heals them.
Then he asked for a cloak. Ibn Kathir's account, in the received transmission, says: he said, Bring me a robe; and one was brought to him. What he did with it the sources record in a consent of detail that is rare even in the sirah of Makkah. He spread the garment upon the ground, and he took up the Black Stone and laid it in the middle of the cloth. Then, in the words Ibn Kathir transmits, he said: Let each tribe grasp one side of the cloth; then all raise it up. Lings renders it: Let each clan take hold of the border of the cloak; then lift it up, all of you together. And the chiefs of Quraysh, the men of the blood pact and the drawn daggers, came to the edges of the garment as they were bidden, a chief of every clan with his hands upon the border of the same cloth, and lifted together, and the Stone rose between them in the mantle of one man, and no man's hand was higher than another's, and no clan could ever say that the crown of the House had passed through any hands but its own. When they had raised it to the right height, the Messenger of Allah ﷺ took the Stone and set it into its corner with his own hands, and the building was continued and completed above it.
Consider what the expedient achieved, clause by clause, for it is a complete school of statesmanship in a single garment. First, it made the honor shared: every clan that held an edge of the cloak lifted the Stone, and the memory of the lifting belongs to every house that was there, which is why the city preserved the detail of the edges with such care. Second, it made the honor equal: the Prophet ﷺ did not weigh the claims of the clans, did not rank the houses of Quraysh, did not hand the Stone to the strongest or the oldest; he made the instrument itself the answer, and the instrument was shaped so that equality was its very form. Third, it reserved to himself only what no clan coveted and every clan could trust: the final placing, which required one pair of hands, was done by the hands of the one man upon whom the whole city had that morning pronounced its satisfaction. And fourth, it converted the spectators into participants: the peace was not decreed upon the chiefs but performed by them; the same hands that had been holding sword-hilts for five nights closed upon the same cloth, and the lifting of the Stone became, in the act, the sealing of the reconciliation. It is the way of Allah's wisdom to answer a quarrel not with a verdict that one side must swallow but with a form that both sides may inhabit.
The transmission of so great an event was never left to a single line, and the reader should be shown the richness of the channels, for the multiplicity is itself a proof. Ali ibn Abi Talib (may Allah be pleased with him) transmits, in the account which al-Bayhaqi relates through Simak ibn Harb from Khalid ibn Arrah, and which Ibn Kathir sets down, that when Quraysh rebuilt the Kaaba and fell into dispute over the positioning of the Stone, they agreed that the first person to come along that street should decide; and that it was the Messenger of Allah ﷺ who came by first, and he decided for them to place it in a piece of cloth so that all the tribes would lift it to its place. The same companion's account comes through a second channel, that of Abu Dawud at-Tayalisi from Hammad ibn Salamah and others from Simak ibn Harb, and this version adds a precious detail: the Prophet ﷺ came in through the door of Banu Shaybah, and a robe was brought, and he ordered each subtribe to take hold of an edge of the cloth. From al-Zuhri, through the transmission of Yaqub ibn Sufyan, comes a fuller narration still, which Ibn Kathir quotes: they agreed to appoint as arbitrator the first person who came up to them, and it was he, being a youth, wearing a leopardskin sash; and he had each leader of the tribes take a side of the cloth while he climbed up, and they lifted it and he put the corner piece in position. Ibn Kathir's verdict upon this channel deserves to be given in his own words as the translation renders them: the context of this tradition is good, it being from the biographies written by al-Zuhri; though he notes one strange element in it, the wording when he reached puberty, for the event is well known to have occurred when the Messenger of Allah ﷺ was in his thirty-fifth year.
To these channels the Musnad of Imam Ahmad adds the voice of a builder. Ibn Kathir cites the account of al-Saib ibn Abd Allah, a man who worked upon the walls in those days, who told how the people suggested that an arbitrator be appointed, and agreed that he should be the first man to appear from the mountain road; and it was he who arrived, and those present said: Well, it is the Trustworthy who has come; and he placed the Stone upon a cloak, and summoned their headmen, and they lifted it up while he, himself, placed it in its position. The agreement of all these lines upon the essentials is total: the deadlock, the resort to the first arrival, the arrival of the Prophet ﷺ, the acclamation of his trustworthiness, the garment, the communal lifting, the setting of the Stone by his own hands. Their variance is confined to the identifying marks of the gate and the road and the garment and the sash, which is the natural variance of honest witnesses describing different edges of one diamond; and the honesty of the sirah is displayed in precisely this, that the compilers kept every line and let the reader see the shape of the event through the sum of them all. The dating itself was weighed by the scholars with the same candor: Ibn Kathir's own chapter places the rebuilding five years before the prophethood, in his thirty-fifth year, as Ibn Ishaq established; al-Bayhaqi is quoted as recounting the building to have been before the marriage to Khadijah, while the widely known transmission, which Ibn Kathir endorses, sets it some ten years after the marriage; and Musa ibn Uqbah, with Mujahid, Urwah and Muhammad ibn Jubayr ibn Mutim, is recorded for the view that it was fifteen years before the prophethood. Ibn Kathir observes that the sacrilegious war and the pact of al-Fudul came in one and the same year, the Prophet's ﷺ twentieth, and that this substantiates the dating of Ibn Ishaq; and this project's chronology follows that received reckoning.
What the event meant in the life of the Prophet ﷺ himself, the earliest sources allow the reader to see, and Lings has gathered it into a sentence that closes the chapter upon this day: it was not long after this outward sign of his authority and his mission that he began to experience powerful inward signs. Let the believer read that sentence slowly. The placing of the Black Stone was an outward sign; the city of his birth, assembled in its utmost crisis, had watched him resolve what its elders could not, and had acclaimed him before he spoke; and within the span of years that remained before the cave of Hira, the inward signs, the true visions like the breaking of the light of dawn, would begin. The arbitration was, in the economy of Allah's preparation of His Messenger, the last and greatest of the public seals upon the man before the private seals began to be set upon the prophet; and the believing reader, who has followed this chronology from the fostering of Halimah through the monastery of Bahira and the pact of chivalry to this day, will recognize the pattern: every station of his youth had been either a protection, a preparation, or a public attestation, and the Stone was the greatest of the attestations, given not to a monk or a matron but to the whole assembled commonwealth of Quraysh, whose memory is harder than any record.
The legacy of the cloak has never faded from the thought of those who love the Prophet ﷺ, and its uses have multiplied down the centuries. The jurists of the Ummah found in it the foundation of the law of tahkim, arbitration, the entrusting of a dispute to one whose judgment all parties accept, and they read in his conduct the ethics of the arbiter: to hear the whole claim, to invent rather than merely choose, to give each party a place in the resolution, and to reserve nothing for himself but the service of the placing. The teachers of wisdom found in it the definition of hikmah, the wisdom that Allah gives to whom He wills, which is not the accumulation of knowledge but the sight of the form that reconciles. And the lovers of the Prophet ﷺ have seen in the cloak itself a parable of everything he ﷺ was sent to gather: one Stone, one garment, many hands, every edge held, the center belonging to Allah alone. What is the Ummah itself, the scholars have asked, but a cloak whose borders are held by every tribe and tongue of mankind, lifted together, crowned by no one hand, and completed only when the hand that is trusted above all hands sets the final stone? The Book that would descend upon him within five years would command the believers to hold fast, all together, to the rope of Allah and not be divided, and would recall to them that they were enemies and He joined their hearts, so that they became brothers by His grace; and every believer who has stood in the mataf and seen the circling of every nation about the Stone that the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ, may the peace and blessings of Allah be upon him, set with his own hands, has watched the cloak of that morning widened to the compass of the earth, its edges still held, its center still whole, and the wisdom that saved Makkah still descending, generation after generation, upon the hearts that ask Allah for it.