When the dust of the rebuilding had settled and the paint of the poets' congratulations had dried, the life of Makkah resumed its ancient rhythms, and at the center of those rhythms, quietly and without display, walked the man whose hands had set the Stone. The years between the completion of the Kaaba and the approach of the fortieth year of the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ, which this event covers, are not empty years in the sources; they are the years in which a settled pattern of devotion, formed in boyhood and proven in manhood, ripened into the spiritual maturity that would receive revelation. Lings marks the transition with a sentence that has guided the arrangement of this chronology: it was not long after this outward sign of his authority and his mission that he began to experience powerful inward signs. The outward sign was the arbitration at the Stone; the inward signs, the true visions that came like the breaking of the light of dawn, belong to the later events of this account. What belongs to this page is the middle term between the two: the worship and reflection of a man living wholly within the life of his city, and yet already living at a depth his city did not share.
The sanctuary itself was the first setting of his devotion. The precinct around the Kaaba was called a mosque, a masjid, a place of prostration, because, as Lings reminds the reader, the rite of bowing down in the direction of the Holy House had been performed there since the time of Ibrahim and Ismail (peace be upon them both); and the circumambulation, the tawaf, was the oldest continuous act of worship in Arabia, older than any idol that had gathered around it. Into these rites the Prophet ﷺ entered as his people entered, but the sources leave the believer in no doubt that he entered differently. Al-Mubarakpuri, gathering the testimony of the authorities in his Sealed Nectar, records that he took an active part in constructive and useful dealings, but otherwise had recourse to his self-consecrated solitude; that he held the idols in extreme aversion and most abhorrence; and that his long silence had helped favorably in his habit of meditation and deep investigation into the truth. The worship of the House, the keeping of kin, the honest work of trade, the feeding of the guest: these were the joints and marrow of his days; the idols, the wine, the festivals of stone: these stood outside the door of his house and were not let in.
The year itself, as Arabia kept it, gave his devotion its seasons, and the sources preserve the calendar of the city he sanctified. Trade was the most common means of providing the needs of life, as al-Mubarakpuri records, and the trade journeys could be fulfilled only when the security of the caravan routes was assured, which the Arabs enjoyed chiefly within the prohibited months, when the assemblies of Ukaz, Dhu-l-Majaz and Mijannah were held near Makkah. In those months the valley filled with the tribes of the peninsula: the pilgrim circling the House, the poet reciting for his clan, the merchant spreading his wares, the soothsayer casting his arrows by the roadside; and in the midst of them all, known to every camp, walked the most trusted man of the city, plying the honest trade he had learned in his youth, keeping the ties of a kinsman among the visitors, and holding his silence through assemblies in which every other tongue was busy with the idols of stone. The believing reader who follows him through those crowded months will notice what the sources notice without comment: he was present at the great things and the small, in the market and at the sacrifice, useful to strangers and kin alike, and at no fair and in no crowd is he ever recorded bowing to what the crowds bowed to. The city that saw him daily had long since stopped expecting it of him; his abstention had become, like the sunrise, one of the facts of Makkah.
One practice of those years has been preserved with a detail so homely that its truth rings like pottery: the people of Makkah sought his prayer over their sacrifices. The account of al-Zuhri, which Ibn Kathir transmits and whose context he declares good, records that as the Prophet ﷺ increased in age he became only more pleasing to his people, and they gave him the sobriquet al-Amin, the Trustworthy, even before revelation came down to him; and that they adopted the practice of never slaughtering a camel for sacrifice without seeking him, and he would say a prayer over it for them. Let the believer stand a moment inside that sentence. The slaughter of the camel was the solemn act of Arabian devotion, offered at the sanctuary and in the sacred months; and the families of Makkah, idolaters almost to a man, would not let the knife fall until the son of Abdullah had asked the blessing of his Lord upon the offering. They did not ask him because he was a priest, for he held no office; nor because his clan held the keys, for they did not; they asked because twenty-five years of watching him had taught the city that this man's asking was heard, and that a sacrifice over which he prayed was blessed in the eating. Years before any verse had descended upon him, the instinct of the common people had already made him the intercessor of their devotions; the pearl of their supplications was entrusted to the one man who never swore by al-Lat and never stood before an idol.
Around that core of prayer, the sources set the temperament of the man: silence, contemplation, and a mind that investigated everything and settled only upon what was true. Al-Mubarakpuri's summary deserves to be set out at length, for it is the fullest contemporary description of the Prophet's ﷺ inner life in these years: he was in his youth a man of weighty mind and faultless insight, favored with intelligence, originality of thought and accurate choice of the means leading to accurate goals; his long silence helped favorably in his habit of meditation and deep investigation into the truth; his vivid mind and pure nature were helpfully instrumental in assimilating and comprehending ways of life and people, individual and community-wise. The reader should notice where this meditation was practiced. It was not yet the cave on the mountain; it was the market, the assembly, the road, the courtyard of the House: the Prophet ﷺ meditated as he lived, amid the traffic of a city whose ways he was studying with the eye of a physician. The same summary records that he shunned superstitious practices while taking an active part in constructive and useful dealings; and the believing reader will recognize in that double description the pattern of all prophetic wisdom, which withdraws from corruption without withdrawing from the corrupted, keeping the sick within reach of the cure.
The distance from idols was the fixed boundary of his participation in the city's life, and the sources are unanimous and specific about it. Al-Mubarakpuri lists it plainly: he kept himself aloof from drinking wine, from eating meat slaughtered on the stone altars, and from attending the idolatrous festivals; he held the idols in extreme aversion and most abhorrence; he could never tolerate someone swearing by al-Lat and al-Uzza. The last clause deserves the reader's particular attention, for it describes not the abstention of a recluse but the intolerance of a conscience: the names of the two chief deities of the Hijaz were so constant upon the lips of his people that a man who could not bear to hear them sworn by was bound to feel the friction of his whole city's speech every day of his life. The deeper examination of what he came to think of the idols themselves, and of the religion of Ibrahim (peace be upon him) which he found beneath the crust of the city's practices, belongs to the events that follow this one in the chronology, where his reflection on the ways of Quraysh is recorded; what this page establishes from the sources is the boundary itself, drawn early and held without one known breach: worship he joined, idolatry he refused, and between the two he made his life a demonstration that the ancient rite of the House could be kept without a single nod to the stones around it.
His conduct in these years was itself a form of devotion, and the city measured it in the only coin it knew. The testimony that has carried the shape of those years to the Ummah was spoken by the person who knew him best: his wife. Al-Mubarakpuri cites the words of Khadijah (may Allah be pleased with her), the Mother of the Believers, transmitted in the Sahih of al-Bukhari: he unites the ties of kinship, he helps the poor and the needy, he entertains the guests, and he endures hardships in the path of truthfulness. She spoke the words, according to the received account, at the hour of the first revelation, in the year that closes this stretch of the chronology; but every clause of the testimony describes a settled habit, years in the making, that the whole city could have witnessed. Here is worship as the Book that was soon to descend would define it: not only the prostration of the body toward the House, but the keeping of the womb-ties, the feeding of the destitute, the honoring of the stranger, and the bearing of loss upon the road of truth. The Prophet ﷺ had never read the verse that joins prayer to the poor; his life had already joined them, and the joining was his liturgy.
The same years hold one further testimony, transmitted from the Prophet's ﷺ own tongue, to the protection that guarded the boundary of his devotion. Al-Mubarakpuri cites the report, which he draws from Ibn al-Athir, of the Prophet's ﷺ saying: I have never tried to do what my people do except for two times; every time Allah intervened and checked me from doing so, and I never did that again. The account he then relates is of his youth in the hills above Makkah: he told his fellow-shepherd to watch his sheep while he went down to Makkah to entertain himself as the young men did, and he came to the first house of the city, and heard music, and asked what it was, and was told it was a wedding party; and he sat down to listen, and Allah caused sleep to overcome him until he was awakened by the heat of the sun, and he returned to his flock, and never tried it again. The report belongs in its fullness among the events of the protected youth, which this chronology has already recorded; it is set upon this page because the years covered here lived under the same protection: even the ordinary amusements of the city, the weddings and the wine that was their ordinary companion, were kept from him by a providence that permitted him every innocent pleasure of Arabian life and restrained him from every doorway that led below the dignity of a prophet. The believing reader does not read such a report as a narrowness; he reads it as the care of Allah for the vessel He was preparing, the way a father keeps clean the garment his son must wear to the king.
The authorities, as al-Mubarakpuri gathers them, close the portrait with a consent that reads like a eulogy written before the death of the age: modesty of deportment, virtuous behavior and graceful manners; the ideal of manhood, possessed of a spotless character; the most obliging to his compatriots, the most honest in his talk, the mildest in temper; the most gentle-hearted, chaste, hospitable, and always impressing people by his piety-inspiring countenance; the most truthful and the best to keep covenant. Every clause of that summary is a form of worship practiced in the streets of Makkah: obligingness is devotion with the hands, honesty is devotion with the tongue, mildness is devotion with the temper, and the countenance that impressed the pious was the outward sign of a heart that had been keeping company with its Lord in secret for years. It was this man, and not a stranger from the desert, whose reputation for trustworthiness the city had sealed at the Stone; and it was this man whom the years 605 to 609 were silently finishing, as the olive is finished in the press, into the Messenger of Allah ﷺ.
The solitude that was beginning to grow in him in these years must be described with the sources' own restraint, for it was not yet the retreat, and this chronology reserves the retreats to their own events. Al-Mubarakpuri says that when no useful and constructive occupation claimed him, he would have recourse to his self-consecrated solitude; and Lings, standing at the threshold of the fortieth year, records that solitude became dear to him, and that he would go for spiritual retreats to a cave in Mount Hira, not far from the outskirts of Makkah. The beginnings of those mountain retreats, their months of Ramadan, and the provisions he carried belong to the next stretch of this chronology, and are told there; the reader is asked to notice here only the direction of the path, which moved by degrees, and within the knowledge of the whole city, for Lings records that there was nothing in it that would have struck Quraysh as particularly strange, since withdrawal to a solitary place for worship had been a traditional practice among the descendants of Ismail, one or two in each generation. The worship within the walls came first, and the worship upon the mountain came after; the prayer over the sacrifices came first, and the nights of solitary devotion came after; and the believer who is tempted to think that devotion must either storm the city or flee it may learn from these years of the Prophet ﷺ a third way, which is to sanctify the city from within, until the heart that has kept faith with the crowds is called up alone to receive what the crowds cannot yet carry.
What held all of this together, and what the reader who prays will recognize at once, was the remembrance of Allah. The Book that descended at the close of this stretch would teach, in the words that the hearts of the believers have never put down, that it is in the remembrance of Allah that hearts find rest; and it would remind, in the story of the fire and the mountain, that prayer is to be established for remembrance. Those verses were not yet sent down; the heart that proved them was already keeping them. The rest that the remembrance gives is not the rest of escape but the rest of right relation: to the Lord of the House in prostration, to the family in kindness, to the poor in bread, to the stranger in the guest-mat, to the city in truthfulness, and to the idols in a settled and avowed refusal. This was the worship and reflection of the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ in Makkah in the years 605 to 609: not a retreat from the world, but the world redeemed in small transactions of obedience, five years of quiet fidelity in which Allah was completing the vessel, and the vessel, unknowing, was being carried by its ordinary devotions to the mouth of the cave, and to the night in which the first word would come.