Continued Family Life with Khadijah

The years between the rebuilding of the Kaaba and the first stirrings of revelation, from about 606 to 609 of the Christian calendar, are the years of the household's maturity. The earlier pages of this chronicle have told how the house was founded, when the bridegroom of twenty-five crossed the threshold of the bride of forty, and how the decade that followed filled it with the births of six children and the sorrows of two bereavements; this page tells of the riper season, when the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ was a man of thirty-six to thirty-nine and Khadijah bint Khuwaylid (may Allah be pleased with her), fifteen years his senior, had been his wife for more than a decade. Nothing in Makkah had changed outwardly: the caravans still left for Syria in the spring, the Sanctuary still stood in the centre of the valley, and the merchant of Banu Hashim was still known to every quarter simply as al-Amin. But within the walls of that house, the master record declares, he maintained a harmonious domestic life, raising the children and managing the family's affairs with deep mutual affection, respect, and emotional stability; and the believer who has learned to read the providence of Allah in the quiet years will find in this season of settled love the immediate preparation of the final prophethood.

Khadijah herself, in these later years, was the still centre of the whole establishment. Al-Buti has caught her standing in a single phrase: throughout this time she was, in his words, the source of honour and respect in the house, and it was she who had borne all the Prophet's children for him except Ibrahim, who was yet far in the future. She was now past fifty, a matriarch of the city's aristocracy who had outlived two earlier marriages, governed a commercial fortune, and buried two infant sons; and the sources record not one word of bitterness in her. Her management of the estate continued with the judgment that had once doubled her capital in the Syrian trade; her gate continued to open to the claimant and the traveller; and her counsel continued to be the first counsel her husband sought in every affair that troubled him. What had begun as a marriage of trust between a young man of pure character and a mature woman of discerning heart had ripened, as the best marriages ripen, into a partnership so complete that the coming of prophethood itself would not alter its pattern: when the greatest event in the history of creation descended upon that house, the first human being to hear of it, to believe in it, and to steady the trembling heart of the Messenger of Allah ﷺ beneath its weight, would be this same wife of the mature years.

The house carried its griefs as well as its joys, and honesty requires that they be remembered here. Both of the little sons, al-Qasim and Abdullah, were gone by these years; the kunya Abu al-Qasim remained to the father as a memorial, but the boy who gave it was under the earth of Makkah, and the last-born son, whom the tradition surnames at-Tayyib and at-Tahir, the Good and the Pure, had died in earliest infancy. Al-Buti, with a pastor's insight, has written of the mother's grief: Khadijah mourned her sons in a society where sons were the pride of the house and daughters were sometimes buried alive at birth, and the fathers' faces, as he says, would darken with anger at the news of a daughter. Yet the house of Muhammad ﷺ was the one house in Makkah where daughters were not shame but light, and the believer notes the wisdom al-Buti discerns in the arrangement of these years: it was as though Allah wished a sad tenderness to be part of the Prophet's ﷺ being, for the man whose own heart had been softened by loss would be the quickest of all men to sympathize with the grieving; the ruler of nations, as the Shaikh observes, is made gentle in the school of sorrow long before he is given authority. The taunt that his progeny would be cut off, which the mockers of Quraysh would later fling at him, was already being answered in these years by the health and brightness of his four daughters, though the world did not yet know it.

The daughters themselves were the life of the house in this season. Zaynab, the eldest, was approaching womanhood, grave and capable like her mother; and it is one of the tender accidents of this chronicle that her marriage was arranged through the very channel of Khadijah's wide affections. Lings preserves the whole domestic sequence: Khadijah's sister Halah had a son named Abu al-As ibn ar-Rabiah, a frequent visitor to the house, whom Khadijah loved, as Lings writes, as if he had been her own son; and because she was continually sought after for help and advice, Halah came to her to find a wife for him. When Khadijah consulted her husband, the Prophet ﷺ suggested their own daughter Zaynab, who would soon be of marriageable age; and when the time came, they were married. The believer pauses over the simplicity of it: the wedding of the Prophet's ﷺ firstborn daughter arranged at a mother's fireside between two sisters, the nephew of the one and the child of the other; and in the union then contracted lay seeds of both sweetness and trial that later pages of this history will unfold, for Abu al-As would stand long between his wife's faith and his people's hostility.

The two middle daughters, Ruqayyah and Umm Kulthum, were in these same years sought in betrothal from another and very different quarter. Lings relates that Abu Lahab, the Prophet's ﷺ uncle, came to his nephew with the proposal that the two girls be betrothed to his own sons Utbah and Utaybah; and Muhammad ﷺ agreed, for he thought well of these two cousins of his daughters, and the betrothals took place. Here the chronicle must exercise the honesty it owes its readers: the sources of this period are household memories, not notarial documents, and the exact year of each of these arrangements is not preserved; Lings sets them in the closing years before the prophethood, and that placing fits the ages of the children. The later historian knows the end of these betrothals before their beginning: when revelation came and the Quran named Abu Lahab by his kunyah, the two sons would be made to put away their wives, and the father of the girls would bear that severance too with the same patience he had borne every other. But that grief belongs to a later page; in the years this event covers, the marriages arranged were honourable ones, contracted with cousins thought well of, in the ordinary course of a household that could not yet know what was coming.

Fatimah, the youngest, was in these years a small child, born in the last years of the previous decade, the father's own portion as the later tradition would call her. The tenderness of the Prophet ﷺ toward his daughters was already one of the wonders of Makkah in a society of hard rearing, and the later sayings of his, preserved in the collections, only gather up what these years had planted. Al-Sheha transmits the well-known report that whoever is tested with daughters and treats them generously, they will be a shield for him from the Fire; and the report that whoever supports two girls until they are grown will come on the Day of Resurrection together with the Messenger of Allah ﷺ, joining his fingers together in illustration. Of his manner with Fatimah specifically, the tradition preserves that he would stand to welcome her when she entered, and seat her in his own place. The believer who weighs these testimonies against the cruelty the age visited upon its daughters sees the whole revolution of the coming revelation already living in one man's house: before a single verse had been commanded about the dignity of women, the best of men was honouring his daughters with his own hands.

To the daughters of the house the sources add the sons who were not born of it. One of these, Zayd ibn Harithah (may Allah be pleased with him), the wedding-day gift of Khadijah grown into the household's beloved young man, was by these years freed and established as a son of the house, known in Makkah by the adoption custom of the age as Zayd ibn Muhammad; his choosing of the Prophet ﷺ over his own father and uncle, and the declaration at the Kaaba that followed it, have been told in an earlier page of this chronicle, and his fuller story, from that adoption to his place in the revelation itself, belongs to pages yet to come. Here it is enough to record what the household knew: that the young man of Kalb and Tayy walked in these years as the eldest son of the most trusted man in Makkah, learning his uprightness at his side.

The other was a child of Abu Talib's crowded house: Ali ibn Abi Talib (may Allah be pleased with him), the son of Fatimah bint Asad, taken in during the drought years that had weighed so heavily upon his father's household. The chronology of his entry the sources preserve differently, and honesty carries the variance plainly: Lings places it about the time Khadijah bore her last child, in the closing years of the decade before this event, when the famine moved the two houses of the Prophet ﷺ and al-Abbas to take charge of one of Abu Talib's sons each; other reports connect the arrangement with the rebuilding of the Kaaba in the Prophet's ﷺ thirty-fifth year. In either reading, by the years this page covers, the boy was settled in the house, brought up, as Lings writes, as a brother to his four girl cousins, of an age with Ruqayyah and Umm Kulthum, somewhat younger than Zaynab and somewhat older than Fatimah; and in a sense, the same writer adds, the little one the house had lost was replaced by Ali. What the family could not yet see, the believer sees: the boy playing in that courtyard would be among the very first to believe when the truth came, and the household that sheltered his childhood was the first school of the Ahl al-Bayt.

The circle was completed by Umm Ayman, the faithful Barakah (may Allah be pleased with her), the Abyssinian freedwoman who had nursed the orphan of Abdullah through his earliest losses. Lings records that it was about this time that she became once more a member of the household, whether widowed or divorced the sources do not preserve, but she had no doubt, as he writes, that her place was there; and for his part, Muhammad ﷺ would sometimes address her as mother, and would say of her to others that she was all that was left him of the people of his house. So the establishment stood complete in these years: the wife and four daughters, the freed and adopted son, the boy cousin, the freedwoman who was as a grandmother to the children, and around them the wide kinship of two great families; and the believer marks without surprise that of this whole circle, every member who lived to see the prophethood believed in it, for they had all been formed inside the one house in Makkah whose air was already worship.

That air deserves its own paragraph, for it was the house's true distinction. Al-Buti writes that there is no doubt that the house was touched by the spirit of its master, the spirit of purification from the filth of the jahiliyyah and contempt for the worship of idols. No idol stood in its rooms; no wine was decanted at its table; no feast of the idols claimed its master's presence; and the children who grew up in it were raised in an island of the pure remembrance of Allah inside the idol-city. Khadijah's own testimony to her husband's character, which al-Mubarakpuri transmits in his review of these years, is the distilled observation of a wife of many years: he united the ties of kinship, he helped the poor and the needy, he entertained the guest, and he endured hardship in the path of truthfulness. Those four clauses she would one day speak again in the darkest and brightest hour of the world's history, to console a Messenger trembling beneath the first descent of revelation; but they were composed, clause by clause, through the ordinary days of these very years, by the woman who watched him closest.

Around the house, finally, there moved the wide circle that Lings has described in a sentence the believer returns to with pleasure: the powerful attraction which centred on al-Amin 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, a circle which included many of her own relations. Sister and aunt and nephew and cousin came and went; the poor knew the gate; the chiefs of Quraysh, as Lings records elsewhere in this period, already counted this man among the most capable of the generation that would succeed them. It is the mark of the mature years of a marriage that its beneficence ceases to be private and becomes a public good; and the house of Muhammad ﷺ and Khadijah in these years was, before ever Islam was proclaimed, the most trusted sanctuary in Makkah.

And over this fullness of domestic peace there began to gather, in its closing seasons, the hush of the approaching heavens. The solitude that would carry him to the cave of Hira, the increasing withdrawal from the city's gatherings, the long walks in the hills with barley porridge and water for provision: these belong to the pages that immediately follow this one in the chronicle, and they are told there. But their domestic half belongs here. Every withdrawal of those years was sustained by this house: the provisions he carried to the mountain came from Khadijah's storerooms, the family he returned to was her family, and the freedom to seek the solitude his soul required was held open by her understanding, which never once, in all the sources, is recorded to have resented the absences of the best of husbands. When the believer asks what kind of wife Allah prepares for His final Messenger, the answer is written across these years: a woman whose love expressed itself in making room for what was coming upon him from his Lord. The maturity of that household was thus the last earthly preparation of the prophethood; and the prayer the Quran would later put in the mouths of the righteous, for wives and children who are the comfort of the eyes, had already found its first and most complete answer in the house at Makkah, in the years when the world did not yet know what had come to dwell within its walls.