The anguish of the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ over the idols of his people, which the preceding page of this chronicle has recorded, was matched in these same years, from his thirty-sixth to his thirty-ninth, by a quieter and more searching labour of the soul: reflection. Distress is an answer, but not a programme; the heart that will not worship the idols must still ask what worship is, what has become of the religion of the fathers, and where the pure path of the first House may be found beneath the accumulations of centuries. The master record frames this event as the rejection of stone idols and false deities joined to deep reflection on the monotheistic Abrahamic heritage, the hanifiyyah, and the seeking of spiritual truth beyond tribal superstition; and the sources, read together, show the Prophet ﷺ measuring the religious practices of Quraysh against two standards at once: the primordial constitution with which Allah creates every soul, and the legacy of Ibrahim and Ismail (peace be upon them both), the builders of the Sanctuary in whose shadow the whole question stood.
The first finding of that reflection was that the religion of Makkah was not a pure paganism but a corruption: the Arabs of the jahiliyyah had not simply invented a worship of their own; they had taken the inheritance of Ibrahim and buried it under additions. Al-Mubarakpuri records the substance of it: the people of the pre-Islamic period, while believing in their superstitions, still retained some of the Abrahamic traditions, devotion to the Holy Sanctuary, the circumambulation, the observance of the pilgrimage, the vigil at Arafah, and the offering of sacrifices, and all of these were observed in full despite the innovations that adulterated the holy rituals. The believer sees at once why this made the sorrow of the Prophet ﷺ more acute and his hope more reasonable: more acute, because the precious thing was present only in a defaced form, as a noble house violated by its tenants; more reasonable, because a defaced inheritance can be restored, and the restoration would not require the invention of a new religion but the cleaning of the old one. This is in fact what the final revelation would prove to be: not a departure from the religion of the Arabs' fathers, but the return of the religion of their true father, Ibrahim the hanif, who was neither a Jew nor a Christian.
The defacements themselves the sources catalogue, and the Quran itself, in later years, would name them one by one, so that the corrections of the Book became the measure of how far the inherited rites had strayed. There was the conceit of the hums, the special sanctity claimed by the Quraysh as the custodians of the House: out of arrogance and a feeling of superiority to the other tribes, they would refrain from joining the pilgrims at the station of Arafah, stopping short at Muzdalifah, and the revelation would rebuke and command them to depart from the place whence all the people depart. There was the body of taboos laid upon the pilgrim state: they would eat no dried yoghurt or cooked fat, and enter no tent of camel hair nor seek shade save in a house of adobe brick, so long as they were in consecration, all of it, as they supposed, godliness. There was the shutting of their hospitality against the pilgrims of other tribes, denying them access to the food they had brought with them to the Sanctuary. And there was the strangest regulation of all, by which the outsider coming to circumambulate the Kaaba must do so in Qurashite garments, or, if he could not obtain them, must make his circuits naked, the men altogether and the women all but uncovered; and if a man or woman was generous enough to go round in their own clothes, those clothes were discarded after the tawaf for good, as too holy for further use. When the Quran came, it addressed even this: O children of Adam, take your adornment at every place of worship.
To these the sources add a corruption that touched the pilgrim's very cry. The talbiyah, the answering cry of labbayk, at Your service, with which the pilgrim enters upon the rites of the House of Ibrahim, had been handed down in the line of the patriarchs; and the tradition of Makkah had so handled it that the confession of Allah's sole divinity was hedged with an exception for the idols. The books of the classical scholars of the idols, above all the Kitab al-Asnam of Ibn al-Kalbi, transmit the form the Quraysh had come to cry: at Your service, O Allah, at Your service; at Your service, no partner have You; and then, as though remembering their idols, the addition: except a partner whom You possess, and who possesses whatever You have given him. The monotheism of the cry thus died in its own mouth, the exception devouring the confession. Against this the sirah preserves, in the account of Zayd ibn Amr, the form the talbiyah bore upon pure lips, and the reader will meet it in its place on this page: at Your service; there is no partner to You, nor any peer. Between those two cries stands the whole distance this event measures: the reflection of the Prophet ﷺ was, in the end, the discovery of which of the two cries was true.
The reflection had living voices around it, for Makkah in these years was not without men who had asked the same questions and died without the answer. Ibn Kathir devotes a whole section of his life of the Prophet ﷺ to them, and the section begins with a scene: there was a group of Quraysh, his account runs, consisting of Zayd ibn Amr ibn Nufayl, and Waraqah ibn Nawfal, and Uthman ibn al-Huwayrith, and Ubaydullah ibn Jahsh, who were present with Quraysh at an idol of theirs on one of their feast days, when sacrifice was made; and the group met apart from the people and bound themselves by a pact of friendship, and one of them said: by Allah, you know that your people are doing nothing; they have strayed from the religion of Abraham and gone against it. Why worship some idol incapable of doing harm or good? Seek out for yourselves. And they left, seeking and searching throughout the land to find the hanifiyyah, the religion of Abraham. The believer stands in awe of the scene: at the very feast of the idol, hearts were whispering that the idol was nothing; in the generation before the revelation, Makkah itself was producing its own dissenters from its own gods. Waraqah ibn Nawfal, the cousin of Khadijah, sought the truth into Christianity and became learned in its scriptures, as earlier pages of this chronicle have told and later pages will tell again; Uthman ibn al-Huwayrith and Ubaydullah ibn Jahsh went other roads after the fashion of their time.
But of them all, none is more precious to this page than Zayd ibn Amr ibn Nufayl, the cousin of Umar ibn al-Khattab within the clan of Adi, and the man whom the sources present as the very embodiment of the search the Prophet ﷺ was now silently conducting. Ibn Kathir records that Zayd gave up the worship of idols and abandoned their religion, and would eat only what had been slaughtered in the name of Allah alone. Asma bint Abi Bakr (may Allah be pleased with her), who saw him with her own eyes, transmitted the report that stands among the treasures of the Sahih: I saw Zayd ibn Amr ibn Nufayl, she said, leaning his back against the Kaaba, saying: O tribe of Quraysh, by Him in whose hand is the soul of Zayd, not one of you apart from myself follows the religion of Abraham. And he would say: O Allah, if only I knew the way most favoured by You, I would worship You by it, but I do not know. And he would bow in prayer upon his mount, turning toward the Kaaba. He rescued the infant girls who were about to be buried alive, saying to their fathers: do not kill her; give her to me to look after, and when she is grown, take her back or leave her with me. Here is the hunger the whole age felt, embodied in one man: the knowledge that the religion of the fathers was wrong, the certainty that the religion of Abraham was right, and the grief of not knowing the favoured way.
Zayd's search took him out of Arabia. The tradition follows him to Syria and Mesopotamia, to the Jews and the Christians and their scholars; and the answers he received are among the most remarkable sentences the sirah preserves. A learned Jew told him that he would not be received into their religion until he had taken his share of the anger of Allah, and Zayd answered: I flee from the anger of Allah; can you direct me to something else? And the Jew said: I know nothing for you except to be a hanif. What is a hanif, asked Zayd. The religion of Abraham, said the Jew; he was neither a Jew nor a Christian, and he worshipped none but Allah. A Christian scholar gave him the same answer, in the same order of words. And a monk of the Balqa, whom Zayd asked about the hanifiyyah, the religion of Abraham, replied with the sentence that carries this whole page: you are asking about a religion in which you will find no one today to instruct you; those who had knowledge of it have faded away and gone; but the emergence of a prophet draws near, his time having come. Another monk, in the account of Muhammad ibn Sa'd, told him: Allah will send from your people, in your land, one who will bring the religion of Abraham, the hanifiyyah; and he is the most noble of creation in the sight of Allah. The searchers of the generation before the prophethood were therefore led, by the very failure of their search, to await a prophet of their own blood; and the believer sees the mercy in the arrangement: the soil of Makkah had been broken and prepared years before the sower came.
Zayd did not live to see the sowing. Al-Waqidi transmits the notice of Sa'id ibn al-Musayyab that he died while Quraysh were building the Kaaba, five years before the divine inspiration descended upon the Messenger of Allah, and died saying the words: I follow the religion of Abraham. Other reports place his death in the land of the Balqa in Syria, attacked and killed in Lakhm territory on his journeying; and Ibn Kathir carries both without forcing them, closing with the humble surrender the tradition always closes with: but Allah knows best. Of the standing of Zayd with his Lord there is no variance, for the Prophet ﷺ himself pronounced upon it. In the account of the Companions, when the story of Zayd's approach to the qiblah was referred to him, the Messenger of Allah ﷺ said that that man would be raised on the Day of Resurrection as a nation all by himself, between himself and Isa son of Maryam (peace be upon him); and Ibn Kathir, who transmits the line through Mujalid from al-Shabi from Jabir, appends his verdict upon the chain: very good. Amir ibn Rabi'ah reported that Zayd himself used to say: I await the coming of a prophet from the progeny of Ismail, and then from the tribe of Abd al-Muttalib; I have faith in him, assert his truthfulness, and testify that he is a prophet; if you live to see him, tell him of my greetings. And Amir testified that when he became a Muslim he passed the greetings on, and the Messenger of Allah ﷺ returned the greeting and prayed for mercy upon Zayd, saying: I have seen him in Paradise, in long flowing robes. Even the meeting of the two men is preserved: al-Bukhari's account, as Ibn Kathir transmits it, records that the Prophet ﷺ met Zayd ibn Amr ibn Nufayl in the lowlands of Baldah before revelation descended upon him, and that when a meal was set out, Zayd declined it, saying: I am not one who eats what has been slaughtered on your sacrificial stones; I will eat only what has had the name of Allah spoken over it.
To the circle of these searchers the sources add one voice from a remoter Arab world: Quss ibn Sa'idah al-Iyadi, the orator of the tribe of Iyad, whom the Prophet ﷺ himself remembered. A delegation came to him, and he asked them what had become of Quss ibn Sa'idah, and they told him he had died; and he said: I once witnessed him at the Ukaz festival, mounted on a red camel, speaking words of strange and wonderful eloquence that I find I do not recall. A bedouin then recited the sermon, whose sentences the tradition has kept: O people, gather round, for all those who have passed away are gone, and things to come will come; gloomy nights, castle-filled skies, seas that rage, splendid stars, towering mountains, flowing streams; in the heavens there is notice, and on earth there is warning; how is it that I see people pass away and not return? Were they content to stay, or were they left and fell asleep? And then the oath: Quss swears by an oath beyond reproach that Allah has a religion more pleasing than the one you follow. The Prophet ﷺ heard the recital and pronounced the verdict the sirah has carried ever since: Quss did believe in the Day of Judgement. The chains of these reports are, as Ibn Kathir notes in his careful way, strange in places; but the sum of them stands, and the believer receives them as the tradition itself received them: the sermon of Ukaz testifying that beyond the rituals of the tribes the seeking soul could still feel the pull of a religion more pleasing to Allah.
What, then, of the Prophet's ﷺ own reflection, which is the heart of this event? The sources state its conclusion more than its process, and state it with a single word: hanifiyyah. Ibn Ishaq's account, transmitted by Ibn Kathir, says of him that he used to go out to Hira and pray alone, being one of those men of Quraysh who would practise this prayer in seclusion in the hanifiyyah, the religion of Abraham. Whatever the scholarly discussion of his pre-revelation devotion, and that discussion exists, Ibn Kathir records it honestly: the scholars differed over the religion of the Prophet ﷺ before his mission, some saying it was the religion of Noah, others that of Abraham as the most similar and the most powerful, others that of Moses, others that of Jesus, and others saying that all that is established is that he did have a religion, and that he followed and observed it; the reader holds the variance as the scholars held it, and notes that the weighing of the matter belongs most naturally to the account of the retreats, where the word describing his devotion is examined. What is not in variance is the direction of his soul: toward the Kaaba he prayed, before the idols he stood aloof, and the pattern of Ibrahim the hanif was the pattern his heart approved. The later Book would seal that direction with the command that names it: follow the religion of Ibrahim, the hanif, who was not of the idolaters.
The reflection closed, as this chronicle has already hinted, not in an answer received but in a life adopted. He did not wait for a doctrine of the fitrah to be revealed before living according to the fitrah; the Book that would one day say that Allah's creation admits no alteration, and that the religion established upon it is the upright one, only put into words what his unstained soul had been from its beginning. And the reader of these pages now stands where the chronicle itself stands, at the meeting of three roads: the anguish over the idols, whose record the preceding page holds; the reflection upon the inherited religion, which this page has given; and the love of solitude which carried both away from the city and up into the hills, whose record the following pages hold. Each of the three was a preparation, and the three together were the preparation: grief for the false, knowledge of the true, and the stillness in which the soul can hold both before its Lord. The hanifs of Makkah had died seeking what their nephew's house would contain; the orator of Ukaz had sworn that a more pleasing religion existed, and the man who heard him swear had been kept thirty-six years from every other; and in the mountains above the city, as the reader is about to see, the appointed preparation of the final Messenger ﷺ was about to enter its last and most wonderful stage.