There is a sentence in the report of Aisha (may Allah be pleased with her) upon the beginning of the revelation, preserved in the Sahih of al-Bukhari, that describes the turn this page records with a precision no later writer has improved upon: forerunners of the revelation came in the form of true visions, and then, she said, solitude was made beloved to him. The grammar is the theology. Not that he gradually acquired a taste for privacy, as any tired merchant might; but that solitude was made beloved to him, was placed into his heart as a gift, by the same hand that was preparing the visions. The master record of this event says exactly this in its own idiom: a profound love for solitude, al-khala' in the language of the sources, was placed in his heart, leading the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ, in his thirty-seventh to thirty-ninth years, to step away from the social gatherings and the commercial pursuits of Makkah and to give himself to quiet contemplation and worship. What the preceding pages have shown as anguish and reflection now becomes a way of life; the soul that grieved at the idols and measured the inherited rites against the truth was drawn, by a love it had not chosen for itself, out of the noise of the city and into the silence where it could hear.
The reader should place this turn where the chronicle places it, between two pages. The habit of solitary reflection was not new in Makkah: an earlier page of this record has told how, following the arbitration of the Black Stone in his thirty-fifth year, he increasingly sought solitary reflection and turned from the idolatrous customs around him, and that habit runs beneath the whole stretch of years as a quiet stream. And the anguish that fed it has just been recorded: Ibn Kathir states the connection with the scholars' plainness, that the Messenger of Allah ﷺ preferred seclusion and being alone from his people because of the clear error in which he saw them engaged, their worshipping and prostrating before idols. What is new in the years this event covers is the degree: the stream has become the channel of the life. Withdrawal, in these years, ceased to be a refuge he visited and became a preference he lived by; and Ibn Kathir adds the sentence that reads like a forecast: his liking for being alone increased as the revelation of Allah came closer to him. The believer learns at once that solitude, in the economy of prophethood, is not emptiness but approach.
What solitude meant for this particular soul the sources describe in a phrase of al-Mubarakpuri's that deserves to be held up to the light: he would have recourse, the Shaikh writes, to his self-consecrated solitude. Not idleness, and not melancholy, and not the misanthropy of a man disappointed with his fellows, but a consecrated aloneness, a solitude set apart for a purpose the way a sacrifice is set apart for the altar. Al-Mubarakpuri's review of these years records the temper that lay beneath it: the Prophet ﷺ was, in his youth, a man of weighty mind and faultless insight, and his long silence helped favourably in his habit of meditation and deep investigation into the truth. The silence is worth the believer's attention. In a city whose glory was eloquence, whose market was a theatre of speech, whose poetry was its proudest art, the most eloquent of its sons was turning quiet; and the quiet was not vacancy but depth, the habit of a mind that had learned to stop talking to men in order to start seeing creation. His vivid and pure nature, as the same review says, was instrumental in comprehending the ways of life and of people, individual and community; and the comprehending eye needed room to work.
For the object of his meditation was nothing less than everything. When he was nearing forty, al-Mubarakpuri writes, he had been wont to pass long hours in retirement, meditating and speculating over all aspects of creation around him. The believer may reconstruct the syllabus of those long hours without much conjecture, for the Book that came after them shows what its bearer had been given to see: the heavens and their rising stars, the mountains pitched like tent-pegs, the cattle and the crops, the water descending from the sky and quickening the dead earth, the alternation of the night and day, the ships sailing the sea, and the souls of men, the only creatures in the landscape who worshipped what their own hands made. Al-Buti adds the other half of the curriculum, the darkness he pondered: scepticism had spread among the people of the jahiliyyah, so that they would swear their utmost by Allah that He would never resurrect the dead; and that deep-rooted unbelief had confused even the best of them about the fate of the world, so that if existence were only this fleeting span on earth, extinction were better, and the searching heart of Makkah was asking whether there was no glimpse of light in the pervading darkness. The solitude of the Prophet ﷺ was thus not an escape from reality but an assault upon the two questions the city could not answer: who governs all this, and what becomes of the dead.
The geography of the withdrawal was the country he had known since boyhood. Al-Mubarakpuri records that he used to provide himself with sawiq, the barley porridge of the Arabs, and water, and then head directly for the hills and ravines in the neighbourhood of Makkah. The shepherd boy who had watched the flocks on the slopes of Ajyad had become the merchant of the Syrian road, and the merchant had now become the walker of the hills again; but the errand had changed. He went up with provision enough for a devotion, not with wares for a market; and the hills received the man they had raised. What believer's heart does not quicken at the picture: the most trusted man of Makkah, whose word was a bond from Busra to the Yemen, climbing alone out of the valley with a skin of water and a bag of barley, while below him the city of his fathers bowed to its three hundred and sixty gods; and above him, in the silence he sought, the skies he had pondered since his shepherding years, keeping their counsel until the appointed time.
The manner of his withdrawal deserves as much reverence as its matter, for it was the manner of a prophet and not of an ascetic. He withdrew from the gatherings of vanity and the festivals of the idols and the circles where wine went round; the record of his youth, which an earlier page of this chronicle has preserved, shows that he was kept from those things by the guarding of Allah before he ever withdrew from them by choice. But he did not withdraw from the market of lawful trade, from the counsel of his kin, from the poor at his gate, or from the service of his household; al-Buti is emphatic on the balance: after his marriage he resumed the life of contemplation and seclusion he had known before, keeping away from the boisterous parties and the rivalry and the showing off of the Arabs, yet this did not prevent him from conducting his trade, earning his living, travelling in the land, and walking in the market-places. Al-Mubarakpuri says the same in his own way: he shunned the superstitious practices, but he took an active part in constructive and useful dealings, and only beyond these had recourse to his consecrated solitude. The believer notes the pattern carefully, for it would become the Sunnah of the final religion: Islam was being prepared, in these years, as neither the worldliness that never withdraws nor the monasticism that never returns, but as a worship that carries its stillness into the market and its justice into the hills. There is no trace, in all the record of these years, of the monk's contempt for the world; there is a man loving Allah so much that he needs hours alone with Him, and loving Allah's creatures so much that he comes back down every time.
The fruit of the solitude, in the description the sources give, was the purification of the soul itself. Al-Buti, writing of the retreats these years were bending toward, says that in the cave the Prophet ﷺ used to meditate and worship, and his heart shone, and his soul was purified, and he approached the truth with all his energy and kept away from falsehood as much as he could, until he reached such a state of purity that the rays of the Unseen began to be reflected from his heart. And al-Mubarakpuri, upon the same theme, states the principle the believer should carry away: privacy and detachment from the impurities of life were indispensable prerequisites for the Prophet's soul to come into close communion with the unseen Power that lies behind all aspects of existence in this infinite universe. The believer reads these sentences and remembers that they describe a process, not an event: the shining of that heart was the slow work of the years this page records, night after night of standing and pondering, until the vessel was clear enough to receive what was coming. No soul is entrusted with weighty speech before it has been schooled in silence; and the greatest speech ever entrusted to a man was preceded by the longest schooling in silence that any man ever kept.
And the event's second word, worship, was as real as its first. The solitude of these years was not the musing of a philosopher but the devotion of a servant: the sources that describe his retreats describe prayer, and the counted nights were nights of standing before Allah, of prostration toward the House, of words spoken to the Lord of the worlds from the hills before any form of the prayer had been revealed. Zayd ibn Amr, the seeker whose search the preceding page recorded, had prayed toward the Kaaba and bowed in devotion upon his mount; and the tradition's phrase for the Prophet's ﷺ own practice, that he used to go out to Hira and pray alone, shows that the prayer preceded the cave and would be perfected in it. What words were spoken in those years no record preserves, for the revelation that would one day give the ummah the words of its prayers had not yet come; but the Book that came after them bears their signature, for the Lord who sent it knew the worshipper He was addressing. He would be commanded, in that Book, to rise in the night and keep vigil, and the command came to a man for whom the night vigil was already the habit of years; and the believer understands thereby that the Sunnah of the midnight prayer of the ummah is, at bottom, the biography of these hidden years, preserved for every generation as a command.
The household, as the reader of these pages already knows, was the hidden partner of the whole turn. Every hour on the hills was underwritten by Khadijah's understanding; every provision in the bag was packed in her storerooms; and al-Sheha, in his brief preface to the life, has caught the ultimate cause of it in a clause: divine mercy on Muhammad made solitude a conduct much after his heart. The mercy of Allah is the author of the whole sequence, and it moved through means: through the wife who made the absences easy, through the household that received him back without complaint whenever he returned, through the hills themselves, the ayat of Allah spread over the earth, that kept their shade for him. When the believer wonders why the preparation of the final Messenger required a marriage before it required a cave, the answer is written in these years: solitude that must be seized against the resentment of a home is warfare, but solitude that is freely granted by a home is worship; and the Lord of both the home and the cave was preparing His Messenger in the gentler school.
The Book that had not yet descended has, for the believer who reads backward from its light, two pictures that name what these years were. The first is the counsel of the youths of Ephesus: when you have withdrawn from them and from what they worship other than Allah, then take refuge in the cave; your Lord will unfold for you some of His mercy and prepare for you a provision in your affair. Withdrawal from the worshipped, then refuge in the cave, then mercy and provision from the Lord: the verse reads like an outline of this stretch of the sirah, and the scholars of the Book have always delighted in the likeness, for the People of the Cave fled the idols of their people to a cave, as the best of men ﷺ fled the idols of his people to a cave. The second picture is the portrait that opens the Surah of the Criterion: the servants of the Most Merciful are those who walk upon the earth with humility, and when the ignorant address them, they say peace. The gait of these years was that gait: through a city of taunts and oaths by Lat and Uzza, the walker of the hills passed humble and unhurried, answering folly with peace, saving his words for his Lord. The Quran, in these two portraits, dignifies forever the two movements of this event: the departure from shirk, and the walk of the servant.
The chronicle must mark its boundaries before it closes the page. The true visions that heralded the final six months belong to the record of the events of the revelation itself, and to the page set aside for them; here it is enough that Aisha's sentence has shown how the love of solitude and the visions came woven in one thread. The greetings of stones and trees that met him on his walks toward the mountain belong to the page of the signs in the wilderness. And the cave itself, its choice and its first nights, belong to the page that immediately follows, toward which this whole account has been walking. This page closes at the threshold of that ascent: a man in his thirty-eighth year, withdrawn from the city's gods and the city's noise, in love with an aloneness he did not create, sustained by a household that understood, purifying a heart that was almost ready, walking the hills of Makkah as a servant walks the courts of his master, waiting without knowing, in the precision of Allah's timetable, for what was about to be said to him from above the seven heavens.
The believer who surveys these years is taught a lesson the busy ages of the ummah have always needed: the altar of Allah is not built in a hurry, and the greatest works are prepared in the greatest silences. The city thought him absent from its life; in truth he was absent into the life to come, gathering in the hills the stillness from which thirteen years of patient preaching and ten of statecraft would afterward flow. Every servant who would carry anything weighty for the faith may take the pattern: keep the lawful errands of the world, and keep the hours apart; love the people, and keep the place where the heart is alone with its Lord; and trust that what is done in the hidden years is not lost, but stored, with Him who warns in the Book that came after the silence that whoever turns away from His remembrance has a life of narrowness. The Beloved of Allah ﷺ withdrew to the remembrance, and to him was given, in exchange, the carrying of the final Word; and the mountain that received his silence was about to become, by the mercy of Allah, the first place on earth to hear the Quran.