The love of solitude that had been placed in the heart of the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ needed, in the end, a place; and the place that Allah had prepared for it stood, and stands, on the skyline of Makkah: a tall, sheer mountain rising to the north-east of the city, one peak of the wall of hills that closes the valley, and on its near side, near enough to the summit that the climber must stoop for the last stretch, a small cave that the Arabs called Hira. This event of the chronicle records the beginning of the retreats: in about the year 607 of the Christian calendar, in his thirty-seventh year, the master record declares, he began to make journeys to that cave, the Cave of Hira atop the Mountain of Light, about two miles outside Makkah, to engage in the devotions the sources call tahannuth. The believer begins by standing, as it were, at the foot of the mountain with him, and asking the questions the sources themselves answer: why this mountain, why this cave, and what happened in those first retreats that changed the history of the world from a hollow of granite in the Hijaz.
The choice of the mountain was not an accident of scenery, and it was not a novelty either. Lings records the fact that sets the whole practice in its frame: there was nothing in it that would have struck Quraysh as particularly strange, for retreat had been a traditional practice amongst the descendants of Ismail (peace be upon him), and in each generation there had been one or two who would withdraw to a solitary place from time to time, so that they might have a period uncontaminated by the world of men. Ibn Kathir, transmitting the account of Ibn Ishaq, draws the same conclusion and seals it with a verse of the ancients: the Prophet ﷺ used to go out to Hira and pray in seclusion, and this shows, he writes, that it was a custom for religious-minded men of Quraysh to go and stay on Hira for prayer; and it is by that custom that Abu Talib himself had sworn, in his famous ode, by Thawr, and by Him who established Thabir in its place, and by those who ascend to Hira and then descend. So the mountain was already consecrated by the usage of seekers; its paths were worn by the hanifs of more than one generation; and when the greatest of the hanifs turned his feet toward it, he was walking, as his whole life had walked, in the furrow of Ibrahim, upon a road the children of Ismail had never entirely forgotten.
The distances the sources preserve with a small and honest variance. Al-Mubarakpuri writes that the cave lay only two miles from Makkah; Ibn Kathir, giving the mountain's situation more exactly, places it in the heights over the city, three miles distant, to the left side of the path to Mina, with a summit from which one side looks down upon the Kaaba, and the cave upon that side. Two miles or three, the climb was an hour's determined walking out of the world of men and a last steep scramble above the ravines; and the believer notes what the geography itself confesses, that the cave looks toward the Kaaba, so that the worshipper within it, when the day was clear, could see the House of his Lord below him and the idols crowding its court, and could hold both in one gaze, the pure foundation and the defiled superstructure, exactly as his heart had held them through all the years the reader has now passed. Nor is the mountain's later name forgotten by the believer: the Muslims came to call it Jabal an-Nur, the Mountain of Light, for the Light descended upon it before it descended anywhere else on the earth.
The cave itself is small, and its smallness is part of its lesson. Al-Mubarakpuri gives the measurements: a cave four yards in length and one and three-quarters in width, room enough for a man to stand, to kneel, and to lie, and for nothing much else. Al-Buti has described what such a cave became in the economy of those retreats: a secluded place in the heart of one of the hills overlooking the city, free, as he writes, from the people's vanities and aimless talk, from which a lone soul could look down upon the world that was heaving with troubles, rivalries and disappointments, and then withdraw into itself, full of sorrow and helplessness, because it knew of no way out and no cure. What believer's mind does not bow before the disproportion: the largest event in the history of creation, the descent of the final revelation, was to be prepared in one of the smallest rooms ever consecrated on earth; the message that would govern a third of mankind and outlast every empire was incubated in a granite chamber a man cannot pace three steps in. Allah is not contained by space, and He does not need cathedrals to begin His work; He needs a heart, and the cave was simply the heart's shell.
The first retreats themselves the sources describe with a plainness that leaves nothing to be romanticized. The Prophet ﷺ would provide himself, as al-Mubarakpuri records, with sawiq, the barley porridge of the Arabs, and water, and head for the hills; Lings writes that he would take with him provisions and consecrate a certain number of nights to the worship of Allah, the counted nights of the tradition's phrase; and al-Buti says of the same practice that in that secluded mountain he took provisions to last the long nights, and there detached himself from the world and turned toward the Lord of the Worlds with his eager heart. The pattern is essential to hold: this was not the flight of a hermit, for it had a rhythm and a home. Aisha's account in the Sahih, which the reader will meet again in the record of the revelation, describes the cycle exactly: he would engage in the devotion there for a certain number of nights before returning to his family, and then he would return for provisions for a similar stay. Out toward the mountain with provision, alone with Allah for the counted nights, back down to the house of Khadijah, and out again: retreat and return, mountain and family, the two poles between which the preparation of the Messenger ﷺ oscillated like a heart between systole and diastole.
And here the provision deserves its own sentence, for it carries the whole household with it. The sawiq and the water came from the storerooms of Khadijah bint Khuwaylid (may Allah be pleased with her), and the rhythm itself was her gift as much as his practice: a wife of lesser greatness would have met the growing absences with resentment, and the sources record, in their silence on any such word, a monument of understanding; but they record more than silence, for the mother of the believers provisioned the retreats as the tradition remembers, and the family he returned to was the family she kept whole for him. The believer who reads the sirah with the heart learns to see the wife in the provision bag and the marriage in the rhythm; and the lesson holds for every household that would serve the faith: behind the mountain hours of the one who is being prepared, there is almost always the quiet logistics of the one who understands.
The return had its own rite, and the rite names the whole spirit of the practice. Ibn Kathir, in the account transmitted from Ibn Ishaq and in the fuller narrative of Wahb ibn Kaysan, records that when the period of retreat was concluded, the first thing the Prophet ﷺ would do was to go to the Kaaba and circumambulate it, seven times or so, before proceeding to his own home. The order of his arrivals is a sermon in itself: the House of Allah before the house of Khadijah; the Lord before the family, not in competition with the family but in precedence to it, for he honored both, and the family itself was honored the more by the precedence of the Lord. So the geography of the whole devotion closed its circle: from the house to the mountain, from the mountain to the House, from the House to the house; and the believer sees in that circle the whole balance of the religion that was about to be revealed, which would command the pilgrimage and the marriage, the mosque and the home, in one Book, from one Lord.
Nor was the retreat selfish even in its solitude, for the sources record that the door of the cave was, in its measure, a gate of generosity. He would feed the poor who came to him, the accounts of Ibn Ishaq and Wahb both state; and al-Mubarakpuri adds that he would always go up inviting wayfarers to share him his modest provision. The solitude of the Messenger ﷺ was never misanthropy; even on the mountain, if a hungry traveller climbed to where he was, the barley was divided. The full pattern of the annual retreats, in which the feeding of the poor in the month of Ramadan became a fixed feature, belongs to the next page of this chronicle, and the reader will find it there; here the chronicle records only what the beginning held, and the beginning held generosity, because the man was generous before he was commanded to be.
What he did in the cave the tradition names with a single word, tahannuth, which al-Bukhari's own explanation renders as devotion; and the reader is directed, for the full study of that word, the discussion of the grammarians from al-Suhayli to Ibn Hisham, and the settled yearly pattern the word came to describe, to the page that follows this one. What this page must state is the word's direction: it was devotion in the line of the hanifiyyah, as Ibn Ishaq's account says plainly, that he was one of those men of Quraysh who practised this prayer in seclusion in the hanifiyyah, the religion of Ibrahim (peace be upon him). The retreats of Hira were thus not a religious innovation of Muhammad ﷺ but an old practice of the seekers of Makkah, carried to its perfection by the greatest of them; and the perfection lay in the object: nights spent in the worship of Allah alone, in meditation upon the universe, as al-Mubarakpuri summarizes, with the heart of the worshipper turning from every carved claimant in the valley below to the Lord of the Kaaba, the Creator of the stars that wheeled over the cave's mouth.
The beginning grew, as the master chronology records, into a settled pattern; and the chronicle must apportion honestly between this page and the next. The annual month of retreat, the month of Ramadan, the recurring cycle of consecutive nights, belongs to the page of the annual seclusion. What this page owns is the threshold: the first ascents, the choice of the cave, the counted nights and the returns, in the years when the practice was being born; and the sources give the period its length. Al-Mubarakpuri, writing of these retreats and the years they spanned, calls them a rich period of privacy which lasted for three years and ushered in a new era of indissoluble contact with the Power behind existence; and he describes the Prophet ﷺ at this stage as nearing forty, a description that belongs to the fullness of the retreats, while the master record, which dates the beginning of the journeys to the cave to his thirty-seventh year, is followed here as the chronology of this event. Three years of ascending and descending, of provision and return, of nights upon the mountain; and the reader who has followed the chronicle from the orphan in the desert understands that those three years were the last third of a preparation forty years long.
The believer should also stand, once, at the boundary of what the cave went on to witness, though the witnessing belongs to later pages. In the fullness of the retreats came the true visions, like the breaking of the morning light, and then, on the paths toward the mountain, the greetings of peace from the stones and the trees; and in the final Ramadan, on a night toward its end, in this same cave, the Angel came, and embraced, and commanded, Recite, and the final revelation of Allah to the children of Adam began. Those events have their own pages, and the chronicle will give each its due measure; but the boundary is worth marking from this side of it, because the cave that received the first retreats was the same cave that received the first verses, and the reader is meant by the whole architecture of the sirah to see that continuity: the worship was not interrupted by the revelation; the worship was the ladder the revelation descended upon. When Jibril came, he came upon a man already standing in devotion, in the place of devotion, at the hour of devotion; and the believer learns that Allah does not summon His servants to unprepared ground.
Al-Buti, pondering this cave, reached for the one comparison the scripture itself invites: before him, he writes, the desert had witnessed a brother of his who came in flight from Egypt, traversing the dry barren lands seeking peace, security and guidance, when he was drawn by the sight of a burning bush, and heard the holy call, Behold, I, even I, am Allah; there is no deity save Me, so worship Me. One flame of that fire, the Shaikh continues, reached across the centuries to flare once more in the depths of the cave wherein was a man devoted to worship and self-purification; only this time it was not a fire but a light that shone with inspiration and guidance upon the startled heart. The comparison is the believer's meditation: the mountains of Sinai and of Hira, the shepherd of Madyan and the merchant of Makkah, the bush that burned and the cave that shone; in both, the Lord of the worlds chose solitude as the antechamber of mission, and in both, what the servant had kept pure in private was suddenly addressed by name. Glory be to Him who prepares His messengers in silence and sends them from the mountains.
So the first retreats of Hira stand in the chronicle as a beginning that was already a promise. The man who climbed those paths carried up with him a grief for his people, a knowledge of the religion of Ibrahim, a love of solitude he had not chosen, and a heart the years had purified to a stillness almost beyond bearing; and he carried down, each time, nothing but the provision eaten, the nights kept, and the waiting renewed. The city below did not mark the change; the caravans came and went; Hubal kept his post at the Kaaba; and upon the mountain, in a chamber four yards long, the final covenant of Allah with mankind was being kept in prospect, night after night, by the last and greatest of His prophets ﷺ. The believer who visits that mountain today, and stands in the cave where the Quran began, stands in the room where patience was perfected; and the lesson the cave teaches every generation of the faithful is the lesson of its first occupant's whole life: that the word which shakes the world is heard, first and longest, by those who will leave the world's crowd, provision in hand and family's blessing behind them, to worship Allah alone in the hours no one sees.