The first journey up the mountain had already been made, and the cave had already been chosen; the story of that beginning belongs to the previous chapter of this chronicle. What concerns us here is what followed, for the visits of the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ to the cave of Hira did not remain a passing impulse of a single season. Within a year or two of his thirty-seventh birthday they settled into a discipline, a rhythm as fixed as the circling of the pilgrims around the Kaaba and as regular as the return of the sacred month itself. Aisha (may Allah be pleased with her), whose account in the Sahih of al-Bukhari is the mother-source for this whole stretch of the Seerah, describes the settled pattern in words transmitted by Imam Ibn Kathir: the first beginnings of the revelation came in true visions, and then solitude became dear to him, and he would go alone to the cave of Hira, devoting himself therein to worship for many consecutive nights before returning to his family, and then he would take provisions for a like period and return once more to the cave. That is the rhythm this event holds: the worshipper climbing the mountain with his provisions, the nights of devotion passing over him in the silence of the heights, the descent to the valley for replenishment, and the climb again, Ramadan after Ramadan, through the closing years of the sixth decade of the Christian era.
The scholar of the sirah should pause over the single word which the Arabic text uses for what he did in the cave: tahannuth. Al-Bukhari, as Ibn Kathir transmits the explanation, glossed it simply as devotion, worship rendered in retreat; and this meaning fits the context of Aisha's account perfectly, for the man who loved solitude was not fleeing the world in idleness but seeking his Lord in worship. Yet the philologists went further, and Ibn Kathir devotes a memorable passage to their inquiry. Al-Suhayli observed that in its form the word suggests entering into al-hinth, which would mean sin or perjury; but the linguists know, he noted, a class of verbs of this shape in which the meaning is the departure from a thing rather than the entering into it, so that the worshipper who practiced tahannuth was understood as the one who left sin behind him and abstained from it. Ibn Kathir sets beside this the parallels the scholars cited: tahammaba, he abstained from crime; tahawwatha, he kept away from sin; ta'aththama, he refrained from iniquity; and the other formations in which the prefix speaks of withdrawal from what is blameworthy. Whether one reads the word as devotion or as the abandonment of sin, the two meanings meet in the person of the Prophet ﷺ, whose worship and whose purity were a single garment.
There was also the opinion of Ibn al-Arabi, whom tradition consulted on the matter. Asked about the verb yatahannathu as it was used of the Prophet ﷺ, he answered with the honesty of a scholar: I do not actually know this; but there is the verb yatahannafu, derived from al-hanifiyyah, the pure religion of Ibrahim (peace be upon him). And Ibn Hisham stated the matter plainly: the Arabs say al-tahannuth and al-tahannuf as having the same meaning, the f replacing the th, just as they say jaddafa and jadhdhafa for the rowing of a boat. This linguistic remark opens a door of light upon the whole practice. The cave of Hira was not the resort of a man inventing a spirituality of his own; it was the worship of the hanif, the one who had turned away from the idols of his people back toward the religion of Ibrahim (peace be upon him), the builder of the Kaaba that lay below in the valley. When the Beloved Prophet ﷺ climbed the slopes of an-Nur in those Ramadans, he was walking in the footsteps of the father of the prophets, seeking the Allah whom the idols had never truly displaced from the memory of the children of Ismail.
The sources are remarkably agreed that this was an inherited and even a communal pattern, not a private eccentricity. Ibn Ishaq transmits, on the authority of a scholar through Abd al-Malik ibn Abdullah ibn Abi Sufyan ibn al-Ala ibn Harithah, that the Messenger of Allah ﷺ used to go out to Hira for one month every year and pray alone, being one of those Qurayshite men who in the hanifiyyah practiced this prayer of seclusion, and that he would feed the poor who came to him. A parallel account came through Wahb ibn Kaysan, the freed-man of the clan of al-Zubayr, who heard Ubayd ibn Umayr relate before Abdullah ibn az-Zubayr that the Messenger of Allah ﷺ used to take up residence in Hira in seclusion for one month of each year, and that this practice, known as al-tahannuth, meaning pious devotion, was one performed by Quraysh before the coming of Islam. Ibn Kathir draws the historical conclusion explicitly: it was a custom for religious-minded men of Quraysh to go and stay on Hira for prayer. Lings renders the same tradition with his customary economy: retreat had been practiced among the descendants of Ismail from of old, so that in each generation there had been one or two who withdrew to a solitary place from time to time, so that they might have a period uncontaminated by the world of men. There is even a line of the old poetry of Quraysh to witness to it, the ode of Abu Talib in which the elder guardian of the Prophet ﷺ swore by Thawr and by Him who established Thabir in its place, and by those who ascend to Hira and then descend. Ibn Kathir records, with al-Suhayli, Abu Shamah and the great hafiz al-Mizzi, that this is the correct reading of the verse, and that the version of some reciters who made it a matter of ascending in heat is weak and incorrect. The mountain of the cave was so woven into the piety of Makkah that it had entered the solemn oaths of its elders.
The month of the retreat was Ramadan. Al-Buti states it in his Fiqh as-Sirah with directness: every year the Prophet ﷺ used to leave Makkah to spend the month of Ramadan in the cave of Hira, situated a few miles from the population in the heart of one of the hills overlooking the city, a place free from the vanities and aimless talk of men; and there he took provisions to last those long nights. Lings likewise notes that Ramadan was the traditional month of retreat. The sacred month which the Qur'an would later call the month in which the Qur'an was sent down as guidance for mankind was already, in the custom of the hanifs of Makkah, the month set aside for the searching of the soul. What believer's heart does not quicken at the sight of this arrangement of divine wisdom: that the month which Allah had marked in the ancient practice of the descendants of Ismail as the month of retreat would become, in His appointed hour, the month in which His word first broke upon the world from this very cave?
The provisioning of the retreat paints the whole scene in humble colors. The Sealed Nectar records that he ﷺ would provide himself with sawiq, the barley porridge that was the traveling food of Arabia, and water, and go directly to the hills. The cave itself was small beyond telling for what it would one day contain: some four yards in length and less than two in width, two miles from Makkah, high on Jabal an-Nur, the Mountain of Light, whose name would prove prophetic. Ibn Kathir locates the mountain precisely as the geographers had fixed it: a mountain in the heights above Makkah, about three miles distant, on the left side of the path to Mina, with a summit that looks down upon the Kaaba, and the cave upon that side which faces the Ancient House. From the mouth of that cave, then, the worshipper could see the sanctuary of Ibrahim (peace be upon him) below him; the object of his longing and the horizon of his worship lay in full view of his place of retreat. And the retreat was not sealed against mercy's visitors: the Sealed Nectar adds that he would invite wayfarers to share his modest provision, and the accounts of Ibn Ishaq and of Ubayd ibn Umayr agree that he fed the poor who came to him there. Even in his solitude he remained the man his wife would soon describe, the one who helped the poor and the needy; worship and generosity were never separated in him, and the cave which received his nights also fed the hungry who found their way to it.
The rhythm of coming down and going up had a domestic center, and that center was Khadijah (may Allah be pleased with her). It was to her house that he ﷺ returned when the numbered nights were complete; it was from her table and her stores that he took the provisions for the next period, as Aisha's account records with its quiet precision, that he would return to his family for provisions to continue doing so, and then come down again to Khadijah and repeat the same. Let the reader mark what this means. The richest woman of Makkah, whose caravans had once equaled the caravans of all Quraysh together, kept open for her husband the simplest of economies: barley porridge and water carried up a mountain. She asked no explanation of his months apart from her; she made the household a harbor for his devotion, and in doing so she was, though neither of them yet knew it, provisioning the very reception of revelation. Al-Buti writes that from that covered cave a lone soul could look down upon the world heaving with troubles, rivalries and disappointments, and then withdraw into itself, full of sorrow, because it knew no way out and no cure; and it was to this searching man, and to the wife who sheltered his searching, that the cure was drawing near. When the retreat month was concluded, Ubayd ibn Umayr relates, 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; so that the circle of his month was closed at the House of Allah itself.
What did those nights contain? The sources answer with restraint, and their restraint is itself instructive. He devoted most of his time, and Ramadan in particular, to worship and meditation on the universe around him, as the Sealed Nectar records; his heart, in al-Buti's phrase, shone and his soul was purified in that far-off cave; 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. The Sealed Nectar sets the whole practice in its divine perspective: this solitude, attended with this contemplative approach, must be understood as a preliminary stage to the period of grave responsibilities that he was very soon to shoulder, and privacy and detachment from the impurities of life were indispensable prerequisites for the soul of the Prophet ﷺ to come into close communion with the Unseen Power that lies behind all aspects of existence. The duration of this schooling the sources give variously: the Sealed Nectar calls it a rich period of privacy which lasted for three years; Lings speaks with more latitude of these few years in which the visions and the greetings occurred; the beginning of the retreats in his thirty-seventh year and the revelation in his fortieth allow the patient heart to trace the arc. Three Ramadans, perhaps, of the numbered nights; and with every passing year, as Ibn Kathir states in his own voice, his liking for being alone increased as Allah's revelation to him came closer.
The scholars have also weighed the question of which revealed law, if any, governed the worship he offered in the cave; for the Qur'an had not yet come to prescribe anything. Ibn Kathir transmits the spectrum of their opinions: some said his devotion followed the religion of Noah; others suggested that of Ibrahim (peace be upon him), it being the most similar as well as the most powerful opinion in their view; others said that of Musa (peace be upon him), and yet others that of Isa (peace be upon him); and others held that all that can be established is that he did have a religion, and that he followed and observed it. The believer who has followed the Seerah to this point will recognize in this honest division of the scholars a confirmation of what the previous chapters have already shown: that the Prophet ﷺ worshipped Allah alone, upon the way of the hanifiyyah, turning his back upon the idols, protected by his Lord from every contamination of the ways of his people, awaiting a guidance that had not yet been given. The Qur'an would one day say of the hours of the night that they are more deeply impressive and more suitable for words, and would describe the servants of the Most Merciful as those who pass the night prostrating and standing before their Lord; those verses were revealed long after these Ramadans of Hira, yet they read like a description of what those nights already were.
There is a lesson in the very length of this preparation which the believer should not pass over. The man who was to receive the weightiest word ever entrusted to a human being was not seized by it unprepared. Forty years of truthfulness in the marketplaces, of shielding of kin and feeding of the poor, and then these years of numbered nights in a cave barely wider than a man's shoulders: Allah builds slowly what He intends to bear much. The agreed-upon hadith of Aisha (may Allah be pleased with her) in the two Sahihs records that the most beloved of deeds to Allah are the most constant, even if they be few; the retreats of Hira are that principle written across years. And the Ummah that came after him ﷺ has never let the pattern die: in every Ramadan since, believers have withdrawn into the mosques in the practice of seclusion which the scholars call i'tikaf, keeping the last ten nights in a solitude of recitation and prayer, directly upon the model of the Prophet's ﷺ own retreats, which the last of those Ramadans crowned. The cave on the Mountain of Light is climbed to this day by the pilgrims of Makkah in their thousands, and they enter it, most of them weeping, and sit where he sat; and the mountain answers them with nothing but wind and silence, and the knowledge that in this narrow place the word of Allah entered the world. That is the inheritance of the annual seclusion: not a memory only, but a rhythm of devotion which Ramadan still teaches, year upon year, to the whole household of the final Messenger ﷺ.