While the true dreams filled the sleeping hours of the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ in those final months, his waking hours were granted their own unmistakable witness. The inward channel had opened; now the outward creation itself began to speak. Ibn Ishaq transmits, as Ibn Kathir relates it in his chapter on the beginning of the revelation, that after Allah wished to honor him with the beginning of the prophethood, the Prophet ﷺ would go far away from the dwellings to see to his needs, out of sight of the houses; and as he walked the pathways of Makkah and pressed deep into its valleys, there was no rock and no tree that he passed but that it would greet him, saying: Peace be upon you, O Messenger of Allah. And he ﷺ would turn all around, looking for the speaker, and see nothing but the trees and the rocks. Thus it continued, with his seeing and his hearing, as long as Allah willed, until Jibril (upon him be peace) came to him with Allah's honor in Ramadan, in Hira. Here is the event this chapter holds: in the hills and ravines outside Makkah, in the closing year before the revelation, the inanimate world was given a voice, and the voice it was given was the greeting of the final Messenger.
The account of Ibn Ishaq is carried, as the science of narration requires us to note, through a channel which Ibn Kathir transmits faithfully with its form intact: on the authority of a certain scholar, through Abd al-Malik ibn Abdullah ibn Abi Sufyan ibn al-Ala ibn Harithah, whom Ibn Ishaq described as a very attentive listener. It is a report of the mursal class, and the biographers received it as they received the treasures of the early sirah, with acceptance and with the naming of its channel; and what it relates is corroborated from more than one other direction, so that the event stands not upon one transmission but upon a convergence. Lings, following the earliest sources, places the phenomenon in the very same stretch of years: during those years, he writes, it often happened that after the Prophet ﷺ had left the town and was approaching his hermitage, he would hear clearly the words Peace be upon you, O Messenger of Allah, and he would turn and look for the speaker, but no one was in sight, and it was as if the words had come from a tree or a stone. The believer who reads both renderings stands in those valleys with him: the slopes silent, the paths empty, and yet, from no throat that could be found, the salutation of prophethood offered again and again to the man of Quraysh walking alone.
The most firmly grounded line of all comes from the mouth of the Prophet ﷺ himself, in the rigorously authenticated collection of Imam Muslim. Ibn Kathir cites it in his discussion of the age at the mission: in the Sahih of Muslim, on the authority of Jabir ibn Samurah (may Allah be pleased with him), the Messenger of Allah ﷺ said: I know a rock in Makkah which used to greet me before my mission; and I know it even now. Ibn Kathir transmits the same hadith again in the fuller setting of his chapter, with its chain of authorities as Muslim arranged it: through Abu Bakr ibn Abi Shaybah, from Yahya ibn Bukayr, from Ibrahim ibn Tahman and Simak ibn Harb, from Jabir ibn Samurah. Let the reader weigh what the hadith quietly contains. It is not a report about a general murmur of the landscape; it is the testimony of the Prophet ﷺ to one particular stone in one particular city, known to him, singled out, which had spoken its peace to him in the days before the revelation, and which he could still identify after prophethood had come. The greeting had left behind it a mark of recognition; the friendship of that stone was not a legend to him but a memory. And Abu Dawud al-Tayalisi transmits a companion version through Sulayman ibn Mu'adh, from Simak ibn Harb, from the same Jabir ibn Samurah: there is a rock in Makkah which used to greet me on the nights of my receiving the mission; I recognize it whenever I pass by it. Between the two wordings, the evenings of the approach and the nights of the mission itself, the stone's salutation spans the whole threshold of prophethood.
There is a further channel, and it belongs to the young cousin who would one day carry the banner of Islam on many fields. The hafiz al-Bayhaqi transmitted in his Dala'il an-Nubuwwah, as Ibn Kathir records, from Isma'il ibn Abd ar-Rahman as-Suddi al-Kabir, from Abbad ibn Abdullah, from Ali ibn Abi Talib (may Allah be pleased with him), who said: we were with the Messenger of Allah ﷺ in Makkah, walking through the quarters of the town, and there was no tree and no mountain that met him but that it said: Peace be upon you, O Messenger of Allah. And in another account Ali said: when I entered a valley in his company, he ﷺ would not pass a single rock or a single tree but that it said: Peace be upon you, O Messenger of Allah; I heard it. The report is carried by al-Bayhaqi in his great compilation of the signs of prophethood, and its narrator heard the salutations with his own ears upon the mountainsides; Ibn Kathir transmits it among his corroborations without further remark, and the student of the sirah receives it as the Dala'il literature has preserved it. Its setting is the Makkah of the prophethood, which teaches us that the voice of the rocks did not fall silent once the revelation had come; the sign which had walked before him in the years of preparation continued beside him in the years of open proclamation, one of the quiet mercies by which his Lord steadied him against the mockery of men.
The wordings of the different channels deserve a careful reading, for they do not blur into one another but mark out a progression. The rock which the Prophet ﷺ knew, in the hadith of Jabir ibn Samurah, greeted him before the mission; in the wording of the Tayalisi collection, the rock greeted him on the nights of the mission itself, as though the appointed nights carried a heavier traffic of the unseen than the ordinary ones; and in the account of Ibn Ishaq the greetings came from every rock and tree he passed, in the pathways and the valleys, until the day in Ramadan when Jibril (upon him be peace) came. There is an escalation built into the evidence, the same escalation the reader of this chronicle has already traced in other registers: from one stone to the whole slope; from occasional greetings to a settled condition that prevailed as long as Allah willed; from the years of the approach to the very mouth of the cave. Allah, who is gentle with His believing servants, was not sparing His final Messenger the steepness of the coming change; He was furnishing the stair with handrails, each salutation a rung by which the heart of the Prophet ﷺ could climb toward the weight that waited for it on the mountain.
The scholars have also marked where these signs belong in the sacred economy. What a prophet receives before his proclamation is a strengthening for himself, a private furniture of certainty; what he works after the proclamation, before the eyes of the people, is an attestating sign, a public proof. The salutations of the rocks belong chiefly to the first order: they were given to the Prophet ﷺ in his solitude, addressed to his hearing, and he ﷺ carried them as an inner assurance into the years when Quraysh would demand of him miracles in the marketplace and turn from the greatest of them all, the Qur'an itself. Yet they were not entirely private even then: Ali heard them in his company, and the hadith of Jabir ibn Samurah was spoken in the assembly of the Muslims, so that the community itself came to know what the mountains of Makkah had done while their fathers slept. The believer therefore receives this event at two levels at once: as history, witnessed upon the slopes of a real city in a named year; and as theology, a parable of the verse of the glorification which the Qur'an would later seal, that there is nothing that does not glorify Allah with His praise, and that men simply do not comprehend it.
The fuller narrative of Ibn Asakir, in his biography of Waraqah ibn Nawfal, carries the same sign into the day of the revelation itself, and shows it from the other side of the threshold: as the Messenger of Allah ﷺ went home from the cave, every tree and rock bowed down before him, saying: Peace be upon you, O Messenger of Allah; and his soul was calmed, and he was certain of the honor Allah had bestowed upon him. In that account, the salutations are the very means by which the trembling of the first revelation was gathered back into confidence; and the same Ibn Asakir narrative gives the Prophet's ﷺ own words to Khadijah (may Allah be pleased with her) upon his return: I came back home and on my way the trees and rocks turned to me and said: Peace be upon you, O Messenger of Allah. The fullest unfolding of that day belongs to the next event of this chronicle; but its sign belongs here, for it is the same voice which had been greeting him for months in the passes of the city, now raised in a multitude, as though all created things within reach had been told at once whom they had been saluting.
Ibn Kathir, summing the state of the Prophet ﷺ in the days after the cave, names the greetings among the grounds of his security: the Prophet ﷺ was secure in what Jibril had said to him, and in the verses which had been revealed to him, and in the fact of the trees and the rocks having made salutation to him. This is a remarkable sentence, and the believer should let it settle. Among the certificates of certainty which Allah gave to His Messenger at the hinge of history, alongside the word of the angel and the verses of the Qur'an, He counted the courtesy of stones. And behind the courtesy stands the doctrine which the Qur'an would soon state in the verse of the glorification: the seven heavens and the earth and whoever is within them glorify Him; and there is nothing that does not glorify Him with His praise, but you do not comprehend their glorification. All created things speak the praise of their Maker; the tasbih of the mountains is constant and real; what happened in the valleys of Makkah in that year was not the invention of speech in the speechless, but a lifting of the barrier, a permission granted to the existing praise of things to become audible to the final Messenger in the words of honor which men could have pronounced. As the Qur'an would later say of the mountain itself, had He sent this Qur'an upon a mountain, you would have seen it humbled and rent asunder from the fear of Allah: the inanimate is not deaf to the things of Allah; only man, of all creatures, sometimes is.
There is a line to be traced through this whole chronicle, and this event completes it. When the boy of twelve came to Busra, a monk who had kept the old books watched a small cloud shade him above the caravan, and said of him what the watchers of the scriptures had been waiting to say. When the young merchant of twenty-five halted beneath the monk's tree on the Syrian road, the man of the cell declared that none but a prophet had ever rested beneath that tree. In those days the recognition of the coming Messenger ﷺ lived in the memory of the People of the Book, in scattered cells and inherited parchments. But in the valleys of Makkah in the year before the mission, the recognition passed out of the keeping of men altogether and was taken up by the creation itself. The stones of his own city, before whose carved idols his people bowed in the sacred precinct, and the acacias of the slopes he had herded beneath as a boy, knew him ﷺ before his own kin knew what he was. No monk was needed now; the east and the west had been told; the wilderness had become the choir. What awe must have gathered in his heart, walking those paths, hearing himself named Messenger of Allah by voices from no mouth, at an hour when he had received no message yet: as though heaven were rehearsing his title in the ears of the hills before announcing it in the ears of men.
The manner of his ﷺ own response is itself a lesson. The sources do not say that he cried out, or that he claimed, or that he gathered an audience; they say that he turned all around, looking for the speaker, and saw nothing but the trees and the rocks. He sought the source of the voice; he examined the slopes; he did not manufacture for himself a theatre out of a marvel. And when, after the revelation, he mentioned the matter, it was in the spare words of the Muslim's hadith: a rock in Makkah, known to me, which used to greet me; I know it now. The whole event is told in the register of quiet certainty. This is the truthfulness of the Prophet ﷺ under conditions in which a lesser man would have grown giddy: the wonder was real, and he neither denied it nor traded upon it; he bore it as he bore the dreams and the retreats, as a trust between his Lord and himself until the hour of open proclamation arrived.
For the believer today, the event leaves a pair of gifts. The first is a new set of eyes for the world: the Qur'an teaches that all things glorify Allah, and the Seerah shows a moment when that glorification became a greeting; the mountain path, the stone in the field, and the tree at the well are not dead matter but creatures of a Lord whose praise they never cease, and the heart that believes this walks through the world differently, hearing in creation's order the accent of its obedience. The second is the confirmation of the Messenger ﷺ himself: before a verse of the Qur'an had been recited, before any human being had been called to believe in him, Allah had already set His signature upon him in the hearing of his own solitude, so that when the call came, and the mockery with it, and the exile which old Waraqah foretold, the memory of the saluting rocks remained among the inner certainties of the man who bore it all. The stones of Makkah spoke peace to the Prophet ﷺ in the year of the approach; the believer who loves him answers, across the centuries, from every mountain and valley of the earth: and upon you be peace, O Messenger of Allah.