The fortieth year of the life of the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ arrived like a tide whose height the shore has been feeling for years. Imam Ibn Kathir opens his great chapter on the beginning of the revelation with the plain statement that the first revelation came to him when he was forty years of age; and the Sealed Nectar adds the meaning the scholars have always read in that number, that forty was the age of complete perfection at which the prophets were raised to disclose their message. The age itself the sources have weighed with their usual care. Ibn Jarir transmitted, from Ibn Abbas and Said ibn al-Musayyib, that his age at the time was forty-three; Imam Ahmad transmitted, through a chain Ibn Kathir declares correct back to ash-Sha'bi, the report that he received his mission at forty; Ibn Abbas is also reported in the wording that revelation came at forty, with thirteen years in Makkah and ten in Madinah; and one further report reckons fifteen Makkah years, seven of them seeing the light and hearing the voice and eight receiving the revelation. The settled verdict of the Ummah's historians, and the master record of this chronicle, stand upon the forty which Aisha's account presupposes; and for the harmony of the rest, Imam Abu Shamah suggested that the three years of preparation of which some reports speak, in which Israfil was charged with his affair, teaching him words, may be fitted before the coming of Jibril (upon him be peace) with the Qur'an, so that the reports embrace rather than contradict one another. In the year 610 of the Christian calendar, then, in the month of Ramadan, the appointed hour stood in the calendar of heaven, and the final retreat of the Prophet ﷺ began.
It began as every retreat of those years had begun. Ubayd ibn Umayr, whose account Ibn Kathir transmits through Wahb ibn Kaysan, relates that the Prophet ﷺ used to take up residence in Hira in seclusion for one month of each year, and that this was so until that month came of the year in which Allah honored him with his mission; that month, it being Ramadan, he went off as usual for his devotions at Hira, and his family accompanied him. The words deserve to be read slowly: as usual. There was no announcement, no intimation that this Ramadan differed from the last. The provisions were gathered as before; the path up the shoulder of an-Nur was taken as before; the cave barely four yards long received its worshipper as before. The Sealed Nectar reckons this as his third year of solitude in the cave; Lings, with the latitudinarian phrasing the sources allow, places the final night towards the end of Ramadan in his fortieth year, when he was alone in the cave. Of the day of the month the later discussions would weigh many reckonings; but that it was the month of Ramadan, in the fortieth year, with the numbered nights of his devotion running toward their close, the sources carry with one voice.
The choice of the month is itself part of the event. Ibn Kathir records that it is widely held the mission began in Ramadan, as Ubayd ibn Umayr, Muhammad ibn Ishaq and others stated, and he sets down the very evidence Ibn Ishaq adduced: the word of Allah, the month of Ramadan, in which the Qur'an was sent down as guidance for mankind. The reasoning is a circle of light: the Qur'an names Ramadan the month of its own sending down, and the custom of the hanifs of Makkah had already consecrated that same month as the month of retreat, so that the devotion of the man in the cave and the descent of the Book upon him were made to meet in one and the same month of the year. Al-Buti says it directly: every year he left Makkah to spend the month of Ramadan in the cave, free from the vanities and aimless talk of the people; and into that consecrated month, in its closing third, the appointment of heaven was set. The believer who keeps the fast today, standing in the nights of Ramadan while the Qur'an is recited, is standing in a month whose holiness runs back through the final retreat of the Prophet ﷺ to the custom of the sons of Ismail, and forward into the presence of the Book which that retreat received.
What sort of man was it, then, who kept this last month of retreat? The preceding chapters of this chronicle have gathered the answer from every quarter of his thirty-nine years: the orphan sheltered, the shepherd of the slopes, the trustworthy merchant whose word the caravans took as coin, the husband of the one woman in Makkah whose counsel was worth more than the assemblies of her kinsmen. Al-Buti, in his Fiqh as-Sirah, draws the portrait at this very hinge: the previous years of contemplation had widened the mental gulf between him and his people, until his opinion of their idolatry resembled the opinion of a man of true learning toward the fables of the ignorant; and as for the spiritual side, skepticism had spread among the people of the age, and the best of men were confused about the fate of the world, asking whether existence was anything more than the fleeting span on earth. Into that confusion the man of forty climbed his mountain. In the cave of Hira, al-Buti writes, he meditated and worshipped; his heart shone; his soul was purified; 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 reflect from his heart; and in that cave, the same author concludes, Muhammad ﷺ met with the heavenly hosts. That last phrase, written of the days before the revelation, is the threshold of this whole event: the meetings of the Unseen were already at the door of his nights, in the dreams which came true like the dawn, and in the salutations which the rocks and trees of the valleys offered him as he walked.
The sources are careful to say what the retreat was not. It was not the ambition of a man who sought prophethood. Ibn Kathir, expounding the words of Aisha's account, that the truth came upon him suddenly and unexpectedly, quotes the verse in which Allah was later to say to him: you did not hope that the Book would be delivered to you, but it is a mercy from your Lord. The Prophet ﷺ had climbed the mountain to worship, not to be commissioned; the coming of the angel found nothing in him that had arranged for its coming. There is, in all the vast literature of the sirah, no report that he ﷺ aspired to the station, or that he expected the encounter, or that he knew the hour; what the reports give instead is a man bowed in devotion whose solitude itself was deepening under a hand not his own. Ibn Kathir says it in his own voice, in the passage on his retreats: the Messenger of Allah ﷺ only loved the seclusion and the being alone from his people because of the clear error in which he saw them engaged, in their worshipping and prostrating before idols; and his liking for being alone increased as the revelation of Allah drew closer to him. Even the intensity of the final retreat was not his own resolution merely; it was the approach of the hour felt in the soul before it was known to the mind.
Below the mountain, the household of the Prophet ﷺ kept its own side of the retreat. The account of Ubayd ibn Umayr notes that his family accompanied him on the journey of that final year, and Aisha's canonical description, with its cycle of provisions and return, had long since made Khadijah (may Allah be pleased with her) the quiet keeper of the rhythm; her house in the valley was the harbor to which the worshipper came down, and the store from which the numbered nights were provisioned. The daughters were growing to womanhood in that house, and Fatimah, the youngest, was a child of about five; and the centuries of retelling have rightly loved to imagine what those descents must have been, the father of al-Qasim coming down from his month upon the mountain, making first the circuits of the Ancient House, as Ubayd ibn Umayr relates, seven times or so, before ever he entered his own door. The family which kept those doors was itself part of the preparation of Allah; within days, the same household would become the first audience of the Qur'an upon the earth, and the wife who provisioned the retreat would be the first of all human beings to believe in the message which the retreat received.
Nor was the world outside the cave wholly asleep. The expectation of a prophet, the scholars of the sirah have always noted, was alive in that generation among the bearers of the earlier scriptures. Ibn Kathir, in his account of the seekers of the old faith, records of Zayd ibn Amr ibn Nufayl that the rabbis and the monks told him of a prophet whose time was near, so that he returned from his journeys still seeking tidings of him, believing in the One Allah, while death found him before the mission began. Waraqah ibn Nawfal, the aged cousin of Khadijah (may Allah be pleased with her), had spent his life in the same watching; he had become a Christian, had learned the Hebrew script, and copied the scriptures of what Allah willed him to write; and the verses of his long waiting, which Ibn Kathir preserves, sound like a man keeping vigil at a window: I persisted, being determined, recalling a matter that often drew my tears; a description from Khadijah, following an account; my waiting has been long, O Khadijah. And in another ode: by news of veracity you foretold of Muhammad, telling them about him; informing that the son of Abdullah is sent to all men on earth. And again: if it be true, O Khadija, then know that your account to us means that Ahmad is sent. The poets of Quraysh mocked, and the years rolled on; but in cells from Busra to the quarters of the People of the Book, the question of the monk who once asked Talhah on the Syrian road was still being asked: had Ahmad yet appeared among the people of the Sanctuary? The night which was coming to the cave of Hira had been awaited, in however dim and fractured a manner, by watchers scattered across the empires of the age. In the design of Allah, the final prophet was not born into an unwitting world merely; he was born into a world in which the expectation of him had been planted in the earlier revelations themselves, and the fortieth year found that expectation and his own readiness converging upon a single cave upon a single mountain.
The last days of that Ramadan the sources enter upon with reverence and restraint. From the covered cave, as al-Buti describes the vantage of all those retreats, a lone soul could look down upon the world below, heaving with troubles, rivalries and disappointments, and then withdraw into itself, full of sorrow and helplessness, because it knew as yet no way out and no cure; and from the same cave a penetrating eye had observed the legacy of the previous prophets and found it like a deep mine whose precious metal could be won only by tremendous effort. The sawiq and the water stood in the cave as they had stood in the Ramadans before; the poor who came up the mountain were fed from the modest store as before; the Kaaba lay below in the curve of the valley, visible from the height, the object of the longing of every hanif, undefended now except by Allah from the idols which the hands of Quraysh had set in her courts. The nights passed over him ﷺ one by one, and with each night the month drew toward its close. Lings fixes the moment with a single line: it was one night towards the end of Ramadan, in his fortieth year, and he was alone in the cave. Of what entered that night, this event must say nothing; the threshold is its boundary, and the crossing of the threshold belongs to the event which follows. But the reader may be permitted to stand, as it were, at the mouth of the cave in the last of the light, and mark the stillness of the pieces upon the board: the worshipper within, kneeling in the narrow place where the roof nearly touches the upraised hands; the mountain silent above him; the town below holding its sleeping markets and its circling idols; the expectation of generations asleep in the scriptoria of the monks and the memory of the rabbis; the dreams of six months folded in the soul of the man of forty; and over the whole scene the mercy of Allah drawing as near as it had ever drawn to the children of Adam since the last of the prophets of Israel had passed.
The believer who reads this pause rightly will find in it the signature of the divine method. Allah does not thrust the greatest trusts upon the unexercised. Four decades of the disciplined life; the retreats measured out year upon year like the courses of a wall; the last month running its numbered nights; and only then, when the vessel was wrought and the expectation of the world was ripe, did the heavens open. There is a lesson here for every soul that is being prepared for a work it has not seen: the season of the cave is not the absence of the mission but the making of it. And there is a lesson in the loneliness as well, for the man who kept that last month kept it in a solitude which his city neither understood nor shared; but the solitude was full, because it was full of Allah. What the Qur'an would later say in describing His righteous servants, that they pass the night prostrating and standing before their Lord, and that the hours of the night are more deeply impressive and more suitable for words, was already the biography of the man in the cave before ever the words were sent down. The Messenger whom the scriptures of the world had awaited, and whom the stones of his own valley had already saluted, spent the final days before his commission as what he had always been, with the single addition that the whole unseen world now stood in attention about the mountain of an-Nur, waiting upon the command of its Lord.
So the night came down over the cave of Hira, the last night of the numbered weeks, deep in the last third of Ramadan of the fortieth year; and the history of the world, which had been rising for forty years toward this hour like water toward the lip of a spring, stood at the very edge of its breaking. The believer's heart, which knows what that night held, may be forgiven if it lingers at the threshold: within the cave the best of creation bowed in the worship of his Lord, unaware of the hour; below the mountain the idols stood their last untroubled night around the Ancient House; and in the heavens the bearer of revelation had received his summons. The next event of this chronicle opens its door: the first revelation of the Qur'an, the event toward which every line of these eighty chapters has been walking, the daybreak of the message of Muhammad ﷺ, the mercy of Allah to the worlds.