The Journey to Syria
When the boy was about twelve, Abū Ṭālib prepared to travel with a Quraysh caravan to Syria, and — moved by the child's clinging to him — took his nephew along. At Buṣrā in the south of Syria the caravan halted near the cell of a monk called Baḥīrā, who, contrary to his habit, prepared food and invited the whole company. The sīrah relates that he had seen the caravan approach with a cloud shading one traveller, and that he questioned the boy, looked between his shoulders for the seal of prophethood of which his books spoke, and told Abū Ṭālib: “Return with your nephew, and guard him from the Jews — for by God, if they see him and know of him what I know, they will seek to harm him. A great destiny lies before this nephew of yours.”12
War and a Better Oath
In his teens Muḥammad ﷺ witnessed the Ḥarb al-Fijār — the “Sacrilegious War” between Quraysh and the tribe of Hawāzin, so called because it profaned the sacred months. His part was marginal; he later said that he gathered the enemy's fallen arrows for his uncles. But the futility of tribal bloodshed left its mark.13
In the war's aftermath, the clans of Quraysh gathered in the house of ʿAbdullāh ibn Judʿān and swore the Ḥilf al-Fuḍūl — the League of the Virtuous: that they would stand as one with any victim of injustice in Makkah, native or stranger, until his right was restored. The young Muḥammad ﷺ was present, and the oath so accorded with his nature that long after prophethood he said: “I witnessed in the house of ʿAbdullāh ibn Judʿān a pact I would not exchange for red camels; and if I were summoned to the like of it in Islam, I would answer.”14
The Most Trusted Man in Makkah
He grew into manhood apart from the vices of his city. He was never seen at the idols, never drank, never gambled; the sīrah records that on the two occasions in his youth when he thought to attend a night's entertainment, sleep overcame him on the way. He earned his living as a shepherd and then as a trader, and in a society where a man's word was his bond, his word proved better than any man's. The Makkans gave him the surnames by which he was known before any revelation: al-Ṣādiq, the truthful, and al-Amīn, the trustworthy — and they deposited their valuables with him as with no one else.235
Years later, when the Negus of Abyssinia asked the emigrant Muslims about the man they followed, Jaʿfar ibn Abī Ṭālib's answer began not with miracles but with this: “God sent to us a messenger from among ourselves, whose lineage, truthfulness, trustworthiness, and chastity we already knew.”6