The Merchant of Makkah
Khadījah bint Khuwaylid was a woman of the clan of Asad — twice widowed, wealthy, and of such nobility that the Quraysh called her al-Ṭāhirah, the pure. She hired men to trade with her goods, and hearing of the truthfulness of the young Muḥammad ﷺ, she engaged him to carry her merchandise to Syria in the company of her servant Maysarah. The venture returned nearly double the expected profit, and Maysarah returned with reports of a character unlike any he had known.12
It was Khadījah who proposed, sending her friend Nafīsah bint Munyah to sound him out. He was about twenty-five; she, by the best-known account, forty — though other early reports say twenty-eight. The uncles of both attended the marriage, and Abū Ṭālib pronounced the wedding sermon. For the next quarter-century, until her death, he took no other wife.13
Khadījah bore him six children: al-Qāsim and ʿAbdullāh, who died in infancy, and four daughters — Zaynab, Ruqayyah, Umm Kulthūm, and Fāṭimah. To the household were joined Zayd ibn Ḥārithah — a slave given by Khadījah to her husband, whom he freed and loved as a son — and, in a year of drought, the child ʿAlī, taken in to ease the burden of Abū Ṭālib, in quiet repayment of an old shelter.13
The Black Stone
When Muḥammad ﷺ was about thirty-five, a flash flood cracked the walls of the Kaʿbah, and the Quraysh resolved to rebuild it — using, they vowed, only honestly earned wealth. The clans divided the labour, but when the walls rose to the place of the Black Stone, each claimed the honour of setting it, and blood was nearly sworn: the clan of ʿAbd al-Dār brought a bowl of blood and plunged their hands into it, pledging to fight.14
The eldest of them proposed that the first man to enter the sanctuary gate should arbitrate. The first to enter was Muḥammad ﷺ, and at the sight of him they cried, “This is al-Amīn — we accept him!” He called for a cloak, laid the Stone upon it, and had a chief of every clan lift it together; then, when it reached its place, he set it in the wall with his own hands. The city that would one day seek his life had just entrusted him with its most sacred object — and war had been averted with a piece of cloth.145
On the Eve of Revelation
So passed the years before the call: a modest, honoured life — a man known for tending the weak and the guest, married to the noblest woman of his city, his four daughters about him. Of Khadījah the Prophet ﷺ said, when Jibrīl brought her a greeting from her Lord: give her “glad tidings of a house in Paradise of hollowed pearl, in which there is no clamour and no fatigue.”6 Nothing in this quiet greatness suggested to Makkah what was coming; but the ḥadīth records that in the days before the revelation, he would hear the stones and trees of the valley give him greeting.7