Ḥalīmah and the Desert
It was the custom of the Makkan nobility to send their infants to be nursed among the Bedouin, that they might grow strong in the desert air and drink in the purest Arabic. In a lean year, the women of Banū Saʿd ibn Bakr came to Makkah seeking nurslings, and each passed over the fatherless child from whom no rich reward could be expected — until Ḥalīmah bint Abī Dhu'ayb, who had found no other, returned and took him rather than go home empty-handed.12
The sīrah remembers what followed as a season of quiet abundance: Ḥalīmah's dry breast filled, her worn she-camel gave milk, her flocks came home satisfied when her neighbours' returned hungry. She and her husband knew the child was blessed, and when the nursing term ended they pleaded with Āminah to leave him with them longer. So Muḥammad ﷺ spent his earliest years as a child of the desert, herding lambs behind the tents of Banū Saʿd — and he would say in later life, “I am the most Arab of you: I am of Quraysh, and I was suckled among Banū Saʿd ibn Bakr.”12
To those years belongs the event of the opening of the chest. Two figures in white, the young companions ran to tell Ḥalīmah, had laid the boy down, opened his breast, and washed his heart in a vessel of gold — removing from it, as the ḥadīth relates, a dark portion, the share of Shayṭān. Anas ibn Mālik, who transmitted the report, said the marks of stitching could be seen on the Prophet's chest. Alarmed, Ḥalīmah returned the child to his mother.3
The Loss of Āminah
When he was about six, Āminah took her son to Yathrib to visit his father's grave and her kin of Banū al-Najjār, attended by the slave-girl Umm Ayman, Barakah the Abyssinian. On the return journey Āminah fell ill and died at al-Abwāʾ, midway between the two cities, and was buried there. Barakah carried the weeping child home to Makkah. Decades later, passing al-Abwāʾ, the Prophet ﷺ would visit his mother's grave and weep at it until his companions wept with him.145
ʿAbd al-Muṭṭalib, then Abū Ṭālib
The orphan passed into the care of his grandfather, who loved him with a marked tenderness: a couch was spread for ʿAbd al-Muṭṭalib in the shade of the Kaʿbah where none of his sons dared sit, yet the old man would draw the boy up beside him, saying, “Leave my son; by God, he has a great destiny.” The shelter lasted two years. When Muḥammad ﷺ was eight, ʿAbd al-Muṭṭalib died, and the boy walked weeping behind his bier.14
Guardianship now fell to his uncle Abū Ṭālib, full brother of his father ʿAbdullāh. Abū Ṭālib was a man of honour and slender means with a large family, and his nephew earned his keep from an early age by herding sheep in the hills about Makkah — a shepherd's apprenticeship the Prophet ﷺ later recalled without embarrassment: “God sent no prophet who did not herd sheep.” His companions asked, “Even you?” He said, “Even I: I herded them for the people of Makkah for a few qīrāṭs.”6 For forty years Abū Ṭālib would remain his protector, and the bond between them never broke.124