CHILDHOOD
"Paradise lies at the feet of mothers."--MAHOMET.
No more beautiful and tender legends cluster round Mahomet than those
which grace his life in the desert under the loving care of his
foster-mother Hailima. She was a woman of the tribe of Beni Sa'ad, who
for generations had roamed the desert, tent-dwellers, who visited cities
but rarely, and kept about them the remoteness and freedom of their
adventurous life beneath the sun and stars.
About the time of Mahomet's birth a famine fell upon the Beni Sa'ad,
which left nothing of all their stores, and the women of the tribe
journeyed,[28] weary and stricken with hunger, into the city of Mecca
that they might obtain foster-children whose parents would give them
money and blessings if they could but get their little ones taken away
from that unhealthy place. Among these was Hailima, who, according to
tradition, has left behind her the narrative of that dreadful journey
across the desert with her husband and her child, and with only an ass
and a she-camel for transport. Famine oppressed them sorely, together
with the heat of desert suns, until there was no sustenance for any
living creature; then, faint and travel-weary, they reached the city and
began their quest.
Mahomet was offered to every woman of the tribe, but they rejected him
as he had no father, and there was little hope of much payment from the
mothers of these children. Those of rich parents were eagerly spoken
for, but no one would care for the little fatherless child. And it
happened that Hailima also was unsuccessful in her search, and was like
to have returned to her people disconsolate, but when she saw
Mahomet she bethought herself and said to her husband:
"By the God of my fathers, I will not go back to my companions without
foster-child. I will take this orphan."
And her husband replied: "It cannot harm thee to do this, and if thou
takest him it may be that through him God will bless us."
So Hailima took him, and she relates how good fortune attended her from
that day. Her camels gave abundant milk during the homeward journey, and
in the unfruitful land of the Beni Sa'ad her cattle were always fattest
and yielded most milk, until her neighbours besought her to allow them
to pasture their cattle with hers. But, adds the chronicler naively, in
spite of this their cattle returned to them thin and yielding little,
while Hailima's waxed fat and fruitful. These legends are the translation
into poetic fact of the peace and love surrounding Mahomet during the five
years he spent with Hailima; for in all primitive communities every
experience must pass through transmutation into the definite and tangible
and be given a local habitation and a name.
When Mahomet was two years old and the time had come to restore him to
his mother, Hailima took him back to Mecca; but his mother gave him to
her again because he had thriven so well under desert skies, and she
feared the stifling air of Mecca for her only son. So Hailima returned
with him and brought him up as one of her children until he was five,
when the first signs of his nervous, highly-strung nature showed
themselves in a kind of epileptic fit. The Arabians, unskilled as they
were in any medical science, attributed manifestations of this kind to
evil spirits, and it is not surprising that we find Hailima bringing him
back to his grandfather in great alarm. So ended his fostering by the
desert and by Hailima.
Of these five years spent among the Beni Sa'ad chroniclers have spoken
in much detail, but their confused accounts are so interwoven with
legend that it is impossible to re-create events, and we can only obtain
a general idea of his life as a tiny child among the children of the
tribe, sharing their fortunes, playing and quarrelling with them, and at
moments, when the spirit seemed to advance beyond its dwelling-place,
gazing wide-eyed upon the limitless desert under the blaze of sun or
below the velvet dark, with swift, half-conscious questionings uttering
the universal why and how [31] of childhood. Legend regards even this
early time as one of preparation for his mission, and there are stories
of the coming of two men clothed in white and shining garments, who
ripped open his body, took out his heart, and having purged it of all
unrighteousness, returned it, symbolically cleansing him of sin that he
might forward the work of God. It was an imaginative rightness that
decreed that Mahomet's most impressionable years should be spent in the
great desert, whose twin influences of fierceness and fatalism he felt
throughout his life, and which finally became the key-notes of his
worship of Allah.
Hailima, convinced that her foster-son was possessed by evil spirits,
resolved to return him to Abd al Muttalib, but as she journeyed through
Upper Mecca, the child wandered away and was lost for a time. Hailima
hurried, much agitated, to his grandfather, who immediately sent his
sons to search, and after a short time they returned with the boy,
unharmed and unfrightened by his adventure. The legend--it is quite a
late accretion--is interesting, as showing an acquaintance with, and a
parallelism to, the story of the losing of Jesus among the Passover
crowds, and the search for Him by His kindred. Mahomet was at last
lodged with his mother, who indignantly explained to Hailima the real
meaning of his malady, and spoke of his future glory as manifested to
her by the light that enfolded her before his birth. Not long after,
Amina decided to visit her [32] husband's tomb at Medina, and thither
Mahomet accompanied her, travelling through the rocky, desolate valleys
and hills that separate the two, with just his mother and a slave girl.
Mahomet was too young to remember much about the journey to Medina,
except that it was hot and that he was often tired, and since his father
was but a name to him, the visit to his tomb faded altogether from his
mind. But on the homeward journey a calamity overtook him which he
remembered all his life. Amina, weakened by journeying and much
sorrow, and perhaps feeling her desire for life forsake her after the
fulfillment of her pilgrimage, sickened and died at Abwa, and Mahomet
and the slave girl continued their mournful way alone.
Amina is drawn by tradition in very vague outline, and Mahomet's memory
of her as given in the Kuran does not throw so much light upon the woman
herself as upon her child's devotion and affectionate memory of the
mother he lost almost before he knew her. His grief for her was very
real; she remained continually in his thoughts, and in after years
he paid tribute at her tomb to her tenderness and love for him.
"This is the grave of my mother ... the Lord hath permitted me to visit
it.... I called my mother to remembrance, and the tender memory of her
overcame me and I wept."
The sensitive, over-nervous child, left thus solitary, away from all his
kindred, must have brought back with him to Mecca confused but vivid
impressions of the long journey and of the catastrophe which lay at the
end of it. The uncertainty of his future, and the joys of gaining at
last a foster-father in Abd al Muttalib, finds reflection in the Kuran
in one little burst of praise to God: "Did He not find thee an orphan,
and furnish thee with a refuge?"
Life for two years as the foster-child of Abd al Muttalib, the venerable,
much honoured chief of the house of Hashim, passed very pleasantly for
Mahomet. He was the darling of his grandfather's last years of life; for,
perhaps having pity on his defencelessness, perhaps divining with that
prescience which often marks old age, something of the revelation this
child was to be to his countrymen, he protected him from the harshness of
his uncles. A rug used to be placed in the shadow of the Kaaba, and there
the aged ruler rested during the heat of the day, and his sons sat around
him at respectful distance, listening to his words. But the child
Mahomet, who loved his grandfather, ran fearlessly up, and would have
seated himself by Abd al Muttalib's side. Then the sons sought to
punish him for his lack of reverence, but their father prevented them:
"Leave the child in peace. By the God of my fathers, I swear he will one
day be a mighty prophet."
So Mahomet remained in close attendance upon the old man, until he died
in the eighth year after the Year of the Elephant, and there was mourning
for him in the houses of his sons.
When Abd al Muttalib knew his end was near he sent for his daughters, and
bade them make lamentation over him. We possess traditional accounts of
these funeral songs; they are representative of the wild rhetorical
eloquence of the poetry of the day. They lose immensely in translation,
and even in reading with the eye instead of hearing, for they were never
meant to find immortality in the written words, but in the speech of men.
"When in the night season a voice of loud lament proclaimed the sorrowful
tidings I wept, so that the tears ran down my face like pearls. I wept
for a noble man, greater than all others, for Sheibar, the generous,
endowed with virtues; for my beloved father, the inheritor of all good
things, for the man faithful in his own house, who never shrank from
combat, who stood fast and needed not a prop, mighty, well-favoured,
rich in gifts. If a man could live for ever by reason of his noble
nature--but to none is this lot vouchsafed--he would remain untouched of
death because of his fair fame and his good deeds."
The songs furnish ample evidence as to the high position which Abd al
Muttalib held among the Kureisch. His death was a great loss to his
nation, but it was a greater calamity to his little foster-child, for it
brought him from ease and riches to comparative poverty and obscurity
with his uncle, Abu Talib. None of Abd al Muttalib's sons inherited the
nature of their father, and with his death the greatness of the house of
Hashim diminished, until it gave place to the Omeyya branch, with Harb at
its head. The offices at Mecca were seized by the Omeyya, and to the
descendants of Abd al Muttalib there remained but the privilege of caring
for the well Zemzem, and of giving its water for the refreshment of
pilgrims. Only two of his sons, except Abu Talib, who earns renown
chiefly as the guardian of Mahomet, attain anything like prominence.
Hamza was converted at the beginning of Mahomet's mission, and continued
his helper and warrior until he died in battle for Islam; Abu Lahab (the
flame) opposed Mahomet's teaching with a vehemence that earned him one of
the fiercest denunciations in the early, passionate Suras of the
Kuran:
"Blasted be the hands of Abu Lahab; let himself perish;
His wealth and his gains shall avail him not;
Burned shall he be with the fiery flame,
His wife shall be laden with firewood--
On her neck a rope of palm fibre."
Mahomet, bereft a second time of one he loved and on whom he depended,
passed into the care of his uncle, Abu Talib. This was a man of no great
force of character, well-disposed and kindly, but of straitened means,
and lacking in the qualities that secure success. Later, he seems to have
attained a more important position, mainly, one would imagine, through
the lion courage and unfaltering faith in the Prophet of his son, the
mighty warrior Ali, of whom it is written, "Mahomet is the City of
Knowledge, and Ali is the Gate thereof." But although Abu Talib was
sufficiently strong to withstand the popular fury of the Kureisch against
Mahomet, and to protect him for a time on the grounds of kinship, he
never finally decided upon which side he would take his stand. Had he
been a far-seeing, imaginative man, able to calculate even a little the
force that had entered into Arabian polity, the history of the foundation
of Islam would have been continued, with Mecca as its base, and have
probably resolved itself into the war of two factions within the city,
wherein the new faith, being bound to the more powerful political party,
would have had a speedier conquest.
With Abu Talib Mahomet spent the rest of his childhood and youth--quiet
years, except for a journey to Syria, and his insignificant part in the
war against the Hawazin, a desert tribe that engaged the Kureisch for
some time. In Abu Talib's house there was none of the ease that had
surrounded him with Abd al Muttalib. But Mahomet was naturally an
affectionate child, and was equally attached to his uncle as he had been
to his grandfather.
Two years later Abu Talib set out on a mercantile journey, and was minded
to leave his small foster-child behind him, but Mahomet came to him
as he sat on his camel equipped for his journey, and clinging to him
passionately implored his uncle not to go without him. Abu Talib could
not resist his pleading, and so Mahomet accompanied him on that magical
journey through the desert, so glorious yet awesome to an imaginative
child, Bostra was the principal city of exchange for merchandise
circulating between Yemen, Northern Arabia, and the cities of Upper
Palestine, and Mahomet must thus have travelled on the caravan route
through the heart of Syria, past Jerash, Ammon, and the site of the
fated Cities of the Plain. In Syria, too, he first encountered the
Christian faith, and planted those remembrances that were to be revived
and strengthened upon his second journey through that wonderful land--in
religion, and in a lesser degree in polity, a law unto itself, forging
out its own history apart from the main stream of Christian life and
thought.
Legends concerning this journey are rife, and all emphasise the influence
Christianity had upon his mind, and also the ready recognition of his
coming greatness by all those Christians who saw him. On the homeward
journey the monk Bahirah is fabled to have met the party and to have
bidden them to a feast. When he saw the child was not among them he was
wroth, and commanded his guests to bring "every man of the company." He
interrogated Mahomet and Abu Talib concerning the parentage of the boy,
and we have here the first traditional record of Mahomet's speech.
"Ask what thou wilt," he said to Bahirah, "and I will make answer."
So Bahirah questioned him as to the signs that had been vouchsafed him,
and looking between his shoulders found the seal of the prophetic office,
a mole covered with hair. Then Bahirah knew this was he who was foretold,
and counselled Abu Talib to take him to his native land, and to beware
[39] of the Jews, for he would one day attain high honour. At this time
Mahomet was little more than a child, but although few thoughts of God or
of human destiny can have crossed his mind, he retained a vivid
impression of the storied places through which he passed--Jerash, Ammon,
the valley of Hejr, and saw in imagination the mighty stream of the
Tigris, the ruinous cities, and Palmyra with its golden pillars fronting
the sun. The tribes which the caravan encountered were rich in legend and
myth, and their influence, together with the more subtle spell of the
desert vastness, wrought in him that fervour of spirit, a leaping,
troubled flame, which found mortal expression in the poetry of the early
part of the Kuran, where the vision of God's majesty compels the gazer
into speech that sweeps from his mind in a stream of fire:
"By the Sun and his noonday brightness,
By the Moon when she followeth him,
By Day when it revealeth his glory,
By the night when it enshroudeth him,
By the Heaven and Him who built it,
By the Earth and Him who spread it forth,
By the Soul and Him who balanced it,
Breathed into its good, yea, and its evil--
Verily man's lot is cast amid destruction
Save those who believe and deal justly,
And enjoin upon each other steadfastness and truth."