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OCTOBER, 1903.]
MUHAMMAD. HIS LIFE, &c.
till the sixth birth-day of Muhammad. The next two years were spent under the fostering care of Abd-el-Muttalib, the grandfather. At his decease Muhammad, now eight years old, was taken into the guardianship of his uncle Abu Taleb (Abd Menaf), an elder brother of Ab Allah. The uncle brought him up to man's estate, The multitude of circumstantial accounts of the future Prophet's early days have no value for us being, as they are, gratuitous fabrications or tortuous narratives wrested out of passages in the Qorán. The sole authentic testimony to Muhammad's childhood is imbedded in Súra 98, 38: --
Thy Lord did not abase thee, nor despised,
Yet the next world shall be better for thee than this,
And thy Lord will endow thee with content.
Did He not find thee an orphan, and yet gave thee shelter?
He found thee astray and conducted thee aright,
And He found thee needy and has enriched thee.
395
From the above we derive the certainty that Muhammad was an orphan in his youth, that he was reared a heathen, and that only after tiding over a period of straitened circumstances he attained to competence. The latter change was apparently brought about by his first marriage. When he was made a sound merchant by Abu Taleb, and had taken part in several journeys undertaken for purposes of trade, especially to Syria, a rich Meccan widow, named Khadija, who had learnt to appreciate his assiduity and attentions, gave him her hand in marriage. Five and twenty years of age, Muhammad united himself to Khadija, aged 40.10 He was noted for his newly-acquired fortune- no mean distinction for a Meccan-as much as he had been distinguished by the superiority of his character which had won for him the honoured sobriquet of Amin or the Faithful. Khadija bore him two sons and four daughters, Kasim, Abd Allah,11 Rukaiya, Umm Kulthara, Zainab and Fatima. The sons died in infancy.12 In pursuance of an Arab custom Muhammad got his surname of Abu'l Kasim, father of Kasim, from the name of his eldest boy.
Thus he arrived at mature manhood without having anywise made himself conspicuous among his fellow-burghers. There was nothing extraordinary in him; nothing foreshadowing unusual good fortune. Even the later traditions, which riot in fables, dare not smuggle into the years of travel uncommon traits bespeaking coming greatness. The improbable incident of the part of arbiter, which an accident called upon Muhammad to play, when the Kaaba was reconstructed, serves at best as a proof of his judicious tact, but not of any unique intellectual gift,13
Muhammad grew to be full forty years of age-a man like all other men. Then, however, as is the usual Oriental phenomenon, he struck into the path of miracles and visions and was straightway metamorphosed into a spiritual being, who held communion with God Himself and founded and spread a new religion!
This naive version is given expression to in a variety of traditions, which, as a connected whole as given by Ibn Ishaq, the best of the earlier biographers of Muhammad, may be summarised as under.
10 [Khadija's father had set his face against marrying his daughter to a penny less youth like Muhammad, who had long out-grown the age when marriage could be decently celebrated. But Khadija plied the old man with wine and extorted his consent. When he was sober, it was too late to mend matters, and eventuaily Muhamad's relatives succeeded in pacifying the father, whose wrath had threatened to terminate in bloodshed. Nöideke, op. cit. 14-TR.]
11 [According to Nöldeke (op. cit. 15), the original and real name of the boy was Abd Manaf, which, literally, means slave of the (god) Manaf, and therefore clearly shows that Muhammad at the birth of the child was still an idolater. He adds that Abd Allah is a later invention.TR.] See Mas'udi, V, 9.
13 [Verily, "he who hates thee shall be childless" (Súra 10.). -"his," says Palmer (8. B. F. IX. 343), "is directed against As ibn Wail, who, when Muhammad's son El Qasim died, called him Ablar, which means 'docktailed,' i. s., childless."-TR.]
13 [The story is as interesting as it is apocryphal. See Muir, op. cit. 23. Ta.)
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