Fostering of the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ by Halimah al-Sa'diyah

It was a custom of the Quraysh nobility to send their newborns away from Makkah to be raised by desert wet-nurses: to protect them from the diseases of crowded settlements, to harden them to a difficult life, to spare them the pampering of relatives, and, above all, because certain desert tribes were famed for speaking the purest, most fluent Arabic, uncorrupted by the loan-words of the city. The most famous such tribe was Banu Sa'd ibn Bakr, and it was they who fostered the Prophet ﷺ. Every year the women of Banu Sa'd would come to Makkah to take in the infants of the Quraysh in exchange for payment. Halimah al-Sa'diyah and her husband were suffering great poverty; her own newborn son had just caused her milk to flow again, so she came to Makkah that year to find a child to nurse for two or three years. Everyone else in her group found an infant to foster except her: the only child left unclaimed was the orphan whose father had died, since the other women expected little payment from a fatherless child's family. With every other woman already provided for, Halimah agreed to take him, and the household experienced immediate blessings: an old goat that had stopped giving milk began producing again, and an aging mount became the fastest of the group. The blessings Halimah witnessed convinced her to extend the arrangement beyond the usual two years, and Aminah bint Wahab agreed even though she would receive no additional payment.