Banu Zuhrah

Shortly after his father Abdul Muttalib's vow concerning him was resolved, Abdul Muttalib chose Aminah bint Wahab, daughter of the chief of Banu Zuhrah, as a bride for his son Abdullah. Her father Wahab, chieftain of another Qurashi tribe, agreed to the proposal shortly before the caravan season, and Abdullah married Aminah. A report (not authentically narrated, but mentioned by the lecturer as harmless to relate) says Abdullah had a distinctive brightness (nadarah) on his face before the marriage that left him afterward, said to have passed to his progeny.

The Prophet Muhammad ﷺ was born in Makkah in the Year of the Elephant, on a Monday. A report attributes the moment to high noon, relayed by the later tabi'i Sa'id ibn al-Musayyib without a clear chain back to a direct witness. Others of his generation later dated their own births by it: Qays ibn Makhramah said he and the Prophet ﷺ were both born in the Year of the Elephant, and Qubath ibn Ashyam RA said he was born before him (al-Tirmidhi); one report has Suwayd ibn Ghafala say the same of himself, though another has him say he was two years younger. On the seventh day, by a report that al-Bayhaqi relates without a sound chain, his grandfather Abdul Muttalib slaughtered for him, held a feast and named him Muhammad ﷺ, a name the Quraysh asked about because it was not among the names of his family. His uncle Abu Lahab freed his slave girl Thuwaybah, who later nursed him; a popular account, not found in the sources checked, says he freed her for joy at the news of the birth.

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.

While the Prophet ﷺ, then four years old, was playing with the other children of the household, Jibril came to him. The other children fled in fear, but he stood his ground. Jibril overpowered him, laid him down, and opened his chest; he took out his heart, removed a black portion from it ("shaytan's portion") and discarded it, then washed the heart in a golden vessel of Zamzam water and sealed the chest back up. Halimah al-Sa'diyah's son and her daughter Shayma ran back to her screaming that their brother had been killed; when Halimah reached him she found him sitting quietly with a pale face, showing fear but not crying out. A visible line remained on his chest ﷺ for the rest of his life. Shaken by the incident, Halimah decided to return him to his mother, Aminah.

When the Prophet ﷺ was around six years old, his mother Aminah took him to Yathrib, accompanied only by her servant Ummi Ayman. It was the only city he ever visited as a child, and the only one where he had relatives before the Hijrah. They stayed a few months, and on the return journey, at the small settlement of al-Abwa', Aminah fell ill and died. Ummi Ayman had her buried there by the people of the village.