These are the last two stories the seerah has before everything changes. Forty years of his life ﷺ, and we are left with barely a dozen scenes; today holds two of them, and then the cave is next. The first is the marriage that gave him the one person who would carry him through the hardest night of his life. The second is the day his whole city nearly went to war over a single stone, and a thirty-five-year-old man settled it with a cloak.
Watch the same thread run through both. A man so honest, so gentle, so clearly trusted by everyone around him that a wealthy woman would hand him her caravan, and a divided city would hand him their holiest decision, before a single verse had ever been revealed to him.
The shy shepherd and the wages
He ﷺ was a shepherd, perhaps twenty-three or twenty-four years old, taking other people's flocks out to graze for a meager wage. Khadijah radiyallahu anha, the wealthiest woman in Makkah, had an older sister who hired him along with another young man to herd her animals. When the grazing was done and it was time to collect their pay, his companion said, come, let us go and ask for our wages. And he ﷺ answered, you go for both of us; I am too shy to go to her, because she is a woman.
So the young man went alone. Khadijah happened to be in the house, and she asked, where is Muhammad? He has earned half of this. The man explained: he was too shy to come and ask. And at that, Khadijah's sister began to praise him. She said she had never seen a man more shy, more honorable, more dignified and modest in how he dealt with her. She had watched him lower his gaze and carry himself with quiet nobility, and she could not stop speaking of it.
This, the narration says, was the first time Khadijah heard his name spoken like that. And like any human heart, something stirred when a man was praised in such a way. It was honesty that opened the door, before anything else. Not wealth, not status, not experience, but the way a poor shepherd conducted himself when no one important was watching.
A caravan placed in trustworthy hands
Khadijah's wealth was not ordinary for a woman of that time. In jahiliyyah women did not usually inherit, but her second husband had been a wealthy merchant with no surviving siblings and no children with her, so when he died she came into a rare fortune and grew it through trade. She would buy goods, send them by caravan to Syria and Yemen, and sell what came back in Makkah. But because she could not travel herself, she had to hire a man each time, on a share of the profit, and time after time the men she hired would cheat her, lie, and shortchange her of what she had earned.
When she heard how this young man carried himself, she decided to entrust her caravan to him, even though he had never made a business journey in his life. He was inexperienced and young, when caravans were usually led by seasoned men in their forties and fifties, but she overlooked all of it for one thing: his honesty. She offered him a generous share, and when the offer reached him ﷺ, he did not simply seize it. He went to his uncle Abu Talib and asked, what do you think? Abu Talib told him this was a blessing from Allah and far better than herding sheep, and not to refuse it. So he accepted.
He ﷺ took the caravan north to Busra, a market town on the edge of the Roman lands where the Arab traders would stop rather than push on to Damascus. Khadijah sent a servant of hers, Maysarah, along with him. And when they returned, Maysarah told her everything: the care he had taken, the honesty he had shown, and a profit many times greater than she had ever seen. Some of the early books even mention a cloud that shaded him on the road, though Sheikh Yasir is careful here. If it happened, it happened, he says, but there is no authentic report of it, and we should be cautious with such signs before the prophethood.
The woman who chose him
By now Khadijah's feelings were clear, and Sheikh Yasir pauses to say plainly what some of us feel shy to say: there is nothing wrong in this. She was a single woman, he ﷺ was an eligible young man, and noble men had already proposed to her and been turned away because she felt none of them would treat her as she deserved. To feel drawn to him was no fault at all. As the Sheikh tells his students, falling in love is not haram; it is what you do with that love that makes it one thing or the other. And she pursued it in the only way that honors it: marriage.
Every version of how the proposal came about agrees on one point: Khadijah was the one who set it in motion. In one account she sent an older woman, Nafisa, to him. Nafisa came and asked, why do you not marry? And he ﷺ answered, who would marry me? I am an orphan, a poor man of the Quraysh. So she said, what if it were Khadijah? He fell quiet, and then said: but why would she want me? Notice, the Sheikh says, that he never said he was not interested. He only wondered why a woman like her would want a man like him.
About three months after his return, in the month of Safar, the marriage took place. Sheikh Yasir deliberately mentions a second version, the one with a weak chain in which Khadijah's father was made drunk and tricked into agreeing, only so that he can set it aside. It is not authentic, he says, and it is contradicted by the stronger reports: her father had already died, which is precisely why she controlled her own wealth, and it was her uncle, Amr ibn Asad, who gave her in marriage. Abu Talib came with him ﷺ and gave the sermon, praising Allah and the noble lineage of the Quraysh, and saying of his nephew that there was no young man in all of Makkah to compare with him in character or in honor. The mahr was a modest, respectful amount: twelve and a fraction in silver.
What Khadijah was to him
The common figure people know is that Khadijah was forty when they married. But Sheikh Yasir lays out the stronger evidence that she was younger, around twenty-eight. The report of forty comes from al-Waqidi, who ranks lower than those who say otherwise; Ibn Ishaq, the great authority of the seerah, and Hisham al-Kalbi both give her age as twenty-eight, and al-Bayhaqi and Ibn Kathir indicate she died in her fifties, not at sixty-five. And there is a simpler proof, he says: she bore him at least six children, which is far more reasonable for a woman of twenty-eight than for one in her forties.
And what a wife she was. She was the first to believe in him ﷺ when the revelation came. She comforted him and thought to take him to Waraqa ibn Nawfal to understand what was happening. Hers was the only household Jibril would enter; he once came while she was out and sent her the greeting of peace from Allah Himself, with the glad tidings of a home in Jannah free of all noise and toil. And her answer, in her wisdom, was not to return the greeting to Allah, for Allah is As-Salam, the source of peace, but to say that Allah is peace, and to send peace back upon Jibril and upon her husband ﷺ.
Years after she died, Aisha radiyallahu anha said she was never as jealous of any woman as she was of Khadijah, a woman she had never even met, simply because she saw how deeply he ﷺ still loved her. He would slaughter a sheep and send portions to Khadijah's old friends. Once, irritated, Aisha asked how long he would keep mentioning this old woman when Allah had given him better. And he ﷺ answered: no, by Allah, Allah did not give me better than her. She believed in me when the people rejected me, she gave me of her wealth when they deprived me, and Allah blessed me with children only through her. When Khadijah's sister later came to Madinah, his face changed at the sound of her footstep, because it was so like Khadijah's. And when Khadijah passed, a companion said they did not see him smile for months.
Al-Kawthar, and the enemy cut off
إِنَّا أَعْطَيْنَاكَ الْكَوْثَرَ
“Indeed, We have granted you, [O Muḥammad], al-Kawthar.”
Surah al-Kawthar 108:1 Read 108:1 with tafsir
فَصَلِّ لِرَبِّكَ وَانْحَرْ
“So pray to your Lord and offer sacrifice [to Him alone].”
Surah al-Kawthar 108:2 Read 108:2 with tafsir
إِنَّ شَانِئَكَ هُوَ الْأَبْتَرُ
“Indeed, your enemy is the one cut off.”
Surah al-Kawthar 108:3 Read 108:3 with tafsir
All of his children were from Khadijah, and there were at least six. His firstborn was al-Qasim, from whom he took his kunya, Abu al-Qasim; the boy grew old enough to ride before he died. Then came four daughters, Zaynab, Ruqayyah, Umm Kulthum, and Fatima the youngest. And then his son Abdullah, also called at-Tayyib and at-Tahir, the pure one, who died in infancy.
When Abdullah died and his line of sons was cut off, his enemy Abu Jahl ran through the streets of Makkah cheering, calling him abtar, the one severed, with no male heir to carry his name. To the Arabs a man without sons was a man with nothing. Imagine it, Sheikh Yasir says: your child has just died, and your worst enemy is running through the town rejoicing. And in that grief Allah revealed a whole surah, and these three short ayat became more beloved to him ﷺ than the whole world and everything in it.
We have given you al-Kawthar, Allah said, the abundance, the river of Jannah, the source of all good. So turn to your Lord and worship; it is your enemy, the one mocking you, who is truly cut off. And Sheikh Yasir reads the legacy in it: fourteen centuries later, the only people who even speak the names of Abu Jahl and Abu Lahab are those who despise them. The man they called abtar is the most remembered human being who ever lived, and they are the ones the world cut off.
Tested by loss, and shaped by it
Sheikh Yasir steps back here over the whole sweep of his life ﷺ, because the pattern is hard to miss. The most painful thing that can happen to a child is to lose his parents, and the most painful thing that can happen to a parent is to lose a child, and he tasted both, again and again. Orphaned of his father, then his mother, then his grandfather, then his protecting uncle. And then he buried his own children: al-Qasim, Abdullah, and three of his four daughters with his own hands, with only Fatima outliving him, and even she by just a few months. Much later he would have one more son, Ibrahim, from Maria, and Ibrahim too died, at around eighteen months, the sweetest age of all.
Why would the greatest of creation be given the heaviest of griefs? Because, the Sheikh teaches, it is precisely through trial that the heart is forged. When life is comfortable the heart hardens; it is loss that throws our hands up to Allah and softens us toward everyone else who suffers. A man who has known poverty feels for the poor; a man who has been an orphan tends to the orphan. It is no accident that he ﷺ gave us so many words about caring for the orphan, even telling us that if we have nothing to give, we should at least pass a gentle hand over the orphan's head. He knew exactly what that child feels.
There was a wisdom too in his having no surviving son, and he ﷺ named it himself. Of Ibrahim he said that had he lived, he would have been a prophet, but there is no prophet after me. The prophethood had to be sealed, so the line of sons could not continue. And look, the Sheikh adds, at what the ummah did even with grandsons through Fatima, the lengths some went to in exalting them; had there been a direct son, people might have made him a god walking the earth. So even this loss was a mercy.
The Ka'bah, rebuilt by a shipwreck
ذَرْنِي وَمَنْ خَلَقْتُ وَحِيدًا
“Leave Me with the one I created alone”
Surah al-Muddaththir 74:11 Read 74:11 with tafsir
Now the years jump forward. He ﷺ was about thirty-five, and in those ten years of marriage the seerah has not preserved for us a single story; we trust there was no benefit Allah withheld. Then comes the rebuilding of the Ka'bah. Two disasters had struck it: a fire that began when an ember from a woman cooking nearby caught its cloth, weakening the structure, and then a great flood that tore off its roof and broke its walls, for Makkah sits in a basin and floods every so often, something the Sheikh says he has waded through himself. The Quraysh decided the House had to be torn down and rebuilt.
But they had no fine wood or marble; they lived in a desert. And here, Sheikh Yasir marvels, is the planning of Allah. The emperor of Rome had sent the finest materials and a skilled craftsman by ship to rebuild a church in Yemen that the Persians had destroyed. Allah sent a wind that wrecked the ship off the coast of Jeddah, and its cargo, the choicest marble and timber, washed up there for sale, the craftsman with it. The Quraysh pooled their wealth, bought it all, and brought to Makkah materials and a builder more skilled than any in Arabia, all financed, unknowingly, by the most powerful man on earth.
Even tearing the old House down terrified them; this was the House of Allah, and no one dared lift the first axe. By one report of Ibn Ishaq, a great snake that had lived in the well had to be carried off by a bird before they would approach. Finally al-Walid ibn al-Mughira, the very nobleman of whom Allah would later say, leave Me with the one I created alone, took up the axe, saying to Allah that he meant only to help. They left him to it as a test, agreeing that if he survived the night they would join him. He woke unharmed, and so the whole Quraysh fell to the work, dividing the walls among their tribes.
The stone no one could lift alone
When they reached the corner of the Black Stone, the work stopped. The stone belonged to no single wall, and the proud tribes each demanded the honor of setting it back. Banu Abd Manaf, his own clan's branch, and Banu Makhzum, the rivals, dug in hardest, and the others refused to be passed over. The dispute grew so heated that building halted for days. Some tribes dipped their hands in blood and swore a pact to fight to the death over it. A city was on the edge of war over a stone.
Then the oldest man among them proposed a way out: let the first person to walk in through the gate decide. Each tribe, of course, was certain the stranger would favor them. And the one who walked in was him ﷺ. Sheikh Yasir lingers on the wonder of what happened next: every tribe rejoiced. Not just his own; all of them. Even Banu Makhzum, even the rivals, were glad, because each one felt this was a man who loved them and would surely choose their side. That is the measure of how he was loved before he was ever a prophet.
But he chose no tribe. He called for a cloak, laid the Black Stone in its center, and told the chieftains of every clan to take hold of its edges and lift together. They raised it as one, and when it reached the height of the wall, he ﷺ set it in place with his own hands. No one was honored above another, and no blood was shed. The Sheikh draws the same thread that ran through the whole evening: this man, decades before revelation, was already the one everyone trusted, already the one who turned rivals into a single pair of hands. The changes the Quraysh made that day, the raised door, the shortened wall that left out the Hijr, stand at the Ka'bah to this very day.