Mahomet - Founder of Islam | Page 8

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