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The life of the Prophet Muhammad (1/11): the Hashemite lineage

By Michel Abdallah Grimbert · May 31, 2021 · 5 min read

Part 1 of 11 · La vie du Prophète

Contents
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The essential purpose of this essay is to provide a biography of the Prophet of Islam allowing each reader, from the divinely disposed unfolding of the events of his life, to root in his heart the light of certainty that he was the Messenger sent by God and the excellent model, the guidance he embodied, with a view to our own edification1. This luminous life is self-sufficient, as everyone will be able to appreciate, in all truth.

The Prophet’s Hashemite lineage

During the period preceding Islam, called al-jahiliyya, meaning ‘ignorance’, the Arabian peninsula, where the starry sky merges with the earthly oases, was for the most part2 abandoned to anarchy and disorder, at the mercy of human passions alone. At that time each group, clan or tribe had its gods, which it worshipped in the form of idols carved in stone. The tribes of the peninsula were continually at war to seize women, livestock and other spoils; and society was dominated by an aristocracy of wealthy merchants, essentially the Qurayshites settled at Mecca, an ancient centre of pilgrimage where the caravans in transit would converge on those occasions. The sacred Text states this situation very clearly in the following verses: (Qur’an V, 50) ‘Do they seek the judgement of the Days of Ignorance? Who is a better judge than Allah for a people possessed of certainty?’ And: (XLVIII, 26) ‘When the unbelievers had put in their hearts the fury of ignorance, God sent down His sakina upon His Prophet and the believers.’

Hashim, the eponymous ancestor of the Hashemite line still present in the present-day kingdom of Jordan, whose name means ‘the breaker of bread’, owes that name to an act of bravery on his part aimed at feeding the famished population of Mecca3. The Prophet’s great-grandfather was known for his charisma, his generosity and his moral elevation. He saw to it that all the caravans coming from the neighbouring empires (Persia, Turkey, Yemen, Syria, Byzantium, Ethiopia) could travel through Arabia in safety. From then on, in the eyes of the Meccans, the direct descendants of Hashim, among them ’Abd al-Muttalib, Muhammad’s grandfather, acquired sympathy and respectability, and were invested with prestigious priestly functions. Thus ’Abd al-Muttalib held the office of steward of the sacred temple: the Ka’ba, bearer of the Black Stone descended from Paradise, which according to the tradition goes back to Adam, the first place he occupied on earth after his ‘Fall’ and where he was reunited with Eve; and which was restored by Abraham and his son Ishmael, the ancestor of the prophetic line proper to the Arabs.

Not far from the Ka’ba lies another of God’s gifts: the miraculous well of Zamzam, which appeared to quench the thirst of Ishmael and his mother Hajar4 as they ran between Safa and Marwa5 in the desert, and which had silted up over time. An angel then came to visit ‘Abd al-Muttalib and commanded him to unearth the dried-up spring, which in the end gushed forth again, to the pilgrims’ delight, to this day. ’Abd al-Muttalib was then entrusted with its use on behalf of the pilgrims. So that the prophetic line that rested upon him might continue, ’Abd al-Muttalib, on the recommendation of a soothsayer versed in the ancient Scriptures, concluded for his favourite son ’Abd Allah a marriage with Amina, the Prophet’s future mother. On that wedding day, ’Abd Allah, the Prophet’s father, had, according to the testimony of Qutayla6, sister of the renowned hanif Waraqa, a forehead haloed with a radiant light which, once the marriage was consummated, had disappeared to pass into Amina’s womb. Soon afterwards, before the Prophet was even born, ’Abd Allah was carried off, on his return from a journey, by a sudden illness, leaving his son fatherless.

Of her son’s birth, Amina used to say: ‘While I was carrying the Messenger of Allah, I felt no discomfort until the moment I gave birth to him. As soon as he left my womb, he gave out a light that illumined everything between East and West… My son was born pure and spotless like a lamb, circumcised, his umbilical cord already cut by the archangel Gabriel.’

By Michel Abdallah Grimbert, disciple of the tariqa Qadiriya Boutchichiya.

Martin Lings’s book ‘The Prophet Muhammad’

Further reading

Footnotes

  1. In this work we have followed the plan of Zidane Meriboute’s book, based on Ibn Sa’d’s recension: Une nouvelle vie du Prophète Muhammad, ed. Erick Bonnier; supplemented by the works of Étienne Dinet and El Hadj Slimane ben Ibrahim, Muhammad Hamidullah, Mohammed el-Khudhary and Martin Lings. The translation of the sacred Text chosen is that of Denise Masson: Le Coran, ed. Gallimard, supplemented by those of Jacques Berque and Muhammad Hamidullah. ↩

  2. Yet believers turned towards God the One were not entirely absent from Arabia before the appearance of Islam. Arab Christian communities were present notably at the oasis of Najran, Jewish tribes at Yathrib, and there were also Arabs called hunafa’ (sing. hanif) who, individually, had preserved the monotheism bequeathed by Abraham. The Arabs were awaiting their Revelation, and questioning that bottomless sky at the measure of their hope. ↩

  3. During a period of famine, he had in fact gone as far as Syria to fetch baked bread so that the people of Mecca could eat, then sacrificed his camels to the same end. This act of bravery made him, from then on, the true hero of Mecca. ↩

  4. After the birth of Isaac, born of Sarah, she, jealous, obliged Abraham to drive Hajar and her son out into the desert. ↩

  5. Qur’an II, 158: ‘As-Safa and al-Marwa truly count among the sacred things of God.’ ↩

  6. Besides Qutayla, many women, such as Amina, the Prophet’s mother, or Khadija his wife, saw, well before the men, that prophetic light which Muhammad bore. ↩

Further reading