An ʿAbd and a Messenger, the simple life of the Prophet ﷺ

Shaykh Yasir Qadhi explains:

To understand the marital episode of this lecture we first have to picture the life the Prophet ﷺ actually lived, because everything turns on it. From his birth to his death he never once knew luxury, never. He was born an orphan; his father had died before he was even born and left him nothing. His very first job, he tells us himself, was herding sheep for qarārīṭ (قَرَارِيط), pennies. Imagine it: a whole day's labour in the sun, and at the end of it a dime, a quarter. That was the wage of the Prophet ﷺ. He grew up in the cramped house of Abū Ṭālib (أَبُو طَالِب) among a crowd of other children, and it was only with his marriage to Khadījah (خَدِيجَة) that he had, for the first time, a household of his own.

❧No camel until the Hijrah

Even then there was no wealth to speak of. He owned no riding animal at all until the Hijrah, he could neither afford one nor had any need of one. The tide turned only slowly, and when it turned it was the Ummah that rose, not him. At Badr the ransom of some seventy captives each brought in thousands of silver coins, and after the Conquest the wealth kept coming. The first truly great break was Khaybar in the seventh year, when its fields were handed over, and the plantations of Fadak (فَدَك), a sister town to Khaybar, were gifted to him personally. Fadak became his family's main source of food, his own private property. And the single largest windfall the early Ummah ever received was Ḥunayn.

❧He kept none of it

And how much of Ḥunayn did he keep for himself? Not one coin. Even though the Sharīʿah grants the legitimate leader, the Khalīfah, a right to the khums (خُمُس), the one-fifth, and even though he ﷺ already had a share appointed by Allāh Himself, he gave the whole of it away. That he lived this way by deliberate choice, and not merely by circumstance, is authentically narrated in the Musnad of Imam Aḥmad, and you should know this ḥadīth by heart. He was sitting with Jibrīl (جِبْرِيل) when another angel descended from the heavens, and Jibrīl told him this angel had never once come down since the beginning of creation until this very moment, he had left his station purely to meet him ﷺ.

❧King-prophet, or slave-messenger

The angel said, "O Muḥammad, your Lord sends me to let you choose: do you wish to be a malikan nabiyyan (مَلِكًا نَبِيًّا), a king who is a prophet, or an ʿabdan rasūlan (عَبْدًا رَسُولًا), a slave who is a messenger?" Look at the beauty of it: the highest rank a person can hold in this world is a king, and the lowest is a slave. He could rise to kingship and carry the rank of Prophet, but a nabī is below a rasūl. Or he could lower himself to be a slave and carry the higher rank of Messenger. Jibrīl ʿalayhi al-salām motioned to him to go low, to humble himself, in one wording, "humble yourself before Allāh", and he said, "I choose to be a slave and a messenger, ʿabdan rasūlan." A slave owns nothing in the sight of his Lord; he chose to be the lowest of the low before Allāh in order to be His Messenger. And the narrator adds that from that day he was never again seen even to eat while leaning back against a wall, the simplest sign of ease, the way any of us settles in to enjoy a meal, gone from his life entirely.

❧"These mountains would turn to gold"

There is a second, slightly weaker narration that carries the same choice with an extra image, which the shaykh mentions for its detail. He is telling ʿĀʾishah about it: "O ʿĀʾishah, had I wished it, these mountains would have been turned to gold and would have walked with me. An angel came to me whose belt-clasp", the fastener they would tie their izār (إِزَار) with, "was larger than the Kaʿbah itself; that is how vast he was. And he asked me whether I would be a prophet-king or a slave-messenger, and I chose to be a slave and a messenger." This was his lifestyle, and it is the frame for everything that follows.