The Monk Bahira

When the Prophet ﷺ was a boy of about nine to twelve, his uncle Abu Talib prepared to set out with the trading caravan to Syria. As he was leaving, the boy clung to him and said, "To whom are you leaving me? I have neither father nor mother." Abu Talib wept out of compassion and took his nephew along, though that had not been his plan.

Near Busra in Syria they passed the cell of a Christian monk named Baḥīrā, who had never before paid the caravans any heed; but this time he came out, invited them, and singled out the boy. He said he had seen the trees and the stones incline toward him, and a cloud shading him wherever he went, signs, he said, of a coming Prophet foretold in the scriptures. He questioned the boy, then asked, "Who is his father?" Abu Talib answered, "I am his father." "No," said the monk, "this boy's father should not be living, that is one of his signs." So Abu Talib said, "He is my nephew; his father died while his mother still carried him." "That is the truth," said the monk; and he warned Abu Talib to guard him well, for if the Romans, in another version, the Jews, should learn of him they would seek to kill him, and he urged that the boy be taken home.

So the tale is widely told, yet the careful scholars of the sirah, such as Imam adh-Dhahabī, Ibn Kathīr, and Ibn Sayyid an-Nās, judged it unsound, and adh-Dhahabī held it to be fabricated. Its own chain names Abu Bakr and Bilal as travelling along, yet Abu Bakr was then but a child, too young for such a journey, and Bilal was not yet born, nor would Abu Bakr acquire him until long after Islam. And had a monk truly proclaimed before all that this boy was the awaited Prophet, why did Abu Talib later wonder at his nephew's mission, why did Quraysh deny it, and why was the Prophet ﷺ himself so shaken and uncertain when revelation finally came in the cave of Ḥirāʾ that Khadijah had to take him to Waraqah?

It matters because the Orientalists seized on this story to claim the Prophet ﷺ learned of the earlier prophets from the monk, an absurd charge, for there were no scriptures, scholars, or schools of the Jews and Christians in Mecca, and the Qurʾan answers it directly:

وَمَا كُنتَ تَتْلُو مِن قَبْلِهِ مِن كِتَابٍ وَلَا تَخُطُّهُ بِيَمِينِكَ

"You did not recite any scripture before it, nor write it with your right hand" (al-ʿAnkabūt 29:48). And of the histories he would recite, Allah said:

تِلْكَ مِنْ أَنبَاءِ ٱلْغَيْبِ نُوحِيهَا إِلَيْكَ مَا كُنتَ تَعْلَمُهَا أَنتَ وَلَا قَوْمُكَ مِن قَبْلِ هَٰذَا

"That is from the news of the unseen which We reveal to you; you knew it not, neither you nor your people, before this" (Hūd 11:49). His knowledge came from revelation alone, not from a monk by the road.