The Splitting of the Chest

It was during his years among the Banū Saʿd, when the Prophet ﷺ was about four years old, that his chest was opened. Anas ibn Mālik narrates the account, recorded in Ṣaḥīḥ Muslim: Jibril came to the Prophet ﷺ while he was playing with the other children. The others fled in fear, but the boy stood his ground. Jibril took hold of him, threw him down gently, opened his chest (شَقَّ صَدْرَهُ), and drew out his heart. From it he removed a black clot and cast it away, saying:

هَٰذَا حَظُّ ٱلشَّيْطَانِ مِنْكَ

"This is the portion of Shaytan in you." Then he washed the heart in a golden basin with the water of Zamzam, returned it to its place, and sealed the chest.

The Prophet ﷺ taught that Shaytan touches every child at its birth, and that to each person is assigned a qarīn (قَرِين), a constant companion who whispers evil. Even the Prophet ﷺ had one, except that, he said, "Allah aided me against him, so that he submitted, and now he enjoins upon me only good." This opening of the chest severed whatever portion Shaytan had held.

The other children ran back to Ḥalīmah crying that the boy had been killed; they found him alive, but pale with the traces of what had passed. Anas said he could still see the line of the seam upon the Prophet's ﷺ chest even when the Prophet ﷺ was an old man. Allah could have healed it without a trace, but He left the mark so that the Companions would know that something real had taken place.

This was a cleansing in preparation for prophethood, for the Prophets are protected (maʿṣūm) from major sin, and Allah refers to it in the Qurʾan:

أَلَمْ نَشْرَحْ لَكَ صَدْرَكَ

"Did We not expand for you your breast?" (ash-Sharḥ 94:1). The same opening would come once more, almost fifty years later, on the night of the Isrāʾ and Miʿrāj, but then there was no black clot to remove, for it had already been taken when he was four. It was this frightening event that decided Ḥalīmah to return the boy to his mother, Aminah.