The Keeper of the Keys 33century, Muhammad was a twenty-five-year-old man, still unmarried,
with no capital and no business of his own, who relied entirely on his
uncle’s generosity for his employment and his housing. In fact, his
prospects were so depressingly low that when he asked for the hand of
his uncle’s daughter, Umm Hani, she rejected him outright for a more
prosperous suitor.
Things changed for Muhammad when he attracted the attention
of a remarkable forty-year-old widow named Khadija. Khadija is an
enigma: a wealthy and respected female merchant in a society that
treated women as chattel and prohibited them from inheriting the
property of their husbands, Khadija had somehow managed to be-
come one of the most respected members of Meccan society. She
owned a thriving caravan business and, though advanced in age and
with children of her own, was pursued by many men, most of whom
would have loved to get their hands on her money.
According to Ibn Hisham, Khadija first met Muhammad when
she hired him to lead one of her caravans. She had heard of his “truth-
fulness, reliability, and nobility of character,” and decided to entrust
him with a special expedition to Syria. Muhammad did not disappoint
her. He returned from the trip with almost double the profits Khadija
had expected, and she rewarded him with a proposal of marriage.
Muhammad gratefully accepted.
His marriage to Khadija paved the way for Muhammad’s accep-
tance at the highest levels of Meccan society and thoroughly initiated
him into the religio-economic system of the city. By all accounts he
was extremely successful in running his wife’s business, rising in status
and wealth until he was, while not part of the ruling élite, a member of
what may be considered anachronistically “the middle class.” He even
owned his own slave.
Yet despite his success, Muhammad felt deeply conflicted by his
dual status in Meccan society. On the one hand, he was renowned for
his generosity and the evenhandedness with which he conducted his
business. Although now a well-respected and relatively affluent mer-
chant, he frequently went on solitary retreats of “self-justification”
(the pagan practice of tahannuth mentioned in the previous chapter) in
the mountains and glens surrounding the Meccan Valley, and he regu-
larly gave money and food to the poor in a religious charity ritual tied