16 In tIN Footsttpi of 1m ProphetThe Orphan and His Educator
Muhammad's story is a difficult one, as is emphasized by the repetition in
thesE' vl"r~e~ from the Quran: "So \'crily, with every difficulty th ere is relie£
Verily, with every difficulty there is re1icf."Zl AI the age o f eight, young
Muhammad had experienced fatherlcssness, poverty, so lirude, and the
death of his mother and then of his gra ndfather. Yet all along his path he
continually encountered signs of a destiny that, through peo ple and cir-
cumstances, accompanied and facilitated his evolution and education. On
his deathbed, Abd al-l\Iuttalib asked his son Abu Talib, Muhammad's
uncle, to loo k after him; Abu Talib carried out this mission as a father
would h ave d o ne for his own child. Later, the Pro phet constantly recalled
how much his uncle and his uncle's wife, Fatinah, had loved and taken
care of him. "Verily, with every difficulty there is relief."
T hroughout th e hardships of his life, Muhammad of course remained
under the protection of the One, his IVJbb, his Educator. In Mecca, tradi-
tion reports that he was persistently protected (rom idol worship and th e
festivals, feasts, or weddings where drunkenness and lack of restraint pre-
vailed. One evening, he heard that a wedd ing was to be celebrated in
r ... 1ecca and he wanted to attend. On th e way there, he reported, he sud-
denly felt tired; he lay down to rest and fell a:.leep. The next morning, the
heat of the sun woke him from his deep slumber. This seemingly trivial
srory is nevertheless mOSt revealing as to the methods used by the
Prophet's Educator to prevent His future i\1ess:nger from being tempted
into lack of restraint and drunkenness. The One, always present at his
side, literally put him to sleep, thus protecting him from his own instincts
and not allowing Hi s protege's heart ta develop a sense of wrongdoing,
guilt, or any such moral torment as a result of 2n attraction that was, after
aU, natural for a boy his age. While gentleness and diversion were us ed to
protect him, those events-which the Pro phet was later to mention-
g radually built in him a moral sense shaped through the understanding of
those signs and of what they pro tected him from. T his natural initiation
into morals, remote from any o bsession with sin and fostering of guilt,
greatly influe nced the kind of education the Prophet was to impan to his
Companions. \'I/ith a teaching method relying on gentleness, on the com -
mon sense of individuals, and on their understanding o f commands, the
Prophet also strO\'e to teach them how to put their instincts to sleep, so