By Allah, we did not sleep a single moment the whole night through because our child wept so bitterly from hunger—my breast held nothing that could satisfy him … and our she-camel’s udder contained nothing with which to nourish him … Indeed, the wretched state and weakness of our donkey (1) caused us to lag behind the caravan, so our fellow travelers grew impatient with us, and the journey became hard on them because of us.

When we reached Mecca and began looking for infants to nurse, I was confronted with something entirely unexpected: every woman in our company had the infant boy Muhammad, son of ʿAbd Allah, offered to her … yet we all declined because he was an orphan, saying, “How could the mother of a child who has no father benefit us? … And what, after all, could his grandfather do for us? …”

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Not even two days had passed before I obtained