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They laid him on the ground, and Gabriel, one of the two angels, opened up the boy’s heart. He cleansed it from impurity; wrung from it those black and bitter drops of the sin that we inherited from our forefather Adam, and which lurk in the hearts of the best of his descendents, inciting them to the commission of sin. When infant Muhammad had been thoroughly purified, Gabriel filled his heart with faith, knowledge and prophetic light, and then he replaced it in his bosom.
During this angelic visitation, Haleema told her listeners, the angels also impressed between Muhammad’s shoulders the seal of prophecy. To prove her claim, she used to make Muhammad bare his body so that those people who doubted her sanity could see with their own eyes the mark that existed between his shoulders.
Haleema had to resort to this cunning tactic in order to hide a serious problem: The child that was born to Amina had no mark at the back of his body; whereas Masroud had a distinctive birth mark between his shoulders. Now, if Haleema had not invented the story of the angels who, she had to claim, impressed Muhammad’s body with “the seal of prophecy,” her entire scheme would have been jeopardized, and her desire to plant her son in Amina’s house, frustrated.
The ground thus prepared for his return to his mother, Haleema carried Muhammad to Mecca and sought to deposit him on Amina’s lap. Seeing her reluctance, Haleema narrated to her all that that had happened to Muhammad, and also the affixation of the seal of prophecy by the angels on his back. Considerably mellowed down by Haleema’s account of the child’s supernatural expositions, Amina took her son back.
Haleema returned to her home in the desert, with the satisfaction that she succeeded in placing her son in a Meccan home where he would grow into a man and then find for himself a place to lead a life, filled with relative abundance and peace.
Muhammad remained with Amina until his sixth year, missing intermittently Haleema, his biological mother. He played with the local children; joined them in their merrymaking games; watched pilgrims praying at the temple of Ka’aba and welcomed and said goodbyes to the caravans that halted at the city before departing for their trading destinations. All the activities of the city fascinated him, for he found them to be quite different from the ones he saw and grew up with in the land of his birth.
Despite the antagonism that Amina harbored against him following his birth, she treated him fairly well after his return from desert. She fed him to the best of her ability; clothed him to the extent it was necessary and took care of his well being as well. She also took him around in the city and introduced him to his near as well as distant relatives.
After a few months of his return to Mecca, Amina took Muhammad to Medina and introduced him to her maternal relatives there. On her journey homeward, she died and was buried at Abwa, a village that lied between Medina and Mecca. Barakat, the slave-girl, now acted as a mother to the orphaned child and delivered him to his grandfather Abd al Mutallib in whose household he was destined to spend three years of his life.