A Woman Negotiates for Her Well

So these two men went and came back and reported to their clan, and told them that there was a well in that area. So now Jurhum went to the place where Zamzam was located, and they asked Hājar (peace be upon her) a strange question, and got a stranger answer. They told Hājar: "Can we settle in this place?" Now, the reason this question is strange is that this was a tribe of warriors, and here they are asking permission from a lonely woman with her child. If they wanted, they could have just pushed her away. But they were kind enough to ask her permission to stay there, even though it was an empty place, with nobody living there to start with.

And her answer was even more amazing, because she started to bargain and negotiate with them. Here you have a woman who's alone, with no power and no strength, no weapons, no army to help her, and she's negotiating and bargaining with them, telling them: "If you want to stay, I have a condition, and that is that the water belongs to us. You can stay here, but the water is mine. The well belongs to me." They agreed. The Messenger of Allah (peace be upon him) says that deep in her heart, she wanted them to stay from the beginning, because she wanted to have some company — but she was just negotiating with them to get a better deal. And she did, and they ended up settling in that area, which later became known as Makkah.

Ismāʿīl (peace be upon him) grew up with them, and he adopted their language. He learned their language — what was the language? Arabic. Because Ibrāhīm's (peace be upon him) language — what was the language of Ibrāhīm? Aramaic, from Iraq. Ibrāhīm (peace be upon him) was from Iraq, and they used to speak a different language there at the time. So Ismāʿīl (peace be upon him) was brought up by this Arab tribe, and he adopted their language, and he married a woman from among them. So this is the beginning of the lineage of the Messenger of Allah (peace be upon him) through Ismāʿīl (peace be upon him), in Makkah.