The chapter
Musa grew, and his strength brought catastrophe before it brought deliverance. Intervening in a street fight, he struck the Egyptian oppressor, one blow, and the man died. Musa's instant reaction defined him: "This is of the work of Shaytan… My Lord, I have wronged myself, so forgive me, and He forgave him." The next dawn brought a warning from the far side of the city: the elite were conspiring to kill him. "So he left it, fearful and vigilant. He said: My Lord, deliver me from the wrongdoing people."
He walked out of Egypt with nothing, no provisions, no tribe, no plan, toward Madyan, saying only: "Perhaps my Lord will guide me to the sound way." At the water of Madyan he found the classic scene of the strong and the weak: shepherds crowding the well, and two young women holding their flock back, unable to compete. He asked, understood, watered their animals for them, and then, exhausted and destitute, retreated to the shade with a du'a that scholars call the most dignified request for help in the Qur'an: "My Lord, I am, for whatever good You send down to me, in need." He did not even name a request. He described his poverty to the Rich and left the specification to Him.
The answer arrived on foot, "walking with shyness": one of the two women, sent by her father to invite him. And in that household the Qur'an sets down its employment law in one verse. The daughter said: "O my father, hire him, indeed the best you can hire is the strong and the trustworthy." Al-qawiyy al-amin: capability and integrity, the two words that fit a man for any trust, from shepherd to caliph.
The elder of Madyan, often identified in tafsir with Shu'ayb, though the Qur'an leaves him unnamed, offered marriage to one of his daughters against eight years of work, "and if you complete ten, that is from you." Musa completed the fullest term. The fugitive prince became a shepherd: a decade of flocks, silence, and open sky, the training Allah gave, the tradition notes, to every prophet before the staff in his hand was asked to do something impossible.