Читать книгу Muhammad: Prophet for Our Time - Karen Armstrong - Страница 7

AFTERWARDS HE FOUND IT almost impossible to describe the experience that sent him running in anguish down the rocky hillside to his wife. It seemed to him that a devastating presence had burst into the cave where he was sleeping and gripped him in an overpowering embrace, squeezing all the breath from his body. In his terror, Muhammad could only think that he was being attacked by a jinni, one of the fiery spirits who haunted the Arabian steppes and frequently lured travellers from the right path. The jinn also inspired the bards and soothsayers of Arabia. One poet described his poetic vocation as a violent assault: his personal jinni had appeared to him without any warning, thrown him to the ground and forced the verses from his mouth.¹ So, when Muhammad heard the curt command “Recite!” he immediately assumed that he too had become possessed. “I am no poet,” he pleaded. But his assailant simply crushed him again, until—just when he thought he could bear it no more—he heard the first words of a new Arabic scripture pouring, as if unbidden, from his lips.

He had this vision during the month of Ramadan, 610 CE. Later Muhammad would call it layla al-qadr (the “Night of Destiny”) because it had made him the messenger of Allah, the high god of Arabia. But at the time, he did not understand what was happening. He was forty years old, a family man, and a respected merchant in Mecca, a thriving commercial city in the Hijaz. Like most Arabs of the time, he was familiar with the stories of Noah, Lot, Abraham, Moses, and Jesus and knew that some people expected the imminent arrival of an Arab prophet, but it never occurred to him that he would be entrusted with this mission. Indeed, when he escaped from the cave and ran headlong down the slopes of Mount Hira’, he was filled with despair. How could Allah have allowed him to become possessed? The jinn were capricious; they were notoriously unreliable because they delighted in leading people astray. The situation in Mecca was serious. His tribe did not need the dangerous guidance of a jinni. They needed the direct intervention of Allah, who had always been a distant figure in the past, and who, many believed, was identical with the God worshipped by Jews and Christians.*

Mecca had achieved astonishing success. The city was now an international trading center and its merchants and financiers had become rich beyond their wildest dreams. Only a few generations earlier, their ancestors had been living a desperate, penurious life in the intractable deserts of northern Arabia. Their triumph was extraordinary, since most Arabs were not city dwellers but nomads. The terrain was so barren that people could only survive there by roaming ceaselessly from place to place in search of water and grazing land. There were a few agricultural colonies on the higher ground, such as Ta’if, which supplied Mecca with most of its food, and Yathrib, some 250 miles to the north. But elsewhere farming—and, therefore, settled life—was impossible in the steppes, so the nomads scratched out a meagre existence by herding sheep and goats, and breeding horses and camels, living in close-knit tribal groups. Nomadic (badawah) life was a grim, relentless struggle, because there were too many people competing for too few resources. Always hungry, perpetually on the brink of starvation, the Bedouin fought endless battles with other tribes for water, pastureland, and grazing rights.

Consequently the ghazu (acquisition raid) was essential to the badawah economy. In times of scarcity, tribesmen would regularly invade the territory of their neighbors in the hope of carrying off camels, cattle, or slaves, taking great care to avoid killing anybody, since this could lead to a vendetta. Nobody considered this in any way reprehensible. The ghazu was an accepted fact of life; it was not inspired by political or personal hatred, but was a kind of national sport, conducted with skill and panache according to clearly defined rules. It was a necessity, a rough-and-ready way of redistributing wealth in a region where there was simply not enough to go around.

Even though the people of Mecca had left the nomadic life behind, they still regarded the Bedouin as the guardians of authentic Arab culture. As a child, Muhammad had been sent to live in the desert with the tribe of his wet nurse in order to be educated in the badawah ethos. It made a profound impression on him. The Bedouin were not very interested in conventional religion. They had no hope of an afterlife and little confidence in their gods, who seemed unable to make any impact on their difficult environment. The tribe, not a deity, was the supreme value, and each member had to subordinate his or her personal needs and desires to the well-being of the group, and fight to the death, if necessary, to ensure its survival. Arabs had little time for speculation about the supernatural but were focused on this world. Fantasy was useless in the steppes; they needed pragmatic, sober realism. But they had evolved a chivalric code, which, by giving meaning to their lives and preventing them from succumbing to despair in these harsh conditions, performed the essential function of religion. They called it muruwah, a complex term that is difficult to translate succinctly. Muruwah meant courage, patience, endurance; it consisted of a dedicated determination to avenge any wrong done to the group, to protect its weaker members, and defy its enemies. To preserve the honor of the tribe, each member had to be ready to leap to the defense of his kinsmen at a moment’s notice and to obey his chief without question.

Above all, a tribesman had to be generous and share his livestock and food. Life in the steppes would be impossible if people selfishly hoarded their wealth while others went hungry. A tribe that was rich today could easily become destitute tomorrow. If you had been miserly in good days, who would help you in your hour of need? Muruwah made a virtue out of this necessity, encouraging the karim (the “generous hero”) to care little for material goods so that he would not become depressed by his life of deprivation. A truly noble Bedouin would take no heed for the morrow, showing by his lavish gifts and hospitality that he valued his fellow tribesmen more than his possessions. He had to be prepared to give all his wealth—his camels, flocks, and slaves—to others, and could squander his entire fortune in a single night by putting on a superb feast for his friends and allies. But the generosity of the karim could be self-destructive and egotistic: He could reduce his family to poverty overnight, simply to demonstrate the nobility that flowed in his veins and enhance his status and reputation.

Muruwah was an inspiring ideal, but by the end of the sixth century, its weaknesses were becoming tragically apparent. Tribal solidarity (‘asibiyyah) encouraged bravery and selflessness, but only within the context of the tribe. There was no concept of universal human rights. A Bedouin felt responsible merely for his blood relatives and confederates. He had no concern for outsiders, whom he regarded as worthless and expendable. If he had to kill them to benefit his own people, he felt no moral anguish and wasted no time in philosophical abstractions or ethical considerations. Since the tribe was the most sacred value, he backed it, right or wrong. “I am of Ghazziyya,” sang one of the poets. “If she be in error, I will be in error; and if Ghazziyya be guided right, I will go with her.”² Or, in the words of a popular maxim: “Help your brother whether he is being wronged or wronging others.”³

Each tribe had its own special brand of muruwah, which, the Arabs believed, had been inherited from the founding fathers of the tribe and was passed, like other physical and mental characteristics, from one generation to another. They called this tribal glory hasab (“ancestral honor”).⁴ As the source of their particular genius, tribesmen revered their forefathers as the supreme authority and this inevitably encouraged a deep and entrenched conservatism. The way of life (sunnah) that the ancients had bequeathed to their descendants was sacred and inviolable. “He belongs to a tribe whose fathers have laid down for them a sunnah,” another poet explained, “Every folk has its own traditional sunnah; every folk has its objects of imitation.”⁵ Any deviation—however trivial—from ancestral custom was a great evil. A practice was approved not because of its inherent decency or nobility, but simply because it had been sanctioned long ago by the fathers of the tribe.

The Bedouin could not afford to experiment. It would be criminally irresponsible to ignore the shari’ah, the path to the waterhole that had been the lifeline of your people from time immemorial. You learned to survive by following a set of rules whose value had been proven by experience. But this unquestioning acceptance of tradition could lead to rampant chauvinism: the sunnah of your people was the best and you could contemplate no other way of doing things. You could only preserve the honor of your tribe by refusing to bow to any other authority, human or divine. A karim was expected to be proud, self-regarding, self-reliant, and aggressively independent. Arrogance was not a fault but a sign of nobility, whereas humility showed that you came from defective stock and had no aristocratic blood in your veins. A base-born person was genetically destined to be a slave (‘abd); that was all he was good for. A true karim could not submit to anybody at all. “We refuse to all men submission to their leading,” sang one poet, “till we lead them ourselves, yea without reins!”⁶ A karim would maintain this defiant self-sufficiency even in the presence of a god, because no deity could be superior to a truly noble human being.

In the steppes, the tribe needed men who refused to be bowed by circumstance and who had the confidence to pit themselves against overwhelming odds. But this haughty self-reliance (istighna’) could easily become reckless and excessive. The Bedouin was easily moved to extremes at the smallest provocation.⁷ Because of his exalted sense of honor, he tended to respond violently to any perceived threat or slight. He did not simply act in self-defense; true courage lay in the preemptive strike. It is not enough for “a warrior, fierce as a lion, to strike back and chastise the enemy who has struck him with a blow,” cried the poet Zuhayr ibn ‘Abi Salma, “he should rather attack first and become an aggressor when no one wrongs him.”⁸ The courage praised by the tribal poets was an irresistible impulse that could not and should not be restrained. If a wrong was done to a single member of his tribe, a karim felt the duty of vengeance as a physical pain and a tormenting thirst.⁹ It was a tragic worldview. The Bedouin tried to glorify their struggle, but their life was grim and there was no hope of anything better. All beings, they believed, came under the sway of dahr (“time” or “fate”), which inflicted all manner of suffering on humanity; a man’s life was determined in advance. All things passed away; even the successful warrior would die and be forgotten. There was an inherent futility in this life of ceaseless struggle. The only remedy against despair was a life of pleasure—especially the oblivion of wine.

In the past, many of the Bedouin had tried to escape from the steppes and build a more secure, settled (hadarah) life, but these attempts were usually frustrated by the scarcity of water and arable land, and the frequency of drought.¹⁰ A tribe could not establish a viable settlement unless it had either accumulated a surplus of wealth—an almost impossible feat—or took over an oasis, as the tribe of Thaqif had done in Ta’if. The other alternative was to become an intermediary between two or more of the rich civilizations in the region. The tribe of Ghassan, for example, which wintered on the border of the Byzantine empire, had become clients of the Greeks, converted to Christianity, and formed a buffer state to defend Byzantium against Persia. But during the sixth century, a new opportunity arose as a result of a transport revolution. The Bedouin had invented a saddle that enabled camels to carry far heavier loads than before, and merchants from India, East Africa, Yemen, and Bahrain began to replace their donkey carts with camels, which could survive for days without water and were ideally suited to navigate the desert. So instead of avoiding Arabia, foreign merchants trading in luxury goods—incense, spices, ivory, cereals, pearls, wood, fabrics, and medicines—began to take their caravans by the more direct route to Byzantium and Syria through the steppes, and employed the Bedouin to guard their merchandise, drive the camels, and guide them from one well to another.

Mecca became a station for these northbound caravans. It was conveniently located in the center of the Hijaz, and even though it was built on solid rock, which made agriculture impossible there, settlement was feasible because of an underground water source that the Arabs called Zamzam. The discovery of this seemingly miraculous spring in such an arid region had probably made the site holy to the Bedouin long before the development of a city in Mecca. It attracted pilgrims from all over Arabia, and the Kabah, a cube-shaped granite building of considerable antiquity, may originally have housed the sacred utensils of the Zamzam cult. During the fifth and sixth centuries, the spring and the sanctuary (haram) were controlled by a succession of different nomadic tribes: Jurham, Khuza’ah, and finally in the early sixth century by the Quraysh, Muhammad’s tribe, who drove out their predecessors and were the first to construct permanent buildings around the Kabah.

The founding father of the Quraysh was Qusayy ibn Kilab, who had brought together a number of previously warring clans that were loosely related by blood and marriage and formed this new tribe, just as Mecca was becoming a popular center for long-distance trade. The name “Quraysh” may have been derived from taqarrush (“accumulation” or “gaining”).¹¹ Unlike the Jurham and Khuza’ah, who had not been able to abandon badawah, they acquired a capital surplus that made a settled lifestyle possible. First they managed to secure a monopoly of the north-south trade, so that they alone were allowed to service the foreign caravans. They were also able to control the mercantile activity within Arabia that had been stimulated by the influx of international commerce. During the first part of the sixth century, Bedouin tribes had begun to exchange goods with one another.¹² Merchants congregated in a series of regular markets that were held each year in different parts of Arabia, and were so arranged that traders circled the peninsula in a clockwise direction. The first market (suq) of the year was held in Bahrain, the most densely populated region; the next were held successively in Oman, Hadramat, and Yemen, and the cycle concluded with five consecutive suqs in and around Mecca. The last fair of the year was held in ‘Ukaz immediately before the month of the hajj, the traditional pilgrimage to Mecca and the Kabah.

During the first half of the sixth century, the Quraysh had started to send their own caravans to Syria and Yemen, and gradually they established themselves as independent traders. But despite this success, they knew that they were vulnerable. Because agriculture was impossible in Mecca, they relied entirely on the exchange of commodities, so if the economy failed, they would starve to death. Everybody, therefore, was involved in commerce, as bankers, financiers, or merchants. In the agricultural settlements, the badawah spirit remained virtually intact because it was more compatible with farming, but the Quraysh were forced to cultivate a strictly commercial ethos that took them away from many of the traditional values of muruwah. They had, for example, to become men of peace, because the kind of warfare that was endemic in the steppes would make business impossible. Mecca had to be a place where merchants from any tribe could gather freely without fear of attack. So the Quraysh steadfastly refused on principle to engage in tribal warfare and maintained a position of aloof neutrality. Before their arrival, there had often been bloody battles around Zamzam and the Kabah, as rival tribes tried to gain control of these prestigious sites. Now, with consummate skill, the Quraysh established the Haram, a zone with a twenty-mile radius, with the Kabah at its center, where all violence was forbidden.¹³ They made special agreements with Bedouin tribes, who promised not to attack the caravans during the season of the trade fairs; in return these Bedouin confederates were compensated for the loss of income by being permitted to act as guides and protectors of the merchants.

Trade and religion were thus inextricably combined in Mecca. The pilgrimage to Mecca was the climax of the suq cycle, and the Quraysh reconstructed the cult and architecture of the sanctuary so that it became a spiritual center for all the Arab tribes. Even though the Bedouin were not much interested in the gods, each tribe had its own presiding deity, usually represented by a stone effigy. The Quraysh collected the totems of the tribes that belonged to their confederacy and installed them in the Haram so that the tribesmen could only worship their patronal deities when they visited Mecca. The sanctity of the Kabah was thus essential to the success and survival of the Quraysh, and their competitors understood this. In order to attract pilgrims and business away from the Quraysh, the governor of Abyssinia and Yemen constructed a rival sanctuary in Sana’a. Then, in 547, he led an army to Mecca to prove that the city was not, after all, immune from warfare. But, it was said, his war elephant fell upon its knees when it reached the outskirts of Mecca, and refused to attack the Haram. Impressed by this miracle, the Abyssinians returned home. The Year of the Elephant became a symbol of Mecca’s sacred inviolability.¹⁴

But the cult was not simply an empty, cynical exploitation of piety. The rituals of the hajj also gave the Arab pilgrims a profound experience. As they converged on Mecca at the end of the suq cycle, there was a sense of achievement and excitement. The caravans were checked by the Quraysh, their camels relieved of their burdens, and, after paying a modest fee, the merchants and their servants were free to pay their respects to the Haram. As they made their way through the narrow streets of the suburbs, they uttered ritual cries, announcing their presence to the gods who were awaiting their arrival. After their long trek around the peninsula, this reunion with the sacred symbols of their tribes felt like a homecoming. When they reached the Kabah, surrounded by the 360 tribal totems, they began to perform the traditional rites in Mecca and its environs, which may originally have been devised to bring on the winter rains. They jogged seven times between the hills of Safa and Marwah, to the east of the Kabah; ran in a body to the hollow of Muzdalifah, the home of the thunder god; made an all-night vigil on the plain beside Mount ‘Arafat, sixteen miles outside the city; hurled pebbles at three pillars in the valley of Mina; and finally, at the end of their pilgrimage, sacrificed their most valuable female camels, symbols of their wealth and—hence—of themselves.

The most famous ritual of the hajj was the tawaf, seven circumambulations of the Kabah in a clockwise direction, a stylized reenactment of the circular trade route round Arabia, which gave the Arabs’ mercantile activities a spiritual dimension. The tawaf became a popular devotional exercise, and citizens and their guests would perform it all the year round. The structure of the Haram acquired an archetypal significance, which has been found in the shrines of other cities in the ancient world.¹⁵ The Kabah, with its four corners representing the four cardinal directions, symbolized the world. Embedded in its eastern wall was the Black Stone, a piece of basalt of meteoric origin, which had once fallen brilliantly from the sky, linking heaven and earth. As the pilgrims jogged around the huge granite cube, following the course of the sun around the earth, they put themselves in harmony with the fundamental order of the cosmos. The circle is a common symbol of totality, and the practice of circumambulation, where you constantly come back to your starting point, induces a sense of periodicity and regularity. By circling round and round the Kabah, pilgrims learned to find their true orientation and their interior center; the steady rhythm of the jog gradually emptied their minds of peripheral thoughts and helped them to enter a more meditative state.

The reformed rites made Mecca the center of Arabia. Where other pilgrims had to leave their homelands and journey to remote sites, the Arabs had no need to leave the peninsula, which remained a law unto itself. All this reinforced the centrality of Mecca as the focus of the Arab world.¹⁶ The city was also isolated and this gave the Arabs a rare freedom. Neither Persia nor Byzantium, the great powers of the region, had any interest in the difficult terrain of Arabia, so the Quraysh could create a modern economy without imperial control. The world passed through Mecca, but did not stay long enough to interfere. Arabs were able to develop their own ideology and could interpret the knowledge and expertise of their more sophisticated neighbors as they chose. They were not pressured to convert to an alien religion or conform to official orthodoxy. The closed circle of both the trade cycle and the hajj rituals symbolized their proud self-sufficiency, which, as the years passed, would become a mark of their urban culture.

Their separation from the great powers meant that the Meccan economy was not damaged by their decline in fortune; indeed, the Quraysh were able to profit from it. By 570, the year of Muhammad’s birth, Persia and Byzantium were locked in a debilitating series of wars with one another that would fatally weaken both empires. Syria and Mesopotamia became a battleground, many of the trade routes were abandoned, and Mecca took control of all the intermediary trade between north and south.¹⁷ The Quraysh had become even more powerful, yet some were beginning to feel that they were paying too high a price for their success. As the sixth century drew to a close, the city was in the grip of a spiritual and moral crisis.

The old communal spirit had been torn apart by the market economy, which depended upon ruthless competition, greed, and individual enterprise. Families now vied with one another for wealth and prestige. The less successful clans* felt that they were being pushed to the wall. Instead of sharing their wealth generously, people were hoarding their money and building private fortunes. They not only ignored the plight of the poorer members of the tribe, but exploited the rights of orphans and widows, absorbing their inheritance into their own estates. The prosperous were naturally delighted with their new security; they believed that their wealth had saved them from the destitution and misery of badawah. But those who had fallen behind in the stampede for financial success felt lost and disoriented. The principles of muruwah seemed incompatible with market forces, and many felt thrust into a spiritual limbo. The old ideals had not been replaced by anything of equal value, and the ingrained communal ethos told them that this rampant individualism would damage the tribe, which could only survive if its members pooled all their resources.

Muhammad was born into the clan of Hashim, one of the most distinguished family groups in Mecca. His great-grandfather had been the first merchant to engage in independent trade with Syria and Yemen and the clan had the privilege of providing the pilgrims with water during the hajj, one of the most important offices in the city. But recently, Hashim had fallen on hard times. Muhammad’s father ‘Abdullah died before Muhammad was born and his mother Aminah was in such straitened circumstances that, it was said, the only Bedouin woman who was willing to be his wet nurse came from one of the poorest tribes in Arabia. He lived with her family until he was six years old, and would have experienced nomadic life at its harshest. Shortly after he was brought back to Mecca, his mother died. This double bereavement made a deep impression on Muhammad; as we shall see, he would always be concerned about the plight of orphans.

He was kindly treated by his surviving relatives. First he lived with his grandfather, ‘Abd al-Muttalib, who had been a highly successful merchant in his prime. The old man made quite a favorite of Muhammad. He liked to have his bed carried outside, where he could lie in the shade of the Kabah, surrounded by his sons. Muhammad used to sit beside him, while his grandfather affectionately stroked his back. When he died, however, Muhammad, now eight years old, inherited nothing. His more powerful relatives controlled the estate and Muhammad went to live with his uncle Abu Talib, who was now the sayyid (“chief”) of Hashim and greatly respected in Mecca, even though his business was failing. Abu Talib was very fond of his nephew, and his brothers also helped with Muhammad’s education. Hamzah, the youngest, a man of prodigious strength, instructed Muhammad in the martial arts, making him a skilled archer and competent swordsman. His uncle ‘Abbas, a banker, was able to get Muhammad a job managing the caravans on the northern leg of the journey to Syria.

The young Muhammad was well-liked in Mecca. He was handsome, with a compact, solid body of average height. His hair and beard were thick and curly, and he had a strikingly luminous expression and a smile of enormous charm, which is mentioned in all the sources. He was decisive and wholehearted in everything he did, so intent on the task at hand that he never looked over his shoulder, even if his cloak got caught in a thorny bush. When he did turn to speak to somebody, he used to swing his entire body around and address him full face. When he shook hands, he was never the first to withdraw his own. He inspired such confidence that he was known as al-Amin, the Reliable One. But his orphaned status constantly held him back. He had wanted to marry his cousin Fakhitah, but Abu Talib had to refuse his request for her hand, gently pointing out that Muhammad could not afford to support a wife, and made a more advantageous match for her.

But when Muhammad was about twenty-five years old, his luck suddenly changed. Khadijah bint al-Khuwaylid, a distant relative, asked him to take a caravan into Syria for her. She came from the clan of Asad, which was now far more influential than Hashim, and since her husband had died, she had become a successful merchant. Urban life often gives elite women the opportunity to flourish in business, though women of the lower classes had no status at all in Mecca. Muhammad conducted the expedition so competently that Khadijah was impressed and proposed marriage to him. She needed a new husband and her talented kinsman was a suitable choice: “I like you because of our relationship,” she told him, “and your high reputation among your people, your trustworthiness, good character, and truthfulness.”¹⁸ Some of Muhammad’s critics have sneered at this timely match with the wealthy widow, but this was no marriage of convenience. Muhammad loved Khadijah dearly, and even though polygamy was the norm in Arabia, he never took another, younger wife while she was alive. Khadijah was a remarkable woman, “determined, noble, and intelligent,” says Ibn Ishaq, Muhammad’s first biographer.¹⁹ She was the first to recognize her husband’s genius, and—perhaps because he had lost his mother at such a young age—he depended upon her emotionally and relied on her advice and support. After her death, he used to infuriate some of his later wives by endlessly singing her praises.

Khadijah was probably in her late thirties when she married Muhammad, and bore him at least six children. Their two sons—Al-Qasim and ‘Abdullah—died in infancy, but Muhammad adored his daughters Zaynab, Ruqayyah, Umm Kulthum and Fatimah. It was a happy household, even though Muhammad insisted on giving a high proportion of their income to the poor. He also brought two needy boys into the family. On their wedding day, Khadijah had presented him with a young slave called Zayd ibn alHarith from one of the northern tribes. He became so attached to his new master that when his family came to Mecca with the money to ransom him, Zayd begged to be allowed to remain with Muhammad, who adopted him and gave him his freedom. A few years later, Abu Talib was in such financial trouble that Muhammad took his five-year-old son ‘Ali into his household to ease his burden. He was devoted to both boys and treated them as his own sons.

We know very little about these early years. But from his later career it is clear that he had accurately diagnosed the malaise that was particularly rife among the younger generation, who felt ill at ease in this aggressive market economy. The Quraysh had introduced class distinctions that were quite alien to the muruwah ideal. Almost as soon as they had seized control of Mecca, the wealthier Quraysh had lived beside the Kabah, while the less prosperous inhabited the suburbs and the mountainous region outside the city. They had abandoned the badawah virtue of generosity and become niggardly, except that they called this shrewd business sense. Some no longer succumbed to the old fatalism, because they knew that they had succeeded in turning their fortunes around. They even believed that their wealth could give them some kind of immortality.²⁰ Others took refuge in a life of hedonism, making a religion out of pleasure.²¹ Increasingly, it seemed to Muhammad that the Quraysh had jettisoned the best and retained only the worst aspects of muruwah: the recklessness, arrogance, and egotism that were morally destructive and could bring the city to ruin. He was convinced that social reform must be based on a new spiritual solution, or it would remain superficial. He probably realized, at some deep level, that he had exceptional talent, but what could he do? Nobody would take him seriously, because, despite his marriage to Khadijah, he had no real status in the city.

There was widespread spiritual restlessness. The settled Arabs, who lived in the towns and agricultural communities of the Hijaz, had developed a different kind of religious vision. They were more interested in gods than the Bedouin, but their rudimentary theism had no strong roots in Arabia. Very few mythical stories were told about the various deities. Allah was the most important god, and was revered as the lord of the Kabah, but he was a remote figure and had very little influence on the people’s daily lives. Like the other “high gods” or “sky gods” who were a common feature of ancient religion, he had no developed cult and was never depicted in effigy.²² Everybody knew that Allah had created the world; that he quickened each human embryo in the womb; and that he was the giver of rain. But these remained abstract beliefs. Arabs would sometimes pray to Allah in an emergency, but once the danger had passed they forgot all about him.²³ Indeed, Allah seemed like an irresponsible, absentee father; after he had brought men and women into being, he took no interest in them and abandoned them to their fate.²⁴

The Quraysh also worshipped other gods. There was Hubal, a deity represented by a large, reddish stone which stood inside the Kabah.²⁵ There were three goddesses—Al-Lat, Al-Uzza and Manat—who were often called the “daughters of Allah” (banat Allah) and were very popular in the settled communities. Represented by large standing stones, their shrines in Ta’if, Nakhlah, and Qudhayd were roughly similar to the Meccan Haram. Although they were of lesser rank than Allah, they were often called his “companions” or “partners” and compared to the beautiful cranes (gharaniq) which flew higher than any other bird. Even though they had no shrine in Mecca, the Quraysh loved these goddesses and begged them to mediate on their behalf with the inaccessible Allah. As they jogged around the Kabah, they would often chant this invocation: “Al-Lat, Al-Uzza, and Manat, the third, the other. Indeed these are the exalted gharaniq; let us hope for their intercession.”²⁶

This idol worship was a relatively new religious enthusiasm, which had been imported from Syria by one of the Meccan elders who believed that they could bring rain, but we have no idea why, for example, the goddesses were said to be Allah’s daughters—especially since Arabs regarded the birth of a daughter as a misfortune and often killed female infants at birth. The gods of Arabia gave their worshippers no moral guidance; even though they found the rituals spiritually satisfying, some of the Quraysh were beginning to find these stone effigies inadequate symbols of divinity.²⁷

But what was the alternative? Arabs knew about the monotheistic religions of Judaism and Christianity. Jews had probably lived in Arabia for over a millennium, migrating there after the Babylonian and Roman invasions of Palestine. Jews had been the first to settle in the agricultural colonies of Yathrib and Khaybar in the north; there were Jewish merchants in the towns and Jewish nomads in the steppes. They had retained their religion, formed their own tribes but had intermarried with the local people, and were now practically indistinguishable from Arabs. They spoke Arabic, had Arab names, and organized their society in the same way as their Arab neighbors. Some of the Arabs had become Christians: there were important Christian communities in Yemen and along the frontier with Byzantium. The Meccan merchants had met Christian monks and hermits during their travels, and were familiar with the stories of Jesus and the concepts of Paradise and the Last Judgment. They called Jews and Christians the ahl al-kitab (“the People of the Book”). They admired the notion of a revealed text and wished they had sacred scripture in their own language.

But at this time, Arabs did not see Judaism and Christianity as exclusive traditions that were fundamentally different from their own. Indeed, the term “Jew” or “Christian” usually referred to tribal affiliation rather than to religious orientation.²⁸ These faiths were an accepted part of the spiritual landscape of the peninsula and considered quite compatible with Arab spirituality. Because no imperial power was seeking to impose any form of religious orthodoxy, Arabs felt free to adapt what they understood about these traditions to their own needs. Allah, they believed, was the God worshipped by Jews and Christians, so Christian Arabs made the hajj to the Kabah, the house of Allah, alongside the pagans. It was said that Adam had built the Kabah after his expulsion from Eden and that Noah had rebuilt it after the devastation of the Flood. The Quraysh knew that in the Bible the Arabs were said to be the sons of Ishmael, Abraham’s oldest son, and that God had commanded Abraham to abandon him with his mother Hagar in the wilderness, promising that he would make their descendants a great people.²⁹ Later Abraham had visited Hagar and Ishmael in the desert and had rediscovered the shrine. He and Ishmael had rebuilt it yet again and designed the rites of the hajj.

Everybody knew that Arabs and Jews were kin. As the Jewish historian Josephus (37-c.100 CE) explained, Arabs circumcised their sons at the age of thirteen “because Ishmael, the founder of their nation, who was born to Abraham of the concubine “Hagar”, was circumcised at that age.”³⁰ Arabs did not feel it necessary to convert to Judaism or Christianity, because they believed that they were already members of the Abrahamic family; in fact, the idea of conversion from one faith to another was alien to the Quraysh, whose vision of religion was essentially pluralistic.³¹ Each tribe came to Mecca to worship its own god, which stood in the Haram alongside the house of Allah. Arabs did not understand the idea of a closed system of beliefs, nor would they have seen monotheism as incompatible with polytheism. They regarded Allah, who was surrounded by the ring of idols in the Kabah, as lord of a host of deities, in much the same way as some of the biblical writers saw Yahweh as “surpassing all other gods.”³²

But some of the settled Arabs were becoming dissatisfied with this pagan pluralism, and were attempting to create an indigenous, Arabian monotheism.³³ Shortly before Muhammad received his first revelation, they had seceded from the religious life of the Haram. It was pointless, they told their tribesmen, to run round and round the Black Stone, which could “neither see, nor hear, nor hurt, nor help.” Arabs, they believed, had “corrupted the religion of their father Abraham,” so they were going to seek the hanifiyyah, his “pure religion.”³⁴ This was not an organized sect. These hanifs all despised the worship of the stone effigies and believed that Allah was the only God, but not all interpreted this conviction identically. Some expected that an Arab prophet would come with a divine mission to revive the pristine religion of Abraham; others thought that this was unnecessary: people could return to the hanifiyyah on their own initiative; some preached the resurrection of the dead and the Last Judgment; others converted to Christianity or Judaism as an interim measure, until the din Ibrahim (the religion of Abraham) was properly established.

The hanifs had little impact on their contemporaries, because they were chiefly concerned with their own personal salvation. They had no desire to reform the social or moral life of Arabia, and their theology was essentially negative. Instead of creating something new, they simply withdrew from the mainstream. Indeed the word hanif may derive from the root HNF: “to turn away from.” They had a clearer idea of what they did not want than a positive conception of where they were going. But the movement was a symptom of the spiritual restiveness in Arabia at the beginning of the seventh century, and we know that Muhammad had close links with three of the leading hanifs of Mecca. ‘Ubaydallah ibn Jahsh was his cousin and Waraqah ibn Nawfal was a cousin of Khadijah: both these men became Christians. The nephew of Zayd ibn ‘Amr, who attacked the pagan religion of Mecca so vehemently that he was driven out of the city, became one of Muhammad’s most trusted disciples. It seems, therefore, that Muhammad moved in hanafi circles, and may have shared Zayd’s yearning for divine guidance. One day, before he had been expelled from Mecca, Zayd had stood beside the Kabah inveighing against the corrupt religion of the Haram. But suddenly, he broke off. “Oh Allah!” he cried, “If I knew how you wished to be worshipped, I would so worship you, but I do not know.”³⁵

Muhammad was also seeking a new solution. For some years, accompanied by Khadijah, he had made an annual retreat on Mount Hira’ during the month of Ramadan, distributing alms to the poor who visited him in his mountain cave and performing devotions.³⁶ We know very little about these practices, which were believed by some of the sources to have been inaugurated by Muhammad’s grandfather. They seem to have combined social concern with rituals that may have included deep prostrations before Allah,³⁷ and intensive circumambulation of the Kabah. At this time, Muhammad had also started to have numinous dreams, radiant with hope and promise, that burst upon him “like the dawn of the morning,” a phrase that in Arabic expresses the sudden transformation of the world when the sun breaks through the darkness in these eastern lands where there is no twilight.³⁸

It was while he was making his annual retreat on Mount Hira’ in about the year 610 that he experienced the astonishing and dramatic attack. The words that were squeezed, as if from the depths of his being, went to the root of the problem in Mecca.

Recite in the name of your lord who created—

From an embryo created the human.

Recite your lord is all-giving

Who taught by the pen

Taught the human what he did not know before

The human being is a tyrant

He thinks his possessions make him secure

To your lord is the return of everything

This verse was an extension of the Quraysh’s belief that Allah had created each one of them. It identified the proud self-sufficiency of muruwah as a delusion, because humans are entirely dependent upon God. Finally, Allah insisted that he was not a distant, absent deity but wanted to instruct and guide his creatures, so they must “come near” to him. But instead of approaching God in a spirit of prideful istighna’, they must bow before him like a lowly slave: “Touch your head to the earth!” God commanded³⁹—a posture that would be repugnant to the haughty Quraysh. From the very beginning, Muhammad’s religion was diametrically opposed to some of the essential principles of muruwah.

When Muhammad came to himself, he was so horrified to think, after all his spiritual striving, that he had simply been visited by a jinni that he no longer wanted to live. In despair, he fled from the cave and started to climb to the summit of the mountain to fling himself to his death. But there he had another vision. He saw a mighty being that filled the horizon and stood “gazing at him, moving neither forward nor backward.”⁴⁰ He tried to turn away, but, he said afterwards, “Towards whatever region of the sky I looked, I saw him as before.”⁴¹ It was the spirit (ruh) of revelation, which Muhammad would later call Gabriel. But this was no pretty, naturalistic angel, but a transcendent presence that defied ordinary human and spatial categories.

Terrified and still unable to comprehend what had happened, Muhammad stumbled down the mountainside to Khadijah. By the time he reached her, he was crawling on his hands and knees, shaking convulsively. “Cover me!” he cried, as he flung himself into her lap. Khadijah wrapped him in a cloak and held him in her arms until his fear abated. She had no doubts at all about the revelation. This was no jinni, she insisted. God would never play such a cruel trick on a man who had honestly tried to serve him. “You are kind and considerate to your kin,” she reminded him. “You help the poor and forlorn and bear their burdens. You are striving to restore the high moral qualities that your people have lost. You honor the guest and go to the assistance of those in distress. This cannot be, my dear.”⁴² Muhammad and Khadijah had probably discussed their dawning understanding of the true nature of a religion that went beyond ritual performance and required practical compassion and sustained moral effort.

To reassure Muhammad, Khadijah consulted her cousin Waraqah, the hanif, who had studied the scriptures of the People of the Book and could give them expert advice. Waraqah was jubilant: “Holy! Holy!” he cried, when he heard what had happened. “If you have spoken the truth to me, O Khadijah, there has come to him the great divinity who came to Moses aforetime, and lo, he is the prophet of his people.”⁴³ The next time Waraqah met Muhammad in the Haram, he kissed him on the forehead and warned him that his task would not be easy. Waraqah was an old man and not likely to live much longer, but he wished he could be alive to help Muhammad when the Quraysh expelled him from the city. Muhammad was dismayed. He could not conceive of a life outside Mecca. Would they really cast him out? he asked in dismay. Waraqah sadly told him that a prophet was always without honor in his own country.

It was a difficult beginning, fraught with fear, anxiety, and the threat of persecution. Yet the Qur’an has preserved another account of the experience on Mount Hira’, in which the descent of the spirit is described as an event of wonder, gentleness, and peace, similar to the conception of Jesus in the womb of Mary.⁴⁴

We sent him down on the night of destiny

And what can tell you of the night of destiny?

The night of destiny is better than a thousand months

The angels come down—the spirit upon her—by permission of their lord from every order

Peace she is until the rise of dawn.⁴⁵

In this surah (chapter) of the Qur’an, there is a suggestive blurring of masculine and feminine, especially in pronouns, which is often lost in translation. In the Qur’an, the question “What can tell you?” regularly introduces an idea that would have been strange to Muhammad’s first audience, indicating that they were about to enter the realm of the ineffable. Here Muhammad has self-effacingly disappeared from the drama of Mount Hira’, and the night (layla) is center stage, like a woman waiting for her lover. The Night of Destiny had inaugurated a new era of communion between heaven and earth. The original terror of the divine encounter has been replaced by the peace that filled the darkness as the world waited for daybreak.

Muhammad would have understood the German historian Rudolf Otto, who described the sacred as a mystery that was both tremendum and fascinans. It was overpowering, urgent, and terrible, but it also filled human beings with “delight, joy, and a sense of swelling harmony and intimate intercourse.”⁴⁶ Revelation cannot be described in a simple manner, and the complexity of his experience made Muhammad very cautious of telling anybody about it. After the experience on Mount Hira’, there were more visions—we do not know exactly how many—and then, to Muhammad’s dismay, the divine voice fell silent and there were no further revelations.

It was a time of great desolation. Had Muhammad been deluded after all? Was the presence simply a mischievous jinni? Or had God found him wanting and abandoned him? For two long years, the heavens remained obdurately closed and then, suddenly, the darkness was dispersed in a burst of luminous assurance:

By the morning hours

By the night when it is still

Your lord has not abandoned you and does not hate you

What is after will be better than what came before

To you the lord will be giving

You will be content

Did he not find you orphaned and give you shelter

Find you lost and guide you

Find you in hunger and provide for you

As for the orphan—do not oppress him

And one who asks for help—do not turn him away

And the grace of your lord—proclaim⁴⁷

Here, Allah offered his assurance that he did not abandon his creatures, and reminded men and women to imitate his continuous kindness and generosity. Human beings, who had experienced the care of God, had a duty to help the orphan and the deprived. Anybody who had known dereliction, hunger, and oppression must refuse under any circumstances to inflict this pain on others. The revelation concluded by telling Muhammad that it was time to “proclaim” this message to the Quraysh. But how would they respond?

*In Arabic, the word Allah simply means “God.”

*The terms “clan” and “tribe” are not easy to distinguish from one another, but here “clan” refers to a family group within the tribe.