Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes (7 page)

The siege strategy, however, scuttled a secret plan the Quraysh were counting on. After the disastrous battle of Uhud, another of Medina’s Jewish tribes had been exposed as collaborating with the Meccans. Like the first Jewish tribe, they had been tried and sent into exile. The third tribe, the Banu Qurayza, then proclaimed its loyalty to the Pact of Medina. Now, however, in the run-up to the Battle of the Moat, its leaders had secretly conspired with the Quraysh to fall upon the Muslim forces from behind as soon as the Meccan forces attacked from the front.

When no frontal attack came, the conspirators within Medina lost their nerve. Meanwhile, the besieging force began to fragment, for it was a confederation of tribes, most of whom had come along only as a favor to their Qurayshi allies. With no battle to fight, they got restless. When a windsto
rm blew up—no small matter in this landscape—they drifted off, and soon the Quraysh gave up and went home too.

All this left the Banu Qurayza in a bad spot. Their plot had been discovered and now their allies were gone. Mohammed put the whole tribe on trial and appointed one of their former associates among the Medina tribes as judge. When the tribe was found guilty, the judge declared that the crime was treason, the punishment for which was death. Some onlookers protested against this sentence, but Mohammed confirmed the sentence, whereupon some eight hundred Jewish men were executed in the public square, and the women and children of the tribe were sent to live with the two tribes exiled earlier.

This whole drama sent a shock wave through Arabia. The trial and execution of the Banu Qurayza announced the grim resolution of the Muslims of Medina. In strictly military terms the Battle of the Moat was a stalemate, but the Quraysh had mustered a force of ten thousand with such fanfare that failing to win was as bad as losing, and this loss helped to stoke a growing myth of Muslim invincibility, communicating a broad impression that this community was not just another powerful tribe feeling its oats but something strange and new. The Muslims lived a distinctly different way of li
fe, they practiced their own devotional rituals, and they had a leader who, when problems came up, went into a trance and channeled advice, he said, from a supernatural helper so powerful that Muslims had no fear of going into battle outnumbered three to one.

Who was this helper?

At first, many of the unconverted might have thought,
It’s a really powerful god.
But gradually the Muslim message sank in: not
a
god but
the
God, the
only
one. And what if Mohammed was exactly what he claimed to be—the one human being on earth directly connected to the creator of the entire universe?

Recruiting people to kill the man grew ever more difficult. Recruiting warriors to go up against his forces grew difficult too. After the Battle of the Moat, the trickle of conversions to Islam became a flood. It’s easy to suppose people were converting out of canny self-interest, a desire to join the winning side. Muslims, however, believe there was more to it. In Mohammed’s presence, they believe, people were having a religious experience.

Mohammed never claimed supernatural powers. He never claimed the ability to raise the dead, walk on water, or make the blind to see. He only claimed to speak for God, and he didn’t claim that every word out of his mouth was God talking. Sometimes it was just Mohammed talking. How could people tell when it was God and when it was Mohammed?

At the time, apparently, it was obvious. Today’s Muslims have a special way of vocalizing the Qur’an called
qira’ut
. It’s a sound quite unlike any other made by the human voice. It’s musical, but it isn’t singing. It’s incantatory, but it isn’t chanting. It invokes emotion even in someone who doesn’t understand the words. Every person who performs qira’ut does so differently, but every recitation feels like an imitation or intimation or interpretation of some powerful original. When Mohammed delivered the Qur’an, he must have done so in
this
penetrating and emotional voice. When peo
ple heard the Qur’an from Mohammed, they were not just listening to words but experiencing an emotional force. Perhaps this is why Muslims insist that no translation of the Qur’an is
the
Qur’an. The true Qur’an is the whole package, indivisible: the words and their meanings, yes, but also the very sounds, even the look of the lettering when the Qur’an is in written form. To Muslims, it wasn’t Mohammed the person but the Qur’an coming through Mohammed that was converting people.

One other factor attracted people to the community and inspired them to believe Mohammed’s claims. In this part of the world, small-scale warfare was endemic, as it seems to be in any area populated by many small nomadic tribes among whom trading blends into raiding (such as North America’s eastern woodlands before Columbus arrived, or the Great Plains shortly after). Add the Arabian tradition of blood feuds lasting for generations, add also the tapestry of fragile tribal alliances that marked the peninsula at this time, and you have a world seething with constant, ubiquitous violence.

Wherever Mohammed took over, he instructed people to live in peace with one another, and the converts did. By no means did he tell Muslims to eschew violence, for this community never hesitated to defend itself. Muslims still engaged in warfare, just not against one another; they expended their aggressive energy fighting the relentless outside threat to their survival. Those who joined the Umma immediately entered Dar al-Islam, which means “the realm of submission (to God)” but also, by
implication, “the realm of peace.” Everyone else was living out there in Dar al-Harb, the realm of war. Those who joined the Umma didn’t have to watch their backs anymore, not with their fellow Muslims.

Converting also meant joining an inspiring social project: the construction of a just community of social equals. To keep that community alive, you had to fight, because the Umma and its project had implacable enemies.
Jihad
never meant “holy war” or “violence.” Other words in Arabic mean “fighting” more unambiguously (and are used as such in the Qur’an). A better translation for
jihad
might be “struggle,” with all the same connotations the word carries in the rhetoric of social justice movements familiar to the West: struggle is deemed noble when it’s struggle for a just c
ause and if the cause demands “armed struggle,” that’s okay too; it’s sanctified by the cause.

Over the next two years, tribes all across the Arabian peninsula began accepting Mohammed’s leadership, converting to Islam, and joining the community. One night Mohammed dreamed that he had returned to Mecca and found everyone there worshipping Allah. In the morning, he told his followers to pack for a pilgrimage. He led fourteen hundred Muslims on the two-hundred-mile trek to Mecca. They came unarmed, despite the recent history of hostilities, but no battle broke out. The city closed its gates to the Muslims, but Quraysh elders came out and negotiated a treaty with Mohammed
: the Muslims could not enter Mecca
this
year but could come back and perform their rites of pilgrimage
next
year. Clearly, the Quraysh knew the game was over.

In year 6 AH, the Muslims came back to Mecca and visited the Ka’ba without violence. Two years later, the elders of Mecca surrendered the city to Mohammed without a fight. As his first act, the Prophet destroyed all the idols in the Ka’ba and declared this cube with the black cornerstone the holiest spot in the world. A few of Mohammed’s former enemies grumbled and muttered threats, but the tide had turned. Virtually all the tribes had united under Mohammed’s banner, and all of Arabia was living in harmony for the first time in reported memory.

In year 10 AH (632 CE), Mohammed made one more pilgrimage to Mecca and there gave a final sermon. He told the assembled men to regard the life and property of every Muslim as sacred, to respect the rights of all people including slaves, to acknowledge that women had rights
over men just as men had rights over women, and to recognize that among Muslims no one stood higher or lower than anyone else except in virtue. He also said he was the last of God’s Messengers and that after him no further revelations would be coming to humanity.
²

Shortly after returning to Medina, he fell ill. Burning with fever, he went from house to house, visiting his wives and friends, spending a moment or two with each one, and saying good-bye. He ended up with his wife Ayesha, the daughter of his old friend Abu Bakr, and there, with his head in her lap, he died.

Someone went out and gave the anxious crowd the news. At once, loyal Omar, one of Mohammed’s fierce
st and toughest but also one of his most hotheaded companions, jumped to his feet and warned that any man who spread such slander would lose limbs when his lie was exposed. Mohammed dead? Impossible!

Then the older and more prudent Abu Bakr went to investigate. A moment later he came back and said, “O Muslims! Those of you who worshipped Mohammed, know that Mohammed is dead. Those of you who worship Allah, know that Allah is alive and immortal.”

The words swept away Omar’s rage and denial. He felt, he told friends later, as if the ground had been cut out from under him. He broke down crying, then, this strong bull of a man, because he realized that the news was true: God’s Messenger was dead.

 

 

D
EVOTED MUSLIMS SEE the whole of Mohammed’s life as a religious metaphor illuminating the meaning of existence, but the religious event does not end with the Prophet’s death. It continues through the terms of his first four successors, remembered as the Rashidun, “the rightly guided ones”: Abu Bakr, Omar, Othman, and Ali. The entire drama, from the revelation in the cave through the Hijra to the death of the Prophet’s fourth successor almost forty years later, forms the core religious allegory of Islam, analogous to the last supper, the crucifixion, and the resurrection of Jesus Chr
ist in Christianity.

Islam emerged well within literate times. People were writing journals, diaries, letters, bureaucratic documents, and other works. For this period a rich documentary record exists. It seems, then, as if the origins of Islam should lie squarely within the realm of journalism rather than legend. And yet, what we know about the life and times of these first four successors derives largely from a history written decades later by the writer Ibn Ishaq, who died in 151 AH (768 CE).

Ibn Ishaq came from a long line of traditionists, the archivists of oral culture: men and women whose job it was to gather, re
member, and retell significant events. He was the first of his line to write the whole story down, but most of his book has been lost. Before it disappeared, however, other writers quoted from it, referred to it, included excerpts from it in their own works, wrote synopses of it, or paraphrased its stories. (Recently, in fact, some academics have been trying to reconstruct Ibn Ishaq’s work from the fragments of it found in other works.)

One historian who used Ibn Ishaq as his major source was Ibn Jarir al-Tabari, who died about three hundred years after the Hijra. He wrote the thirty-nine-volume
History of the Prophets and Kings
that begins with Adam and ends in the year 292 AH (915 CE). His work
has
survived into the present day, and most of the anecdotes and details we read about Mohammed and his successors come to us through him. It is he who tells us what color hair these men had, what their favorite food was, and how many camels they owned. He includes their key speeches and conversations as direct quota
tions. His history is not exactly a readable narrative, however, because each story is nested in a mind-numbing list of names, the
isnad,
or “chain of transmission”: “X reports that Y told him that he heard from Z that . . . and finally the anecdote.” After each anecdote comes a different version of the same anecdote, nested in a different isnad: “A reports that he heard from B that C said that D recounts that . . . [anecdote].” Tabari doesn’t say which version is true; he just puts them out there for you the reader to decide. Over the centuries, writers have compiled their own versions of the most compellin
g anecdotes, some of which make their way into popular and oral accounts and eventually turn into the Islamic version of “Bible stories,” told to kids like me at home by our elders and in grammar school by our religion teachers.

Overall, these stories chronicle a tumultuous human drama that unfolded in the first twenty-nine years after the Prophet’s death, a story of larger-than-life characters wrestling with epic issues, a story filled with episodes that evoke wonder and heartbreak. It’s quite possible to take sides in retelling these stories, for there are sides to take, and it’s quite possible to speculate about motives and make judgments about people’s decisions.

On the other hand, these anecdotes have acquired allegorical status: different judgments and interpretations support different doctrines and represent various theological positions. We cannot know the hard facts of this story in a journalistic way because no untouched eyew
itness account has survived. We have only the story of the story of the story, a sifting process that has drawn the mythological significance of the raw events to the surface. Here, then, is
that
story of the succession.