Joseph Anton: A Memoir (7 page)

Muhammad ibn Abdullah grew up with a reputation as a skilled merchant and honest man and at the age of twenty-five this brought him a marriage proposal from an older, wealthier woman, Khadijah, and in the next fifteen years he was successful in business and happy in his marriage. However, he was clearly a man with a need for solitude, and for many years he would spend weeks at a time living like a hermit in a cave on Mount Hira. When he was forty years old, the Angel Gabriel disturbed his solitude there and ordered him to recite. Naturally, he immediately believed he had lost his mind, and fled. He only returned to hear what the Angel had to say when his wife and close friends persuaded him that it might be worth a return trip up the mountain, just in case; that it was probably a good idea to check if God was really trying to get in touch.

It was easy to admire much of what followed as the merchant transformed himself into the Messenger of God; easy to sympathize with his persecution and eventual flight to Medina, and to respect his rapid evolution at the oasis community of Yathrib into respected lawgiver, able ruler and skilled military leader. It was also easy to see how the world into which the Qur’an was revealed, and the events in the life of the Messenger, directly influenced the revelation. When Muslim men were killed in battle, the Angel was prompt to encourage their brothers to marry their widows, in order that the bereaved
women might not be lost to the faith by remarrying outside it. When the Prophet’s beloved Aisha was rumored to have behaved inappropriately while lost in the desert with a certain Safwan ibn Marwan, the Angel of the Lord came down in some haste to point out that no, in God’s opinion, the virtuous lady had not fooled around. And, more generally, it was evident that the ethos of the Qur’an, the value system it endorsed, was, in essence, the vanishing code of nomadic Arabs, the matriarchal, more caring society that did not leave orphans out in the cold; orphans like, for example, Muhammad himself, whose success as a merchant, he believed, entitled him to a place on the city’s ruling body, and who had been denied such preferment because he didn’t have a powerful family to fight for him.

Here was a fascinating paradox: that an essentially conservative theology, looking backward with affection toward a vanishing culture, became a revolutionary idea, because the people whom it attracted most strongly were those who had been marginalized by urbanization—the disaffected poor, the street mob. This, perhaps, was why Islam, the new idea, felt so threatening to the Meccan elite; why it was persecuted so viciously; and why its founder may—just may—have been offered an attractive deal, designed to buy him off.

The historical record was incomplete, but most of the major collections of
hadith
or traditions about the life of the Prophet—those compiled by Ibn Ishaq, Waqidi, Ibn Sád, Bukhari, and Tabari—told the story of an incident that afterward became known as the incident of the satanic verses. The Prophet came down from the mountain one day and recited the
sura
(number 53) called
an-Najm
, the Star. It contained these words: “Have you heard of al-Lat and al-Uzza, and al-Manat, the third, the other one? They are the exalted birds, and their intercession is greatly to be desired.” At a later point—Was it days later? Or weeks, or months?—he returned to the mountain and came down, abashed, to state that he had been deceived on his previous visit; the Devil had appeared to him in the guise of the Archangel, and the verses he had been given were therefore not divine, but Satanic, and should be expunged from the Qur’an at once. The Angel had, on this occasion, brought new verses from God, which were to replace the Satanic verses in the great book: “Have you heard of al-Lat and al-Uzza,
and al-Manat, the third, the other one? They are but names that your forefathers invented, and there is no truth in them. Shall God have daughters while you have sons? That would be an unjust division.” And in this way the Recitation was purified of the Devil’s work. But the questions remained: Why did Muhammad initially accept the first, “false” revelation as true? And what happened in Mecca in the period between the two revelations, Satanic and angelic?

This much was known: Muhammad wanted to be accepted by the people of Mecca. “He longed,” Ibn Ishaq wrote, “for a way to attract them.” And when the people heard that he had accepted the three winged goddesses, the news was popular. “They were delighted and greatly pleased at the way in which he spoke of their gods,” Ibn Ishaq wrote, “saying, ‘Muhammad has spoken of our gods in splendid fashion.’ ” And Bukhari reported, “The Prophet … prostrated while reciting
An-Najm
, and with him prostrated the Muslims, the pagans, the jinns, and all human beings.”

Why, then, did the Prophet afterward recant? Western historians (the Scottish scholar of Islam W. Montgomery Watt, the French Marxist Maxime Rodinson) proposed a politically motived reading of the episode. The temples of the three winged goddesses were economically important to the city’s ruling elite, an elite from which Muhammad was excluded, unfairly, in his opinion. So perhaps the “deal” that was offered ran something like this: If Muhammad, or the Archangel Gabriel, or Allah could agree that the bird-goddesses could be worshipped by followers of Islam—not as the equals of Allah, obviously, but as secondary, lesser beings, like, for example, angels—and there already were angels in Islam, so what harm could there be in adding three more, who just happened already to be popular and lucrative figures in Mecca?—then the persecution of Muslims would cease, and Muhammad himself would be granted a seat on the city’s ruling council. And it was perhaps to this temptation that the Prophet briefly succumbed.

Then what happened? Did the city’s grandees renege on the deal, reckoning that by flirting with polytheism Muhammad had undone himself in the eyes of his followers? Did the followers refuse to accept the revelation about the goddesses? Did Muhammad himself regret
having compromised his ideas by yielding to the siren call of acceptability? It was not possible to say for sure. Imagination had to fill in the gaps in the record. But the Qur’an spoke of how all the prophets had been tested by temptation. “Never have We sent a single prophet or apostle before you with whose wishes Satan did not tamper,” it said in Sura 22. And if the incident of the Satanic verses was the Temptation of Muhammad, it had to be said that he came out of it pretty well. He both confessed to having been tempted and also repudiated that temptation. Tabari quotes him thus: “I have fabricated things against God and have imputed to Him words which He has not spoken.” After that the monotheism of Islam, having been tested in the cauldron, remained unwavering and strong, in spite of persecution, exile and war, and before long the Prophet had the victory over his enemies and the new faith spread like a conquering fire across the world.

“Shall God have daughters while you have sons? That would be an unjust division.”

The “true” verses, angelic or divine, were clear: It was the femaleness of the winged goddesses—the “exalted birds”—that rendered them inferior and fraudulent and proved they could not be the children of God, as the angels were. Sometimes the birth of a great idea revealed things about its future; the way in which newness enters the world prophesied how it would behave when it grew old. At the birth of this particular idea, femaleness was seen as a disqualification from exaltation.

Good story
, he thought when he read about it. Even then he was dreaming of being a writer, and he filed the good story away in the back of his mind for future consideration. Twenty years later he would find out exactly how good a story it was.

JE SUIS MARXISTE, TENDANCE GROUCHO
, said the graffiti in Paris that revolutionary spring. A few weeks after the Paris
évènements
of May 1968, and a few nights before his graduation day, some anonymous wit, possibly a Marxist of the Grouchonian tendency, chose to redecorate
his bourgeois, elitist college room, in his absence, by hurling a bucketful of gravy and onions all over the walls and furniture, to say nothing of his record player and clothes. With that ancient tradition of fairness and justice upon which the colleges of Cambridge prided themselves, King’s instantly held him solely responsible for the mess, ignored all his representations to the contrary, and informed him that unless he paid for the damage, he would not be permitted to graduate. It was the first, but, alas, not the last occasion on which he would find himself falsely accused of muck spreading.

He paid up, and, in a defiant spirit, went to the ceremony wearing brown shoes. He was promptly plucked out of the parade of his properly black-shod contemporaries, and ordered to change. People in brown shoes were mysteriously deemed to be dressed improperly, and this again was a judgment against which there could be no appeal. Again he gave in, sprinted off to change his shoes, got back to the parade in the nick of time; and at length, when his turn came, he was required to hold a university officer by his little finger and to follow him slowly up to where the vice chancellor sat upon a mighty throne. He knelt at the old man’s feet and held up his hands, palms together, in a gesture of supplication, and begged in Latin for the degree, for which, he could not help thinking, he had worked extremely hard for three years, supported by his family at considerable expense. He had been advised to hold his hands way up above his head, in case the elderly vice chancellor, leaning forward to clutch at them, should topple off his great chair and land on top of him.

Looking back at those incidents, he was always appalled by the memory of his passivity, hard though it was to see what else he could have done. He could have refused to pay for the gravy damage to his room, could have refused to change his shoes, could have refused to kneel to supplicate for his B.A. He had preferred to surrender and get the degree. The memory of that surrender made him more stubborn, less willing to compromise, to make an accommodation with injustice, no matter how persuasive the reasons. Injustice would always thereafter conjure up the memory of gravy. Injustice was a brown, lumpy, congealing fluid, and it smelled pungently, tearfully, of onions. Unfairness was the feeling of running back to one’s room, flat out, at the last
minute, to change one’s outlawed brown shoes. It was the business of being forced to beg, on one’s knees, in a dead language, for what was rightfully yours.

Many years later he told this story at a Bard College commencement ceremony. “This is the message I have derived from the parables of the Unknown Gravy Bomber, the Vetoed Footwear, and the Unsteady Vice Chancellor upon His Throne, and which I pass on to you today,” he told the graduating class of 1996 on a sunny afternoon in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. “First, if, as you go through life, people should some day accuse you of what one might call Aggravated Gravy Abuse—and they will, they will—and if in fact you are innocent of abusing gravy, do not take the rap. Second: Those who would reject you because you are wearing the wrong shoes are not worth being accepted by. And third: Kneel before no man. Stand up for your rights.” The members of the class of ’96 skipped up to get their degrees, some barefoot, some with flowers in their hair, cheering, fist punching, voguing, uninhibited.
That’s the spirit
, he thought. It was as far from the formality of Cambridge as you could go, and much the better for it.

His parents didn’t come to his graduation. His father said they couldn’t afford the airfare. This was untrue.

There were novelists among his contemporaries—Martin Amis, Ian McEwan—whose careers took off almost as soon as they were out of the egg, so to speak, and they soared into the sky like exalted birds. His own early hopes were not fulfilled. He lived for a time in an attic on Acfold Road off the Wandsworth Bridge Road, in a house he shared with his sister Sameen and three friends from Cambridge. He pulled up the stepladder and closed the hatch and then he was alone in a triangular world of wood, pretending to write. He had no idea what he was doing. For a long time no book took shape. In these early days his confusion—which he afterward understood was a confusion in the self, a bewilderment about who and what he had become after being uprooted from Bombay—had a harmful effect on his personality. He was often sharp, often got into heated arguments about unimportant
things. There was a claw of tension in him, and he had to work hard to hide his fear. Everything he tried went badly. To escape from the futility of the attic he joined fringe theater groups—“Sidewalk,” “Zatch”—at the Oval House in Kennington. He put on a long black dress and a blond wig, and kept his mustache, to play a male agony aunt in a piece by a fellow Cambridge graduate, Dusty Hughes. He was a member of the cast of a British revival of
Viet Rock
, the anti-Vietnam agitprop show created in New York by the La MaMa group. These performances were less than seminal, and to make matters worse, he was broke. A year after graduating from Cambridge he was on the dole. “What am I going to tell my friends?” Anis Rushdie had cried when he announced his literary aspirations, and as he stood in the dole queue Anis’s son began to see his father’s point. In the house on Acfold Road there was much youthful misery. Sameen had an unsuccessful fling with one of his college friends, Stephen Brandon, and when it failed she left the house and went home. A young woman called Fiona Arden moved in and he found her one night half-conscious at the foot of the stairs, having swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills. She clutched his wrist and wouldn’t let go, and he went with her in the ambulance to the hospital where they pumped her stomach empty and saved her life. He moved out of the attic after that and wandered from flat-share to flat-share in Chelsea and Earls Court. Forty years later he heard about Fiona again. She was a baroness in the House of Lords and had attained great eminence in the world of business. Youth was often wretched, the struggle to become themselves tore the young to shreds, but sometimes, after the struggle, better days began.

Not long after he left Acfold Road a troubled local boy set fire to the house.