Muhammad (21 page)

After his death, the ranks closed around absolute truth, which meant that it was a test of faith to turn any act by the Prophet, even the beheading of his enemies, into something right and good. On this point, the critics of Muhammad cite his marriage to Aisha. She was the youngest daughter of Abu Bakr, the merchant who stood up among the first and most devout of the new Muslims. At the age of six Aisha was betrothed to a husband, until Muhammad had a revelation that she was meant for him. The prospective groom was persuaded to give her up. The marriage to Muhammad took place but wasn't consummated until Aisha was nine. Beyond Islam, this episode is more than distasteful. Within the faith, however, it is praised. None of Muhammad's other wives were virgins, and the rationale is that Aisha served as a kind of Virgin Mary, made all the more pure because she was so young. To the outside world, this is a prescription for blind fanaticism.

CLOSING THE GAP

The bald fact is that we cannot identify with customs that exist across such a yawning abyss. And as mentioned, every faith closes ranks around its own version of the absolute truth. Islamic extremism is no exception, and unfortunately the loud minority have poisoned our view.

The God who speaks in the Koran isn't simply an Old Testament God with revenge and punishment in mind, whimsically deciding who will be rewarded or destroyed. The Koran affirms Judaism and Christianity. The most significant mystical event in Muhammad's life was the night journey he took to Jerusalem on the back of a lightning
steed. Muhammad worshiped there with his predecessors and then was lifted up to the seventh heaven, where he communed with Abraham, Moses, and Jesus before being ushered into the presence of Allah.

The purpose of the Koran, to borrow Jesus's words, was to fulfill the law, not to break it. It took warfare to spread the new faith, but just over the horizon was a Paradise in which one God welcomed all believers. We can say that Islam brought monotheism to replace polytheism—the Arabs got one God in place of many. But the message was more universal. Allah wasn't Yahweh dressed in a caftan. He was the One, an all-pervasive presence that upheld the cosmos.

Every Muslim loves the Prophet, but one special branch of Islam developed an intense, mystical love for Allah—the Sufis. Within their approach to God, we can glimpse the immense beauty and power of Muhammad's legacy. In my childhood, I was taken to visit Sufishrines, usually the graves of saints who were prayed to for miracles. There were all-night poetry readings and dancing, truly ecstatic events. For me, these Sufis, with their extreme courtesy to one another and the ever present reminder of God's love, stood for Islam—white domes against the sky, romantic tales of princes and princesses, and the hypnotic call of the muezzins from their minarets.

The sweetness of these images is real, even if history has added a bitter aftertaste. Sufis strove for unity with God, and their path to enlightenment was love. Devotion led to rapture, and rapture led to the Infinite. No romance of the soul is more extreme, as witnessed in this poem by Rumi, the greatest Sufimystic:

These lines aren't a flight of fancy—they describe what Sufis actually did to reach God. The beauty of union with the One was exquisite, but the seeker burned himself to ashes before reaching his Beloved.

If Muhammad opened the door to God, Sufis were the ones who flung themselves through it, blindly and crying out with passion. This ardent striving is the best interpretation of
jihad,
and the one I hope will prevail. It brings light out of darkness, as Rumi proclaimed:

Muhammad's ultimate legacy was to make time for the timeless. The One has no limitations in time and space. No
face or body can be assigned to Him, which is why Islam forbids portrayals of God. By comparison to Allah's transcendent reality, the world below is a trifling illusion. Thus the heart of Islam calls the faithful to look beyond illusion to find reality. For the Sufis, fear of a punishing Father evolved into a love affair with the invisible One, whose essence is mercy, compassion, and the sacredness of all life.

Muhammad can be judged by the worst of his followers or the best. He can be blamed for planting the seeds of fanaticism and
jihad
or praised for bringing the word of God to a wasteland. In my walk with Muhammad I found that every preconception was unfair. What the Prophet bequeathed to the world is entangled with the best and worst in all of us.

I doubt that the angel Gabriel has an appointment to meet me in a flash of blinding light. But if he does, I'd expect to wrestle with revelation every day. God didn't make life easier for Muhammad. He made it far more difficult, and the wonder of his story is how he brought light out of darkness with all the fallibility of “a man among men.” The message he brought wasn't pure; it never is. As long as our yearning for God exceeds our ability to live in holiness, the tangled mystery of the Prophet will be our own mystery too.