The First Muslim: The Story of Muhammad (13 page)

Impassioned, outraged, the message was a warning of the highest order. This was a radical call, and the Meccan elite recognized it as such.

t seems inconceivable to modern Muslims that the majority of Meccans would have done anything but flock to Muhammad the moment he began to preach his message. But that is not what happened. Then as now, the status quo was a powerful force for inaction;

safer to stay with what you know than to go out on a limb with a radically new vision of society. By the end of the first year, Muhammad had no more than a few dozen followers, a seemingly ineffectual medley of young men, women, freedmen, and slaves. You would hardly have thought this new movement worth the trouble to oppose.

Yet opposition was the crucible in which Islam would be forged. If the Quraysh elite had not so virulently opposed Muhammad—if they had not organized a campaign of denigration and harassment, leading up to a concerted attempt on his life—he might have remained just another of the many preachers of the time claiming divine inspiration. His revelations might never have been memorized and Islam never taken shape as a distinct religion, instead fading into a footnote in the history of monotheism. After all, the revelations insistently instructed Muhammad to say that he was “ just a messenger,” “only a man like you,” “a warner from among yourselves.” It would be years before the Quranic voice would call him “the first Muslim.” This was emphatically not about him, but about the message itself. Those who opposed it did make it about him, however. And in so doing, helped him.

Where Muhammad’s struggle had formerly been against his own doubts, now the doubters were external. No matter how frustrating and anxious and dangerous the next few years, and however great the despair that sometimes tempted him, it was no longer despair with himself. The stronger the opposition, the more he took it as confirmation of the validity of his message.

So long as the revelations focused on the wonders of creation, the movers and shakers of Mecca could afford to ignore him. They saw such ideas as nothing to get excited about—quite harmless, in fact. Nor did they have any problem with the concept of one omnipotent God, since that was already implicitly accepted in a city centered on the sanctuary of the high god. The tribal totems were powerful as intercessors, their subservience clear in the collective name given to Lat, Manat, and Uzza: “the daughters of al-Lah.” But no other gods at all? That was a direct attack on the whole tradition of tribal identity. An attack, that is, on “the ways of the fathers.”

Just as people swore their sincerity in the name of God, as well as in the names of lesser deities, so too they swore by their fathers and forefathers. This may sound strange to the modern ear until you remember that people still swear—at least in movies—“on my mother’s grave.” But in Muhammad’s Arabia, this went far beyond honoring one’s parents. The importance of forefathers is one reason why the early Islamic texts can be so hard for a Westerner to follow: they make the multiple nomenclature used in classic Russian novels seem simple by comparison. In the Middle East, full identification involved naming not just your father but your whole ancestry: your grandfather, and his father, and his father in turn, back to the patriarch of the clan and even further back to the founder of the tribe (thus the long list of antecedents that opens the Gospel of Matthew, identifying Jesus as a descendant of Abraham and David). History was an integral part of identity, a way of rising above the particulars of individual life to reach both backward and forward in time through lineage. And it was all the more important given the awareness of how history could be lost.

The theme of lost greatness was as central in the Quranic verses of this time as it had been in the great pre-Islamic odes. The ruins of the past were object lessons, reminders not only of what had happened, but of what still could. Whether by earthquake or drought, plague or conquest, any civilization could be wiped out in the blink of history’s eye. The emphasis on lineage thus served as a kind of defense against this awareness, an extension of oneself through time. Ancestors were venerated, and the dead accorded powers to intercede in the present. The graves of the most powerful were made into shrines, as those of great rabbis, saints, and imams still are today throughout North Africa and the Middle East, monotheism notwithstanding. For Jews, Christians, and Muslims alike, they satisfy a deep-seated human longing for the tangible, for stones to touch and kiss, walls to weep and pray beside, places to bring votives and flowers, gifts and letters.

So there was nothing too radical when the Quranic revelations first began to talk about the Day of Judgment, when all souls would rise up from the dead to be called to account for their actions. It was understood that this was a world full of spirits, containing not only those living in it but also all who had lived in it in the past. Even though Muhammad’s critics took the idea of resurrection literally and jeered at it—“What, shall those rooted in the dirt be brought back to life?” they taunted, “can you give a dry bone flesh again?”—this was not what really disturbed them. It was what they saw as the disrespect for their forefathers that was so intolerable.

The tribal forefathers had been ignorant, the revelations now said, part of the benighted time of jahiliya. Worse, it seemed they would have to pay for their ignorance. True monotheists like Abraham were called hanifs and honored as prophets, but those who had refused the idea of the one god would be consigned to be “companions of the fire” in hell instead of “companions of the garden” in paradise. And since there was no possibility of the dead accepting monotheism, Muhammad’s opponents took this to mean that their fathers and forefathers were condemned, ipso facto, to be companions of the fire. They took it, that is, as the ultimate insult: literally, “Go to hell.”

It might be said that a man orphaned before he was born would be more than willing to abandon “the ways of the fathers.” However unintentionally, Muhammad’s immediate ancestors had let him down, leaving him adrift when the whole point of his culture was to be well moored. But what he was preaching now went far beyond matters of personal identity. Like that other prophet six centuries earlier and far to the north in Galilee, he was calling on his people to transcend the traditional ties of family, clan, and tribe, and to unite in renewed loyalty to the one God.

“I am come to set a man at variance with his father,” Jesus had said. “If any man come to me and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea and his own life also, he cannot be my follower.” And now Muhammad was saying essentially the same. The Meccans faced losing everything “if your fathers, your sons, your brothers, your wives, your clan, the possessions you have gained, the commerce you fear losing, the dwellings you love—if all these are dearer to you than to strive in the way of God.” Those who accepted islam were the true brothers and sisters, a new family that superseded the old, crossing all established boundaries to find its identity in the real forefathers: not the tribal ones, but the original founding figures of monotheism, Abraham and Moses.

What had been the sticking point for abu-Talib now troubled the whole Meccan elite. In a society where honoring your father and forefathers was itself a point of honor, it sounded as though people were being asked to abandon their ancestors. But even this could have been tolerated and thus ignored if Muhammad’s message had not constituted a far more immediate threat to their well-being. The real issue was not one of principle, but of self-interest. With traditional values subservient to the new drive for profits, the Quranic attack on the accumulation of wealth for wealth’s sake was downright subversive. It placed in question what the elite wanted taken for granted, exposing the injustice of what seemed to them the rightful order of things.

They responded with the blind scorn of power. “Just look at Muhammad’s companions!” said one aristocrat with snobbish disgust. “These are the ones God has chosen to show the right way and teach the truth? If what he brings were of any value, it’s hardly likely such people would have gotten hold of it before us.”

Muhammad was a mere rabble-rouser, other critics said, a petty demagogue preying on those who were weak-minded and easily influenced: younger sons with no hope of leadership status; members of minor clans without influence; the outsiders known as “confederates” who lived under the protection of a Quraysh clan; freedmen and slaves and women. Yet even some of their own seemed to have been swayed by the new message, none more significantly than Attiq ibn-Uthman, better known as abu-Bakr, the man who would eventually be famed in Islam as the first caliph, Muhammad’s khalifa or successor.

Abu-Bakr was well liked, successful, and highly respected as a genealogist, an expertise of prime importance in a culture that placed such emphasis on lineage. This made him the leading historian of Mecca, the one who determined all-important ancestry and kinship ties. So when he formally accepted islam by reciting the declaration of faith, the shahada—“There is no god but God, and Muhammad is his prophet”—he very publicly gave the lie to the argument that Muhammad was dishonoring the fathers and forefathers. “After that,” ibnIshaq reports, “islam became a general topic of conversation in Mecca and everyone talked of it.”

Determined to tolerate no more defections such as that of abuBakr, the ruling elite began a concerted effort to ensure that Muhammad and his followers remain “a despised minority,” and even an endangered one. Pressure began to mount on abu-Talib to disown his nephew: to expel him from the Hashim clan and thus leave him without protection. Nobody needed the meaning of this to be spelled out. Expulsion would make Muhammad a man whose “blood was licit,” as the phrase went: a man who could be killed legally, without fear of retribution.

he law of retribution is otherwise known as blood vengeance, a term that sounds suitably barbaric, and not just to modern ears. It was exactly the kind of thing eighth- and ninth-century Islamic historians, writing from their studies in Damascus and Baghdad, would expect of pre-Islamic Mecca—part of the dark ages and darker practices of jahiliya. It had been rescinded, as they saw it, by Islamic enlightenment, since the Quran would specifically say that while “an eye for an eye” had been called for in the past, “whoever forgoes it out of charity, this will serve as atonement for his own bad deeds.”

That “eye for an eye” is of course from the Hebrew bible, where it appears first in the book of Exodus, and is then repeated for good measure in Leviticus. But it was never uniquely biblical. It had been the basis of law throughout the ancient world, and had been encoded under the Latin name of lex talionis—a phrase that means “law of retaliation” and is associated in English, however incorrectly, with the sharp talon of a predatory bird: nature red in tooth and claw.

Both early Islamic historians and modern Western ones tend to paint a picture of seventh-century Arabia as mired in ceaseless intertribal warfare fueled by blood feuds in which every violent death demanded retaliation by other members of the clan or tribe, resulting in a self-perpetuating spiral of violence. It’s a picture that might well lead one to ask how any such society could survive for very long. In fact the root cause of inter-tribal conflict, throughout history and into the modern era, was the competition not for revenge but for power. In Arabia this meant control of water sources, territorial grazing rights, and the authority to levy taxes and tolls on those living in and passing through tribal territory. If anything, the principle of blood vengeance worked to keep the peace more than to break it; in the absence of a strong central authority, it was a rough-and-ready but effective way of ensuring security. Rather than perpetuating violence, it served to deter it.

All groups recognized that there was only one way the lex talionis could work, and that was if retaliation was a sure thing. If a member of a clan or tribe was killed, then his kin were obliged to seek revenge. Indeed if a slaying went unavenged, it was believed that an owl would emerge from his grave calling “Give me drink! Give me drink!” in demand for blood to slake its thirst. This obligation was directed as much inward as outward, reinforcing group solidarity within the clan or tribe since all could be held responsible for the actions of any member. And it applied in preventive as well as offensive mode: the certainty that killing someone from another group would place your own kin in danger meant that you were under strong social pressure to avoid fatal violence. While Beduin warriors regularly raided camel caravans, for instance, they tried to avoid killing anyone in the process lest they set in motion a blood feud. The raids were purely for goods, not lives. At least in principle.

Whether by intention or not, swords wielded in anger did fatal work, which is why the law of retaliation incorporated a system of compensation. Well established in both Babylonian and Roman legal systems, it was applied also in Arabia, where it was known as blood- wit: blood ransom or blood money. The amount, whether in gold or in goods, was usually established by a hakam, a wise man or arbitrator. It might be ten milk camels, for instance, or even, as in the ransom demanded by the totem Hubal for Muhammad’s father, as many as a hundred. Thus when extremists wanted to taunt others with the accusation of cowardice, they’d charge them with being content with “milk instead of blood.” Most people, however, being attached to life rather than death, preferred milk.

The whole system was predicated on a strong sense of community affiliation. Your clan or tribe protected you, and this protection extended also to slaves and freedmen, who were under the formal auspices of their owners and former owners. But if someone had no clan affiliation—if he had been expelled as the Quraysh elite now wanted for Muhammad—he would have no such protection. He would be literally an outlaw: beyond the law.

Muhammad had grown, his status and influence had diminished along with his wealth. But he still had his pride. As the head of the Hashims, it was his duty to extend his protection to everyone within the clan. This was an integral part of the ways of the fathers, and he was sworn to uphold it. So when the heads of the other clans confronted him as a group, they placed abu-Talib squarely between the proverbial rock and a hard place. He was indebted to Muhammad, who had helped him out and all but formally adopted his son Ali. If he could not personally accept everything his nephew was preaching, that was no matter; over the years, the two men had developed a deep bond of trust and affection, and such ties were all-important elements in a man’s sense of honor. Yet this sense of honor was exactly what abuTalib was now urged to forgo.