The First Muslim: The Story of Muhammad (15 page)

He called out those of his own clan, like abu-Lahab, who had sided against their kinsmen: “I see our brothers, sons of our mother and father, / When asked for help, they say, ‘It’s none of our business’. . . / You have flung us aside like a burning coal, / You have slandered your brothers among the people.” And he excoriated the Umayyad leader abu-Sufyan, whom he’d considered a friend and ally: “He averted his face from me as he passed, / Sweeping along as though he were one of the great ones of the earth. / He tells us that he is sorry for us like a good friend, / But hides evil designs in his heart.”

This boycott was “a heinous offense” against all accepted ethics and values, abu-Talib concluded, and called on tribal solidarity, warning that “if we perish, you too will perish.”

bu-Jahl fought back, doing his utmost to bolster the boycott by pressuring other leaders to enforce clan discipline and bring any of Muhammad’s followers within their ranks into line. In response, a small group of believers left Mecca for Ethiopia, determined to stay there until such time as tempers calmed in Mecca and the boycott was called off. Eleven men and four women, they were led by Muhammad’s eldest daughter and her new husband Uthman, one of Muhammad’s few wealthy followers, who had married her the moment her first husband had succumbed to the pressure to divorce her. Ethiopia offered them not only refuge, but as ibn-Ishaq put it, “an ample living, security, and a good market” as well as “a righteous ruler,” the Negus— the Geez title for the king.

In time, this Ethiopian sojourn, bolstered by the arrival of a second small group of believers, would become a major rhetorical factor in the history of early Islam. The argument was that while the pagan Meccans were persecuting early Muslims, Christian Ethiopians recognized and welcomed them, much as the hermit monk Bahira had done when Muhammad was still a boy on the camel caravans. Some reports maintain that the Negus gave the small group of believers special personal protection. It’s said that he wept when he heard about the injustice of the boycott, summoned his bishops to confirm that Muhammad’s message was also that of Jesus, and indignantly refused offers of gold from a Meccan delegation demanding that the refugees be sent back. But all of this errs on the side of too good to be true. More likely, any official protection was accorded the believers simply as foreign merchants, with permission to do business as temporary residents. Certainly, the Negus remained resolutely Christian.

Realizing that some of Muhammad’s most loyal followers had slipped his net, a vengeful abu-Jahl decided on intimidation of those who remained. Under his direction, a campaign of harassment by the more thuggish elements of Mecca now verged on a kind of open season on believers. If they could not be persuaded into common sense, it would be beaten into them.

Ibn-Ishaq and al-Tabari both include several reports on the violence, such as an attack on a group of believers praying in one of the wadis outside Mecca. In the fracas, one of them was apparently struck and wounded with a camel’s jawbone—a picaresque detail that sounds very much like a later stereotype of pre-Islamic Arabia. Assuming that seventh-century Mecca was mired in the pre-enlightenment darkness of jahiliya, a sophisticated ninth-century Baghdadi intellectual might easily imagine the area strewn with camel skeletons in much the same way as visitors under the influence of Georgia O’Keeffe might expect to see bleached cattle skulls littering the landscape of northern New Mexico. If only as a matter of practicality, a camel’s femur would surely have served as a more effective weapon.

An oddly convenient camel jaw appears again in another report, this time placed even more strangely in a Meccan alley. A nephew of Khadija’s had been smuggling flour into the Hashim quarter when abu-Jahl grabbed hold of him, leading a passer-by to intervene: “Are you trying to prevent him taking food to his own aunt? Let him go.” When abu-Jahl refused, the nephew picked up the jawbone, knocked him down, and kicked him—a story that would certainly give great comfort to later believers, but that seems unlikely considering abuJahl’seminence.

Yet despite such retrospective embellishment, the harassment was all too real. Abu-Jahl himself openly threatened believers. If they were well connected, the threat was of shame: “You have forsaken the ways of your fathers who were better than you. We’ll declare you weak- minded, brand you a fool, and destroy your reputation.” If they were merchants, the threat was exclusion: “We will boycott your goods and reduce you to beggary.” And if they were “people of no importance,” as ibn-Ishaq put it—those without strong clan protection, the slaves and freedmen, migrant artisans and the seventh-century equivalent of “guest workers”—abu-Jahl didn’t even bother with verbal threats. He saw to it that they were physically assaulted, as happened to the son of a freed slave who had volunteered to be the first after Muhammad to recite the Quranic verses in the Kaaba precinct. The moment he began, with the invocation “In the name of God, the compassionate, the merciful, who taught the Quran,” he was set upon with blows and curses: “What on earth is this son of a slave woman saying? How dare he?”

Slaves were starved and freedmen deprived of work. Inevitably, some gave in to the pressure. It got so bad, one later remembered, that if the thugs had pointed to a beetle and asked the victim if this was God, he would have said yes just to stop the beating. Others withstood ill treatment to the point of torture, most famously Bilal, a tall, gaunt Ethiopian slave whose owner, a kinsman of abu-Bakr’s, had him staked out in the open sun with a huge stone on his chest to slowly suffocate him. “You will stay here until you die,” he was told, “or deny Muhammad and worship Lat and Uzza.”

Abu-Bakr pleaded with his kinsman to let Bilal go: “Have you no fear of God that you treat him like this? How long is it to go on?”
“You are the one who corrupted him,” came the retort. “It is up to you to save him if you want.”
Finally, ibn-Ishaq reports, they agreed to exchange “a tougher and stronger slave, and a heathen” for Bilal. Abu-Bakr then declared him a freedman, and ten years later the former slave would become the first muezzin of Islam, his deep bass voice ringing out from the highest rooftop with the call to prayer.
Soonabu-Jahlhaddifficulty imposing his will even inside his own clan. Much as he wanted to knock some sense into one young Makhzum believer, he was wary of the notoriously violent temper of the youth’s older brother, so he asked the brother for permission to “teach this young man a lesson.”
“Very well,” came the answer, “teach him a lesson, but have care of his life. I swear, by God, if you kill him, I will kill your family to the last man.” That was enough to curb the teaching impulse.
Muhammad himself was spared the worst, since abu-Talib’s protection still held sway, boycott or no. Most of the attacks on him remained at the level of insults as he walked by, though when a group of jeering thugs surrounded him and grabbed at his robe in the Kaaba precinct, abu-Bakr intervened and got beaten up instead; his daughter Aisha would remember him coming home that day “with the hair of his head and beard torn.”
The danger forced the believers to meet secretly. A dissenting kinsman of abu-Jahl’s offered his home as a safe house, so they gathered, as it were, right under the nose of their main antagonist. They had been forced into the role of a small persecuted minority, but this sense of threat served only to strengthen the feeling of solidarity among them. Taking their cue from Muhammad himself, they met violence with non-violence, a tactic that began to impress others with the injustice of the whole situation. In fact it was this sense of manifest injustice that now brought two famed warriors into the early Muslim fold.
The first was Muhammad’s uncle Hamza. Another of the ten sons of Abd el-Muttalib, he was known as “the strongest man of the Quraysh, and the most unyielding”—never a man to cross. Just back from several days out in the mountains hunting game for the beleaguered Hashims, his bow still slung over his shoulder, he had come to circumambulate the Kaaba in the traditional ritual of thanksgiving and homecoming. That done, he passed by a group of people talking about an astonishing scene that had just taken place: Muhammad sitting absolutely still as abu-Jahl stood over him, ranting and cursing, all while “Muhammad answered not a word.”
Passive resistance was not Hamza’s style. Enraged by such flagrant abuse of his nephew, he strode on up to abu-Jahl and, in full view of everyone in the precinct, struck him with the edge of his bow. And then, possibly as much to his own amazement as anyone else’s, he heard himself saying: “Will you revile Muhammad when I too am one of his followers and say what he says? Hit me back if you dare!”
It was the strongest endorsement yet of Muhammad, coming as it did with muscle and brawn to back it up. Even abu-Jahl backed down for the moment. As some of his Makhzum kinsmen made to come to his aid, he waved them off in apparent contrition, saying, “Let Hamza alone, for I insulted his nephew deeply.” Or perhaps he was simply astonished that he himself had been the instrument of Hamza’s accepting islam.
A different kind of dramatic conversion took place in the case of the second famed warrior, Omar, whose height alone made him fearsome: he was said to “tower above everyone else as though he were on horseback.” Still in his twenties, he was known for his quickness with a whip and for his volatility, made worse by a fondness for potent date wine. He would mature into the most famed military commander of Islam, succeeding abu-Bakr as the second caliph, though if you’d told this to anyone when the boycott began, they’d have laughed you out of town. Omar was a nephew of abu-Jahl’s, after all, and it was his father who years earlier had hounded his own half-brother Zayd the hanif out of Mecca. If there was one man abu-Jahl could rely on to tolerate no monotheistic nonsense, it was his nephew. Or so he thought.
Ibn-Ishaq recounts how one evening, musing on the split caused by the boycott and filled with the righteous anger of the thoroughly drunk, Omar strapped on his sword and declared, “I am going to Muhammad the traitor, who has divided the Quraysh and mocked and insulted us. I am going to kill him.”
“You deceive yourself, Omar,” a friend said, and invoked the law of retaliation: “Do you think the Hashims would allow you to keep walking this earth if you kill Muhammad? Better you should go back to your own family and set their affairs in order.”
His own family? Why yes, replied the friend. Didn’t Omar know that his sister, his brother-in-law, and his nephew had all accepted islam?
Since his sister had wisely neglected to inform him of this, he’d had no idea. In a fury, he went storming into her house, ready to lay about him with fists and whip, only to find a small group sitting peaceably on the floor, chanting verses from the Quran. They continued calmly despite Omar’s bursting in, disconcerting him enough to make him stand still. The musicality of the verses began to reach through the fog of rage and alcohol, and he sat down to listen. “How fine and noble are these words,” he said when they had finished, and asked to be taken to Muhammad to make the shahada, the formal pledge of belief. He’d never touch alcohol again.
These are classic “seeing the light” stories of the type familiar to any student of early Christianity. But however they came about, high- profile conversions such as those of Hamza and Omar led to more. And just as they bolstered the strength and spirit of the beleaguered believers, so too they increased doubts among the Meccan leadership as to the wisdom of boycott and harassment. Yet again, their tactics seemed to be backfiring.
Voices were raised in favor of taking a less adversarial approach. “Let Muhammad alone,” argued one elder. “He is only a man with no sons, so when he dies, his memory will perish, and you will have rest from him.” Others tried for compromise, suggesting that they propose to Muhammad that “we will worship what you worship if you worship what we worship. If what you worship is better, then we will accept it, and if what we worship is better, than you will accept it.” But a few took the Quranic message far more seriously, implicitly recognizing its power to radically change Mecca.
“Oh Quraysh, this is a situation you cannot deal with,” said one of the more perceptive clan leaders. Neither ridicule nor force would work. “You liked Muhammad well enough until he brought you his message. It’s time to look to your own affairs, by God, for a serious thing has befallen you.”

elpless to intervene as his kinsmen suffered deprivation and his followers were either forced into exile or threatened and beaten, Muhammad felt intensely responsible for so much suffering. He was buoyed by the faith of the believers and the stoic integrity of the Hashims, but haunted by the fact that if not for him, none of this would be happening. Yet the greater the turmoil inside him, the more the revelations responded to it. It was as though the Quranic voice was able to see deep inside him and address questions he was barely aware he was asking.

Steadily and repeatedly, new verses arrived to console and encourage him as the taunts and derision increased by the day. The need for patience and fortitude became a constant drumbeat throughout the revelations from this period, creating an almost Gandhian stance of non-violentresistance.

Again and again, he was told that he was not the only one to have undergone such treatment. “Many messengers before you were mocked, Muhammad,” the voice said. Like him, they had been disbelieved, and called “sorcerers and madmen.” From Moses to Jesus, they had brought the same divine message of warning, calling people back to a life of real values and ethics, only to be taunted and derided.

“We are well aware that your heart is weighed down by what the idolators say,” he was told, but he was to ignore them. “Do not let their words grieve you,” the voice said. “Do not let your heart be oppressed.” “Do not be saddened.” “Do not be distressed.” “Do not let them discourage you.”

His task was merely to warn his fellow Meccans, not to save them. “You cannot make the dead hear, nor the deaf listen to your call.” The cynics have “hearts they do not understand with, eyes they do not see with, ears they do not hear with.” Much as Muhammad may have wished it, “you cannot guide the blind out of their error . . . Even if they saw a piece of heaven falling down on them, they would say ‘ just a heap of clouds,’ so leave them, messenger, until they face the Day of Judgment.” This was hard to do, the voice acknowledged, but “do not waste away your soul with regret for them.”