The First Muslim: The Story of Muhammad (16 page)

At times the Quranic voice sounded almost like that of a protective parent or spouse: “Will you worry yourself to death because they do not believe?” Muhammad should pay no attention to the derision: “Leave them to flounder in their obstinacy.” “Leave them to their own inventions.” “Leave to themselves those who take their religion merely as a sport and a pastime.”

“Turn away from them and wait,” he was told. Or in the words of an earlier messenger, turn the other cheek. “Ignore them; you are not to blame. Be tolerant and command what is right; pay no attention to the foolish.” And almost impatiently, the voice urged patience: “Endure what they say, ignore them politely, and leave those who live in luxury and deny the truth to me.”

Yet by its sheer insistence on ignoring mockery, the Quran would ensure that the sting of it lasted long into the future. Here, in the foundation text of Islam, is the source of the modern Muslim sensitivity to insult that has taken so many by surprise. Where satire may be thought relatively harmless in the non-Muslim West, a matter more of entertainment than injury, the memory of the constant Meccan taunting of Muhammad and the harassment of his early followers would lie behind the worldwide outbreak of anger at the well-informed satire of Salman Rushdie’s 1988 novel The Satanic Verses and at the 2005 publication in a Danish newspaper of crude cartoons of Muhammad. Since the wiser course in both instances would have been precisely the one advocated by the Quran—to pay no attention to such provocations—the fact that it was ignored has to be yet another of the many indelible ironies of history and faith.

o find himself the cause of such divisiveness among his own people was intensely painful for a man who had struggled through childhood to be included. The impulse to reconciliation had always been strong in him. It was part of what had made him so effective as a negotiator on the trade caravans, and it was what lay behind the perfect compromise he’d fashioned when he’d resolved the argument over who would replace the Black Stone in the rebuilt Kaaba. Surely now that the argument centered on him, he could find a way for everyone to live and work together again.

While men like abu-Jahl were clearly driven to extremes by hatred and ambition, Muhammad could see that most of the Quraysh leadership, like abu-Sufyan, were sincerely concerned that his message threatened what they held sacred. The Quran would call them kufr, a word that literally means “ungrateful,” as in ungrateful for all that God had created, but is usually taken to mean unbelievers or faithless infidels. In their own way, however—“the tradition of the fathers”— these men were in fact deeply faithful. They did not deny God; the Kaaba was the divine sanctuary, and they took their role as its custodians in good faith as much as good profit. This faith demanded loyalty not only to al-Lah, but also to all the lesser gods such as the “three daughters” Uzza, Lat, and Manat. The Quraysh were not so much faithless as spreading their faith too thin. If they were misguided, there had to be an acceptable way for Muhammad to guide them in the right direction.

He resumed his long nights of prayerful vigil and meditation, hoping for the voice to give direction on how to resolve the divisiveness swirling around him. There had to be some means to include rather than exclude the Meccan traditions. Surely the solution would be revealed to him. And in an all too human way, it was.

Ibn-Ishaq tells how it happened: “When Muhammad saw that his own people turned their backs on him, he was pained by their estrangement from what he brought them from God, and longed for a message that would reconcile him with his own people. He would gladly have seen those things that bore down harshly on them softened, so much so that he kept saying it to himself, fervently wishing for such an outcome. Then God revealed Sura 53, beginning with ‘By the star when it sets, your comrade does not err, nor is he deceived, nor does he speak out of his own caprice.’ But when Muhammad reached the words ‘Have you thought on Lat and Uzza, and the third one, Manat?’ Satan added this upon his tongue: ‘These are the three great exalted birds, and their intercession is desired indeed.’ ”

And here they were: the infamous Satanic Verses. The three “daughters of God” were no longer false gods, but giant high-flying birds covering the earth with their wingspans, graced with the power to intercede for those who worshipped them.

The moment Muhammad recited these newly revealed verses in the Kaaba precinct, the response was overwhelmingly positive. “When they heard them, people rejoiced and were delighted,” ibn-Ishaq reports. “They said: ‘Muhammad has mentioned our gods the daughters in the most favorable way possible. We recognize that it is God, al-Lah, who gives life and death, who creates us and who provides sustenance, but if the daughters can still intercede for us, and if Muhammad gives them their share of worship, then we accept what he says.’ ”

At one stroke, the rift appeared to have been healed. But that verse praising the “three great exalted birds” would never appear in the Quran.

The following night, says ibn-Ishaq, the angel Gabriel came to Muhammad and berated him. “What have you done? You have recited something I did not bring you from God, and you have said what he did not say to you.” In that moment, Muhammad realized that he had been misled by his own desire for reconciliation; he had taken the easier path rather than the hard one laid down for him. There was no god but God. There could be no partners with God, no daughters or sons. God was neither begotten nor begetter. What indeed had he done?

He was devastated—“bitterly grieved, and greatly in fear of God,” as ibn-Ishaq puts it. “So God sent down another revelation to comfort and ease him, assuring him this: ‘Never have we sent a messenger or a prophet before you but that when he longed for something, Satan cast words into his mouth. But God annuls what Satan does, and establishes the real verses. God is all-knowing, all-wise.’ ”

That assurance would find its place in the Quran, as would another verse sent to replace the Satanic ones. It began the same way, but went in quite another direction: “Have you thought on Lat and Uzza, and the third one, Manat? What, as men have sons, so God has daughters? This is indeed wrong. They are naught but names which you and your fathers have invented. God has sent them no authority.”

It was the most radical rejection yet of the local Meccan divinities. They were just names, nothing more. They had no authority, no power; they were mere figments of the imagination.

heopolitics would make the story of the Satanic Verses both famous and infamous. It has been rejected as apocryphal if not blasphemous by many Islamic clerics, especially after the nineteenth- century Orientalist William Muir used it to argue that Muhammad had been satanically inspired all along (an argument that led even The Times of London to criticize him for “Christian propagandistic writing”). Such clerics deem the whole thing impossible, since it runs counter to the tenet that Muhammad was divinely protected from error. Yet this idea appears nowhere in the Quran. To the contrary, human fallibility seems to be explicitly acknowledged in that verse stating that every messenger and prophet had had words “cast into his mouth” by Satan. Nonetheless, there are still conservative Muslim scholars who suspect that the whole episode was invented by enemies of Islam in order to undercut the credibility of Muhammad and of the Quran itself.

To an outside eye, however, the story of the Satanic Verses seems if anything to reinforce Muhammad’s credibility. It casts light on the process of revelation, showing it less as a miraculous coup de foudre and more as a kind of collaboration between human and divine—an ongoing conversation, as it were, in which one side speaks for both. It allows us to see the depth of Muhammad’s pain and of his desire for reconciliation. It reveals him as movingly vulnerable, given to the very human habit of projecting his own deepest desire onto divine will. And it shows him succumbing to a moment of weakness, imagining he heard what he wanted to hear.

It is precisely this fallibility that makes the whole incident so believable. That, and Muhammad’s intense distress when even as the verses had their desired effect and the Quraysh opened their arms wide to welcome him back into the fold and embrace his message, he realized that he had deceived himself into betraying that message. As the Quran would order him to say again and again, he was only human: “a man like you” and “one of your own.” Only God could be infallible.

It has to have taken a great deal of courage for Muhammad to acknowledge his mistake so publicly, all the more since it was clear how it would be used against him. Seventh-century Meccans were no more able to recognize the integrity of someone who could publicly correct himself than twenty-first-century Americans. To acknowledge error is still mistaken for a sign of weakness instead of strength. As Kathryn Schulz writes in Being Wrong, “The idea of error is our meta- mistake. We are wrong about what it means to be wrong. Far from being a sign of intellectual inferiority, the capacity to err is crucial to human cognition. Far from being a moral flaw, it is inextricable from some of our most humane and honorable qualities: empathy, optimism, imagination, conviction, and courage.”

The Quraysh elite, of course, did not see things this way. They were all the more incensed since so far as they were concerned, Muhammad had gone back on his word—the ultimate sin in a society where a man’s word was literally his bond, an oath and a handclasp better than a written contract. While Muhammad knew that he had deceived himself, Mecca’s leaders instead felt that it was they who had been deceived. And that was unforgivable. He had given his opponents exactly the weapon they had wanted all along. Where he had tried to meet them halfway, driven by the impulse to unity, now they could turn around and call him a liar. “All he says is clearly nothing but a tissue of lies. It is all of his own invention,” they declared. He had tried to bridge the divide, and instead made it deeper than ever.

Yet however much conservative Muslims may disagree, it could be said that the whole episode was necessary. It was the means of making it clear that no matter how painful, Muhammad needed to be true to himself, to his voice and to that of God. That was the meaning behind the revelation of Sura 109, which reads in full: “Muhammad, say: ‘Disbelievers, I serve not what you serve, and you serve not what I serve. I will never serve what you serve, and you will never serve what I serve. To you your religion, and to me mine.’ ” The Satanic Verses had forced the issue once and for all. There would be no going back.

y the time the boycott was formally annulled, sun and wind had almost shredded the declaration nailed to the door of the Kaaba. It had taken nearly two years for the Quraysh leadership to concede the obvious, by which time the only words still legible

on the tattered parchment were the customary opening ones: “In your name, oh God . . .” But no sooner had life returned to something approaching normal for Muhammad than personal tragedy struck: Khadija died.

It happened suddenly. There was no long illness, so the cause may well have been a heart attack brought about by the stress of living through the boycott, or simply the fact that she was in her sixties by then, a good old age for the seventh century. Quite possibly it was a combination of the two: the effect of stress on an aging heart. But to the end, a loving one.

F or twenty-four years, she had beenMuhammad’s pole-star—his refuge, his rock, his confidante, his solace. From the beginning, she had seen what was in him more accurately and more presciently than anyone else. She had defied social norms to marry him, lifting him out of insecurity into respectability. Together they had raised four daughters and two sons, one formally adopted and the other in effect adopted, both of whom had become as close as birth sons. It had been in her arms that he had sought shelter from the terror of that night on Mount Hira, and her voice that had reassured him. Together they had faced hardship and boycott, scorn and derision. They had persevered. And now, just when it seemed there might again be some measure of peace for them, she was gone, and Muhammad was utterly bereft.

No matter how many more times he married, he would never find that quality of love again. Many years later, Aisha, the youngest and most outspoken of the nine wives to come, would say, “I was never jealous of any of the prophet’s wives except for Khadija, even though I came after her death.” And though this was clearly not so—she’d bristle when there was so much as a mention of another wife’s beauty— Khadija was certainly the focus of her jealousy. Muhammad’s first wife was the one woman who was unassailable, and he would make this crystal clear to the teenage Aisha when she dared turn her sharp tongue on her predecessor.

Teasingly, Aisha would ask him how he could possibly remain so devoted to the memory of “that toothless old woman whom God has replaced with a better.” The language is unmistakably hers; nobody else would have dared be so startlingly direct. It was the kind of question only a teenager could ask, and only a much older woman could regret as she related the incident many years later—words spoken with the casual disregard of the young and vivacious for the old and dead. But if Aisha thought for a moment she could gain precedence over Khadija this way, Muhammad’s response would stop her in her tracks.

“Indeed no, God has not replaced her with a better,” he’d say. And the man who though multiply married would never have any children after Khadija then drove the point home: “God granted me her children while withholding those of other women.”

As he buried and mourned Khadija, however, Muhammad had no thought of marrying again. The ones who supported him through this time were his young cousin Ali, his close companions abu-Bakr, Omar, and Uthman, and two of his uncles, the fierce Hamza and the honordriven abu-Talib, who continued to stand by his nephew out of loyalty to the cherished values of both clan and tradition. But the effort had taken its toll on him. Even as Muhammad was still reeling from Khadija’s death, abu-Talib fell ill, and never recovered.

As it became clear that his sickbed would be his deathbed, other clan leaders came to pay their last respects—and to push once more for a negotiated solution to the problems his nephew’s activities posed for them. Even abu-Jahl took a more moderate stance for the time being; whether because of the failure of the boycott or the imminence of death, he let abu-Sufyan do the speaking.

“You know we honor your standing, abu-Talib,” said the Umayyad leader, “and now that you are on the brink of death, we are deeply concerned on account of what will happen to it after you are gone. So let us call your nephew and make an agreement that he will leave us alone and we will leave him alone; let him have his religion and we will have ours.” Perhaps deliberately, abu-Sufyan’s words were almost exactly those Muhammad had used after he’d acknowledged the error of the Satanic Verses. But what might have worked then would not work any longer.

Muhammad was called in, and stood by his uncle’s bedside. “Nephew,” said abu-Talib, “these notables have come to you that they may give you something and take something from you.” Ill though he was, he had chosen his words carefully; even as he seemed impartial, he made it clear that there would be a price to pay, and implied that Muhammad would be the lesser for it if he accepted abu-Sufyan’s proposal. After the reaction to his retraction of the Satanic Verses, Muhammad needed no further prompting. He stood firm, insisting that the Quraysh leaders acknowledge no god but God and abandon all the totems and lesser gods. By way of reply, abu-Sufyan and the others simply threw up their hands in frustration and stalked out of the sickroom, leaving Muhammad alone with his dying uncle.

What abu-Talib said then is still a matter of debate. In one account he whispered, “Nephew, why did you go too far with them?” But in another he said, “Nephew, you did not ask them for too much,” and it is this second version that reflects the hope of many pious Muslims that the man who had led his clan through hardship to protect Muhammad did in the end die a believer. Certainly both accounts agree that Muhammad took his uncle’s hand as the life began to fade from his eyes and urged him to say the shahada, to accept islam and testify that there was no god but God: “Say it, uncle, and then I shall be able to witness for you on the Day of Judgment.”

But abu-Talib remained faithful to Meccan tradition to the last. “Were it not that they would consider this shameful and say that I was afraid of death, I would say it if only to give you pleasure, nephew. But I must remain in the ways of my fathers.”

And just like that, within a few weeks of each other, Khadija and abu-Talib were both gone. Muhammad’s two main bastions of support, the one impelled by love, the other by clan and honor, had been ripped away from him.

eath echoes in the mind. For those who mourn, no death takes place in isolation. Each one reverberates with memories, conscious or not, of earlier loss, and with the almost physical ache of abandonment that comes with such loss. So severe a blow as the double deaths of a beloved spouse and a firm protector would be devastating for anyone, but for a man whose father had died before he was born and who had known his mother for less than a year before she too died, it was all but overwhelming. Especially since this time, he was left even more vulnerable.

With abu-Talib gone, the Hashims had to select a new clan leader, and their choice did not bode well for Muhammad. Though they had not ousted abu-Talib during the boycott as his half-brother abu-Lahab had hoped, they now looked to the “father of flame” as the next in line, thus replacing Muhammad’s protector with one of his most vehement opponents.

Even then, things might have worked out, since it seemed at first that their mutual grief over abu-Talib’s death might bind the two men together. In honor of the dead man’s memory, abu-Lahab assured his nephew that he would protect him as abu-Talib had done, but his assurance was short-lived. Alarmed at his apparent change of heart, the other clan leaders argued that far from upholding the honor of the Hashims by protecting Muhammad, abu-Lahab was in fact dishonoring it. Muhammad was shaming his clan, they maintained, since his message meant that the clan fathers, from Hashim through al-Muttalib down to abu-Talib himself, were all suffering the fires of hell in the afterlife because they had not accepted islam.

By the time they were finished, abu-Lahab was newly incensed at the idea of any Hashim pronouncing such a fate on the fathers and besmirching their memory in this way. He withdrew his protection, in essence expelling his nephew from the clan. Any physical attack on Muhammad would no longer be taken by the Hashims as cause for blood revenge. In the language of the time, “his blood was licit,” and he was literally an outlaw—beyond the protection of the law.

In the great pre-Islamic odes, this might have been presented in a romanticized manner, as was the legend of the fugitive “wandering king” Imr al-Qais, who lived proudly by his wits and his guts, defying rejection. But Muhammad was no admirer of this classic meme. Even as a boy thrust to the margins, he had never thought of himself as alone against his own people. On the contrary, he had done all he could to be one of them, and was now striving to change them from within, to save Mecca from its own worst self. His vision was not the antisocial one of the rebel but the reformer’s one of society remade from within. He thought of himself as Meccan to the core, deeply loyal to his place and his people, and thus all the more pained by the direction in which they were going. Yet the gulf between them had only widened. What he saw as reform, they took to mean overthrow. And in so doing, they may have grasped the revolutionary aspect of his message more acutely than he himself had yet done.

Muhammad was no longer merely mad or possessed, his opponents argued. He was far more dangerous than that. By trying to turn Mecca away from “the ways of the fathers,” he was trying to undermine and overthrow the whole society. To the abu-Lahabs and abuJahls of Mecca, this was treason.

The political psychology involved here is dispiritingly familiar to the modern ear. In autocracies especially, but also in democracies under threat, those who speak out against injustice are still accused of subversion and branded as traitors. They take their stand as deeply loyal citizens, but are condemned by demagogues either as wantonly destructive, or as motivated by hatred or even self-hatred. Character assassination comes with this territory, all too often followed by arrest, torture, and physical assassination.

s news spread of abu-Lahab’s withdrawal of protection, the attacks on Muhammad became more pointed. Pails of dust were emptied over his head as he walked to the Kaaba precinct, and stones thrown at him when he tried to preach there. Even at home, he was at risk. As he sat in his own courtyard, someone threw sheep’s offal at him, splattering him with blood and gore. The specific organ hurled was the one distinctly female part of the animal, the uterus, making the insult all the more flagrant in a society based so strongly on male pride. It was clear that if Muhammad was not to live under virtual house arrest—in fact, if he was to survive—it was of paramount importance that he find the protection of a clan leader.

Some accounts say he looked first to Taif, a small city in the mountains a day’s journey southeast of Mecca. But Taif was a major cultic center of Lat, one of the goddesses Muhammad had denigrated as false, and was closely connected with the Meccan elite. Many had built summer homes there, taking advantage of the ample springs and greenery that made it cool and pleasant by comparison with the stifling heat of Mecca. It seems like the last place Muhammad would look for support, but he reportedly ventured there nonetheless.

The reaction of Taif ’s leading citizens was wryly predictable. “If you were sent by God as you claim, then your state is too lofty for me to speak with you,” came one sardonic response to his plea. “And if you are taking the name of God in vain, then it’s not fit that I should speak with you.”

Another simply looked at him and said, “Could God send only a nobody like you?”
Within a few days, stone-throwing thugs had hounded him out of Taif, but since it was unsafe for him to return to Mecca without official protection, he stopped a few miles short of the city and sent message after message to several minor clan leaders, begging for their help. Finally one agreed. The aging al-Mutim was one of the few who had never supported the boycott, and now he sent a small armed escort to accompany Muhammad back into the city.
Abu-Jahl, the “father of ignorance,” watched warily as they arrived in the Kaaba precinct. “Is this protection or a call to arms?” he asked al-Mutim. “I am offering protection,” came the reply, to which even abu-Jahl had no choice but to respond as any Quraysh was obliged to: “We shall protect whomever you protect.”
It wasn’t the strongest form of protection, since Muhammad was in the position of a “client” or dependent of al-Mutim rather than an equal, but it was as much as he could get for now. At least it gained him a temporary respite, some time in which to gain his bearings and figure out where to go from here. Yet it was at this point of utter insecurity, when it seemed he was forced to focus on the most down-to-earth matter of survival, that he would soar instead. The isra, the Night Journey, would become one of the most symbolically weighted events of his life.

n it simplest form, the Night Journey is a miracle story. Muhammad woke in the middle of the night and went to the Kaaba to pray in solitude. There he fell asleep, only to be woken by the angel Gabriel, who picked him up and lifted him onto a winged white horse. The horse took off and flew north through the night, in the same direction in which Muhammad and his followers turned when they prayed. Jerusalem was where the ancient Jewish temple had been built over the stone slab where Abraham, the first hanif, had raised his knife to sacrifice his son in obedience to the one god. By turning toward it in prayer, the early believers affirmed the primacy of Abraham as the founding monotheist in a tradition far more ancient and venerable than those of the Meccan fathers. Abraham was the original father, and thus the father of all. And now Muhammad would meet him.

Hordes of angels greeted him on his arrival, and as he dismounted, he was offered a choice of three goblets from which to drink. One contained wine, the second milk, the third water. He chose the milk as the middle way between asceticism and indulgence, and Gabriel was delighted: “You have been rightly guided, Muhammad, and so will your people be.”

“Then,” Muhammad is quoted as saying, “a ladder was brought to me finer than any I have ever seen. It was that to which the dying man looks when death approaches.” Led by Gabriel, he climbed the ladder and ascended through seven circles of heaven presided over by, respectively, Adam, Jesus and John, Joseph, Enoch (called Idris in Muslim tradition), Aaron, Moses, and finally in the seventh and highest circle—at the threshold of the divine sphere—Abraham.