The First Muslim: The Story of Muhammad (17 page)

This is the essence of the Night Journey as given by ibn-Ishaq, who is quite clear that while he has been told one form or another of it by many people, he is unsure as to how reliable any of them are. Carefully choosing his words, he introduces the episode this way: “This account is pieced together, each piece contributing something of what that person was told about what happened.” And to indicate that the story may be more a matter of faith than of fact, he makes ample use of such phrases as “I was told that in his story al-Hassan said . . .” or “One of abu-Bakr’s family told me that Aisha used to say . . .” or “A traditionalist who had heard it from one who had heard it from Muhammad said that Muhammad said . . .”

The story is not told in the Quran, though the verse that begins Sura 17 is understood as a clear reference to it: “Glory be to God, who made his servant go by night from the sacred house to the far house, that we might show him some of our signs.” From the sacred house of the Kaaba sanctuary, that is, to the far house of the Jerusalem one. In the light of this Quranic verse, ibn-Ishaq sums up his reportorial dilemma this way: “The matter of the place of the journey and what is said about it is a searching test and a matter of God’s power and authority, wherein is a lesson for the intelligent, with guidance, mercy, and strengthening for those who believe.”

It’s a wisely phrased abstention from certainty. Whether the Night Journey was a dream, a vision, or lived experience, ibn-Ishaq’s view is that what matters is not how it happened, but its significance. He steps carefully between his duty as a believer and his obligation as a biographer—a delicate balancing act that he carries out with considerable aplomb, finally threading the needle with this conclusion: “I have heard it said that the messenger used to say, ‘My eyes sleep while my heart is awake.’ Only God knows how revelation came and what he saw. But whether he was asleep or awake, it was all true.”

Not every early Islamic historian would agree. Al-Tabari, writing a century later in the new Muslim capital city of Baghdad, was wary as always of miracle tales and far more focused on politics. Despite his repeatedly acknowledged debt to ibn-Ishaq, he would omit the episode altogether in his multi-volume history, and ignore the much-quoted dictum attributed to Aisha, speaking many years after Muhammad’s death: “The messenger’s body remained where it was, but God removed his spirit by night.”

as the Night Journey simply a dream, then? But there was no such thing as “simply a dream” at the time. Freud was far from the first to recognize the symbolic weight of dreams, nor did he invent dream interpretation; he invoked the new science of psychology to resuscitate an ancient practice in which sleep was understood not as a passive state, but with the right preparation, as an active experience of the soul.

The ritual known as dream incubation was highly regarded in both Greek and Roman times, when people would purify themselves by fasting and meditating before sleeping in a temple precinct in order to receive divine guidance in a dream. And throughout the Bible, dreams are a manifestation of the divine. “If there be a prophet among you, I the Lord will make myself known to him in a vision, and will speak to him in a dream,” Yahweh says to Aaron and Miriam. Joseph’s skill at dream interpretation made him a senior counselor to Pharaoh, while Abraham, Jacob, Solomon, Saint Joseph, and Saint Paul were all visited by God as they slept.

The tradition continues in the Talmud, where dreams channel divine wisdom. According to one Midrash, “During sleep the soul departs and draws spiritual refreshment from on high”—a statement very close to the one attributed to Aisha. Later rabbinical tradition would prize the she’elat halom, literally the “dream question,” or rather, a dream answer to a waking question. The mystical aspect of dreams would be incorporated into the thirteenth-century Zohar, the foundation book of Kabbala, which would identify the angel Gabriel as “the master of dreams” and the link between God and human, as he was for Muhammad. One story about the Kabbalist master Isaac Luria even has Gabriel appearing to him in a dream wielding the stylus of a scribe.

Muslim philosophers and mystics played an equally important part in the tradition. Two of the greatest, ibn-Arabi in the twelfth century and ibn-Khaldun in the fourteenth, wrote extensively about alam al-mithal, “the realm of images,” in which dreams were the highest form of vision of divine truth. Ibn-Khaldun wrote that God created sleep as an opportunity to “lift the veil of the senses” and thus gain access to higher forms of knowledge. Several hadiths—traditional reports of Muhammad’s sayings and practice—show him counseling his followers on the preparatory ritual of purification and prayer known as istikhara, which was to be used either when awake, in which case divine response would come in the form of “an inclination of the heart,” or just before sleep, when it would come in a dream.

But in the days immediately after the Night Journey, even Muhammad’s closest followers were nervous about how it would be understood. One of them begged him to keep quiet about it. His critics would deliberately take it as literally as possible, she said: “They will give you the lie and insult you.” When Muhammad insisted nonetheless, the reaction was exactly as she’d predicted.

“This is patently absurd!” his opponents crowed, with all the glee of modern politicians exploiting an electoral rival’s gaffe. “A caravan takes a month to go to Syria and a month to return, and Muhammad claims he made the journey to Jerusalem in one night?”

he journey is still the subject of disagreement between those Muslims who see it as mystical experience and those who take it more literally. Brightly colored posters of Buraq, the winged white mare whose name means “lightning,” hang in many Muslim homes throughout Asia, North Africa, and the Middle East, the details of her saddle and trappings varying according to local folk-art traditions. Sometimes her wings are magnificently extended with peacock feathers, and despite the conservative Islamic ban on human representation, she’s often shown with a beautiful woman’s head, dark hair cascading down her long neck. Soaring against a star-studded sky, she spans the distance between the golden Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem and the minarets of Mecca, defying both geography and chronology, since neither the Dome of the Rock nor the minarets had yet been built. But for the most part, this image of Buraq is not taken literally. It’s

a concretization of what cannot be made concrete—a translation of the metaphysical into the physical. And the same might be said for the account of the journey itself. The question has to be not whether Muhammad “really” flew overnight to Jerusalem and back, but what his experience of it meant.

As in Jacob’s dream in the book of Genesis, a ladder led up to heaven. But where Jacob remained sleeping at the foot of the ladder, Muhammad saw it as “that to which a dying man looks,” and climbed it. Did he feel as though he was dying, as he had during that first Quranic revelation on Mount Hira? Was this the death of the self that has been the goal of mystics of all faiths, the better to unite with the divine? Or did it seem as though he had taken leave of his body and hovered above it, looking down at his earthly self as some who survive near-death experiences report having done? Could there even have been some element of reaching beyond death to the wife and uncle he had so recently lost?

Certainly the Night Journey is deeply symbolic in psychological terms, coming as it did when Muhammad was at his most vulnerable, sure of his mission but deeply unsure as to where it would lead him or how. The images of flight and ascension are expressions of freedom and transcendence, of escaping the particulars of daily life to soar beyond them. In fact the journey could be seen as a kind of overcompensation for the double loss of Khadija and abu-Talib. Even as he was mired in the terrible loneliness of grief and made to feel more isolated in Mecca than ever, the episode acted as confirmation that Muhammad was not alone; he was welcomed within the community of angels and greeted by the great prophets of the past as one of them.

But just as a miraculous understanding of the journey ends up reducing it to a simple matter of yes or no, belief or disbelief, so this kind of psychological interpretation undermines its real significance. Because here is where it can be said that Muhammad fully assumes what the Hebrew bible calls “the mantle of prophecy.” The man told earlier to say he was “ just one of you” and “ just an ordinary man” is now specially graced. “Just one of you” does not fly hundreds of miles through the night to consult with angels and prophets and ascend into the divine presence. Muhammad is no longer the passive recipient of revelation but,an active participant: he flies, ascends, prays with the angels, and speaks with the prophets.

Whether physical or visionary, waking reality or dream reality, the Night Journey marks a radical change. This is where Muhammad first under stands himself not merely as a messenger but as a leader. It is here, when his future in Mecca is most in doubt, that he sees himself projected into the future. “Thy seed shall be as the dust of the earth, and thou shalt spread abroad to the west and to the east, to the north and to the south,” Yahweh told Jacob in his dream, and in a similar way, the Night Journey was the promise of the future for Muhammad. It represents a leap forward to a new level of determination and action, one that would givc him the resolve to uproot himself from the bonds of clan and tribe, and fully commit himself to the radical implications of his message.

His closest ties had been irrevocably broken by death, but by the same token he was now free to step fully into the role assigned him and assume the authority of his vision. However cold-hearted the idea may be, perhaps the woman he most loved and the man he most depended on both had to die in order to release him from the ties of home, and thus launch him on the journey out into the larger world.

n much of the world today, the question “Where are you from?” is answered with either where you were born or where you grew up. To a greater or lesser extent, your childhood home still defines you. One way or another, whether gladly or resentfully, some part of

you always belongs to that place. But in seventh-century Arabia, home was not merely part of identity; home determined it. Geography and identity were inextricably intertwined, each the foundation of the other. To be Meccan was not just to be from Mecca; it was to be of Mecca. For Muhammad, it was to be bound to both the place and the people whose place it was, the Quraysh, with a sense of belonging so deep it was imprinted in muscle memory through the ritual circling of the Kaaba.

Whenever the Quranic voice had spoken, it had told him what to say to his own people. The warning was specifically addressed to them. He had relayed the message as a Meccan, as “one of you.” To stop being a Meccan was unthinkable. But now, as he neared fifty, Muhammad faced the prospect of doing just that. Home was no longer a safe place for him to be. Inconceivable as it was, he needed to leave.

Every immigrant knows that leaving home is not simply a matter of geography. Whether the move is from a rural to an urban area, from one city to another, or from one country or even one continent to another, it is often a wrenching experience. It means uprooting yourself—tearing out your roots and leaving yourself vulnerable. You abandon what is known and open yourself to the mercy of a new world, or the lack of it. Nothing is certain. Inevitably, questions of rejection and acceptance arise. What does it take to be accepted in a new place? Does it necessitate rejection of the old place? What if the place you move to does not accept you? Where does that leave you, especially if the place you always thought of as home has already rejected you?

For Muhammad, such questions were all but overwhelming. He had struggled for the acceptance and respect of his own people, earning his identity as a Meccan and as a Quraysh the hard way. But now everything he had struggled for had been placed in violent question. He faced an existential challenge to his most basic sense of identity. And the Night Journey was the key to his meeting that challenge. It had been an affirmation of a spiritual home beyond the physical confines of geography— a metaphysical experience that had its physical correlate in terms of a worldly home. It reoriented him in the world just at the time he was forced to think the unthinkable.

His message had had the potential all along to radically expand the sense of home, and thus of identity itself. Now that potential would be tested. Where Mecca had been the center of his life, would it now be only his point of departure? Could leaving it be the beginning of a new life, even a new world? But where?

here was no flash of inspiration, let alone revelation. Medina would be seen as the inevitable choice only in retrospect. But Muhammad was not entirely an outsider in that oasis settlement two hundred miles north of Mecca. There was an inside connection, at least in principle. His father had died there, and six years later his mother had died on the way back from a visit there. And if these connections seemed more a matter of fate and timing than anything else, there was also a deeper one. His great-grandfather, the eponymous founder of the Hashim clan, had married a Medinan woman. And fathered a son with her.

Hashim had been the chief Quraysh representative to Syria, which at the time included all of what is now Israel, Palestine, Jordan, and Lebanon, as well as the modern Syrian state. As such, he had often passed through Medina on his way north and south. During one such layover, he had married a woman from the majority Khazraj tribe, then continued on his mission, only to fall sick and die in Gaza without even being aware that he had sired a son. In a detail that certainly struck deep in the mind of the orphaned Muhammad, that son—the man who would become Muhammad’s grandfather—was also born an orphan.

It’s a measure of the psychological distance between Medina and Mecca that the existence of this son seems to have been unknown in Mecca for seven years. So far as the Meccans were concerned, Medina was the boondocks: a useful caravan stop, but really just a loose confederation of hamlets strung along the eight miles of a fertile spring- fed valley thick with date palms. Like most city dwellers even today, the Meccans considered themselves infinitely superior to what they saw as a bunch of provincials. So when news of the boy’s existence finally reached Mecca, it was clear to his uncle, Hashim’s brother al-Muttalib, that he had to be brought back to his father’s flesh and blood.