The First Muslim: The Story of Muhammad (22 page)

The Meccans were incensed, all the more since every clan of the Quraysh had shares in the caravan. “Do Muhammad and his companions imagine that it will be like the raid at Nakhla?” roared his old nemesis abu-Jahl. “No, by God, they will find otherwise this time!” Muhammad had three hundred men? They would show him what real numbers were. Overnight, they raised an army nearly one thousand strong and made a forced march north to Badr under abu-Jahl’s command, secure in the assumption that Muhammad would never dream of fighting against such overwhelming odds. They’d quash this bumptious crew of outcasts simply by showing up.

Meanwhile, unsure if the army would make it in time, abu-Sufyan decided to bypass Badr by doubling back and leading the caravan safely to the west along the Red Sea. That left two armed forces, one coming north from Mecca, the other west from Medina, converging on a caravan that was no longer there. It was a clear recipe for trouble, and abu-Sufyan tried to forestall it by sending a rider to intercept abuJahl and his men. “You came out to protect your caravan and your property, oh Quraysh,” his message said. “God has kept them safe, so turn back.”

But asking abu-Jahl to turn back from a confrontation with Muhammad was like asking a dust storm to stop in its tracks. At the very least, he was spoiling for a fight, even though by doing so he’d be raising Muhammad’s profile. As Machiavelli would put it, “There is no doubt that a ruler’s greatness depends on his triumphing over difficulties and opposition. So fortune finds enemies for him and encourages them to take the field against him, so that he may have cause to triumph over them and ascend higher on the ladder his foes have provided.” In this, the Quraysh, led by abu-Jahl, were now spectacularly cooperative.

In fact for all his aggressive rhetoric, abu-Jahl may have calculated what was at stake more accurately than the calmer abu-Sufyan. This was a matter of Meccan prestige. To have even allowed Muhammad to divert the caravan had been to concede him a kind of semi-victory. Word would spread. The desert grapevine allowed few secrets, especially at a place like Badr where everyone stopped for water, making it a mother lode of gossip and news. For abu-Jahl to turn back now would be a further concession, and he was damned if he’d be the one to make it. Not only would his forces advance on to Badr, he declared, but “we will spend three days there, slaughter camels, and give food to eat and wine to drink to all, so that the Beduin may hear of what we have done and continue to hold us in awe.”

Not everyone in the Meccan army agreed. What if it turned out to be more than a show of force, and they actually had to fight? “There is no need to take to the battlefield except in defense of property, and the caravan is safe,” argued one clan leader, only to provoke an accusation of cowardice from abu-Jahl: “Your lungs are inflated with fear,” he sneered.

Another pointed out that Muhammad’s men included emigrants who were kinsmen of theirs: “By God, if you defeat Muhammad in battle, you will not be able to look one another in the face without loathing, for you will see someone who has killed your nephew or your kinsman. Let us turn back.” But again abu-Jahl responded with scorn: “You say this only because your own son is among Muhammad’s followers. Don’t try to protect him.” And then he trumped the kinship argument by calling on the brother of the man killed in the Nakhla raid to come forward. “You see your revenge before your eyes,” he told

[Author: Note “father of darkness”; see later query]

him. “Rise and remind them of your brother’s murder.” By the time the bereaved brother had finished, most of the Meccans were thoroughly riled up for blood vengeance. Though some did turn back, over seven hundred rode on.

They might have had their revenge if the argument over whether to advance had not delayed them. The grapevine had worked both ways, so Muhammad had been informed not only that abu-Sufyan had diverted the caravan but also that a strong Meccan force was on the way. At this point, like the Meccans, he faced a choice: he too could simply retreat and go home. But to do so would be to betray weakness on his part, in the eyes of his own men as well as the eyes of others. This was no longer about the caravan. Nor was it simply an abstract matter of honor. This was about Muhammad and the believers establishing their reputation, and the Meccans defending theirs. Both sides needed to dispel any notion of weakness— the one in order to gain power, the other for fear of losing it.

By the time the Meccan army reached Badr, Muhammad and his men were already there, dug in on the higher ground. That night there was a steady rain, a rarity especially in mid-March. The Meccans hunkered down in field shelters, but Muhammad used the rain as cover. He quietly worked his men to block up the wells and cisterns closest to the Meccans, so that at dawn they’d be forced higher up the wadi, where the believers held the high ground. By controlling access to the water, he would control the whole field.

The fighting began under cloudy skies early the next morning. The believers’ ranks held steady, but the Meccan ones—with each clan fighting as a separate unit and no unified command—fractured and broke. By noon, they had been routed. Forty-four Meccans lay dead, including “the father of darkness,” abu-Jahl himself. The kill was claimed by a young emigrant, a former herdsman whom he’d once hit in the face. “I struck him a blow which severed his foot and half his leg,” the herdsman would say. “By God, when it flew off it was like the pit of a date flying out of a date-wine crusher.” And he had the satisfaction of hearing abu-Jahl say as he died: “You have risen high, little shepherd.”

Whether abu-Jahl actually said these words or not, the story perfectly expressed the insult of the defeat for the Meccans. “Here the Quraysh have flung their dearest flesh and blood to you,” Muhammad told his men as he surveyed the field afterward, as much in sadness as in pride. The crème de la crème of Mecca had fought what they thought was a ragtag group of outcasts, including freed slaves—their own former slaves!—and lost. What had happened at Badr was simply not possible, not in their scheme of things. The natural order of their world had been upended.

he herdsman’s story of abu-Jahl’s leg flying off so spectacularly is one of many such details in the accounts of Badr. Both ibnIshaq’s life of Muhammad and al-Tabari’s history of early Islam are Homerically resplendent with battlefield gore. Enemy feet and legs are cut off with one slice of the sword so that “the marrow flowed on out.” Intestines spill out of gaping bellies. Wounds are bravely suffered, no deterrent to further bravery, so that when an enemy sword leaves one believer’s arm hanging by shreds of skin and tendon, “I put my foot on it and stood on it until I pulled it off, then went on fighting.”

Exaggerated combat stories had been part of the foundation legends of every culture from the Sumerians down to the Byzantines. They were to be expected. But even as ibn-Ishaq and al-Tabari helped build a heroic Islamic identity, they remained conscientious chroniclers. Alongside the usual tales of death-defying derring-do, they gave realistic accounts of the panic and confusion of battle. The death of each of the fifteen believers killed at Badr is recorded, for example, no matter how ignominious. One fell off a high rock in his excitement and broke his neck. Another was thrown by his panicked horse and fatally kicked in the head. When a third swung his sword hard at an enemy and missed, the momentum carried the blade deep into his own leg, severing his femoral artery.

Like a split screen, the accounts shift back and forth between the conventionally heroic and the humanly fallible, the brave warrior of legend and the terrified human being desperate to survive. In the modern era of remote control, it’s easy to forget the sheer messiness of face-to-face combat, which was in fact eye-to-eye combat, one on one. Each fighter could smell the rank breath of the other’s fear on his face, feel his grip slipping on his adversary’s sweat, hear the grunting effort with each thrust and parry. They used not only swords and daggers but stones, fists, elbows, fingers—anything at all in the frantic effort to be the one to survive—and their panic was sharpened by the fact that many found themselves grappling not with an anonymous enemy but with people they knew. Sometimes intimately. In a battle that was all the more ferocious for being so intensely personal, both emigrants and Meccans fought former neighbors, distant cousins and in-laws, uncles and nephews, and even fathers, brothers, and sons.

That afternoon the victors roamed the field of battle, claiming chainmail, swords, horses, and riding camels as booty. Muhammad himself took only two items: an ornate double-edged sword and the prized stud camel that had belonged to his arch-nemesis, the newly deceased abu-Jahl. But the booty was nothing compared with the ransoms they’d negotiate with Mecca for the fifty captives they’d taken. These included not only one of abu-Sufyan’s own sons but also close kin of Muhammad’s: his uncle Abbas as well as a nephew of Khadija’s who was also Muhammad’s son-in-law, having married his daughter Zaynab. Determined to show no favor, Muhammad held both men along with the others, but when Zaynab sent jewels from Mecca as ransom payment—a good wife, she had stayed with her husband in Mecca rather than emigrate—she included a necklace that had been Khadija’s wedding gift to her. Recognizing it, Muhammad broke down and sent both son-in-law and jewels back to her. This was all very close to home.

y the time they told their battle stories, the believers saw victory in the face of such odds as a sign of divine favor. God had been on their side at Badr. Some would tell of angels descending in clouds of dust to fight alongside them, while Meccans would later explain their unaccountable defeat by recalling “white-robed men on piebald horses, between heaven and earth, for which we were no match and which nothing could resist.” As the Quranic voice would soon tell the believers, “It was not you who killed the enemy, but God.”
Then as now, everyone loves a winner, all the more an unexpected

one. Badr created a huge upsurge in confidence among the believers. As word spread, the magnitude of the victory increased, along with Muhammad’s reputation. He had routed the most powerful tribe in Arabia, and in the most public of places, and this only added to the injury for the Quraysh. Where they thought they’d solved their Muhammad problem with his expulsion, it was now infinitely worse. Word of the battle would spread throughout the Hijaz and beyond, over the mountains to the high desert steppeland of the Najd, all the way down to Yemen in the south and up into Syria to the north. The blow to Meccan prestige was particularly painful since like all successful merchants, the Quraysh traded on their reputation; if they could not defend it, their economy would suffer. They knew that Muhammad and the early Muslims would gain respect in inverse proportion to the Quraysh loss of it. The challenge to the established order would create a palpable frisson, an excited rustling through the grapevine as old alliances were reconsidered. In the canny assessment of power politics that determined the allegiance of the many tribes of Arabia, nobody could now afford to discount Muhammad.

There was no question that the Quraysh would seek revenge. Further warfare between Mecca and Medina was inevitable, and their Beduin confederates would be drawn into it. The nomadic tribes’ main concern was to ally themselves with the winning side, but where that had seemed obvious before Badr, it no longer was. It made sense, then, to cover their bets. Especially when the stories of divine intervention seemed borne out by Muhammad’s victory in the face of overwhelming odds.

Even as the captives from Badr were still being ransomed, Muhammad sent out armed delegations with orders to fight the Beduin only if they refused to ally themselves with Medina. The nomads took the pragmatic option, lining up behind the rising new power rather than the fading old one. Time after time, ibn-Ishaq reports, the delegations “made a treaty of friendship and returned to Medina without a fight,” and with each such agreement Muhammad expanded his sphere of influence and decreased that of Mecca.

If few of the tribes officially accepted islam, that was not a problem. By pledging mutual self-defense and recognizing Muhammad’s authority, they were allying themselves with the new umma; in time, belief would follow action. The agreements were sealed in the traditional way with tribute and taxes, so that Muhammad was now bringing serious income into Medina. A community treasury was established for the believers, quickly enriched further by successful caravan raids as their new Beduin allies withdrew the protection they’d previously given the Meccans. Money spoke as loud then as it does now, and Muhammad’s support within Medina rose further. In just two years he had gone far beyond his role as an arbiter and established himself as a political force. For the first time, perhaps, he could see himself not only as the leader of the believers but as the leader of all of Medina, blending spiritual and political authority into one.

But power was respected only so long as it continued to be demonstrated. This was the political logic of the time, and Muhammad still had to prove himself within its terms. The Quranic voice had advocated forgiveness and tolerance, but that had been when he had only a small minority behind him. If he was to establish his newly made power position, he would need to meet the expectations of his time. A new ruthlessness was called for, and it would be demonstrated nowhere more than in his relations with the Jewish tribes of Medina.

t may be only human to feel the most bitterness not for declared enemies but for those to whom one once felt closest. Only they have the ability to disappoint deeply. The sense of disloyalty—“How could you?”—cuts deep, not least because it’s a defense against realizing how much had been assumed, mistaking friendship for unqualified support. When such expectations fall short, there’s a tendency to experience this as the fault of the other, and to see it as personal betrayal. Muhammad certainly assumed that the Jews of Medina would be

the most open to his message. Their prophets were his prophets, divinely inspired men who had warned their people just as he had been trying to warn his own people in Mecca. The Quran would honor the great figures of the Hebrew bible from Adam through Abraham down to Joseph and Moses, Solomon and Elijah. Like all Arabians, the Jews spoke of God as al-Lah, the high one, and often used the honorific that would become familiar in the Quran, ar-Rahman, the merciful, just as the newly completed Babylonian Talmud used Rahmana. It seemed clear to Muhammad that Jews and Muslims were the common descendants of Abraham, the first hanif: two branches of the same monotheistic family. They were cousins, not strangers. And since the Jews were the original upholders of din Ibrahim, the tradition of Abraham, he took it for granted that he would have not merely their assent, but their enthusiastic support. The superiority of the new message he brought seemed self-evident. How could anyone who claimed to worship God possibly reject it?