The First Muslim: The Story of Muhammad (29 page)

So it seemed, but then they would be seen as capitulating to Muhammad, and that was out of the question. Both abu-Sufyan and Muhammad needed to save face, and each recognized the other’s need. But while Muhammad certainly knew this all along, he could also see that many of his followers did not. That was why he’d called for the renewed vow of obedience under the acacia tree: he needed to be sure that whatever the outcome, his men would accept it. But even that assurance would now be severely tested.

On the face of it, the agreement he hammered out with the Meccan council seemed to concede the day. Known as the Truce of Hudaibiya, it stipulated that there was to be no armed confrontation between Mecca and Medina for the next ten years, and that all Medinan raids on Meccan caravans were to stop. In the meantime, any tribe wishing to ally themselves with either party was free to do so; if they had been allied with Mecca or with Muhammad before, they were now free to switch sides without penalty. But there was to be no umra, not this year. Muhammad and the believers were to turn back, so that nobody could say that he had forced Mecca into compliance. In return, Mecca would allow him to enter the city and make the umra in a year’s time.

This was not what any of the seven hundred would-be pilgrims had anticipated, especially the emigrants among them. Where they’d been sure they were on the verge of a long-awaited return, they were now faced with what felt like dishonorable withdrawal. The subtleties of the agreement escaped them, especially the clause that freed the Beduin tribes from their former alliances and allowed them to choose between Mecca and Muhammad, thus recognizing Muhammad’s authority as the head of an entity on a par with Mecca. Even his closest advisers were divided. Where abu-Bakr and Ali saw the long-term advantages, the warrior Omar saw only weakness. They had come all this way just to be fobbed off with a promise of “next year”? Was this all you got for giving up the right to wage war? Omar’s was the most strenuous voice raised in objection, but far from the only one. As ibnIshaq would report, “When they saw what they saw—the truce, the retreat, and the obligations Muhammad had taken on himself—they felt so grieved that they were close to despair.”

If Muhammad himself was disappointed, he showed no sign of it. There was no telling if he had accepted the agreement in pilgrim-like modesty and humility, or if he knew he had gotten exactly what he wanted and perhaps even more. For now, he presented it as a test of his followers’ faith. “Be patient and control yourselves,” he told them, “for God will provide relief. We have given and have been given a promise in the name of God. We cannot deal falsely and go back on our word.”

He could see that they needed more, however. They had come so far, in such good faith and with such high expectations; it was asking too much to expect them to simply turn round and go home, trailing seventy sacrificial camels behind them. Instead, they would do what they had come to do. If they couldn’t perform the pilgrimage in Mecca itself, they would do so right here at Hudaibiya. He stood and gave the order: “Arise, sacrifice, and shave your heads.”

But nobody moved. Surely they’d misheard. How could they perform the rituals anywhere but at the sanctuary of the Kaaba? What kind of makeshift pilgrimage was this? Even when Muhammad gave the order a second time, and then a third, they sat in stunned silence.

If anger flared in him at this flagrant breaking of the vows of obedience they’d so recently made, he didn’t let it show. If he gave way for a moment to despair, there was no outward sign of it. Instead, Muhammad held all eyes on him as he picked up a dagger and made for the silver-nose-ringed camel that had once been abu-Jahl’s. Everyone stared open-mouthed as he recited out loud the plea to God to accept this sacrifice, then pushed the animal’s head back to bare its jugular vein, slashed with the dagger, and cut its throat.

Their paralysis broke as the blood gushed out onto the sand, and cries of praise went up throughout the encampment. Muhammad called for an aide to come cut off his long braids and shave his head in the sign that his pilgrimage had been made, and hundreds of men rushed to emulate him. One of them would later stoutly maintain that once they had all been shaven, the mound of tresses and braids was lifted into the air on a sudden breeze and carried the nine miles to the Kaaba in a sign that their sacrifice had been accepted by God.

In time, the truce of Hudaibiya would come to be seen as a strategic masterstroke on Muhammad’s part. Ibn-Ishaq would write that “no victory greater than this one had been won previously in Islam. There had only been fighting before, but when the truce took place and war laid down its burdens and all the people felt safe with each other, they met with each other in conversation and debate, and all who possessed understanding and were told about islam accepted it.” Both Beduin and Meccans were exquisitely attuned to the shift in the balance of power, and many now openly pledged their support for Muhammad. And in case some of the emigrants who’d followed him to Hudabiya still doubted his judgment in accepting the truce, a Quranic revelation on the way back to Medina effectively silenced them. “God was well pleased with the faithful when they swore allegiance to you under the tree,” the voice told Muhammad. “He knew what was in their hearts, and sent down tranquillity among them . . . He has held back the hands of people hostile to you as a sign to the faithful. There are many more gains to come.”

If war was deception, so too, in a way, was peace. By disarming his own men, Muhammad had effectively disarmed the Meccans, forcing them into a classic zero-sum game in which compromise was the only possible solution, even as any compromise was to his advantage. Eleven centuries before Clausewitz’s famous dictum that war was the continuation of politics by other means, Muhammad had demonstrated quite the reverse. What war could not achieve, politics would. Unarmed confrontation had not only forced Mecca to accommodate him; it had also served as a very public demonstration to all of Arabia that he and his followers were more loyal to “the traditions of the fathers” than the Meccans themselves.

Neither Gandhi nor Machiavelli could have done better. Muhammad had reversed the terms of engagement, turning apparent weakness into strength. He had proved himself as effective unarmed as armed, and used the language of peace as forcefully as that of war. In fact it was precisely this dual aspect of him that would so confound his critics and his followers alike. Whether in the seventh century or the twenty-first, he would frustrate the simplistic terms of those trying to pigeonhole him as either a “prophet of peace” or a “prophet of war.” This was not a matter of either/or. A complex man carving a huge profile in history, his vision went beyond seemingly irreconcilable opposites. He had allowed himself to be turned away from Mecca in the full knowledge that he had in fact completed the first stage of his return.

ith the Meccan truce in place, Muhammad set about securing what he now considered his hinterland to the north. Just a month after returning to Medina, he headed an expedition of sixteen hundred men against Khaybar, the richest of the oases of the northern Hijaz. Its vast date-palm plantations were divided between seven Jewish tribes, each one with its own fortified stronghold. When abuSufyan had led a massive army against Medina, with its similar system of strongholds, he had laid siege to it and failed. Now Muhammad would give practically a textbook illustration of how it should be done. First he secured the neutrality of Khaybar’s Beduin allies, the Ghatafan: the dates they’d forfeited at the siege of Medina would now be theirs in reward for not intervening. Then, instead of trying to lay siege to the whole of Khaybar, he dealt with the strongholds methodically. Starting with the weakest, he forced their surrender one by one—a process made all the easier by offering terms that were graciously munificent compared with those the Medinan Jews had received. Having established how severe he could be, he had no need to resort to such drastic measures again. Considering what they might have faced, the Khaybar tribes willingly agreed: they accepted

Muhammad’s political authority and his protection, pledged their support, and surrendered half their annual income in taxes to Medina. Once again the deal was sealed with marriage. Safiya, a beautiful seventeen-year-old whose father was the leading chief of Khaybar, became not only Muhammad’s eighth wife, but his second Jewish one.

With Khaybar secured, he marched on to the smaller Jewishdominated oasis of Tayma, halfway between Medina and the ancient necropolis city of Petra in what is now southern Jordan. The tribes there offered no resistance, and in return received more generous terms than those granted at Khaybar. With the major settled areas of the northern Hijaz now solidly in line behind him, it was only a matter of time until all the Beduin tribes in the region accepted Muhammad’s authority. And, to the south, Mecca. He was ready for the second stage of his return.

In February 629, he set out with two thousand followers on the promised umra, which was to go down in the history books as the Lesser Pilgrimage of Fulfillment. He led the way mounted on Qaswa, the slit-eared camel he had ridden into Medina seven years before and given free rein until she knelt at the spot where the mosque would be built. The creature that had carried him into exile would now carry him back.

Abu-Sufyan kept the word he had given the year before. As agreed at Hudaibiya, the Quraysh withdrew from the Kaaba precinct and gave free access to Muhammad and his followers. The dream of return that had haunted him day and night for years had come true, and he set foot on his home soil again.

Yet instead of the fulsome account one might expect, the early Islamic historians would treat the event with extraordinary brevity. The usually loquacious ibn-Ishaq devotes a single page to it where one would have expected at least a dozen. He speeds through the details as Muhammad rides to the Kaaba, touches the Black Stone with his staff, then dismounts to circumambulate the sanctuary before making his sacrifice and having his head shaved. There is a distinct sense of anti-climax. Or rather, pre-climax. It’s as though this pilgrimage, done only with the grudging acquiescence of the Quraysh, was not quite the real thing. If the Quraysh council kept their word and tolerated Muhammad’s entry with tight-lipped resignation, they certainly did not welcome him. The real homecoming was yet to happen.

And Muhammad himself? Did he feel resentful eyes boring into him as he rode through the familiar alleys? Was he aware that many Meccans still wished him nothing but ill even as he performed the hallowed rites of pilgrimage? Or was all this rendered null and void by the sheer elation of once more binding himself to his birthplace with those seven orbits of the Kaaba, by the confirmation on his body of what he had known deep inside all along: that he would return, no matter the odds? All we know for sure is that he stayed the full three days allotted him, and that the evident sincerity of his pilgrimage brought many more Meccans over to his side—if not openly, at least by implication.

His uncle Abbas, for instance, a leading Meccan banker who had been careful to keep his distance from his nephew over the past seven years, presided over the marriage of his sister-in-law Maymuna to Muhammad on the third day of the umra, thus publicly indicating that even if he had not openly accepted islam, he was moving closer to it. He was far from the only one to sense which way the wind was blowing. Maymuna was the aunt of one of Mecca’s top military commanders, Khalid, and when Muhammad and his followers departed at the end of the third day, Khalid and another senior commander, Amr, joined them. Both men were greeted with open arms in Medina, welcomed as prodigal sons despite the fact that Khalid had led the Meccan cavalry against Muhammad at both Uhud and the Battle of the Trench, and was thus responsible for the deaths of several believers. That was now a thing of the past, Muhammad assured him, telling him that his acceptance of islam had “erased all debts.” Indeed, Khalid was to become such a renowned Muslim commander that he would earn the sobriquet “the sword of God.”

Most important of all, though, was one other very public figure with whom Muhammad spoke in those three days in Mecca. They must have met discreetly, given the atmosphere of tension around Muhammad’s presence in the city, but meet they certainly did, because shortly after his return to Medina, Muhammad married his ninth wife, the widowed Umm Habiba, who was the daughter of none other than the leader of the Meccan council, abu-Sufyan. She had defied her father by accepting islam early on, but the time for defiance was long past. This was about rapprochement. However quietly given, abuSufyan’s consent to his daughter’s marriage now bound him to Muhammad. Between them, father-in-law and son-in-law were to figure out the terms of the third and final stage of Muhammad’s return to Mecca.

ust six months later, the Hudaibiya truce was challenged when a long-running feud between two Beduin tribes broke out in renewed violence, encouraged by hardliners on the Meccan council who were looking for any excuse to break the truce. Since one of the tribes was allied with Mecca and the other with Muhammad, the ultimate responsibility for their actions fell on their protectors, which would place Mecca and Medina at loggerheads again. Sure enough, after killing twenty of their opponents, the fighters allied with Mecca fled into the sanctuary city, demanding protection. In response, Muhammad’s allies demanded that he force Mecca to hand over the men it was sheltering.

Muhammad would clearly be in the right if he took up arms in defense of his allies, so this time it was abu-Sufyan who made the tenday journey between Mecca and Medina. The man who had laid siege to Medina just three years before was now obliged to beg for Muhammad’s restraint, appealing to him on the grounds that only with Muhammad’s cooperation could he contain the hardliners at home in Mecca.

Ibn-Ishaq and al-Tabari concede nothing about Muhammad’s response. In fact they go out of their way to insist that Muhammad refused to answer abu-Sufyan at all. Yet this seems not merely impolitic but highly unlikely. The two former enemies had come to respect each other, not only as in-laws but as men of integrity. Even in war, abu-Sufyan had acted honorably, apologizing for his wife Hind’s mutilation of Hamza’s body at Uhud. He had witnessed Muhammad’s devotion during the umra and could see that his deportment was more in tune with the spirit and traditions of the sanctuary city than that of many Meccans. But above all, he was a realist. If some members of his council did not yet recognize that their days in power were numbered, abu-Sufyan certainly did. With commanders like Khalid and Amr now among Muhammad’s top advisers, there was no longer any doubt that he could take Mecca by force if he decided to. All the Meccan hardliners had achieved was to bring the reign of the Quraysh very close to an end.