The First Muslim: The Story of Muhammad (30 page)

The only question was when and how that end would come, and that is what abu-Sufyan and Muhammad quietly and secretly negotiated. In fact it is still the way most treaties are negotiated. The public meetings take place only after the basics have been privately agreed on in closed sessions far from prying eyes and gossiping tongues. This is where discretion is tested and trust slowly and painfully established. If you are politically wise, you meet publicly only with the negotiated assurance of a good outcome, and this assurance was what abu-Sufyan and Muhammad now hammered out. Basically, they wrote the script for the surrender of Mecca.

So far as anyone else was concerned, the end came abruptly. The moment abu-Sufyan returned to Mecca, Muhammad began to mobilize. He summoned contingents from all his Beduin allies and on January 1, 630, marched south. By the time his army set up camp one day’s ride from Mecca, its numbers had been swelled to ten thousand by those fearful of eventual reprisal or eager to be on the right side of history. Or perhaps both.

What happened next can only have been agreed on beforehand. Abu-Sufyan came out of Mecca and rode into the Medinan encampment on a distinctive white horse that belonged to Muhammad, a sign that he was under Muhammad’s protection. Not even the most hotheaded believer would dare touch a hair on the head of anyone riding this animal. This was a pre-arranged rendezvous between Muhammad and abu-Sufyan, designed to be part of the public record. And this time their words were recorded.

The exchange between them, far from being antagonistic, seems more like banter: ruefully good-natured on abu-Sufyan’s part and almost teasing on Muhammad’s. “Alas, abu-Sufyan,” he said, “hasn’t the time come for you to know that there is no god but God?”

“May my father and my mother be your ransom,” abu-Sufyan replied, “you are both forbearing and generous. If there were another god along with God, I think he would have availed me somewhat before now.”

It’s not hard to imagine Muhammad smiling at this, at least to himself, before pressing his advantage: “Hasn’t the time come for you to know that I am the messenger of God?”

“I have indeed been thinking about that,” said abu-Sufyan. And referring to Muhammad in the formal third person, he added: “He who with God overcame me, was he whom I had driven away with all my might.” At which Muhammad punched him playfully in the chest and said, “Indeed you did!”

Then and there, the leader of Mecca formally accepted islam by reciting the shahada: “I testify that there is no god but God and Muhammad is his messenger.” He placed himself and his city under Muhammad’s protection, and the pledge was returned as Muhammad swore to ensure safety of life and property for all who did not resist when he and his forces entered. Mecca had formally surrendered.

Abu-Sufyan was given safe conduct back into the city, where he went straight to the Kaaba precinct to announce the terms of the surrender. “People of Quraysh, Muhammad has come upon you with forces you cannot resist,” he proclaimed. “Anyone who enters my house will be safe, as will anyone who enters the Kaaba precinct, and anyone who stays at home and bolts his door and withholds his hand from action against Muhammad.”

But not even all those closest to him could accept this, least of all Hind. Living up to her fierce reputation as “the liver-eater” of Uhud, she strode up, grabbed her husband’s beard in public humiliation, and accused him of cowardice. “Kill that fat greasy bladder of lard!” she screamed at him. “A fine leader he is for this people!” Abu-Sufyan was reduced to fighting her off as he appealed again to all of Mecca: “Woe unto you, Quraysh. Do not let her lead you astray, for you cannot resist what will come.”

The majority of Mecca was nothing if not realistic. For the most part, those who didn’t actively welcome the surrender to Muhammad at least resigned themselves to the inevitable. But there were still hardliners determined to resist no matter what, and in Muhammad’s encampment his followers were well aware of this. They pelted him with questions. What if they entered Mecca only to be attacked despite abu-Sufyan’s assurance of surrender? If they were met with violence, what were they to do? Could they respond in kind despite the ban on fighting in the sanctuary precinct? But then what if they actually killed someone on sacred ground? Would they be damned to be “companions of the fire,” consigned to hell?

The answer came in a new Quranic revelation. Yes, it said, they were permitted to use violence on sacred ground, but only as a last resort. Only, that is, if enemy fighters tried to stop them from reaching the Kaaba, and only if they were attacked first. They were not to initiate any violence. They were to give the Meccans every opportunity to surrender peacefully, and there was to be absolutely no looting or any other form of damage to property: no booty, no spoils of war. They were entering a holy city, and they were to behave accordingly.

On the morning of the following day, January 11, 630, Muhammad made Mecca his own. He divided his army into four columns, each one entering the city from a different direction. Only the southern column headed by Khalid met with resistance when one of his horsemen was killed; twelve of the attackers were quickly dispatched, and the others fled. The fatah—literally the “opening” of Mecca, a word that would only later come to mean conquest or victory—had been achieved.

Muhammad’s followers thronged the alleys as he rode on in. They cheered and chanted “Praise be to God” as he entered the Kaaba precinct, and the Meccans who had taken refuge there joined in, though whether out of hope or fear was still unclear. No longer the enemy, or even the barely tolerated visitor, he was now the ruler. The man who had grown up on the margins of Meccan society had become its center, the outsider transformed into the ultimate insider. When he struck the Black Stone set into the corner of the Kaaba and shouted “Allahu akbar!”—“God is great!”—the cry was taken up throughout the city. It reverberated through the alleys and echoed off the mountains all around, as though to say that this was not a matter of Muhammad returning to Mecca but of Mecca returning to itself. And indeed this was his message as he mounted the steps leading to the door of the Kaaba and addressed the crowd.

“There is no god but God, he has no partner,” he declared. “He has fulfilled his promise and helped his servant. He alone has put to flight those who banded together against his servant.” This was to be a new beginning, the dawn of an age of enlightenment: “People of Quraysh, God has taken from you the haughtiness of jahiliya,” the era of pre-Islamic ignorance. From this point on, the rule of privilege was over. In islam, all would be equal, and Mecca would no longer be the fiefdom of a small ruling elite: “Behold, every alleged claim of hereditary privilege, whether by blood or wealth, is hereby abolished. It is as dust under your feet.” And then, looking down at the throng of upturned faces, he asked them directly: “People of Quraysh, what do you think I intend to do with you?”

It was a rhetorical question. He knew what they feared: reprisals, enslavement, confiscation of everything they owned. “Only good,” came the answer from the crowd, “for you are a noble brother tribesman and the son of a noble brother tribesman.” And if they had thought so little of his nobility before that they had driven him out of the tribe, now they not only welcomed him back into it as “one of us” but clamored to acclaim him both as their leader and as the messenger of God.

Muhammad stepped up to the moment. There would be no more bloodshed between them, he declared: “God made Mecca holy the day he created heaven and earth, and it is the holy of holies until the Day of Judgment. It is not lawful for anyone who submits to God and believes in the Day of Judgment to shed blood here. It was not lawful to anyone before me, and it will not be lawful to anyone after me.”

There was to be a general amnesty. “Go,” he said, “for you are now those whose bonds have been loosed; you are free.” And the word he used, al-tulaqa, “the freed ones,” was resonant with meaning. They were free not only of physical bonds—the shackles and ropes they could have been tied with—but free too of the bonds of the benighted past. This was not a conquest, he was saying, but a liberation: a revolution peacefully achieved, and peacefully accepted.

And with that, almost two years to the day after he’d first dreamed it, he took the key to the Kaaba in his right hand, turned it in the lock, and entered.

hat does one dream of when the dream has been achieved? For the past eight years, Mecca had been the lodestone of Muhammad’s life, the focus of prayer, of battle, of every thought about the future. And now it was his. After so

many years of resistance and oppression, the exile’s dream had come true: not merely return, but return to huge acclaim. Yet Muhammad reveled neither in his victory nor in the ease of it.

The early historians give no sense of elation or exhilaration. Instead there’s a feeling almost of letdown, and one can see why. When a man of sixty suddenly achieves the thing he most hoped for, there is none of the triumphalism one might expect in someone younger. The enormity of his achievement is shadowed by a certain sadness as he reflects not only on how much had to be gone through in order to arrive at this point, but on how much will still be required in the future. As he entered the Kaaba, Muhammad must have sensed the full weight of revolution achieved, and known that to realize a dream was only to wake up to a more complex reality.

Perhaps the closest we can come to how he felt that day is in the recollections of another man who had succeeded against all odds. In 1989, the playwright and former dissident leader Václav Havel became Czechoslovakia’s president after the collapse of the Communist regime, and oversaw the first free elections in decades. “It had been a time of excitement, swift decisions, and countless improvisations,” he recalled, “an utterly thrilling, even adventurous time. It was, in a way, a fairy tale. There were so many things that could have gone wrong. We were traveling on totally unknown terrain. And none of us had any reason to believe that it wouldn’t collapse under our feet. But it didn’t. And now the time had come when there was indeed reason to rejoice. The revolution, with all its perils, was behind us, and the prospect of building a democratic state, in peace, lay before us. Could there be a happier moment in the life of a land that had suffered so long under totalitarianism?

“And yet,” Havel continued, “precisely as that splendid historical moment dawned, a peculiar thing happened to me . . . I was in some sort of profoundly subdued state. I felt strangely paralyzed, empty inside. The pressure of exhilarating events, which until then had aroused in me a surprising level of energy, abruptly vanished, and I found myself feeling exhausted, almost irrelevant. The poetry was over and the prose was beginning. It was only then that we realized how challenging, and in many ways unrewarding, was the work that lay ahead of us, how heavy a burden we had shouldered. Only now could we appreciate the weight of the destiny we had chosen.”

This is what one senses in Muhammad: instead of elation, a sudden aching feeling of exhaustion. He was no longer a rebel, no longer a visionary radical, but a man who had achieved the seemingly impossible in just two decades. Yet how much energy can one man have? The toll of the past twenty years was visible in the deep lines creasing his eyes and cheeks, his forehead furrowed against the headaches that had become more and more intense since his injury at Uhud. Now, as he entered the Kaaba, he had to have known that the demands of running an incipient state would only increase this toll, and sensed that from this moment on, his body would begin to fail him.

At all events, he conducted himself with extraordinary restraint. While the popularly accepted image has him demonstratively smashing the idols said to be inside the Kaaba, there is no historical record of this, not least because the sanctuary was almost certainly empty of all physical representation. Neither ibn-Ishaq nor al-Tabari give any details of what happened when he turned that key and entered, and perhaps that’s as it should be. It was a private moment, unrecorded, so that one can only imagine him closing the door behind him and welcoming the hush as the men’s shouts of acclaim and the women’s ululations of celebration were muffled by the thick stone walls and he was a man alone once more, whispering into the darkness, offering a quiet prayer of praise and thanksgiving. Though he did not yet know it, it was to be one of the last private moments he would ever be willingly allowed.

e emerged to declare the Kaaba formally rededicated to the one god, then gave the order to smash the totems in the precinct surrounding it, and rode to the nearby mound of Safa. There he sat for three days as the Meccans came out of their houses and lined up to swear allegiance to God and to Muhammad as his messenger. Among them, toward the end of the third day, was one elegantly dressed woman who had pulled her shawl over her face. She spoke only when her turn came to take the pledge, and then it was clear who she was, and why she had hidden her face. It was abu-Sufyan’s wife Hind, the woman who had so horribly mutilated Hamza’s corpse at Uhud.

A tense hush descended on the gathering as they waited to see how Muhammad would deal with her, and they hung on every word of the charged exchange between them. “Forgive me for what is past,” she begged the man she’d so publicly and recently called a bladder full of lard, “and God will forgive you.”

“You shall not invent slanderous tales,” Muhammad responded, taking his measure of her. She replied with another plea for forgiveness, or at least for forgetfulness. “By God,” she said, “slander is disgraceful, but it is sometimes better to ignore it.”

He tested her further: “You shall not disobey me in carrying out orders to do good.” And now her answer was impatient if not downright impertinent: “We should not have sat all this time waiting to pledge allegiance if we wanted to disobey you in such things.” But perhaps she sensed that whatever she said, short of outright hostility, Muhammad had no intention of exacting revenge on her.

The Quran insisted on forgiveness of former enemies once they pledged allegiance, and if Hind’s pledge was clearly less than wholehearted, he would accept it nonetheless, possibly respecting her forthrightness more than the most abject declaration of obedience. This was the opportunity to heal old wounds, and he knew all too well that healing takes time. The massacre of the Qureyz had already established that he was capable of ruthlessness when he deemed it necessary; he had no need to prove it again. On the contrary, to forgo revenge even when it seemed justified would create a sense of obligation and loyalty far more reliable than anything that could be obtained by force. Graciousness would be effective not least for being unexpected.

Moreover, his public forgiveness of Hind would bind her husband abu-Sufyan all the more closely to him, and this was essential if his vision of unity was to be fulfilled. He did not see this as a conquest where winner takes all, but rather as a reuniting of what should never have been divided. What he envisioned was not the enforced subjection of the conquered but a new coalition of the willing, one in which old enmities were abolished and all who wanted were welcomed into the umma as equal partners. Accordingly, he overrode objections from Omar and other leading advisers, accepting Hind’s plea for forgiveness and then reaching across the aisle, as it were, to appoint leading Meccans to senior administrative and military positions. Among those favored was not only abu-Sufyan himself but also, strikingly, his son by Hind, Muawiya.

Knowingly or not, Muhammad was again creating the future leadership of Islam. Muawiya would become one of his scribes, and within a few years would rise to the powerful position of governor of Syria after that huge province fell to Muslim control. But his ascendance would not stop there. Just nineteen years after Muhammad’s death, when Ali, by then the fourth caliph, was assassinated, Muawiya would assume control of the whole of the Muslim empire and found the Umayyad dynasty, based in Damascus. His mother would be long dead by then, but ever the aristocrat, Hind would doubtless have thought it fitting that her son and his descendants had assumed the caliphate.

If most other Meccans were not so favored, at least there would be no reprisals against them— or nearly none. The sole exceptions were twelve named individuals, among them four woman poets whose satires had been particularly galling, and one man who could conceivably have nothing but hatred for Muhammad: Ikrima ibn abu-Jahl, the son of his old nemesis “the father of darkness.” Muhammad reportedly ordered that these twelve were to be killed “even if they were to be found under the curtains of the Kaaba itself ” unless they begged for forgiveness. Half of them did precisely that and accepted islam, none more notably or with more demonstrable effect than Ikrima, since Muhammad then appointed him to a senior administrative position in Mecca, turning the son of bitter enmity into an integral part of the new amity.

t was done, it seemed. The city that had expelled him was now formally his. Everything Mecca had rejected for so long had been accepted, and almost entirely in peace. And yet it wasn’t done, of course.

[Author: Note “father of darkness”; see earlier question re
“ignorance”]

It never is. There is never a definite point at which it can be said, “There, finished!” Less than two weeks after he had entered Mecca in victory, Muhammad was forced to fight one more battle. Not against the Quraysh this time, but against their enemies.

To the Hawazin, the large confederation of nomadic tribes allied with the mountain city of Taif sixty miles to the southwest, Mecca’s surrender only seemed to make the Quraysh still more powerful than before. Since Muhammad himself was Quraysh, they thought in traditional terms and assumed that he was the newly crowned Quraysh king. Taif was clearly next in line for conquest, and nobody there expected any good from that. Just ten years earlier, after abu-Talib’s death, they had refused Muhammad’s plea for protection. It seemed inevitable that now he’d want revenge.

Headed by Malik, a charismatic thirty-year-old chieftain, the Hawazin decided to force the issue. In a show of determination and confidence, thousands of warriors set out on the road to Mecca, accompanied by their women and children and even their livestock— by some accounts, forty thousand camels alone. Not all agreed that this was a wise move. One aged warrior, reduced by infirmity to riding in a howdah, objected that it merely placed everyone at risk, but he was quickly snubbed by the overly confident Malik. Within a few days the young chieftain would wish he had listened. He never even made it halfway to Mecca. Muhammad and a joint force of Meccans and Medinans met his army near the spring of Hunayn, and the ensuing battle was a rout. Half the Hawazin men were taken captive along with most of the women, children, and livestock, while Malik and his surviving men were forced to flee for refuge inside the walls of Taif, where they closed the gates and prepared for a siege.

The victory would be bittersweet. Among the prisoners, there was one elderly woman who kept insisting, to the amusement of her captors, that she was a relative of Muhammad’s. This mere Beduin woman? It was nothing but a pathetic plea for mercy, they thought. But when she was hauled along with her clan in front of Muhammad, she appealed to him directly. “Oh messenger of God,” she said, “I am Shayma, your foster sister, who used to look after you when you were a young child among us.”

Could it be? Fifty-five years had passed since he had last laid eyes on her. He remembered now that her clan had been part of the Hawazin confederation, but could this frail, white-haired woman possibly have been that adolescent girl? “And where is the proof of that?” he demanded. For answer, she rolled up her sleeve to show her arm. “The scar I still bear here,” she said, “from where you bit me that time when I was carrying you on my hip to join the herders at Wadi Sarar.”

It was true. Here was the oldest daughter of his foster mother Halima—the girl in whose arms he’d wriggled and fought when all she was trying to do was keep him safe—reduced all these years later to begging him for mercy. Was this what warfare and victory brought? When would it end? Childhood memories crowded in on the newly acknowledged head of state, reminding him of the extraordinary distance he had traveled. Holding back tears, he stunned everyone by spreading out his cloak and inviting Shayma to come sit on it beside him. She could live with him in affection and honor, he said, or go back to her land with her family, taking her pick of the captured camels as compensation for all that had been lost. Beduin to the core, she opted for the latter.

The other Hawazin captives would have Shayma to thank for their lives and their freedom, though they would forfeit their thousands of camels and other livestock, which Muhammad now parceled out as bonuses. A hundred camels each went to leading Meccans like abu-Sufyan and his son Muawiya, fifty each to the heads of Beduin tribes allied with Mecca, and so on down the line of status for “all those whose hearts were to be won over.” If there had been any doubt that allegiance to Muhammad was to the direct advantage of his former opponents, the sheer size and number of these bonuses dispelled it. Where they had expected to be subordinated, they now found themselves unexpectedly advantaged, and accepted Muhammad all the more willingly as a result.

Muhammad marched on to Taif, but quickly concluded that time and political momentum would deal with Malik better than a siege of the well-fortified city. With Mecca’s surrender, Taifan resistance was no longer a practical option. Sure enough, Malik would acknowledge this ten months later, when Taif formally accepted Muhammad’s authority.

Malik had been correct in one thing, however: if Muhammad wanted, he could now have declared himself the king of Mecca— indeed of the whole of the Hijaz region. He had been acclaimed; he had received the pledges of allegiance; he was in a more powerful position than anyone in living memory. Yet having done all this, he did none of the things a conquered people might expect. He did not build a mosque in Mecca right by the Kaaba, nor did he build a palace and set up court. He did not even declare Mecca his new capital. In fact he did not move back there at all. Just two months after those four columns of men had marched with him into the city, most of them marched out again, and followed him the two hundred miles back to Medina.

t seems as though he must have struggled with this decision. If his heart lay with one city, his soul lay with the other, though it would be hard to say which was which. Mecca was the city of the Kaaba sanctuary, but Medina was the city that had given him sanctuary. While Mecca was his birthplace, Medina could be seen as the place of his rebirth. His vision had been born in one, but had come to fruition in the other. Surely there was no way to choose between them.