The First Muslim: The Story of Muhammad (7 page)

The caravans provided the safety of numbers. The lone traveler may have been a staple of the great Beduin odes, taking his pleasures where he could and stoically enduring the dangers of the road even as he boasted of them, but that was poetry, and this was real life, and only the young and inordinately idealistic would be so rash as to confuse the two. Any caravan consisted of at least a dozen camels, but twice a year the Meccan merchants organized huge camel trains up to two thousand strong, one heading north to Damascus in the spring, the other south to Yemen in the fall. And Muhammad had been newly assigned to work on the northbound one when one of the best-known events of his childhood took place.

hey had been following the high ground to the east of the Jordan River, on the ancient route known as “the kings’ highway,” and the caravan leader had already given the sign to halt for the night close by an abandoned Byzantine fortress in which a single Christian monk had taken up residence.

The ruins were a sign of the times: as political systems begin to collapse, so too does the infrastructure. The conflict between the Byzantine and the Persian empires was in effect an eight-hundred-year war that had gone on since the time of Alexander the Great, and by now it had thoroughly depleted the resources of both sides. To the east, the vast Persian-built irrigation systems of the Iraqi plain between the Euphrates and the Tigris rivers were deteriorating, much as upkeep on the Marib dam in Yemen had deteriorated under the stress of warfare over a century earlier. In the Byzantine province of Syria, which included all of what is now Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Israel, and Palestine, troops had been withdrawn for lack of money, leaving many of the fortresses in the long north–south line of defense to be eroded by sand and dust storms. Occasionally Beduin nomads moved inside the crumbling walls, using them as winter shelter for themselves and their flocks, but monks also settled in them, sometimes in groups but more often as solitaries. Hermits, preachers, holy men, sometimes wild men, they were respected by local tribesmen, who’d leave food and water for them— offerings as much to the idea of holiness embodied in these men’s one omnipotent god as to the men themselves.

The image of the monk in his desert cell “alone with the livelong night and its wearily lingering stars” became a romantic trope in preIslamic poetry, where the light from “the lamp of the hermit who pours o’er the twisted wicks the oil from his slender cruse” was a source of distant comfort to the solitary traveler or warrior. The pattern had been set as early as the fourth century in Egypt, when Saint Anthony, often called “the father of the desert fathers,” spent twenty lone years in an abandoned Roman fortress on the Nile. Or maybe not so lone. His Alexandrian biographer Athanasius would write that his presence there attracted a steady stream of tourists, including Arabian traders who detoured to pass by his hermitage simply to be close to the presence of holiness. Anthony’s example was so powerful, Athanasius claimed, that “monasteries flourishing like the flowers of springtime have been scattered throughout the whole earth, and the sign of the solitary ascetic rules from one end of it to the other.”

The solitary ascetic who would now play such a vital role in the legend of Muhammad’s childhood was known as Bahira, a strange name for a desert dweller since it comes from the Arabic bahr, sea. Perhaps he’d once been a seaman, or perhaps the name indicated that he had a sea of knowledge at his fingertips, specifically in the form of a book that was rumored to be old beyond knowing, handed down from one generation of monks to the next. At a time when few people could read or write, the very existence of this book was iconic. It was thought of as a kind of oracle, its power projected by osmosis into its guardian or possessor. In fact Bahira’s book was most likely a parchment copy of the Bible in one of the many variants still current at the time, and since parchment was perishable, he was one of those who had devoted his life to the painstaking task of copying it, letter by letter, verse by verse, in order to preserve it.

As ibn-Ishaq tells it, with his usual sprinkling of caveats such as “it is alleged,” Bahira had never before paid any attention to passing camel trains. But as abu-Talib’s section of the Damascus-bound one approached, the hermit saw a single small cloud in the otherwise cloudless sky, hovering low over one particular point in the caravan. Recognizing it as an omen, he broke with his usual habit, went out, and invited everyone to be his guest and to come share what food he had. Abu-Talib and the others accepted, leaving the ten-year-old Muhammad behind to watch over the camels and the goods. But no sooner had they all entered the fortress walls than Bahira sensed that someone was missing. He questioned them closely, at which they acknowledged that, well, yes, there was always the camel boy. But surely the invitation didn’t include him?

It did. Bahira insisted that the boy be brought in, then had him stand still while he examined his torso, searching for the “seal of prophethood” foretold in that mysterious tome of his—in varying accounts either a third nipple, as some say is found in each reincarnation of the Dalai Lama, or a birthmark between the shoulder blades “like the imprint of a cupping glass.” Whichever it was, he found it, then turned to abu-Talib and announced: “A great future lies before this nephew of yours.”

In a way, this is a perfect story, pregnant with signs and wonders. The aura of the hovering cloud and the code of the hidden seal are exactly what one might expect for a child with a heroic future. Yet once again a miracle story contains within itself the ironic counterplay of legend and reality. Even as it magnifies the young Muhammad’s status, it also places him on the lowest rungs of the camel trade, so insignificant as to be thought automatically excluded from Bahira’s invitation. If such an event did indeed take place, it can only have seemed risible at the time to abu-Talib and the others. They’d have understood it as the ravings of an old man who had spent far too much time alone, touched by solitude and the desert sun. Majnun, they’d have called him—under the influence of a jinn, a spirit of madness— and gone on their way to Damascus.

Still, the legend works as a classic illustration of predestination. Unknown and unrecognized among his own people, the hero is instantly recognized by the holy men of other peoples. And most significantly, in Byzantine Syria, by a Christian monk, thus establishing the future revelation of the Quran as the culmination of previous revelations foretold in the Bible itself. The point would be considered so important that a very similar version of the same story—the lone monk, the route to Damascus, the recognition of specialness—would eventually be placed fifteen years later, when Muhammad was twenty- five, by which time he had worked his way up through the ranks of the camel trains to become an independent agent representing the interests of others. But the transition from camel boy to a respected figure on the well-traveled trade routes was to be lengthy and hard-earned. He had much to learn, and a whole world to learn it from.

s a glance at the extent of foreign news coverage in The Wall Street Journal or the Financial Times still demonstrates, successful traders need information. Meccan merchants had to be politically and culturally well informed, with up-to-date information on what was happening both en route and at their destination. And they needed to be very skilled at diplomacy.

It began with the need to assure safe conduct across the territories of numerous tribes and tribal confederations. Such assurances had to be negotiated and paid for in a desert form of a toll, or basically, protection money. Permission was requested to use local springs or wells, arrangements made to buy provisions en route, gifts offered to the sheikhs and chieftains who could award such permission and make such arrangements. And all this entailed not only a widespread network of contacts but detailed knowledge of tribal politics: who had the authority to guarantee protection, who was in ascendance and whose power was fading, who was newly in alliance with whom, which alliance had recently fallen apart over issues of grazing or water rights. The caravan leaders needed to know whose word they could rely on, especially when a man’s word truly was his bond. Agreements were signed not in writing but with hands clasped, forearm against forearm, constituting a solemn pledge on which rested the most important thing to any man of the time: his reputation. But some reputations were justified and others less so, and the difference could be that between life and death.

Once the caravan was under the formal protection of the local chieftain or sheikh, the merchants were guests in his territory, to be protected as though they were in his tent or his palace. Any attack on them by rogue elements like a raiding party from a rival tribe would be dealt with as though the sheikh himself had been attacked. He would assign guides to accompany the caravan through his territory, and these men could read the desert as you would a book. The seemingly endless expanse of stark rock, scrub steppe, and sharp-edged lava fields was neither empty nor monotonous to their experienced eyes, but as full of signs and recognizable landmarks as any city neighborhood today.

They needed no maps: the land was in their heads. They knew exactly which well held the freshest water in which season, and where to find winter pools—the depressions that collected runoff from winter rains and held it for a few weeks at a time. Much as sailboats tack with the prevailing wind, they led the caravans on routes that angled from one watering spot to the next, sometimes within a day’s ride of each other, more often two or three. Usually they’d arrive at an encampment of nomads by an underground spring, or a few scraggly trees and a rough stone hut marking the presence of a brackish well. But occasionally there’d be the luxury of one of the oases strung like beads widely spaced on a chain necklace: permanent settlements like Medina, Khaybar, Tayma, and Tabuk on the northbound route from Mecca, where spring-fed date plantations stretched for miles, long ribbons of green hidden in deep valleys.

The arduousness of these month-long treks was more than compensated for by their profitability. By Muhammad’s time, Meccan merchants had expanded their business through an area larger than Europe, reaching north and south in large sweeping arcs encompassing Syria and Iraq, Egypt, Yemen, and Ethiopia. And wherever they went, they were not strangers. They put down roots in the lands and cities they traded with, for to be a trader at that time was to be a traveler, and to be a traveler was to be a sojourner.

They did not travel eight hundred miles to do a kind of sixthcentury version of a pilot’s touch-and-go at Damascus airport. There was no dropping in, shaking hands on a deal, and heading right on out again. It took time to give and receive hospitality, to create and develop the face-to-face relationships that enabled trade, and to carry out the slow, elaborate ritual of negotiation. You settled in for the duration and made yourself at home, so much so that by the time Muhammad began work on the caravans, Meccan aristocrats owned estates in Egypt, mansions in Damascus, farms in Palestine, and date orchards in Iraq.

Like all property owners, they were keenly aware of everything that might affect the value of their holdings, especially the see-saw of dominance as the Byzantines and Persians pushed each other’s boundaries of influence first one way, then the other. The geopolitical balance that had held for nearly eight hundred years was in question, and major cities like Damascus, where Byzantine control was becoming increasingly tenuous, were alive with rumor and speculation, conflicting claims and contradictory expectations.

For Muhammad, there could be no better education than Damascus, one far more expansive than that of any modern schoolchild confined to a computer screen and the four walls of a room. For the first time he realized that no matter how cosmopolitan Mecca might be in its own terms, it was provincial in terms of this greater world to the north. Just as he was simultaneously an insider and an outsider in Mecca, so too his city was itself both inside and outside: relevant by virtue of its central position on the land route north from Yemen and the Indian Ocean, yet separated by that vast expanse of desert from the physical arena of Byzantine–Persian rivalry, in which Mecca played the role of a kind of giant, arid Switzerland unaligned with either side.

Damascus was an ancient city even then, its history stretching back over fifteen hundred years. It was the most important hub on the western portion of the famed Silk Road, and its streets teemed with people from as far north as the Caspian Sea and as far east as India. Greeks, Persians, Africans, Asians, light skins and dark, melodiously soft languages and harshly guttural ones—all came together here in a fertile intermingling not only of goods but of cultures, and of the religious traditions that framed those cultures.

Through the lingua franca of Aramaic, spoken throughout the Middle East in different but mutually comprehensible dialects, Muhammad was confronted with a kaleidoscope of sacredness. The stories treasured by those he encountered carried their history and their identity, and they were not shy about telling them. In the courtyards of synagogues and churches, in the markets and the great caravansaries, under the shade trees lining the canals that made Damascus especially enchanting to desert dwellers (the very idea of water in the streets!), these stories were told by soft-spoken elders, by young firebrand preachers, by poets and clerics, dreamers and philosophers. Their audiences sat rapt, nodding and swaying and joining in on the best-known lines as the heroic legends of Christians and Jews, Zoroastrians and Hindus— dramas of the human and the divine—played out across the backdrop of history. Everyone sought to explain the world in their own way, all of them full of the passionate conviction that they and only they knew the truth. Yet even among those of the same faith, truth differed.

The biblical stories told by the Jews of Medina, for instance, were not quite the same as those told by the Jews of Damascus. The Christian stories differed too, often with poignant variations. When Jesus defended the woman accused of adultery, one version had him saying: “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.” But another, still current in today’s Middle East, had him physically protecting the woman by shielding her with his body and adding two crucial words: “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone at me.”