Muhammad: A Story of the Last Prophet
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Ordinary people were used to praying to idols and offering sacrifices in return for rewards as basic as a good crop and a reliable water supply. Allah took over the functions of hundreds of idols, and in addition there was the promise of going to Paradise after death, dwelling forever in the Garden.
If the promise is delightful, the reverse is terrifying. Living according to your own whims, without regard for God’s commands, leads to hellfire. That is why modernism has met with stubborn resistance in the Islamic world. Going on the Internet, watching television, or attending a nightclub could imperil your soul. Orthodoxy is always that way, regardless of the faith. Muslims don’t hold a patent on fearing the creeping infection of secularism. Fundamentalists in every faith hold the same suspicions. To them, the worldly has always been the enemy of the other-worldly.
If we look at Arabia before Muhammad, life was so harsh that it must have come as an immense relief to find a way that promised not just eternal life, but things far more basic: the end of blood feuds, a sense of belonging, the comfort of one faith for one people, and simple rules for getting along. The life dictated by the Koran wasn’t a prison deprived of free will—it was order in place of chaos.
The tale of Muhammad and the five mares is central here. As recounted in the novel, Muhammad had a string of horses that he loved. It was his habit to take them out into the desert for a run. One day he took them out so far from Medina that the animals became desperately thirsty. Up ahead they smelled an oasis and began to gallop toward it. Muhammad let them reach almost to the water hole, and then he gave a sharp whistle for them to return. Most of the horses kept running, but five mares turned around and returned to the Prophet’s hand. He used these five mares to breed the strain of Arabian horses that are most prized today.
The story is a parable about religious obedience, and when it’s told, the moral is that God favors loyalty above all other virtues.
THE RETURN OF THE LOST
One has to remember that the Arabs of Muhammad’s time felt like a people who had been left behind. The desert isolated them almost completely, making them safe from invasion, but also immune to religious influence. I was amazed to read that during Muhammad’s childhood not a single Bible could have been found in the Arabian Peninsula. The dominant tribe in Mecca, the Quraysh, considered themselves the children of Abraham. And yet they also knew that Abraham’s religion had been lost; they inherited only scraps and dusty remains. That’s why the myth of Zamzam, the well that God created to bring water to his children, was so crucial. When Zamzam was lost, so was the water of life. When it was found again, by the Qurayshi chieftain Muttalib, the water of life returned.
Muhammad was in the direct line of Muttalib, who was his grandfather. History writes itself from front to back, and once Islam thrived, writers were quick to revisit the Prophet’s early life and fill it with portents and omens. They had Christ in mind as a rough model. We are given a lone mystical hermit who lays hands on the head of the boy Muhammad and predicts that he will be the prophet foretold by the Bible. In Medina another mystic, a Jewish rabbi, arrives to proclaim that the last prophet is at hand. In Mecca a handful of monotheists, known as hanif, instruct the young orphan in their ways, and the most outspoken of them, Waraqah, is bold enough to proclaim Muhammad as the chosen one at the very doors of the Kaaba.
If this is exciting, the disturbing parts aren’t far behind. The Jews of Medina were the first to welcome Muhammad and his tiny band of followers into their midst. The young faith was quite fragile. No more than a dozen close followers, the companions, had developed over the twelve years since the first revelation. For the first three years Muhammad told no one about his calling outside his family. Under constant threats from the Quraysh, perhaps forty to a hundred converts emerged before the Hijra. It is remarkable that the Jews of Medina were willing to accept Muhammad as someone to judge their disputes and to draw up a plan for bringing peace to all the warring tribes in the city.
Yet in the next few years, as the faithful grew in numbers, God told Muhammad to drive the Jewish tribes out of Medina, exiling them to marginal wastelands. Later, when Jewish resentment flared up and the last remaining tribe cooperated with the invading army from Mecca, Muhammad exercised violent retribution. All the men were beheaded, and the women and children divided as the spoils of war, many to be sold into slavery. This horrifying decision, because it came by revelation, has been praised by Islamic historians. Only in recent times have some revisionists considered it as the barbaric crime it is.
Here we meet the dark underside of the Prophet’s mission. His every act and word has the force of God behind it (except perhaps only the “satanic verses” in the Koran, so called because they were inspired by demonic forces to delude and briefly mislead Muhammad—he soon saw through them and returned to Allah’s guidance). I don’t think Muhammad believed himself to be infallible. We have touching stories about his humility. He admitted his mistakes, and far from being the only one to give orders in times of crisis, he sat in council with his chieftains and listened to their voices.
After his death, the ranks closed around absolute truth, which meant that it was a test of faith to turn any act by the Prophet, even the beheading of his enemies, into something right and good. On this point, the critics of Muhammad cite his marriage to Aisha. She was the youngest daughter of Abu Bakr, the merchant who stood up among the first and most devout of the new Muslims. At the age of six Aisha was betrothed to a husband, until Muhammad had a revelation that she was meant for him. The prospective groom was persuaded to give her up. The marriage to Muhammad took place but wasn’t consummated until Aisha was nine. Beyond Islam, this episode is more than distasteful. Within the faith, however, it is praised. None of Muhammad’s other wives were virgins, and the rationale is that Aisha served as a kind of Virgin Mary, made all the more pure because she was so young. To the outside world, this is a prescription for blind fanaticism.
CLOSING THE GAP
The bald fact is that we cannot identify with customs that exist across such a yawning abyss. And as mentioned, every faith closes ranks around its own version of the absolute truth. Islamic extremism is no exception, and unfortunately the loud minority have poisoned our view.
The God who speaks in the Koran isn’t simply an Old Testament God with revenge and punishment in mind, whimsically deciding who will be rewarded or destroyed. The Koran affirms Judaism and Christianity. The most significant mystical event in Muhammad’s life was the night journey he took to Jerusalem on the back of a lightning steed. Muhammad worshiped there with his predecessors and then was lifted up to the seventh heaven, where he communed with Abraham, Moses, and Jesus before being ushered into the presence of Allah.
The purpose of the Koran, to borrow Jesus’s words, was to fulfill the law, not to break it. It took warfare to spread the new faith, but just over the horizon was a Paradise in which one God welcomed all believers. We can say that Islam brought monotheism to replace polytheism—the Arabs got one God in place of many. But the message was more universal. Allah wasn’t Yahweh dressed in a caftan. He was the One, an all-pervasive presence that upheld the cosmos.
Every Muslim loves the Prophet, but one special branch of Islam developed an intense, mystical love for Allah—the Sufis. Within their approach to God, we can glimpse the immense beauty and power of Muhammad’s legacy. In my childhood, I was taken to visit Sufishrines, usually the graves of saints who were prayed to for miracles. There were all-night poetry readings and dancing, truly ecstatic events. For me, these Sufis, with their extreme courtesy to one another and the ever present reminder of God’s love, stood for Islam—white domes against the sky, romantic tales of princes and princesses, and the hypnotic call of the muezzins from their minarets.
The sweetness of these images is real, even if history has added a bitter aftertaste. Sufis strove for unity with God, and their path to enlightenment was love. Devotion led to rapture, and rapture led to the Infinite. No romance of the soul is m
ore extreme, as witnessed in this poem by Rumi, the greatest Sufimystic:
You miracle-seekers are always looking for signs,
You go to bed crying and wake up in tears.
You plead for what doesn’t come
Until it darkens your days.
You sacrifice everything, even your mind,
You sit down in the fire, wanting to become ashes,
And when you meet with a sword,
You throw yourself on it.
Fall into the habit of such helpless mad things—
You will have your sign.
These lines aren’t a flight of fancy—they describe what Sufis actually did to reach God. The beauty of union with the One was exquisite, but the seeker burned himself to ashes before reaching his Beloved.
If Muhammad opened the door to God, Sufis were the ones who flung themselves through it, blindly and crying out with passion. This ardent striving is the best interpretation of jihad, and the one I hope will prevail. It brings light out of darkness, as Rumi proclaimed:
In love that is new—there must you die.
Where the path begins on the other side.
Melt into the sky and break free
From the prison whose walls you must smash.
Greet the hue of day
Out of a fog of darkness.
Now is the time!
Muhammad’s ultimate legacy was to make time for the timeless. The One has no limitations in time and space. No face or body can be assigned to Him, which is why Islam forbids portrayals of God. By comparison to Allah’s transcendent reality, the world below is a trifling illusion. Thus the heart of Islam calls the faithful to look beyond illusion to find reality. For the Sufis, fear of a punishing Father evolved into a love affair with the invisible One, whose essence is mercy, compassion, and the sacredness of all life.
Muhammad can be judged by the worst of his followers or the best. He can be blamed for planting the seeds of fanaticism and jihad or praised for bringing the word of God to a wasteland. In my walk with Muhammad I found that every preconception was unfair. What the Prophet bequeathed to the world is entangled with the best and worst in all of us.
I doubt that the angel Gabriel has an appointment to meet me in a flash of blinding light. But if he does, I’d expect to wrestle with revelation every day. God didn’t make life easier for Muhammad. He made it far more difficult, and the wonder of his story is how he brought light out of darkness with all the fallibility of “a man among men.” The message he brought wasn’t pure; it never is. As long as our yearning for God exceeds our ability to live in holiness, the tangled mystery of the Prophet will be our own mystery too.
About the Author
DEEPAK CHOPRA is the author of more than fifty-five books translated into over thirty-five languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers in both fiction and nonfiction categories. Visit the author at www.deepakchopra.com
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Credits
Jacket design: LeVan Fisher Design
Cover image: Corbis Images
Copyright
MUHAMMAD: A Story of the Last Prophet. Copyright © 2010 by Deepak K. Chopra and Rita Chopra Family Trust. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Chopra, Deepak. Muhammad: a story of the last prophet / Deepak Chopra.—1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 978–0–06–178242–8
1. Muhammad, Prophet, d. 632—Fiction. I. Title.
BP75.C46 2010
297.6’3092—dc22
[B] 2010019308
EPub Edition © August 2010 ISBN: 978-0-06-201058-2
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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