by Ed Husain
The God of Islam is not a different deity to that worshipped by Christians or Jews. Allah is merely the Arabic word for God. In seventh-century Arabia, the Prophet Mohamed called his fellow city folk in Mecca to abandon popular paganism and turn to worship the one God of Adam, Noah, David, Jacob, Joseph, Abraham, Sarah, Hagar, Isaac, Moses and Jesus. Muslims recognise and venerate Old Testament prophets, and believe in Jesus as a mighty messenger of the same God. Why, then, is there a need for Islam, a different pathway from Judaism and Christianity?
Mohamed was a merchant in the city of Mecca born in the year 570 into the noble Quraysh tribe, custodians of the ancient pilgrimage, the annual Hajj. His father, Abdullah, died six months before Mohamed’s birth. His mother, Aminah, had dreams in her pregnancy that she was carrying a light inside her that lit up the palaces of Rome and Persia. When she gave birth, her handmaids reported something extraordinary; a child had been born who did not wail and cry as others do, but breathed calmly. Reluctantly, Aminah followed the expectations of the Quraysh tribe and sent her child to the desert for raising and suckling away from the clutter and clamour of Mecca.
The Quraysh valued the desert. Its vastness held secrets for nomadic Arabs. Newborns were often sent to the wilderness to be raised by Bedouin women. There, they breathed fresh air and spoke a purer Arabic. In the desert sands they were free from the corruption of Mecca, where pilgrims to the Ka’bah, home to 360 idols, polluted the poetic language of the Meccan Arabs.
In the year that Mohamed was born, Halima, a foster-mother from the respected Banu Sa’d tribe, arrived in Mecca late one night on a slow, frail she-camel. Her husband asked around, but the wealthier children had already been fostered. They were too late to find a child whose family would pay for his days of desert nursing. There was only Mohamed left.
Halima’s husband wanted to postpone the search, but Halima was insistent. ‘The baby boy looks blessed,’ she said upon seeing Mohamed. ‘Let us take him with us. Perhaps God will bless us because we were kind to him.’ Not all Arabs were pagans – and many who worshipped multiple deities also believed in a chief god. Some were also known as haneef, or monotheists. Halima was one of them.
As they journeyed back to the encampment of Banu Sa’d, Halima started to see changes around her. ‘Did you not notice the sudden health of our camel?’ she asked her husband and travelling companions when they were back in their desert tents. ‘Did you notice that she was faster? And have you seen that her udder is full of milk?’
Halima noticed more about Mohamed. When she breast-fed her own son and her new baby, she told the other women, Mohamed would only drink from one breast, leaving the other for Halima’s son.
Halima and her family grew fond of this special child. The two boys would play together in the desert. One day, Halima’s son came running to his mother.
‘Mother, mother,’ he shouted. ‘My Qurayshi brother is being held by two strange men! Come!’
Halima rushed to see the young Mohamed looking shocked, but not troubled. The boys recounted how two men in clean white clothes approached Mohamed, laid him down, opened his shirt and washed his heart with holy water and ice. Though Mohamed seemed calm, Halima was worried. She had witnessed and heard of so many extraordinary things happening to this boy that she was no longer sure she could protect him. After much deliberation, she took Mohamed back to Mecca.
Mohamed once again lived with his mother, who secured the support of his grandfather and uncle.
Mohamed was not yet ten when his mother died in al-Abwa, a village near Mecca. Umm Ayman, his mother’s helper, was with Mohamed at his mother’s death. Years later, she recalled how the boy kept running back to his mother’s grave, refusing to return to Mecca. Fifty-seven years later, at the Hajj pilgrimage, with thousands of companions and after his famous last sermon in Mecca, Mohamed returned to his mother’s final resting place in al-Abwa. The orphan boy’s inner wounds had not healed. Such was the sensitivity, humility and humanity of the man who would lead masses to the one God, Allah.
Soon, marked out as different from such a young age, Mohamed was joining his uncle on business trips to Syria. In Borsa, a town near Damascus, a Christian monk warned his uncle that the boy would face harm in years to come. ‘Protect your nephew,’ he urged, ‘for he is destined for greatness.’
When Mohamed was in his twenties, the lady Khadija, a wealthy Meccan, asked him to take her caravan to Syria and trade on her behalf. A trustworthy manager, Mohamed returned to Mecca with a handsome profit, impressing her family with his business acumen. Soon Khadija, a forty-year-old widow, fell in love with her new merchant trader and proposed to him through her relatives.
With the marriage, Mohamed’s reputation as a gentleman of high moral character was secured. His and Khadija’s home became the depository of others’ valuables. Among the Meccans, he became known as al-ameen, or the trustworthy one. He was the keeper of their credit notes and secrets. When there were disputes, people turned to Mohamed for fair arbitration. And yet, the more he was exposed to the city’s clamour, corruption and chaos, the more he yearned for solitude. Was this a leftover from his desert childhood? Or had he observed the Christian monks leaving Mecca for their spiritual retreats?
When he needed time on his own, Mohamed would retreat to a cave in Mount Hira, in the suburbs of Mecca. Aged forty and father to three children, Mohamed was given to long periods of pondering the future of humanity, the absence of justice in Mecca, and the widespread worship of multiple gods. For Mohamed, these were signs of ingratitude to the creator, Allah. Meccan paganism worried him. Though Judaism and Christianity presented monotheistic alternatives at that time – indeed, Khadija’s cousin was a Christian – Mohamed felt an inner calling for something else.
I have climbed Mount Hira and entered the cave in which Mohamed found solace. It is a steep, forty-minute ascent over a hard rock surface in the daytime Arab heat. The fissure in the mountain’s topmost point is small and has adequate space for only one person to move within. The silence, the distance from crowds, and the long days and nights of meditation that he undertook command deep respect. From atop the peak, I could see the centre of Mecca and the Ka’bah, the House of God. The Prophet would have beheld these places as he climbed and descended Mount Hira.
On one such solitary night Mohamed saw someone appear on the horizon. The being, full of light in the dark, and imposing in kindness and majesty, commanded Mohamed to ‘read’.
‘I am not a reader,’ Mohamed responded, fearful. ‘I don’t read.’3
Again the being asked Mohamed to read, and he refused. Then the angel knelt down, embraced Mohamed, and said: ‘Read in the name of your Lord who created you. Created mankind from a clot of blood.’
The words that Mohamed repeated in rhyming, authoritative Arabic became the first words of Islam’s central text, the Quran, which Muslims believe is a revelation from God.
‘Who are you?’ asked Mohamed.
‘I am Gabriel. You are the last and chosen prophet of God. Go forth and warn your people. Read, in the name of your Lord ...’
Mohamed shivered with fear, and started to sweat. He rushed out of the cave and headed back to Mecca. In the sky above, he saw the angel Gabriel over him, vast and resplendent.
Islam, the last of the world’s three monotheistic faiths, was now born. The Prophet Mohamed continued the Abrahamic tradition of worshipping the one God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Aaron, Jesus, and others. He sought to return Meccans to monotheism. He never claimed to have founded a new faith; he was reaffirming and reviving the worship of one creator.
2
Origins of the Quran
When Mohamed was back home in Mecca, Khadija embraced him.
‘Cover me, cover me,’ he pleaded. Despite the Arabian heat, he felt cold and flushed with fever, and he questioned himself intensely. Was that really God’s angel, or was the devil playing tricks on him? Mohamed doubted his experiences, but his wife did not. She was the first to reassur
e him. He was doing no harm, she said, and thus no evil would befall him. Keen to soothe him further, she called her Christian cousin, Waraqah bin Nawfal.
When Mohamed told Waraqah what had happened, his facial expression changed.
‘It is he, indeed. For it is Gabriel, the messenger from God to his chosen ones.’
With Waraqah’s confirmation that Mohamed was indeed God’s prophet, Khadija immediately proclaimed: ‘There is none worthy of worship except Allah, and you, Mohamed, are the Prophet of Allah.’ It was the year 610, or thereabouts, and with this short declaration, the lady Khadija became Islam’s first convert.
Soon afterwards, that same day, the Prophet again felt the heaviness of revelation. It was as if a weight was holding him down, and once again he started to recite:
‘O thou wrapped up ... Arise and deliver thy warning. And thy Lord do thou magnify. And thy garments keep free from stain. And all abomination shun. Nor expect, in giving, an increase for thyself. But, for thy Lord’s cause be patient and constant.’
In Arabic, these verses rhyme and appear in perfect grammar. For the next twenty-three years, God spoke through Gabriel to Mohamed in this same poetic language. These revelations became the Quran, the sacred scripture of Islam.
Al-Quran, Arabic for ‘the recitation’, accompanies Muslims through life. Its verses are whispered into the ears of newborn babies. Its shorter chapters are memorised for daily prayers. In marriage ceremonies, the Quran’s poetic Arabic tells Muslims of their marital duties. In the final moments of life, the holy book provides comfort as family members recite it around one’s deathbed. Most Muslims see the Quran as the literal word of God revealed to the Prophet, but there has always been a debate about whether God ‘spoke’ those exact verses. Some Muslims believe that the melodic Arabic was inspired by God and then articulated by Gabriel and the Prophet.
When Mohamed had questions, Gabriel appeared with answers. The Quran is a dialogue, a conversation between the Prophet and God. Verse by verse, it quotes the Prophet as he uttered what Gabriel revealed to him: ‘Say, He is God, The One and Only. God, the Eternal, Absolute. He begetteth not, Nor is He begotten. And there is none Like unto Him.’ (Quran:112)
The Quran differs in many ways from the New and Old Testaments. It is not always coherent or thematic, jumping from theme to theme in a style that can seem inaccessible to a reader unaccustomed to the text. There are no neat paragraphs, no demarcated new beginnings with logical end points. Perhaps the closest analogy is the biblical books of prophecy, such as that of Isaiah.
Grasping this context is difficult for those who have never encountered anything quite like it. In the eighth century, John of Damascus, a rare chronicler and eyewitness of early Islam, mocked the Quran and accused Muslims of collecting stories from unorthodox Christians. A thousand years later, the French Enlightenment writer Voltaire dismissed the Quran as unscientific and full of contradictions. The Scottish thinker Thomas Carlyle, who admired the Prophet Mohamed as one of the ‘great men’ who changed the course of history, had difficulty with the Quran. He declared it ‘toilsome reading’, ‘insupportable stupidity’, and ‘a wearisome confused jumble, crude, incondite; endless iterations, long-windedness, entanglement’. Despite his lack of comprehension he detected that ‘sincerity, in all senses, seems to be the merit of the Quran’. Carlyle read it in English and therefore missed the richness of the poetic Arabic, but still he intuited the honesty of the Prophet.
Napoleon collected manuscripts of the Quran in Cairo when he invaded Egypt in 1798 and sent back copies of the original Arabic text to France. The words have never changed. There is no ‘King James Version’, or some Ottoman sultan’s rendition of the Arabic text. Sunni and Shi‘a Muslims, divided on so many issues, all agree on the Quran. The University of Birmingham’s specialists have been studying Napoleon’s eighteenth-century acquisitions. They date those Quranic manuscripts as far back as the seventh century, thirteen years after the death of the Prophet. Mohamed’s close companion Amr ibn al-Aas, conqueror of Egypt, most likely brought copies of the Quran with him from Medina, the city in which the Prophet settled and preached. To Muslims, the university’s findings are not surprising, but neither are they reassuring. They did not have doubts in the first place.
The Quran, Muslims believe, was the result of the miracle sent from God to the Prophet Mohamed and a society absorbed in the art of playing with words and poetry. Just as Moses surpassed pharaoh’s magicians and Jesus outperformed the healers of Jerusalem, Mohamed outshone the poets of Mecca. No one could produce verses quite like it. Fourteen centuries later it remains unmatched. Committed to memory by the early believers, written down on parchments and paper by the Prophet’s companions, the earliest Muslims, the Quran remains preserved as it was at the time of the Prophet.
Violent extremists cite the Quran today for their cause, but to most Muslims their holy book is anything but violent. All except one of its 114 chapters begin with Bismillahi Al-Rahman Al-Rahim, ‘In the name of God, the most compassionate, the most merciful.’ This daily recital and remembrance of God’s mercy and compassion is intended to reflect in the behaviour of the believer. A popular chapter of the Quran is called Al-Rahman, The Most Compassionate, but no chapter title invokes war, violence, fighting or killing. Indeed, the Prophet was known for outlawing the common Arab use of the name Harb, meaning ‘war’, for newborns. The Quran’s main emphasis reflected the character and the call of the Prophet: to be kind and compassionate. The Quran declares of the Prophet: ‘We sent thee not, but as a Mercy for all creatures.’ (Quran: 21:107) In an age of warfare and tribal rancour, the Quran was a call to peace.
The Quran’s 6,236 verses are broadly divided in two parts: chapters revealed to the Prophet in Mecca, and then, after the year 622, those that were revealed to him in Medina. The Meccan chapters are rich in similes, allegories, and majestic prose that recall the greatness of the next life, a sublime reward for the trials and tribulations faced in this world. The Medina chapters, meanwhile, address the circumstances and conditions of being in Medina, the city-state of which the Prophet was now a worldly leader.
This context of the Quran’s chapters is known among Muslim scholars as Asbab al-Nuzul: the reasons for revelation. Historically, a Muslim would never come to a conclusion on the meanings of verses without consulting a scholar on the whys and wherefores of a chapter or verse. That culture is changing among Muslims in the information age, where Google and readily available books empower the individual. The Quran, like other books, is becoming a manual. In fact, the context of the Quran is being lost, because every believer is able to access the text directly and become an ‘expert’. With this modern ease of entry to the scripture, the old respect is being eroded.
My parents taught me that the Quran always belonged on the highest shelf, just out of easy reach. At home, our Quran was covered in expensive velvet or some other quality cloth. My parents were devout Muslims and their veneration for the Quran, both as a physical book and its message, was the lived reality of an Islam that had a deep impact on the lives of believers. In a recent conversation, Archbishop Justin Welby told me how he admired old Muslims he met in remote parts of Africa who uphold this practice. To convey a similar veneration for the divine, the Archbishop said, he had taken to placing his Bible on the top ledge, too.
In a way, this interaction of the inward conviction and the outward devotion embodies the central message of the Quran. The holy book rarely mentions belief or faith without an accompanying emphasis on doing good deeds. Among its greatest and earliest commentators were Imam Ali (d. 661) and Ja’far al-Sadiq (d. 675). Both emphasised the Quran’s multiple meanings; they warned that the text was not to be read, nor its injunctions implemented, literally. Just as God is Zahir and Batin, outward and inward, His book also has inner and outer meanings. This aspect of the historically multidimensional Quran is beginning to be lost on many Muslims. The House of Islam is losing its connection with the Quran.
3
> Who is a Muslim Today?
‘Go to Yemen,’ the Prophet instructed one of his closest companions, Muadh bin Jabal. ‘Call the people to believe in one God. Inform them that we will be brought to account for our actions in this world. If they accept, invite them to pray. Advise them that the poor among them have a right to a small percentage of the riches of the wealthy.’
His words encapsulated the most basic element of Islam: believing in the one God and his messenger, Mohamed, the last of the prophets. Stating these facts is known as the Shahadah, or declaration of faith. As long as a person holds them dear, they are Muslim. That is, quite literally, the definition of a Muslim.
For centuries, these beliefs manifested in a rich, diverse Islamic culture that was created by Muslims that were united in their identity by sharing this common and cosmopolitan faith. The Oxford historian John Darwin captures this accurately:
The cultural life of Islam (in the Ottoman Empire and beyond) was strikingly cosmopolitan. An educated man might seek his fortune anywhere between the Balkans and Bengal. The historian ‘Abd al-Latif (1758–1806), born in Shustar at the head of the Persian Gulf, acquired his learning from scholars in Iran. But the hope of advancement took him to India, where his brother was already a physician in Awadh. He became the vakil (agent) of the ruler of Hyderabad to the Company government in Calcutta. His view of Indian history was Islamic not ‘Indian’. For the Islamic intelligentsia, the idea of territorial patriotism to an Ottoman, Iranian or Mughal ‘fatherland’ was deeply alien. The nation state as the unique focus of loyalty was simply meaningless. In the Ottoman Empire, Muslims (like Christians and Jews) drew their identity from their scripture and religion, not from their language or a concept of race.1
Those attitudes have changed. The Ottoman Empire, which ruled vast territories for centuries, is no more. Still, though Muslims are much more nationalist today than they were in the Ottoman or Mughal past, they continue to share a strong, global, religious identity. But where do most Muslims reside in the world? And what does it mean to ‘practise’ or ‘observe’ Islam through the oft-cited ‘five pillars’ of the faith?