by Tamim Ansary
Meccans were wide-ranging merchants and traders, but their biggest, most prestigious business was religion. Mecca had temples to at least a hundred pagan deities with names like Hubal, Manat, Allat, al-Uzza, and Fals. Pilgrims streamed in to visit the sites, perform the rites, and do a little business on the side, so Mecca had a busy tourist industry with inns, taverns, shops, and services catering to pilgrims.
Mohammed was born around the year 570. The exact date is unknown because no one was paying much attention to him at the time. His father was a poor man who died when Mohammed was still in the womb, leaving Mohammed’s mother virtually penniless. Then, when Mohammed was only six, his mother died too. Although Mohammed was a member of the Quraysh, the most powerful tribe in Mecca, he got no status out of it because he belonged to one of the tribe’s poorer clans, the Banu (“clan” or “house of ”) Hashim. One gets the feeling that this boy grew up feeling quite keenly his uncertain status as an orphan. He was not abandoned, however; his close relatives took him in. He lived with his grandfather until the old man died and then with his uncle Abu Talib, who raised him like a son—yet the fact remained that he was a nobody in his culture, and outside his uncle’s home he probably tasted the disdain and disrespect that was an orphan’s lot. His childhood planted in him a lifelong concern for the plight of widows and orphans.
When Mohammed was twenty-five, a wealthy widowed businesswoman named Khadija hired him to manage her caravans and conduct business for her. Arab society was not kind to women as a rule, but Khadija had inherited her husband’s wealth, and the fact that she held on to it suggests what a powerful and charismatic personality she must have had. Mutual respect and affection between Mohammed and Khadija led the two to marriage, a warm partnership that lasted until Khadija’s death twenty-five years later. And even though Arabia was a polygynous society in which having only one wife must have been uncommon, Mohammed married no one else as long as Khadija lived.
As an adult, then, the orphan built quite a successful personal and business life. He acquired a reputation for his diplomatic skills, and quarreling parties often called upon him to act as an arbiter. Still, as Mohammed approached the age of forty, he began to suffer what we might now call a midlife crisis. He grew troubled about the meaning of life. Looking around, he saw a society bursting with wealth, and yet amid all the bustling prosperity, he saw widows eking out a bare living on charity and orphans scrambling for enough to eat. How could this be?
He developed a habit of retreating periodically to a cave in the mountains to meditate. There, one day, he had a momentous experience, the exact nature of which remains mysterious, since various accounts survive, possibly reflecting various descriptions by Mohammed himself. Tradition has settled on calling the experience a visitation from the angel Gabriel. In one account, Mohammed spoke of “a silken cloth on which was some writing” brought to him while he was asleep.1 In the main, however, it was apparently an oral and personal interaction, which started when Mohammed, meditating in the utter darkness of the cave, sensed an overwhelming and terrifying presence: someone else was in the cave with him. Suddenly he felt himself gripped from behind so hard he could not breathe. Then came a voice, not so much heard as felt throughout his being, commanding him to “recite!”
Mohammed managed to gasp out that he could not recite.
The command came again: “Recite!”
Again Mohammed protested that he could not recite, did not know what to recite, but the angel—the voice—the impulse—blazed once more: “Recite!” Thereupon Mohammed felt words of terrible grandeur forming in his heart and the recitation began:Recite in the name of your Lord Who created,
Created humans from a drop of blood.
Recite!
And your Lord is most Bountiful.
He who taught humans by the pen,
taught humans that which they knew not.
Mohammed came down from the mountain sick with fear, thinking he might have been possessed by a jinn, an evil spirit. Outside, he felt a presence filling the world to every horizon. According to some accounts, he saw a light with something like a human shape within it, which was only more thunderous and terrifying. At home, he told Khadija what had happened, and she assured him that he was perfectly sane, that his visitor had really been an angel, and that he was being called into service by God. “I believe in you,” she said, thus becoming Mohammed’s first follower, the first Muslim.
At first, Mohammed preached only to his intimate friends and close relatives. For a time, he experienced no further revelations, and it depressed him: he felt like a failure. But then the revelations began to come again. Gradually, he went public with the message, until he was telling people all around Mecca, “There is only one God. Submit to His will, or you will be condemned to hell”—and he specified what submitting to the will of God entailed: giving up debauchery, drunkenness, cruelty, and tyranny; attending to the plight of the weak and the meek; helping the poor; sacrificing for justice; and serving the greater good.
Among the many temples in Mecca was a cube-shaped structure with a much-revered cornerstone, a polished black stone that had fallen out of the sky a long time ago—a meteor, perhaps. This temple was called the Ka’ba, and tribal tales said that Abraham himself had built it, with the help of his son Ishmael. Mohammed considered himself a descendant of Abraham and knew all about Abraham’s uncompromising monotheism. Indeed, Mohammed didn’t think he was preaching something new; he believed he was renewing what Abraham (and countless other prophets) had said, so he zeroed in on the Ka’ba. This, he said, should be Mecca’s only shrine: the temple of Allah.
Al means “the” in Arabic, and lah, an elision of ilaah, means “god.” Allah, then, simply means “God.” This is a core point in Islam: Mohammed wasn’t talking about “this god” versus “that god.” He wasn’t saying, “Believe in a god called Lah because He is the biggest, strongest god,” nor even that Lah was the “only true god” and all the other ones were fake. One could entertain a notion like that and still think of God as some particular being with supernatural powers, maybe a creature who looked like Zeus, enjoyed immortality, could lift a hundred camels with one hand, and was the only one of its kind. That would still constitute a belief in one god. Mohammed was proposing something different and bigger. He was preaching that there is one God too all-encompassing and universal to be associated with any particular image, any particular attributes, any finite notion, any limit. There is only God and all the rest is God’s creation: this was the message he was delivering to anyone who would listen.
Mecca’s business leaders came to feel threatened by Mohammed because they were making good money from religious tourism; if this only-one-god idea took hold, they feared, the devotees of all the other gods would stop coming to Mecca and they’d be ruined. (Today, ironically, over a million people come to Mecca each year to perform the rites of pilgrimage at the Ka’ba, making this the biggest annual gathering on earth!)
Besides, Mecca profited from drinking dens, gambling, prostitution, and other such attractions, and the tribal power brokers could not tolerate a man railing against the very entertainments that brought in their wealth, even if he had merely a smattering of followers, many of them powerless poor people and slaves. Well, for one thing, not all his followers were poor people and slaves: they included the wealthy and respected merchants Abu Bakr and Othman, and soon they even included the physically imposing giant Omar, who started out as one of Mohammed’s most bitter enemies. The trend looked disturbing.
For nearly twelve years, Mohammed’s uncle Abu Talib defended him against all criticism. According to most Muslims, Abu Talib never converted to Islam himself, but he stood up for his nephew out of personal loyalty and love, and his word had weight. Khadija also backed her husband unstintingly, which gave him precious comfort. Then, in the course of a single devastating year, both these major figures in Mohammed’s life died, leaving God’s Messenger exposed to his enemies. That year, seven elders of the Qurays
h tribe decided to have Mohammed killed while he slept, thereby getting rid of the troublemaker before he could do real damage to the economy. One of Mohammed’s several uncles spearheaded the plot. In fact, all seven plotters were related to Mohammed, but this didn’t soften their resolve.
Fortunately, Mohammed caught wind of the plot and worked out how to foil it with help from two close companions. One was his cousin Ali, now a strapping young man, who would soon marry Mohammed’s daughter Fatima and become the Messenger’s son-in-law. Another was his best friend, Abu Bakr, Mohammed’s first follower outside his immediate family circle and his closest adviser, soon to become Mohammed’s father-in-law.
The Prophet had already been in contact with delegates from Yathrib, another town near the Red Sea coast, some 250 miles north of Mecca. It was an agricultural rather than a commercial town and it was torn by conflict because its inhabitants belonged to several quarreling tribes. The people of Yathrib wanted a fair-minded outsider to come in and oversee negotiations among the tribes; they hoped that if they ceded judicial authority to such a person, he would be able to bring about a peace. Mohammed had a reputation as a fair-minded and skillful arbitrator, a role he had played in several crucial disputes, and so the Yathribis thought he might be the man for the job. Several of them visited Mecca to meet Mohammed and found his charisma overwhelming. They converted to Islam and invited Mohammed to move to Yathrib as an arbiter and help put an end to all the quarrelling; the Prophet accepted.
Mohammed’s murder was planned for a September night in the year 622 CE. That night, the Prophet and Abu Bakr slipped away into the desert. Ali crawled into Mohammed’s bed to make it look like he was still there. When the would-be assassins burst in, they were furious to find Ali, but they spared the kid and sent a search party out to hunt down the Prophet. Mohammed and Abu Bakr had made it only to a cave near Mecca, but legend has it that a spider built its web across the mouth of the cave after they entered. When the posse came by and saw the web, they assumed no one could be inside, and so passed on. Mohammed and Abu Bakr made it safely to Yathrib, by which time some of Mohammed’s other followers had moved there too, and the rest soon followed. Most of these Meccan emigrants had to leave their homes and property behind; most were making a break with family members and fellow tribesmen who had not converted. But at least they were coming to a place where they would be safe, and where their leader Mohammed had been invited to preside as the city’s highest authority, the arbiter among the rival tribal chieftains.
True to his promise, Mohammed sat down with the city’s fractious tribes to hammer out a covenant (later called the Pact of Medina.) This covenant made the city a confederacy, guaranteeing each tribe the right to follow its own religion and customs, imposing on all citizens rules designed to keep the overall peace, establishing a legal process by which the tribes settled purely internal matters themselves and ceded to Mohammed the authority to settle intertribal disputes. Most important, all the signatories, Muslim and non-Muslim, pledged to join all the others to defend Medina against outside attack. Although this document has been called the first written constitution, it was really more of a multiparty treaty.
Mohammed also appointed one Yathribi Muslim to mentor and help each family of Meccan Muslims. The native was to host the newcomer and his family, get them settled, and help them start a new life. From this time on, the Yathribi Muslims were called the Ansar, “the helpers.”
The name of the city changed too. Yathrib became Medina, which simply means “the city” (short for a phrase that meant “city of the prophet”). The emigration of the Muslims from Mecca to Medina, is known as the Hijra (often spelled Hegira in English.) A dozen years later, when Muslims created their own calendar, they dated it from this event because the Hijra, they felt, marked the pivot of history, the turning point in their fortunes, the moment that divided all of time into before the Hijra (BH) and after the Hijra (AH).
Some religions mark their founder’s birthday as their point of origin; some, the day he died; and still others, the moment of their prophet’s enlightenment or his key interaction with God. In Buddhism, for example, the religion begins with Siddhartha Gautama’s achievement of enlightenment under the bodhi tree. Christianity attributes key religious significance to Christ’s death and resurrection (as well as his birth.) Islam, however, pays little attention to Mohammed’s birthday. Growing up as a Muslim, I didn’t know when he was born, because nothing special happened that day in Afghanistan. Some countries, such as Egypt, commemorate the day more elaborately, but still, there’s no analog to Christmas in Islam, no “Mohammedmas.”
The revelation in the cave is commemorated as the most sacred night in Muslim devotions: it is the Night of Power, Lailut al-Qadr, which falls on or near the twenty-seventh day of Ramadan, the month of fasting. But in the Muslim calendar of history, that event occurred ten years before the really crucial turning point: the Hijra.
What makes moving from one town to another so momentous? The Hijra takes pride of place among events in Muslim history because it marks the birth of the Muslim community, the Umma, as it is known in Islam. Before the Hijra, Mohammed was a preacher with individual followers. After the Hijra, he was the leader of a community that looked to him for legislation, political direction, and social guidance. The word hijra means “severing of ties.” People who joined the community in Medina renounced tribal bonds and accepted this new group as their transcendent affiliation, and since this community was all about building an alternative to the Mecca of Mohammed’s childhood, it was an epic, devotional social project.
This social project, which became fully evident in Medina after the Hijra, is a core element of Islam. Quite definitely, Islam is a religion, but right from the start (if “the start” is taken as the Hijra) it was also a political entity. Yes, Islam prescribes a way to be good, and yes, every devoted Muslim hopes to get into heaven by following that way, but instead of focusing on isolated individual salvation, Islam presents a plan for building a righteous community. Individuals earn their place in heaven by participating as members of that community and engaging in the Islamic social project, which is to build a world in which orphans won’t feel abandoned and in which widows won’t ever be homeless, hungry, or afraid.
Once Mohammed became the leader of Medina, people came to him for guidance and judgments about every sort of life question, big or little: how to discipline children . . . how to wash one’s hands . . . what to consider fair in a contract . . . what should be done with a thief . . . the list goes on. Questions that in many other communities would be decided by a phalanx of separate specialists, such as judges, legislators, political leaders, doctors, teachers, generals, and others, were all in the Prophet’s bailiwick here.
Portions of the Qur’an recited in Mecca consist entirely of language like this:When earth is shaken with a mighty shaking
and earth brings forth her burdens,
and Man says, “what ails her?”
upon that day she shall tell her tidings
for that her Lord has inspired her.
Upon that day men shall issue in scatterings to see their works
and whoso has done an atom’s weight of good shall see it
and whoso has done an atom’s weight of evil shall see it.
When you look at the verses revealed in Medina, you still find much passionate, lyrical, and imprecatory language, but you also find passages like this one:God charges you, concerning your children:
to the male the like of the portion
of two females, and if they be women
above two, then for them two-thirds
of what he leaves, but if she be one
then to her a half; and to his parents
to each one of the two the sixth
of what he leaves, if he has children
but if he has no children, and his
heirs are his parents, a third to his
mother, or, if he has brothers, to his
mother a sixt
h, after any bequest
he may bequeath, or any debt.
Your fathers and your sons—you know not
which out of these is nearer in profit
to you. So God apportions; surely God is
All-knowing, All-wise.
This is legislation, and this is what the Muslim enterprise expanded to, once it took root in Medina.
After the Hijra, the native Arabs of Medina gradually converted to Islam, but the city’s three Jewish tribes largely resisted conversion, and over time a friction developed between them and the Muslims. Among the Arabs, too, some of the men displaced by Mohammed’s growing stature harbored a closely guarded resentment.
Meanwhile, the Quraysh tribe had not given up on assassinating Mohammed, even though he now lived 250 miles away. Not only did Quraysh leaders put a huge bounty of a hundred camels on Mohammed’s head, they remained fixated on stamping out his whole community. To finance an assault on Medina, the wealthiest merchants of Mecca stepped up their trading expeditions. Mohammed countered by leading Muslims in raids on these Meccan caravans (which helped solve another problem the Meccan emigrants faced: how to support themselves now that they had lost their goods and businesses.)
After a year of these raids, the Meccans decided to raise the stakes. A thousand of them strapped on weapons and marched out to finish off the upstarts. The Muslims met them with a force of three hundred men at a place called Badr and defeated them soundly. The Qur’an mentions the battle of Badr as proof of Allah’s ability to decide the outcome of any battle, no matter what the odds.