Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes

by Tamim Ansary

  Before Badr, some of the bedouin tribesmen had worked for merchants in Mecca as contract bodyguards. After Badr, these tribes began to switch sides. The growing solidarity of the Muslim community in Medina began to alarm the Jewish tribes. One of the three renounced the Pact of Medina and tried to instigate an uprising against Mohammed and a return to the pre-Islamic status quo, but the uprising failed, and this tribe was expelled from Medina.

  Now the Quraysh really did have cause to worry. Instead of eliminating Mohammed, it looked like they might have dug themselves the beginnings of a hole. In the year 3 AH, they decided to overwhelm the Muslims while they still had the numbers. They tripled the size of their army, heading for Medina with three thousand men. The Muslims could scratch up only 950 warriors. Again, they would be outnumbered three to one—but after Badr, how could this matter? They had the only asset that mattered: Allah was on their side.

  The second of Islam’s three iconic battles occurred at a place called Uhud. At first the Muslims seemed to be winning again, but when the Meccans fell back, some of the Muslims disobeyed one of Mohammed’s explicit orders: they broke ranks and spilled across the field in a chaotic rush to scoop up their share of booty—at which point the Meccans struck from behind, led by Khaled bin al-Walid, a military genius who later converted to Islam and became one of the Umma’s leading generals. The Prophet himself was wounded at Uhud, seventy Muslims were killed, and many of the rest fled. The Umma survived, but this battle marked a bad defeat.

  These seminal battles of Islamic history were so small-scale, measured against most real wars, that they barely qualify as battles. Each one, however, was incorporated into Muslim theology and vested with meaning. Thus, the battle of Badr showed that Allah’s will, not material factors, determined victory in battle. But the battle of Uhud raised a thorny theological question. If Badr showed the power of Allah, what did Uhud show? That Allah could also lose battles? That He was not quite as all-powerful as Mohammed proclaimed?

  Mohammed, however, found a different lesson in defeat. Allah, he explained, let the Muslims lose this time to teach them a lesson. The Muslims were supposed to be fighting for a righteous cause—a just community on earth. Instead, at Uhud they forgot this mission and went scrambling for loot in direct disobedience to the Prophet’s orders, and so they forfeited Allah’s favor. Divine support was not an entitlement; Muslims had to earn the favor of Allah by behaving as commanded and submitting to His will. This explanation for defeat provided a stencil that Muslims invoked repeatedly in later years, after the Mongol holocaust of the thirteenth century, for example, when nomadic invaders from Central Asia overwhelmed most of the Islamic world, and again in response to Western domination, which began in the eighteenth century and continues to this day.

  The Quraysh spent two years planning their next assault. Recruiting allies from other tribes, they built an army of ten thousand men—inconceivably gigantic for that time and place. When Mohammed heard about this force marching on Medina, he had his Muslims dig a moat around their town. The Quraysh arrived on camels, which would not or could not cross the moat. The stymied Quraysh decided to starve Medina with a siege.

  The siege strategy, however, scuttled a secret plan the Quraysh were counting on. After the disastrous battle of Uhud, another of Medina’s Jewish tribes had been exposed as collaborating with the Meccans. Like the first Jewish tribe, they had been tried and sent into exile. The third tribe, the Banu Qurayza, then proclaimed its loyalty to the Pact of Medina. Now, however, in the run-up to the Battle of the Moat, its leaders had secretly conspired with the Quraysh to fall upon the Muslim forces from behind as soon as the Meccan forces attacked from the front.

  When no frontal attack came, the conspirators within Medina lost their nerve. Meanwhile, the besieging force began to fragment, for it was a confederation of tribes, most of whom had come along only as a favor to their Qurayshi allies. With no battle to fight, they got restless. When a windstorm blew up—no small matter in this landscape—they drifted off, and soon the Quraysh gave up and went home too.

  All this left the Banu Qurayza in a bad spot. Their plot had been discovered and now their allies were gone. Mohammed put the whole tribe on trial and appointed one of their former associates among the Medina tribes as judge. When the tribe was found guilty, the judge declared that the crime was treason, the punishment for which was death. Some onlookers protested against this sentence, but Mohammed confirmed the sentence, whereupon some eight hundred Jewish men were executed in the public square, and the women and children of the tribe were sent to live with the two tribes exiled earlier.

  This whole drama sent a shock wave through Arabia. The trial and execution of the Banu Qurayza announced the grim resolution of the Muslims of Medina. In strictly military terms the Battle of the Moat was a stalemate, but the Quraysh had mustered a force of ten thousand with such fanfare that failing to win was as bad as losing, and this loss helped to stoke a growing myth of Muslim invincibility, communicating a broad impression that this community was not just another powerful tribe feeling its oats but something strange and new. The Muslims lived a distinctly different way of life, they practiced their own devotional rituals, and they had a leader who, when problems came up, went into a trance and channeled advice, he said, from a supernatural helper so powerful that Muslims had no fear of going into battle outnumbered three to one.

  Who was this helper?

  At first, many of the unconverted might have thought, It’s a really powerful god. But gradually the Muslim message sank in: not a god but the God, the only one. And what if Mohammed was exactly what he claimed to be—the one human being on earth directly connected to the creator of the entire universe?

  Recruiting people to kill the man grew ever more difficult. Recruiting warriors to go up against his forces grew difficult too. After the Battle of the Moat, the trickle of conversions to Islam became a flood. It’s easy to suppose people were converting out of canny self-interest, a desire to join the winning side. Muslims, however, believe there was more to it. In Mohammed’s presence, they believe, people were having a religious experience.

  Mohammed never claimed supernatural powers. He never claimed the ability to raise the dead, walk on water, or make the blind to see. He only claimed to speak for God, and he didn’t claim that every word out of his mouth was God talking. Sometimes it was just Mohammed talking. How could people tell when it was God and when it was Mohammed?

  At the time, apparently, it was obvious. Today’s Muslims have a special way of vocalizing the Qur’an called qira’ut. It’s a sound quite unlike any other made by the human voice. It’s musical, but it isn’t singing. It’s incantatory, but it isn’t chanting. It invokes emotion even in someone who doesn’t understand the words. Every person who performs qira’ut does so differently, but every recitation feels like an imitation or intimation or interpretation of some powerful original. When Mohammed delivered the Qur’an, he must have done so in this penetrating and emotional voice. When people heard the Qur’an from Mohammed, they were not just listening to words but experiencing an emotional force. Perhaps this is why Muslims insist that no translation of the Qur’an is the Qur’an. The true Qur’an is the whole package, indivisible: the words and their meanings, yes, but also the very sounds, even the look of the lettering when the Qur’an is in written form. To Muslims, it wasn’t Mohammed the person but the Qur’an coming through Mohammed that was converting people.

  One other factor attracted people to the community and inspired them to believe Mohammed’s claims. In this part of the world, small-scale warfare was endemic, as it seems to be in any area populated by many small nomadic tribes among whom trading blends into raiding (such as North America’s eastern woodlands before Columbus arrived, or the Great Plains shortly after). Add the Arabian tradition of blood feuds lasting for generations, add also the tapestry of fragile tribal alliances that marked the peninsula at this time, and you have a world seething with constant, ubiquitous violence.
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br />   Wherever Mohammed took over, he instructed people to live in peace with one another, and the converts did. By no means did he tell Muslims to eschew violence, for this community never hesitated to defend itself. Muslims still engaged in warfare, just not against one another; they expended their aggressive energy fighting the relentless outside threat to their survival. Those who joined the Umma immediately entered Dar al-Islam, which means “the realm of submission (to God)” but also, by implication, “the realm of peace.” Everyone else was living out there in Dar al-Harb, the realm of war. Those who joined the Umma didn’t have to watch their backs anymore, not with their fellow Muslims.

  Converting also meant joining an inspiring social project: the construction of a just community of social equals. To keep that community alive, you had to fight, because the Umma and its project had implacable enemies. Jihad never meant “holy war” or “violence.” Other words in Arabic mean “fighting” more unambiguously (and are used as such in the Qur’an). A better translation for jihad might be “struggle,” with all the same connotations the word carries in the rhetoric of social justice movements familiar to the West: struggle is deemed noble when it’s struggle for a just cause and if the cause demands “armed struggle,” that’s okay too; it’s sanctified by the cause.

  Over the next two years, tribes all across the Arabian peninsula began accepting Mohammed’s leadership, converting to Islam, and joining the community. One night Mohammed dreamed that he had returned to Mecca and found everyone there worshipping Allah. In the morning, he told his followers to pack for a pilgrimage. He led fourteen hundred Muslims on the two-hundred-mile trek to Mecca. They came unarmed, despite the recent history of hostilities, but no battle broke out. The city closed its gates to the Muslims, but Quraysh elders came out and negotiated a treaty with Mohammed: the Muslims could not enter Mecca this year but could come back and perform their rites of pilgrimage next year. Clearly, the Quraysh knew the game was over.

  In year 6 AH, the Muslims came back to Mecca and visited the Ka’ba without violence. Two years later, the elders of Mecca surrendered the city to Mohammed without a fight. As his first act, the Prophet destroyed all the idols in the Ka’ba and declared this cube with the black cornerstone the holiest spot in the world. A few of Mohammed’s former enemies grumbled and muttered threats, but the tide had turned. Virtually all the tribes had united under Mohammed’s banner, and all of Arabia was living in harmony for the first time in reported memory.

  In year 10 AH (632 CE), Mohammed made one more pilgrimage to Mecca and there gave a final sermon. He told the assembled men to regard the life and property of every Muslim as sacred, to respect the rights of all people including slaves, to acknowledge that women had rights over men just as men had rights over women, and to recognize that among Muslims no one stood higher or lower than anyone else except in virtue. He also said he was the last of God’s Messengers and that after him no further revelations would be coming to humanity.2

  Shortly after returning to Medina, he fell ill. Burning with fever, he went from house to house, visiting his wives and friends, spending a moment or two with each one, and saying good-bye. He ended up with his wife Ayesha, the daughter of his old friend Abu Bakr, and there, with his head in her lap, he died.

  Someone went out and gave the anxious crowd the news. At once, loyal Omar, one of Mohammed’s fiercest and toughest but also one of his most hotheaded companions, jumped to his feet and warned that any man who spread such slander would lose limbs when his lie was exposed. Mohammed dead? Impossible!

  Then the older and more prudent Abu Bakr went to investigate. A moment later he came back and said, “O Muslims! Those of you who worshipped Mohammed, know that Mohammed is dead. Those of you who worship Allah, know that Allah is alive and immortal.”

  The words swept away Omar’s rage and denial. He felt, he told friends later, as if the ground had been cut out from under him. He broke down crying, then, this strong bull of a man, because he realized that the news was true: God’s Messenger was dead.

  3

  Birth of the Khalifate

  10-24 AH

  632-644 CE

  DEVOTED MUSLIMS SEE the whole of Mohammed’s life as a religious metaphor illuminating the meaning of existence, but the religious event does not end with the Prophet’s death. It continues through the terms of his first four successors, remembered as the Rashidun, “the rightly guided ones”: Abu Bakr, Omar, Othman, and Ali. The entire drama, from the revelation in the cave through the Hijra to the death of the Prophet’s fourth successor almost forty years later, forms the core religious allegory of Islam, analogous to the last supper, the crucifixion, and the resurrection of Jesus Christ in Christianity.

  Islam emerged well within literate times. People were writing journals, diaries, letters, bureaucratic documents, and other works. For this period a rich documentary record exists. It seems, then, as if the origins of Islam should lie squarely within the realm of journalism rather than legend. And yet, what we know about the life and times of these first four successors derives largely from a history written decades later by the writer Ibn Ishaq, who died in 151 AH (768 CE).

  Ibn Ishaq came from a long line of traditionists, the archivists of oral culture: men and women whose job it was to gather, remember, and retell significant events. He was the first of his line to write the whole story down, but most of his book has been lost. Before it disappeared, however, other writers quoted from it, referred to it, included excerpts from it in their own works, wrote synopses of it, or paraphrased its stories. (Recently, in fact, some academics have been trying to reconstruct Ibn Ishaq’s work from the fragments of it found in other works.)

  One historian who used Ibn Ishaq as his major source was Ibn Jarir al-Tabari, who died about three hundred years after the Hijra. He wrote the thirty-nine-volume History of the Prophets and Kings that begins with Adam and ends in the year 292 AH (915 CE). His work has survived into the present day, and most of the anecdotes and details we read about Mohammed and his successors come to us through him. It is he who tells us what color hair these men had, what their favorite food was, and how many camels they owned. He includes their key speeches and conversations as direct quotations. His history is not exactly a readable narrative, however, because each story is nested in a mind-numbing list of names, the isnad, or “chain of transmission”: “X reports that Y told him that he heard from Z that . . . and finally the anecdote.” After each anecdote comes a different version of the same anecdote, nested in a different isnad: “A reports that he heard from B that C said that D recounts that . . . [anecdote].” Tabari doesn’t say which version is true; he just puts them out there for you the reader to decide. Over the centuries, writers have compiled their own versions of the most compelling anecdotes, some of which make their way into popular and oral accounts and eventually turn into the Islamic version of “Bible stories,” told to kids like me at home by our elders and in grammar school by our religion teachers.

  Overall, these stories chronicle a tumultuous human drama that unfolded in the first twenty-nine years after the Prophet’s death, a story of larger-than-life characters wrestling with epic issues, a story filled with episodes that evoke wonder and heartbreak. It’s quite possible to take sides in retelling these stories, for there are sides to take, and it’s quite possible to speculate about motives and make judgments about people’s decisions.

  On the other hand, these anecdotes have acquired allegorical status: different judgments and interpretations support different doctrines and represent various theological positions. We cannot know the hard facts of this story in a journalistic way because no untouched eyewitness account has survived. We have only the story of the story of the story, a sifting process that has drawn the mythological significance of the raw events to the surface. Here, then, is that story of the succession.

  THE FIRST KHALIFA (12 - 14 AH)

  The moment Mohammed died, the community faced an overwhelming problem. It wasn’t just “Who
is our next leader?” but “What is our next leader?” When a saint dies, people can’t simply name some other saint in his place, because such figures aren’t created by election or appointment, they just emerge; and if they don’t, oh well; people may be disappointed, but life goes on. When a king dies, by contrast, no one says, “Wouldn’t it be nice if someday we had another king?” The gap must be plugged at once.

  When Prophet Mohammed died, it was like a saint dying but it was also like a king dying. He was irreplaceable, yet someone had to take his place. Without a leader, the Umma could not hold together.

  The new leader had to be more than a king, however, because this was not a community like any other. It was, its members believed, the embodiment of the revelations, existing to express Allah’s will and thereby transform the world. The leader of this community could not get by on brains, bravery, strength, and such traits. He had to have some special religious grace or power. Yet Mohammed’s successor would not be a God-guided messenger, because Mohammed himself had said there would be no more of those. So if the leader wouldn’t be a king or a God-guided messenger, what would he be?

  Curiously enough, the nascent Muslim community had given no consideration to this question before the Prophet died; and it gave no consideration to it in the hours immediately after his death either, for this was not a time for grand philosophical discussions. With the Prophet’s body scarcely cold, Abu Bakr heard a disturbing report: the native Muslims of Medina were meeting to elect a leader of their own, as if they and the immigrants from Mecca were separate groups: here, quite possibly, was the beginning of the end of the Umma!