Cumin, Camels, and Caravans

  Abd al-Muttalib, Muhammad’s grandfather, was a prominent Quraysh trader and a guardian of the Kaaba. He was esteemed and loved by his peers and was a caring elder who took the little orphaned boy under his wing. He let the boy apprentice with his son and the head of the Bani Hashim clan, Abu Talib, who had once been a respected merchant banker but who had become so poor that he made the adopted boy herd sheep and goats for him. During this time of his life, Muhammad became content with the simple foods of the shepherd’s camp, rustic dishes such as tharīd,10 and never acquired the taste for more sophisticated or exotic foods. But when he was between nine and twelve years of age, Abu Talib took him on a camel caravan to Syria to expose him to the larger world, hoping he would learn the art of cross-cultural trading with Jews and Christians. Along the way, a Christian hermit noticed that as the caravan passed by, a sheltering cloud followed the boy wherever he walked or rode. This anchorite was named Bahira and was perhaps the first to recognize that Abu Talib’s charge would emerge as a prophet.11

  Once Abu Talib and Muhammad had arrived with their wares in Damascus, they undoubtedly haggled over prices with the speakers of Aramaic and Syriac who flocked into such cities as Damascus and Aleppo at that time. They probably carried camel hair, wool, and goat skins with them, as well as some spices or perfumes.

  Damascus is where I enter my first Middle Eastern souk as well, accompanied by my brothers and my Lebanese uncles from the Bekáa Valley. I have been told that we are going to an open-air market, but the walkways are sheltered from the blazing summer sun by all matter of cloths, plastic, and tarps. While my brothers look at Persian rugs from the nineteenth century that they hope to air-freight back to the United States, I set my sights on a trail-worn camel saddlebag with a pale geometric design woven into it, akin to those on the saddle blankets that my Navajo friends weave from the wool of Navajo-Churro sheep in the Painted Desert of Arizona. My Lebanese uncle Victor is assisting my brothers with identifying and evaluating the quality of some kilim carpets when he notices that I am ready to pay the shopkeeper for a camel saddlebag. The Syrian merchant is trying to talk me into purchasing two bags for a 10 percent discount on both when my uncle interrupts him.

  “What price did you ask of that boy for that frayed, camel piss–stained piece of junk?”

  The shopkeeper switches from English to Arabic and tries to calm my uncle down. And yet, when Victor hears the price, he is livid. He takes the camel saddlebag out of my hands, throws it on the floor, grabs me by the arm, and begins to escort me out of the shop, waving to my brothers to put the kilims down and to follow us. Then, once we are out in the walkway of the souk, he whistles to the shopkeeper and begins his ritualistic rant: “You offer those scandalous prices to my own blood and kin when I’ve known you since you were still sucking on your mother’s breast? My father did business with yours on the old Damascus Road to Zahle, and yet you forget the ties we’ve had? Their grandfather Najim, their granduncle Ferhat, and my own father—bless his soul—helped defend you Syrians during the Ottoman war, and what do we get for it? Prices like we are tourists! Prices like we are foreigners! I will never allow another man from the Nabhan clan to set foot in this shop!”

  The shopkeeper rushes up to my uncle and hugs him, kissing him three times on each cheek, and then holds his hand.

  “Victor, I thought you were becoming an old man, but you still have your fire! Of course, I wasn’t going to cheat your nephew. I was just offering this bearded one a second camel bag for free. Now I will give him both camel bags for free if one of his brothers offers me a fair price for the fine kilims I have on hand. I will make another discount and give them each a bottle of Syrian rose water or arak if both of the brothers buy kilims from me before noon.”

  At one thirty in the afternoon, after two hours of negotiation, each of my brothers leaves the shop with a giant kilim, and the rug dealer throws in both of my camel saddlebags gratis.

  All of the passionate bickering and bartering that Uncle Victor and the Syrian shopkeeper engaged in was little more than a minor drama compared to that which young Muhammad probably witnessed as understudy to his uncle Abu Talib. Although he apparently gained some facility in such negotiations, there are hints that he found cross-cultural haggling to be distasteful and beyond his capacity for patience and tolerance at the time. Nevertheless, he was good enough at caravanning across the desert and delivering the goods that a distant relative of his, a widow named Khadijah bint Khuwaylid, asked the twenty-five-year-old man to make a few runs for her to trading hubs for a salary that was twice as high as what she paid others.12

  Muhammad made good on her confidence in him in a manner that became like an economic golden rule for Muslims. This principle, loosely paraphrased, states that if someone is doubly kind to you, repay them twice over for the trust they invested in you. The profits that he returned to her after his first expedition to Damascus were indeed twice what she had anticipated, so she sent him off to Yemen the next winter with triple the usual commission. Again, he came back with profits greater than what Khadijah had expected. Although his entrepreneurial skills may have initially caught her eye, she soon noticed his passionate spirit as well, and before long she engaged him as her husband.

  In Arabic narratives, Khadijah is regarded with considerable admiration, for she routinely fed and sheltered the poor, offered hospitality to foreigners, and parted with most of her wealth to promote the ideals of Islam. Her wisdom and guidance helped nurture the best in Muhammad after their partnership began in 595. But perhaps she is loved as much for being the kind of enigmatic person who challenged and still challenges the Western stereotypes of Arab and Muslim women. It is clear that she held the purse strings, not only during her relationship with the younger Muhammad but also while managing the trade for her father and two earlier husbands.

  And yet, it was not uncommon in those times for a confidant woman to be in fiscal control of expeditions that took men away from their home base for months at a time. That said, Khadijah was more than an operations manager. She was also a venture capitalist. She grubstaked young men to go out on the road with a certain range and quantity of goods and coached them on how to bring back the best financial dividends to be shared by all. This replicable pattern of mentors guiding younger men and women in how to set up franchises of their pioneering businesses in faraway places became a common thread in the blanketing of the world with what we now know as globalization.

  While Muhammad took on the role of traveling salesman, or al-tajir as-saffar, Khadijah ran the other aspects of the business in Mecca, acting as head merchant in residence, or al-tajir al-muqim. Whether Muhammad or his colleagues set out on the Hejaz road to the Transjordan and Syria, one of the Frankincense Trails to Yemen, or the nejd road to Hira in what is now southern Iraq, Khadijah was back in Mecca both holding down the fort and planning future expeditions.

  But after a few years of running caravans for Khadijah, Muhammad suddenly lost interest in living a merchant’s life on the road. He became listless and began to spend more of his time meditating in the dark recesses of Gar Hira, a tiny cave that he found by climbing six hundred steps up above the desert floor of Mecca to the mountain Jabal al-Nour. Many of his friends and relatives feared that he was listening to some crazy jinn that had gotten inside his head, as they had with other poets and seers, and Khadijah, who was at first baffled, took him to be diagnosed (or exorcised) by a nearby Christian monk who lived among the Nestorians. The monk intuitively understood that Muhammad was already on a spiritual quest and assured him and his wife that his visions were “messages from the divine.”13 Khadijah stood by him. His prophesy painfully and laboriously spun itself out over several years, and yet it has become one of the world’s most orally elegant and eloquent incantations. Its immense popularity has continued to grow over the centuries, so that today, it is recited daily by about one-third of the world’s population. The Prophet Muhammad’s gift to the world from the poverty of that cave is called the Qur’an.


  After his revelations became known, Muhammad had difficulty returning to camels, caravans, or trade in cumin. Nevertheless, over the rest of his illustrious life he saw no contradiction between the spiritual path he was promoting and the trail of trade that Khadijah and other businesswomen had sustained. As long as she and her kin took care of the poor and offered a portion of their wealth to sustain the religious endowments known as waaf funds, there was no inherent contradiction between making money and the spiritual precepts of Islam.

  But Khadijah and Muhammad were careful to caution individuals or clans against accumulating so much wealth that they created greater disparities among communities of believers, and they endeavored to redistribute capital across clans and landscapes in ways that fostered cohesion among all these communities. More important, they forbid riba, or “usury,” a custom common among Jews of charging exorbitant interest on loans to the poor, for such practices would sooner or later make indentured servants out of those who lacked capital. They proclaimed that wealthy trade brokers controlling harbors and caravansary outposts could not tax any practitioners of their faith. The only duty Muslims were required to pay was the zakat redistribution of wealth that provided charity for the poorest of the poor.

  These mandates and constraints on how trade could be enacted did not sit well with the richest of the Quraysh in Mecca, nor among the Jewish moneylenders with whom they regularly dealt. Even though Muhammad was born into the Banu Hashim, one of the Quraysh tribes, the other Quraysh tribes forced him and his followers out of Mecca. Over the next decade, three major battles ensued among these factions. The Prophet himself barely escaped from several assassination attempts by the Quraysh. So Muhammad and his “new Muslims” took refuge in nearby Yathrib, now known as Medina (from Madinat Rasul Allah, the “Holy City”), where the Banu al-Nadir, a tribe of Jewish merchants, was in power.

  The Banu al-Nadir Jews were just as wary as the Quraysh Arabs of the Prophet Muhammad’s growing power. They also found his boycott of moneylenders engaged in usury disruptive and the militancy of his followers worrisome. But when they witnessed his followers’ blood-thirsty attacks, not only on the Quraysh but also on some of their own, the Banu al-Nadir began to fear for their own lives. Muhammad had already ordered the killings of two lesser Jewish poets, but he was now vying to silence the voice of their greatest remaining bard.14 The Jews were defiant, however. When they sent envoys to the Quraysh to leverage an alliance against Muhammad, one of those envoys was their poet-sharif Ka‘b ibn al-Ashraf, who, by some accounts, was as charismatic as the Prophet himself.

  When I was in Abu Dhabi, I had learned that the poet Ka‘b was born into my own paternal tribe, the Banu Nebhani. But he soon became a leader in the tribe of his Jewish mother, the Banu al-Nadir, and for some reason, the fact that his father was a polytheistic Arab of the Banu Nebhani is rarely mentioned.

  Upon discovering that I had a famed poet in my ancestry, I was at first elated. But when I came to understand how Ka‘b’s poetry had put a wedge between Muslims and Jews that has persisted for centuries, my enthusiasm evaporated. The Arabs claimed his cleverness and cruelty with words were evidence that he was under the spell of jinn if not Satan himself, for he used his power as a bard as a weapon in his struggle against Muhammad, challenging the Prophet’s new moral, religious, and economic protocols.

  To his credit, Muhammad had made some pacts with Jewish tribes other than the Banu al-Nadir, but he had clearly become wary of the economic power wielded by particular Jewish tribes in his area. They still profited by employing usury on the poor. They also taxed merchants like Muhammad’s own wife, Khadijah, when she sold her goods in their privately owned markets. Such practices set up economic disparities to which Muhammad objected. When he considered building a utopian community (umma) in Yathrib for the supertribe he would coalesce under the banner of Islam, he dreamed of a mosque, a garden, a madrassa (school), a haram (sacred enclave), a hima (a land sanctuary or inviolate reserve of pasturelands), and last but not least, an equitable, communal marketplace where no form of usury would be allowed.15

  So when he set his roots down in Yathrib, Muhammad wondered whether he could restructure the world of trade, employing ethical protocols that would be consistent with the spiritual precepts that had been revealed to him. Curiously, his first public action in his new hometown was to set up an unrestricted marketplace as a charitable endowment that would benefit the broadest range of participants possible, including the spice traders who had come with him from Mecca.16

  It was an Occupy Wall Street sort of move into Jewish-controlled territory. In this public rather than privately owned market, no one could exclusively control cooking spaces or access to water, and traders were forbidden to have any merchandise earmarked for them as “futures” before they were delivered to the marketplace. This latter policy change allowed everyone to compete equally for the incoming spices, metals, or fibers without some participants receiving special deals in advance. Muhammad also mandated that taxes and bribelike payments could no longer be extorted from merchants and caravanners. His principle of al-suq sadaqa essentially allowed public markets to be duty-free zones along many transcontinental trade routes.

  All of this began once Muhammad and his disciples roped off and occupied an area for the new Yathrib market, with the idea of establishing shops on the lower level and rentable sleeping quarters above, so that the souk would be structured like so many caravansaries he had frequented in his youth. But as soon as he began to implement his design, two problems quickly arose. First, he had chosen to occupy land that already belonged to Jews allied with the tribe of Ka‘b ibn al-Ashraf, land that they had used in the past as a cemetery. Ka‘b considered Muhammad’s action to be a violation of sacred Jewish-controlled space.17 Ka‘b and his followers were also wary of the Prophet’s economic reforms, for it meant that they might eventually lose their competitive edge.

  Worse yet, Ka‘b considered the new market to be in direct competition with one that three Jewish tribes, including his own, had long managed in Yathrib as one of their primary sources of income. Muhammad and Ka‘b were suddenly on a collision course, as the chronicler Ibn Shabba reported at the time:

  The Prophet pitched a tent [for the market] in the Baqī al-Zubayr [cemetery], and said [to all comers, including his followers from Mecca]: This is your market. Then Ka‘b b. al-Ashraf came up [to the area], entered inside [the roped-off area] and cut its ropes. The Prophet then said: Indeed, I shall move it into a place which will be more grievous for him than this place. And he moved into the place of the “Market of Medina”[which Ka‘b’s tribal allies had controlled]. . . . Then he said: This is your market. Do not set up sections in it [that will aggravate factionalism among you] and do not impose taxes for it.18

  While Muhammad drew a line in the sand to distance Islam’s economic activities from those routinely managed by Jews, Ka‘b used his poetic talents to tell of the horrific massacre that had taken place at the hands of the new Muslims in the Battle of Badr. He wrote a eulogy that lamented the loss of Quraysh men at the hands of the Muslim warriors:

  O, how I wish that when these men were killed

  The earth beneath them could have opened its arms to caress them,

  Cradling them so that all their assassins, when they heard

  The news, would cower with fear, or be struck deaf and blinded.19

  It became clear that the Hejaz wasn’t big enough for two singerseers as powerful as Muhammad and Ka‘b. By some accounts, as soon as Muhammad heard Ka‘b’s eulogy for the Quraysh, he immediately sought out someone to kill the poet. Others claim that Ka‘b was part of an assassination attempt against the Prophet. Still others claim that Muhammad was insulted and humiliated by Ka‘b’s satirical poems that made fun of his revelations. But what most Muslim historians contend is that Muhammad displayed patience until Ka‘b ibn al-Ashraf crossed the line with a bawdy poem that defamed the honor and chastity of a young Muslim woman, Ummu’l-Fadl bint al
-Harith.

  That indiscretion proved too much for the Prophet and his lieutenants to tolerate, so they commissioned a Muslim half brother of Ka‘b named Silkan to set a trap for the poet in the fortress of the Banu al-Nadir. Around the time of the spring equinox in 625, after a night of reciting poetry with his half brother, Ka‘b was in bed with a girl who warned him of trouble in the air.20 Ka‘b ignored her but soon found himself being dragged out of bed by his half brother, the Muslim convert. Silkan was then joined by Muhammad’s most trusted guards and together they stabbed the poet to death. From then on, there was only one prophetic and poetic voice left to be heard in the Hejaz.

  Nearly fourteen hundred years later, I find Muslims and Jews who still differ in how they read the series of events that led to Ka‘b ibn al-Ashraf’s death and the sparing of the Prophet Muhammad. I have met contemporary Jews who argue that these events initiated a lingering animosity among Muslims toward all people of the Jewish faith. For them, Muhammad did not place a death wish solely on a Jewish poet; he condemned all Jews. I have also met Muslims who feel that no Jewish poet or comic has the right to ridicule the Prophet. But this limited view fails to take into account the fact that Ka‘b ibn al-Ashraf had Arab blood—more specifically, Nabhan blood—running through his veins. It is clear that this initial conflict was as much about the ethics of economic exchange as it was about religious and political dominance. Regardless of whatever else has been read into these incidents by revisionist historians of the Jewish or Islamic faiths, there were originally Jews and proto-Muslim Arabs on both sides of the argument. It remains contested ground to this day.